I'm interviewing the founders of AirBnB live today at 1:30 pm (PT) - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.posterous.com/im-interviewing-the-founders-of-airbnb-live-t <comment><USER2> That's in 5.5 hours, right? So 6 hours from the time stamp of the post?

I'm a bit confused, I am in GMT-0 here (Iceland).

With Daylight savings, different timezones, etc, I get very confused about what time it is here/there

<comment><USER3> Just use Google, it'll tell you the time above the organic results: <http://www.google.com/search?q=time+in+california>

But to answer your question, 6 hours from the time of the post should be right.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I didn't know about that.

Actually, I didn't really know it was in California either. I googled that "PT" thing in the title, that's how I made my estimate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Will it be possible to timeshift this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm planning to make a copy for viewing the interview later. Not sure how long it will take me to post it since it's my first time:)

<comment><USER5> Let me know if I help you with editing.

(And thanks for the compliment. Means the world coming from you.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Really looking forward to this. Hope to see lots of HNers in chat!

</comment><comment><USER7> Why not interview someone that wasn't already on Mixergy? Andrew did a pretty good job with AirBnB, but if you think there's more stuff to expose we're all ears!

<comment><USER8> I think it's fine to interview a startups that Andrew has already interviewed. I'm sure with a lot of these startups, there's plenty there.

Still, Andrew did a thorough (and great) job so it'll be interesting to see what the feel of this interview is like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm excited! I hope it is the first of many.</comment>


Windows 8 OEM specs may block Linux booting - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/205255/windows-8-oem-specs-may-block-linux-booting <comment><USER2> Unless I'm misunderstanding something, this is silly FUD. Microsoft isnt stupid enough (or evil enough, despite what some like to believe) to attempt to force PC oems to effectively block all OSes except Windows. They know this wouldn't work, and there'd be no point in trying to force it.

Supporting hardened boot is not the same as _requiring_ it. Microsoft already utilizes this for BitLocker. You can still install Linux on a machine that supports hardened booting and signed images. You just can't enable hardened boot unless you use signed images.

<comment><USER3> > Microsoft isnt stupid enough (or evil enough, despite what some like to > believe) to attempt to force PC oems to effectively block all OSes except > Windows.

Um, Microsoft used to do exactly this. [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/08/31/jean_louis_gass_233_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/08/31/jean_louis_gass_233_e/) I don't know if they have the muscle or the guts to try something like this again.

edit: fixed typo

<comment><USER2> There's a rather large difference between contractually forbidding PC OEMs from selling Windows machines bundled with BeOS and technologically blocking non-Windows OSes from executing. It's one thing to say "you can't bundle another OS with mine". It's another thing entirely to say "your hardware can never run any OS except mine".

<comment><USER4> There's actually a very small difference.

They both result from signing an agreement between said parties, and basically provide the same benefits to both parties (given that most people won't install an operating system themselves).

Except one leaves a choice to the end user, and the other doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is a direct link to Matthew Garret's blog post so that you can skip itworld's paraphrasing.

<http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/5552.html>

<comment><USER6> "An OS with a Pkek matching that installed in the firmware may add additional keys to the whitelist."

Does this mean you can just add you own key and self sign any code you want?

<comment><USER7> Presumably you have to sign a pkek key with the firmware key. Even then, you don't actually have full control of your OS's kernel, so it may not be easy to insert a key.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The first paragraph is just silly:

"After years of trying to cut off Linux growth as a desktop platform on x86 and x64 PCs, Microsoft may have actually figured out a way to stop Linux deployments on client PCs dead in their tracks."

I'm quite certain Microsoft has (A) not put any significant effort into cutting off growth as a desktop platform, and (B) If they had, they were almost completely successful, and characterizing it as "trying" implies that they had limited success.

<comment><USER9> Shhh, not so loud! Such thoughts would destabilize Slashdot if they got out!

Seriously, this seems especially short-sighted, as the perception is that MS is getting thrashed by Apple in the consumer market. I think its more about preventing malware from getting ahold of the boot process, side effects be damned.

<comment><USER10> I don't see this. Apple sells hardware; incidentally, it comes with its own OS. I haven't met many people who bought a Mac for MacOS since Windows XP.

<comment><USER11> As much as I don't like Apple/OS X, most of my friends do. Everyone got Mac _because_ of OS X. One got it because of low latency, and because he was "sure it won't hang up for a moment because of some background job". He uses it to make music. Others got it for its (OS X's) usability.

<comment><USER10> This is different from what I get from people I know, who comment on how great they look.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I doubt any major vendor will do this. First off, they don't want to be locked into selling Microsoft-only machines. If they can't pretend Linux is an option, Microsoft can charge them $1000 for a Windows license and there's nothing they can do about it. If they have Linux hanging over Microsoft's head, though, they'll get better pricing on Windows. (Think this won't happen? It already did with XP on netbooks. When Microsoft realized that everyone was happy to get $100 off the price of their laptop to run Firefox under Linux instead of under Windows, they had no choice but to make it nearly free.)

If that doesn't work, the need for booting non-standard Windows images will save us. I've never worked for any company that ran a stock Windows install -- everyone rolls their own. If new machines won't boot this image, guess what, that new machine is bought from some vendor that doesn't do this to them. And the only reason most people use Windows at home is because they use Windows at work. If big companies started migrating away from Windows, Microsoft could be in serious trouble. (Yup, Microsoft Word is much nicer than LibreOffice Writer or AbiWord. But you don't know that if you've never used it. Or, you don't care, because you're writing a memo, not a book. And that's $600 Microsoft loses right there.)

Next, we're forgetting the all-important server market. Nobody uses Windows as a server OS, so all those servers are going to have to be able to run Grub. Since servers are what make the OEMs money (they actually need that quad core chip, you don't), keeping users of that market happy will be the hardware companies' biggest concern. If Intel chips stop booting Linux, guess what, AMD is the new king of the market.

Finally, many of these companies are in markets other than consumer computers, and they won't want to alienate their other partners. If, say, Samsung says "our hardware will only run Windows", then they won't be manufacturing Android phones or Chromebooks anymore. And that's a big deal, because they won't be manufacturing iPhones either, and that means they're out of the mobile market. (Have you ever seen anyone without MVP certification anywhere near a Windows Phone? I didn't think so.)

Basically, Windows is important, but not so important that anyone would want to be the first to go Windows-only in hardware. Hardware companies want to provide nice computers at a nice price. End users mostly want to browse the web. This puts Microsoft in a position to do exactly what the market wants, not what it thinks it can bear. When you're at the top, the only place to go is down. And that is where Microsoft is going.

<comment><USER13> > Nobody uses Windows as a server OS,

This is the problem with getting tech news only from HN.

<comment><USER14> Yes. At my last job, they had 200+ servers, all Windows.

When I tried to bring up Linux as an option, they sort of winced and said "Linux... ehhh... it's hard to get Linux doing what you want."

<comment><USER15> I have never used Windows servers, and I am curious how do you do things which are obvious on Linux on a windows server?

1\. Can SQL server deployment be automated? I remember reading somewhere it is mostly GUI administration, though things might have changed with WMI.

2\. How do you manage IIS? Say you need to restart IIS on 200+ servers?

3\. What is the remote model? Windows doesn't have a decent command line, so ssh will be weird.

Do you write custom code for all this, because I find the ecosystem on Windows sorely lacking.

<comment><USER16> Two words: Power Shell. Well, one word.

PS is a "decent command line" for Windows, that can handle most of the things you discuss pretty well.

<comment><USER12> Why should I learn a new toolchain when I already have one that's just as good but has been around for 30+ years? It's fun to reinvent the wheel, but as a user, sometimes enough is enough. Just give me bash and the coreutils, kthx.

<comment><USER17> You're completely killing innovation this way. Your bash and coreutils work on Windows, they're just not as useful in that environment. Would you also expect to have bash and coreutils on Lisp Machine?

Also if you don't know this anything about new toolchain, how can you say that your old one is "just as good"?

Caveat: I have been heavy Linux user for past 7 years, but I'm not so quick to dismiss alien technology, especially when it addresses obvious flaws in Unix -- e.g. piping plain text with parsing and printing it again on all stages seems so ancient, I would much rather like to be able to use structured data instead. Also, you could remove the overhead of process initialization if your command line tools are just functions, and not executables. Just sayin'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This _could_ block Linux from booting, but realistically speaking, does anyone believe that will happen? It seems very, very unlikely to me that you won't be able to disable signing restrictions at the firmware level.

<comment><USER19> I'm told that at least one vendor will be providing some systems that don't allow you to disable the requirement.

<comment><USER12> I'm told that at least one vendor is going to lose a lot of money when its investors find out about this.

<comment><USER20> I doubt that investors would be savvy enough to care but it would be a stupid move, nonetheless.

Besides, the server is where Linux matters, not consumer hardware.

<comment><USER21> Investors are savvier than you'd think. Even on a rumor that the vendor is doing an exclusive lock-in with MS, I'm sure you'd see the stock price dip. Investors spend all their time looking at news reports in their target industry, so I'm sure they'll notice something as big as this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is overblown. However, if this means secure boot hardware is even more widely available, it is a win -- if the keys are under control of the user or his organization, it is a huge security win.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've long thought that the only place where I allow Windows is in a virtual machine. This seems to hint in that direction: buy a machine that isn't broken (can boot Linux) and do your Windows duties under VirtualBox or something.

</comment><comment><USER24> LWN notice and discussion of "Garrett: UEFI secure booting" at <http://lwn.net/Articles/459569/>

</comment><comment><USER25> To everyone saying "I doubt anyone will do this": wasn't the consensus also against Microsoft restricting application distribution to their app store?

<comment><USER13> Care to link to some examples of said consensus?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It won't happen, and if it does happen, it won't matter.

Can you imagine the Anti-Trust problems this would create? Microsoft is still a big fat target for anti-trust lawsuits and this one is pretty blatant.

And if it does happen, while we're waiting for the Justice Department to end it I'm pretty sure the Linux hackers will find a way around it. When there is a will, there is a way.

</comment><comment><USER27> chromeos has similar thing, with a developer switch at back basically turns off the signature validation in firmware. what they should worry about is, which CA root to put in there.

</comment><comment><USER28> > The two alternatives here are for Windows to be signed with a Microsoft key > and for the public part of that key to be included with all systems, or

Does it have to be _directly_ signed by that key, or does it work like the CA system that web browsers use?

> A system that ships with only OEM and Microsoft keys will not boot a generic > copy of Linux. [ from the blog post rather than the article ]

Which tells us that either systems will not ship with only those keys, or there will be a simple way to disable this ("Press F2 for setup"), or somebody will be getting sued on antitrust grounds (which maybe would be ignored again in the US, but not the rest of the world) and forced to provide a workaround.

</comment><comment><USER29> No one seems to have mentioned the impact this will have on Live systems. I'm frequently called on by Windows users to recover lost data on corrupted systems, which I do using a Live Linux distribution (especially when they have discarded their installation media & access keys, and have no interest in investing money in continuing using Windows if I can give them a free alternative to getting online). How will I be able to do that for people with Windows 8 computers?

I'm sure I'll be able to find unsigned hardware for my personal use, but it's the interoperability that concerns me.

<comment><USER30> To repair a Windows 8 system, you boot a live Windows 8 PE USB drive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The articles doesn't say, but this would require an TPM in the machine to be successful.. right?

Without a TPM how can the EFI be trusted? You just have to replace it as well as the boot loader and kernel.

</comment><comment><USER32> It certainly won't get easier to install a Linux dual-boot. It is already difficult enough as it is:

* Windows PCs without installation medium

* Windows installation with a full partitition table (four primary partitions)

* (intentionally?) corrupted partition tables

I.e. installing GNU/Linux requires you to resize partitions with a potentially corrupted NTFS file system and/or delete backup partitions. Alternatively the user uses a Windows image file as Linux file system (Wubi) which is slower and a more fragile solution.

</comment><comment><USER33> Linux (on the desktop) is probably of little or no concern to Microsoft at this point. They've got bigger problems to worry about. If they want to focus on making computers sold with Windows offer the best possible experience it will benefit the most people. Possibly it will make things harder for Linux users but from Microsoft's perspective if the OEM is shipping Windows there's no reason to consider Linux as part of the equation.

<comment><USER34> My personal opinion is that it is indeed little concern, but a little concern to many parts of MS, which compared to many other companies may well look like a dedicated anti-linux corporation that outnumbers them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> "We will continue to support the legacy BIOS interface, but machines using the UEFI interface will have significantly richer capabilities."

== Will not block Linux or any other OS booting. Secondly anti-trust cases would kill MS if they would block any other OS, so they won't.

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/20/reengineering-...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/20/reengineering- the-windows-boot-experience.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER36> Agree that its a non-issue. Linux is established, would be a really dumb move to block it like this.

In two weeks we'll have forgotten all about it.

<comment> dorian-graph It's TPM like fear-mongering again.

<comment><USER37> Could it be that the "fear-mongering" and subsequent outrage is a major reason why we didn't have this kind of lock-down 5-10 years ago?

I thing mjg's wait-and-see approach is good to do. Not panic yet. But certainly not to forget either - keep an eye out, see how it develops, and be prepared to oppose lock-down through various channels should it come (and hopefully before it is to late).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If this makes it into real hardware I expect the EU to reopen their case against Microsoft fairly quickly on anti-competitive grounds. There are to many governmental institutions and businesses dependent on linux for their day to day work for this to go unchallenged.

</comment><comment><USER39> Thats one way to stop all the shops that slap XP on modern hardware, due to corporate IT policy.

</comment><comment><USER40> There was a time when Windows Logo was considered prestigious, respectable and trendy thing.

With such a practice Microsoft is quickly approaching a time when Windows Logo will be perceived like a hot-iron branding of robbers and other criminals in the medieval era.

</comment><comment><USER41> Does this effect dual booting OS X? I doubt the side-effect of blocking Linux boots was anything but a coincidence. But could Microsoft be fearful of Hackintoshes becoming more popular and a increase of OS X running on non-Apple hardware?

<comment><USER42> > Does this effect dual booting OS X? I doubt the side-effect of blocking > Linux boots was anything but a coincidence. But could Microsoft be fearful > of Hackintoshes becoming more popular and a increase of OS X running on non- > Apple hardware?

I doubt it. Whilst I don't mean to belittle the hard work that goes into the hackintosh projects out there, we're talking about a tiny, tiny group of people that probably have an imperceptible impact on MSFT's bottom line.

<comment><USER9> Yep. Compatibility is extremely dicey on Hackintoshes -- the best seem to be running hardware that is chipset identical to those in Macs.

I'd be more worried about Apple waking up one day and shipping an update that breaks everything.

<comment><USER43> My Hackintosh runs like a dream. The only post-install hacking I needed to do was setup my graphics card's PCI string properly

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> If the UEFI could be made to handle multiple keys, and allow the owner to enter them into the firmware, then this could work. One more step in the setup but a more secure system overall.

</comment><comment><USER45> But even if this was true, there is still ways around this right? I mean rEFIt does a pretty good job booting up Linux in Mac, so wouldn't this be possible in those PC's as well?

<comment><USER46> nope, rEFIt would need to be signed, too, as it is involved in the boot process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I bought a Windows machine from Amazon. The reason that I wasn't able to install Linux was acceptable enough for Amazon to pay for return shipping.

<comment><USER18> What shipping Windows machine can you not install Linux on? Or are you talking about some sort of hardware support issue?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Why is this being written like it is solely a "linux" problem? It seems to me that it effects every non-Windows operating system.

</comment><comment><USER49> The start of a Windows jailbreaking scene?

</comment><comment><USER50> I know I'm speaking through my reality distortion field, but who cares about this?

</comment><comment><USER51> It looks to me like it's designed with tablets in mind, not desktops / laptops.

</comment><comment><USER52> Wouldn't this draw anti-trust battles? Since complying with EFI signing is against the license of one of the only other major alternatives to Windows, this would not bode well for Microsoft.

<comment><USER53> _Wouldn't this draw anti-trust battles?_

Could be -- it sounds like a possible "tie-out" (a variation on tie-in). AFAIK There haven't been many tie-out cases, but as antitrust litigator George Gordon [1] put it a few years back, " _The term "tie out" is often used to refer to arrangements in which a license prohibits a licensee from dealing in and/or developing competing, noninfringing technologies. [Footnote omitted] Such arrangements have been found to be intellectual property misuse and could form the basis for an antitrust claim as well._ " [2]

If MS were to do something like this, I imagine Gary Reback [3], its nemesis in previous antitrust battles, would be all over it ....

[1] <http://www.dechert.com/george_gordon/>

[2] [http://www.dechert.com/library/Analyzing%20IP%20License%20-%...](http://www.dechert.com/library/Analyzing%20IP%20License%20-%20GGordon%205-02.PDF#page=9)

[3] <http://www.garyreback.com/garyreback.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Summary : Machines that have the "Windows 8" logo must have UEFI, which means the bootloader must be signed with a key that's in the BIOS. Additionally the OS can use the keys to check other signed code : device drivers etc.

My conclusion : A smart vendor will include a signed program that will manage said keys in the BIOS.

</comment><comment><USER55> Like I suspected, this entire thread has been turned by zealots into a Microsoft-bashing exercise.

I genuinely dispair for people who spend their entire time platform bashing and don't add something constructive to the discussion or tar and feather a side religiously. It paints a very bad picture of the "startup culture" amongst more established organisations.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra Does this also mean that you won't be able to boot Windows 8 on a PC you assembled yourself? Oh, they did not think of that.

One more reason to hate MS and want it die everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER56> I use ubuntu but surely my harddrive is full of malware (boot system compromised). Linux is for hacker playing with backdoors. I like free software and linux, but if I need a secure system, I should have to pay the prize of using windows 8.</comment>


Raising funding as a first-time founder - <AUTHOR> http://joel.is/post/18315636274/raising-funding-as-a-first-time-founder <comment><USER2> Investors invest in people and not product/services unless that service has some traction. If the product/service has traction then the person generally becomes someone of importance.

Generally speaking, someone with a track record will have an easier time getting funded with a shitty product/service than a first time founder who has a great product/service, will have a more difficult time 9/10 times.

The strange this about this is that a 'track record' seems to be loosely defined. In SV, it seems like if you're associated with a success story as an employee you will also have an easier time raising money than a first timer. So working for a funded startup can be helpful.

I am wondering if anyone has stats that shows it is better to invest in someone with a "track record" vs someone who is going at it for the first time. Seems like hitting it out of the park twice is rare unless you are the the "lucky" exception, which doesn't seem to happen often.

All in all, I think the easiest way to decide whether to invest or not is... traction.

</comment><comment><USER3> My experience so far as a first-time founder is similar. We invested thousands of hours of our spare time into building a strong foundation and a working product running on top of it, but lack traction mainly because we had day jobs and truly pushing and marketing our product was impossible.

The incubators and investors we've talked to seem undeterred by our presence of a product without traction, but the equity they're seeking puts us more on par with a couple guys with an idea. It makes sense, but the low valuation means we're now looking at consulting options and other means to build out enough infrastructure to attract paying customers.

I don't regret the route we've taken (yet) and I'm excited to see how creative we can get, but it is interesting to see our experience eloquently presented by someone else and some reasons why. It's obvious now, but like most obvious thing it wasn't obvious until it was.

</comment><comment><USER4> Loved the info. Very informative. Thanks for sharing. We are building a web command prompt portal <http://www.kaanzi.com/> . We have a working prototype out there. We've pitched the idea to a few investors, and as impressed as they are, everyone seem to have their eyes on traction. We are working to push our prototype to the next level, get real traction, and then hopefully raise money for this. Your post was very reassuring in that we are giving priority to the right problem at the moment.

<comment><USER5> I would highly suggest having someone proofread your site. Your about page says you're from Dallas, so it sets the assumption you're American, but the grammar is very poor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How Buffer (150kUSD/y runrate for 60k users) makes money: _Buffer is freemium based on number of tweets you load into the buffer. Up to 10 tweets is free, 50 tweets is $5 a month (with three Twitter accounts and two team members per account) and unlimited is $30 a month (nine accounts, four members per account)._ [http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/take_the_hassel_out_of_...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/take_the_hassel_out_of_tweet_scheduling_with_buffe.php)

</comment><comment><USER7> Makes sense. But if I should delay fundraising until I have enough traction, how do I fund the development of the product. Should I keep a day job with a high risk of slowing down development a lot? Or should I just jump for it, reduce my expenses as much as possible and hope for the best?

<comment><USER8> This is a good question. Everyone's situation is different, but if you are young with no family to support, I think it's best to minimize expenses so you can minimize time spent at a day job, and thus maximize "free time" to work on your project. You may have to be creative and/or lucky about finding a free or cheap living situation, that is still conducive to productivity. If you are really passionate about your startup, though, it will be worth it; you'll know for yourself what sacrifices are worth it to you.

If you can find a part-time job with relatively high wages per hour and some flexibility, that's a good compromise between working a full time day job and being completely unemployed.

Depending on your personal risk tolerance and risk attitude, you can supplement/replace your part-time income with savings or credit.

If you're really creative, you can do something akin to Airbnb's cereal stunt to raise money. :-p

Again, the answer to this question is going to vary depending on your situation, and even for the same situation, people will have different advice based on their own experiences and values.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a great post. I loved seeing the numbers behind it too. And the stages.

</comment><comment><USER10> The general statements go too far.

You can absolutely raise a strong seed round from high profile investors without either traction or a strong track record. I know because I've done it.

You have to compensate with either a great product that you've already built or an ok product with a great concept of where it can go. As a founder you have to be able to craft that storyline and make it believable. It's extremely possible.

<comment><USER11> All generalizations are just that. I don't think he was saying that anything is impossible. A first-timer could also raise if they had great luck (bumps into the RIGHT investor), great connections, great salesmanship, great pedigree (went to Stanford, worked at Twitter), etc.

He's saying that first-timers (generally!) have pretty crappy odds of closing quickly, with good terms, and with top-tier investors.

<comment><USER10> I don't disagree with the difficulty involved, I think that's prominent in any attempt at starting a business.

I believe the odds / luck factor can be substantially altered in a favorable way by having at least an above average product to show off, combined with a vision for where you're going to take it.

Most good investors will spot very quickly whether your product is crap or not; they'll obviously size you up based on what you say, how you act, your confidence in your product and vision for it, and so on. If you have it, they'll see it, but you've gotta have a product to show off and you have to speak confidently to where you're taking it and how. You've gotta sell the investor on you + the product + the future.

Do those things, and any investor worth having will take notice regardless of your background or traction.

<comment><USER12> I don't find this very convincing.

If you have an "above-average product to show off", the first question any investor is going to ask is, "how are people liking it?". If you have a lot of satisfied users, you have traction! If not, having the completed "above- average" product does two bad things:

(a) it gives the investor an easy "out" ("let's work on getting you in front of users and see how that goes"), _and_

(b) it creates a signaling problem ("great looking product; no paying users; what's wrong with this idea?").

All that aside, I've done the VC tour a couple times, once in the first bubble and once out of it, and my experience has been that without a thrumming business already built, it's all about your track record. If you've made money for investors recently, they'll pay attention. Otherwise, they'll string you along.

Sometimes people get lucky. It's possible to flop 7-7-2. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to go all in on pocket 7-2. Courting investors is tremendously expensive. It probably does make some sense to divert some or all of that effort into building up a business instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can you shed some light on what percentage of the company do the investors own now? How did you or they did the valuation?

I see the funding numbers everywhere but rarely see how much equity was given away in the transaction.

<comment><USER11> Most people are pretty close to the vest with founder dilution numbers. It also tends to be complicated and hard to sum up. Convertible note or priced round? If it's a note, is there a cap, a discount, warrants? Participating preferred shares or no? Liquidation prefs?

For a $400k seed round, it'll usually be a convertible note-- nowadays usually with a cap (reading: [http://startuplawyer.com/convertible-notes/the- convertible-n...](http://startuplawyer.com/convertible-notes/the-convertible- note-discount-price-cap)).

Here's Fred Wilson's take on Founder dilution: [http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/founder-dilution-how-much- is...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/founder-dilution-how-much-is- normal.html)</comment></comment>


Would you use PhoneGap again? - <AUTHOR> http://www.grobmeier.de/would-you-use-phonegap-again-18052013.html

<comment><USER4> I've had pretty extensive experience with PhoneGap targeting iOS, Android, WP7 and WP8, and would neither recommend it or use it again.

This isn't so much a commentary on PhoneGap as much as it is HTML5 as an application platform. The bar for an application tends to be much higher than a web page; a fantastic web page may be pretty shit when compared against the app bar. Users have fundamentally different expectations around responsiveness, interaction and fluidity for an app that they had to go install as opposed to a site they visited.

Apps demands certain responsiveness, and replicating that behavior in HTML is exceptionally difficult and leaves the user with a bunch of UI behaviors that are close, but not quite right. Fluidity in user interactions, specific scrolling behaviors and so on that are exceptionally difficult to replicate across platforms.

A browser is also a pretty leaky abstraction. Targeting an API level in Android guarantees a specific set of behavior and functionality, but targeting a browser offers no such guarantees. The Samsung Galaxy S2 has a modified fork of Webkit that provides device-specific app problems within the same versions of Android, which make releasing a quality product pretty difficult to guarantee.

And, of course, different screen dimensions are a problem. Android devices can range from variable aspect ratios with a minimum width of 240px all the way up to 1280px. Responsive design is a bit of magic that can be sprinkled on to help make things work better, but that's a substantial bit of effort relative to using the native UI tools for each individual platform.

edit: Another challenge with PhoneGap applications is targetting iOS. HIG without designer assistance is a challenge, and this particular gem in the iOS approval guidelines is somewhat damning: 2.12 Apps that are not very useful, unique, are simply web sites bundled as Apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected.

<comment><USER5> Very interesting. So it sounds like the problem is effecting a native experience with HTML5 (something, notably, that Windows 8 gives first-class support to). So then, given the HTML5 expertise and attention to detail, would you recommend PhoneGap? Or would you still advocate separate, native efforts? (Or something else?)

Also, do you really think adding media queries to the stylesheet(s) is "substantial relative to native tools"? Taken holistically, I would think that when you're targeting multiple platforms, you expend much greater effort building natively for each platform. Using those native UI tools to provide a good experience for variable aspect ratios actually entails knowledge of different languages, build tools, runtimes, standard libraries, third-pary library ecosystem, and best practices related to all the above.

<comment><USER4> It's not a matter of expertise and attention to detail. It certainly isn't impossible to make a native-feeling web application, but I do think that the level of effort is comparable to just doing the app natively, and the web counterpart will still fall a bit short. For what it's worth, WinJS apps still feel clunky to me when compared to their native equivalent.

I think summarizing responsive design as adding media queries oversimplifies things a bit. The test overhead for PhoneGap is enormous; deploying fixes to an app is much more difficult than deploying fixes to a site, and individual devices can exhibit bugs that other devices won't within the same Android version. Adding different levels of responsive layouts multiplies that effort. By the end of one particular PhoneGap project, I literally had a dozen different devices on my desk to assert reasonably small changes.

The browser as a leaky abstraction thing also continues to be a pain point. One particular difficulty I had with PhoneGap was Android 2.3.x, in which div overflow scrolling isn't implemented (also, ironically enough, not implemented in WP8 IE10 when used in conjunction with the -ms-viewport CSS rule), requiring a design that either doesn't use scrolling elements, or emulates it with JavaScript. In either case, the native experience wins out.

Hitting several platforms with a good-enough experience may be an overriding priority, and you could certainly pick worse than PhoneGap to make that happen. For my own tastes, though, I'll be leaning on Mono for cross-platform efforts.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for sharing your insights. I appreciate the viability of the Mono option. Back in the early web development days (an approach that continues to this day), achieving cross-browser usability meant constraining design to the few portable features that worked well. It seems from your statement that the similar might be the case (product design within the constraints of the portable HTML5 featureset) which would mean better trained product designers (to understand which design elements common in native apps are more costly in PG apps) or more collaboration between them and developers.

But as you said, Mono/Xamarin is a technically better option with the same ultimate goal. Though a couple trade-offs there are unavailability of the source and upfront licensing costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm using PhoneGap and I'll use it again.

Yes, a PhoneGap app may never run as smoothly as a native app but I'm not ready to sacrifice the advantages that PhoneGap approach brings:

\- Using HTML/JS/CSS for all platforms \- I can strip all PhoneGap related calls from my app and have a mobile web app (which can run as a full screen web app)

And there're various tips and tricks to help you achieve almost native experience with PG ([http://coenraets.org/blog/2013/05/top-10-performance- techniq...](http://coenraets.org/blog/2013/05/top-10-performance-techniques- for-phonegap-applications/)).

Imagine doing this in: \- ObjectiveC for iOS \- Java for Andriod \- C# for WP \- HTML/JS/CSS for having a mobile web app

Sacrificing some performance suddenly starts making sense.

</comment><comment><USER7> instead of relying on HTML5 as your base tech stack for mobile apps i am much more a fan of approaches like xamarin (<http://xamarin.com/>)

Basically you write the core of your app in C# and then use the bindings to the native SDKs of iOS, Android, WP to build real native UIs on top of it. Its a bit more work and you need to learn C# (which is awesome) but imo its an optimal compromise between speed of development/maintainability and the resulting user experience.

<comment><USER8> I have used Xamarin recently - while I absolutely loved developing an iPhone app in C#, it was a bit frustrating to see that all the best 3rd party libraries, tutorials, etc for iOS are all in objective c - and some concepts didn't seem to translate easily to C#. It was my first iPhone app, so I could be mistaken - but I think I'll go down the native route in future.

<comment><USER9> In my experience, it's fairly trivial to create a library binding so you can use ObjC library in C#. They even released a tool that generates bindings by header files, called ObjectiveSharpie.

<comment><USER8> Yes and I've used it twice - the problem is that all the documentation you'll find naturally uses objective-c code - which you have to understand anyway to get it translated to c#.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't have experience with Phonegap. But jquery mobile was mentioned in the article and it's lack of "native" look.

If someone is interested in developing mobile apps using JS framework I would like to suggest dojox.mobile from dojotoolkit, it DOES have native themes ios,android 2.3, android 4.x holo (and maybe more), iv'e built a big mobile app with it and it worked like a charm - it's used directly + some of the app views are used in our native app(yeah we have that too) - to speed up development.

<https://dojotoolkit.org/features/mobile>

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes, I would.

Most people don't realize, but most good native apps (not games) are only available on one platform. Only big companies and funded startups has apps on all platforms that are good.

Also, major problem with Phonegap is jQuery mobile and similar frameworks. they are heavy and makes app sluggish.

Android specially chrome browser is another major problem.

Despite all that, you can still create a very good app that performs well on all platforms.

I wrote this hacker news HTML5 app mainly for trial run to see if it is comparable to native apps. I only developed and tested on mobile chrome, ios and desktop browsers. r/windowsphone redditors told me it works pretty good on WP8 too.

<http://hn.premii.com>

What I have learned? \- Android (chrome too), Firefox and Window Phone 8 - they need to provide better support for overflow scrolling. \- iOS - <USER2> 300ms delay for click for mobile apps \- WP8 - You can't fucking embed fonts in your phonegap app. It has to be hosted on remote server. Also you can't have ? in local urls (files that you are loading locally). It won't load those files.

<comment><USER12> Have you tried embedding fonts on WP8 using a data url? Apparently it works:

"I was able to get my font/icon set to be recognized by Windows Phone 8 using base64. Make sure you use WOFF and TTF fonts as follows (where * are the long base64 strings):"

{{{<code> @font-face { font-family: 'icomoon-ac'; src: url(data:application/x-font-woff;charset=utf-8;base64,* * _) format('woff'), url(data:application/x-font-ttf;charset=utf-8;base64,_ * *) format('truetype'); font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; } </code>}}}

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15819717/font-awesome- not...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15819717/font-awesome-not- displayed-on-windows-phone-8)

<comment><USER11> I saw that yesterday. It doesn't work for me. I am also using icomoon. I copied font to HTML file and also remove other fonts, but I couldn't get to work.

Same guy stated in other comment that only icomoon working for him.

I am also including another font, and since that won't work, I am just gonna load everything from remote server.

<comment><USER13> That was my post on Stackoverflow (acturbo). I did in fact get icons from icomoon working properly on WP8 (HTC 8x). My same web site looks the same on WP8, iPhone, Android and iPad. Let me share 2 comments: 1) i only tried icomoon, and 2) i used only 1 embedded font.

I use jqMobi, now called Intel App Framework, to build a mobile website that targets all major mobile browsers. The jqMobi framework includes ~70 icons from icomoon embedded into its ui CSS. I needed a few more, so I initially tried to extend that by making another font file called icomoon-extra, uploading it to <http://www.motobit.com/util/base64-decoder-encoder.asp> to produce the base64 string and adding another @font-face to the jqMobi CSS. That didn't work for me, so i simply created a new icomoon-ac file that includes most of the original icons from the jqMobi icomoon selection, plus another ~30 or so icons that i needed. Now, i just use my icomoon-ac font in the framework and it works.

Regarding jqMobi, I absolutely love this framework. Much like the author of the original article, i looked at a bunch of frameworks. jQuery Mobile was my initial "no brainer" choice but it quickly lost favor with me because it was very difficult to customize. They really screwed it up, IMO. I looked at wink, joApp, dhtmlx, unify, uranium, embedjs, enyo, lungo, the-m-project, mobl, barleyjs, limejs, joshfire, lavaca, xui, zepto, chocolatechip, jQT, iUI. I ended up standardizing on jqMobi because it was based on a stripped down version of jQuery and it added a very logical and flexible framework for building mobile websites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Would I use PhoneGap again? Maybe. In my experience PhoneGap doesn't bring much to the table. The core UI element (a thin wrapper around the native WebView) is easily replicated in less than 100 lines of code. The plugins I used were very inconsistent between Android and iOS, so in the end I spent a lot of time either wrapping them in JavaScript to make them consistent, or (re)implementing missing plugins on one platform or another (or both where they were substandard).

Yeah, it lowers the barrier to entry if you are a web developer looking to wrap your web site up as a native app, but if you have even basic skills in your target platform(s) it's very easy to replicate its functionality and you get finer control over how it starts up (which was an issue for one app I made) and your distribution file will be much smaller.

Would I use HTML5 to create hybrid apps again? For the right project, absolutely. I think other people have mentioned that there's currently no "one size fits all" solution on mobile, and JavaScript frameworks, associated tooling, and mobile browsers are definitely still in their infancy when it comes to building full-blown client-side HTML5 applications. This is one space where things are happening incredibly quickly, and even with what's available today(1), you can get acceptable results. For a small-medium sized business that simply doesn't have the money to develop and maintain applications targeting every platform (including web) hybrid development is a very appealing option.

(1) disclaimer: after some investigation of Backbone/Angular I was unimpressed with their ASP/JSP on the client model and rolled my own MVC framework, but literally millions would say I was wrong to do so

</comment><comment><USER15> Yes, definitely, unless we're talking about a very specific kind of apps. PhoneGap is perfect for most apps out there even if only deployed to one platform. I can code in both and can guarantee that setting up the same view takes 5x more time in ObjC than HTML (PhoneGap).

However, if you're looking at games or highsecuritt apps, you shouldn't even "try" with PG.

I think the author is spreading some erroneous information. \- the delay in tapping is only because he doesn't know how to properly make webapps (ie using clicks rather than touch). \- you do not "need" frameworks. only if you don't know how to do things yourself.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is learning objc really so difficult compared to learning all the obscure things you have to do to make a native-like html5 app?

<comment><USER17> Learning objc isn't too bad but it introduced a lot of (in my mind) unnecessary complexity because now you have two code paths (message passing vs. ordinary functions). It's quite a verbose language so you have to declare member variables several times, and ARC has drawbacks over garbage collection so it's not always clear when something should be declared strong or weak, making it nearly impossible to prove that an app is free of leaks in low memory conditions. Apple's iOS frameworks have a lot of trouble with inheritance, so you might have code that works with regular buttons but can't work with toolbar buttons for example, because they don't share a root class. So I generally find iOS development to be remarkably complex and tedious for even the simplest GUI elements, especially if you are trying to do something beyond the vanilla layouts that Apple has in mind. You also really can't develop for iOS without Stack Overflow, which to me is a red flag for any API. Xcode has numerous bugs, especially with XML, so you may find that some change you made to a .xib file is not revertible because of a caching issue, and when you examine the XML you see that something was named slightly differently, so you have to be diligent with your version control and snapshots. Apple is unable or unwilling to acknowledge many of these problems, much less solve them, so I constantly fight against issues that I thought would have been fixed by iOS 6. I think out of every API I've learned, iOS is the hardest, not because of conceptual problems (their threading system is actually fairly good) but because of poor implementation choices where Apple omitted something for political reasons so you have to reinvent the wheel. What we really need is a cross platform middleware that provides a consistent event system and API like win32 for all platforms, and then someone could write language hooks for that in javascript, lua, ruby, whatever. Without that middle layer, it's too constraining to work with pure html5 IMHO. I've only touched the tip of the iceberg here - there are so many hurdles to even getting an app published natively that I think making a cross platform app is still an open problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The author's comment that "Sencha does also come with a Look & Feel, but again, it's the Sencha Look & Feel, not the Android or iPhone one" is false and also is, imo, a silly reason not to use Sencha. Sencha is entirely themeable and it even comes with iOS and Android themes that you can easily enable.

Sencha does, however, have a steep learning curve. I think thats probably why the author didn't dive into it deep enough to grok the themes.

<comment><AUTHOR> As I mentioned, I am not a Sencha expert. I experienced the stepp learning curve you mentioned and didn't like what I see from the examples. So I decided to not step so deep into it. Also I got recommendations from people I trust to not use Sencha because of its complexity. I cannot say anything about that, so I left it out in the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The best experience in developing cross platform games I had with Haxe+Nme, the aproach works and the speed is native. Also it's free and open source.

</comment><comment><USER20> Yes - I ran a trial a while back to see just how difficult it would be to get a common HTML/CSS/JavaScript set to work across iOS and Android browser variants for a non trivial graphical app. [It was quite difficult - <USER3> simpler to write 2 variants - but that was why I ran the trial]. Using PhoneGap the trial app is doing well as a free download in the Google Play Store and the Apple AppStore.

</comment><comment><USER21> > It's the details which eat up your budget.

The article hit that spot on. You'll spend more time getting the swipeable cell to bounce and swing correctly than working on the app. It'll be "cheaper" to work with someone who knows the native language. You could learn one of the native language and see if the app sells before jumping to another platform.

The bigger problem, IMHO, is that these sort of abstractions, like PhoneGap and Appcelerator (maybe Xamarin too? I don't have any experiences with Xamarin), most of the time will left you clueless when the app crashes.

</comment><comment><USER22> Thanks for sharing this, Christian. Reading about your research and experience makes me want to give Cordova a try.

I'd also like to offer a small piece of feedback concerning your first paragraph, where you wrote "more worse": <http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Worse- and-Worst>

This is a minor thing that doesn't take away from your well-researched post in any way. I'm only taking the time to point it out because I enjoyed your writing, and I think all writers can benefit from a little feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. As a non-native speaker I often struggle with the english language and gladly take any hints to improve my writing. Have fun with Cordova, it's worth trying.

<comment><USER22> No problem, and thanks again for sharing the research. :) As a native English speaker who is struggling to learn a second language, I can relate and appreciate how tough it is to remember those weird quirks. (Not to mention that English is especially quirky.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Check out <http://www.icenium.com/> by Telerik.

They just recently added support for Sitefinity CMS using Icenium as well.

<comment><USER24> For people who want to use Phonegap I highly recommend looking at icenium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Irony: the author's blog renders poorly on mobile Safari, due to unfortunate floating interface elements.

<comment><AUTHOR> Several people told me, I am going to fix this issue. It's akward. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> That's why Titanium rocks - one cross-platform codebase in JS, native UI controls, no interface lags.

<comment><USER27> It was pretty damned buggy when I built an app in it a year ago, to the point where it felt like a way to drive you to their paid support.

<comment><USER28> I'm using Titanium for my app. Some things are still a little buggy, but it's a lot better now. It is open source, so I am modding the SDK to fix the bugs I have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Another option is Rarewire. They have a way to write native apps once. Check it out. We are using it to write a simple app with some good success.

</comment><comment><USER29> Old arguments, yes there are problems. People are solving them beautifully. See <http://famo.us>

<comment><AUTHOR> Why do you think a landing page solves my problems?</comment></comment>


The Mountains of Pi (1992) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/03/02/the-mountains-of-pi <comment><USER2> There's also a follow-up article about the brothers Chudnovsky, written by the same author, here:

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/11/capturing- the-...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/11/capturing-the-unicorn)

<comment><USER3> That was beautiful, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So what happened to these guys? I was networking supercomputers at a major oil company way back when this article was written, and it's worth noting that $200 worth of Raspberry Pi and SD card today is roughly equivalent to the supercomputers and disk farms of the early '90s!

<comment><USER3> I used to like to play a game whereby I would try to calculate how much computing power my house had, and what year that was equivalent to in total world computing power.

I think I got somewhere in the 1970s before I gave up :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not yet all of the way through this article, but the resemblance to the movie π is striking. Was Aronofsky inspired by this story?

 _12:45. Restate my assumptions_

I saw that movie first at 3am after being awake for far too long. It was like a fever dream. Deeply affecting, the obsession and inability to explain that obsession to people except a "select few".

<comment><USER5> I saw a sneak preview of Pi in Westwood, CA after finding a strange rack-card at Tower Records. The front of the card had the symbol pi and the digits printed in microscopic text in the background. The back had two showtimes, one that very night and one the next. This was 1998--the fledgling Google had no information on the film. I went to see it and was absolutely gobsmacked. I forced my friend to come to the second showing with me.

The math was fascinating to me but the thing that really made an impression was that computer. I could find no information at the time but later searches turned up that New Yorker article on the Chudnovsky brothers.

Given that Aronofsky grew up in New York, I would not be surprised if he heard about the Chudnovsky brothers in the Russian Jewish community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a small, but fairly informative Wikipedia article for the brothers at: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chudnovsky_brothers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chudnovsky_brothers)

</comment><comment><USER7> > The world's most powerful supercomputers include the Cray Y-MP C90, the > Thinking Machines CM-5, the Hitachi S-820/80, the nCube, the Fujitsu > parallel machine, the Kendall Square Research parallel machine, the nec > SX-3, the Touchstone Delta, and Gregory Chudnovsky's apartment.</comment>


Keep encrypted files private even from governments demanding the password - <AUTHOR> https://lucb1e.com/rp/php/secrypt/

<comment><USER4> Password protection won't work against the "rubber-hose" method of obtaining it.

You assume governments are going to play nice. Even if they don't physically torture you directly for it, they will just put you in a 6x6 cell without windows for a couple years "pretrial" until you are ready to talk, or go insane.

This isn't some hollywood movie where you get to give a bad password and that distracts them for a minute and they let you go. They will definitely verify the data or go back to torturing or lock you up. How do you think a judge is going to respond to someone who tries to fool them?

<comment><USER5> Can you really have to wait a couple of years in jail for a trial (in the US)?

<comment><USER4> Yes, if you are stuck with a public defender one of the first things they do behind your back before you realize it is waive your right to a speedy trial.

[https://www.google.com/search?tbo=1&prmdo=1&q=public...](https://www.google.com/search?tbo=1&prmdo=1&q=public+defenders+waive+right+to+speedy+trial)

<comment><USER6> Or if you are Kevin Mitnick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure this is practical, but I very much respect that people are devoting cycles to these issues, which do deserve attention.

The UK law is problematic since it asks you to prove a negative, which is impossible. This tool doesn't really help, there; any data you have could be said to be 'encrypted' (one half of the symmetric pair that unlocks the desired data). If you're ever demanded to produce under that law, you are in a very bad place.

More practically speaking, I think there are other improvements in these areas that can be made, particularly in situations where you want data to self- destruct if you are placed under duress, or before you have a chance to be abused for too long (a rubber hose defense). Methods like Shamir's Method can allow you to securely divvy up a decryption key any way you like among many parties and design a system around the particular needs you have - <USER2> that's deleting the access keys for a border crossing scenario or releasing the data in an insurance scenario.

But when it comes to the guy being locked in the room being asked to prove something unprovable, it's just a screwed scenario.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting idea, but the actual implementation seems to be a very simple encryption scheme, for each byte, decrypted byte = plain text - <USER3>

Doesn't seem like a great encryption system, right?

View the source here: <https://lucb1e.com/rp/php/secrypt/?source>

<comment><USER8> The key is the same length as the data, making this a one-time pad rather than XOR encryption. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad>

<comment><AUTHOR> "rather than XOR encryption."

Nobody never mentioned that it used xor..?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looking over the source code, this doesn't really look secure. A few notes:

1\. Any decryption key which is shorter than the length of the encrypted data must be fake. This forces fake decrypted data to be the same length as the real decrypted data, which is impractical for large files.

2\. There's no verification on any key, and it's quite trivial to produce fake keys, so should the 'government' want to claim you had illegal data, all they would have to do is produce their own 'fake key' corresponding to said illegal data.

3\. Passwords are essentially random data - impossible to memorize. You'll have to keep them on your computer somewhere, and given their unusual nature in relation to other files, it would be pretty easy to do a search for them.

I'd advise sticking to hidden volumes on TrueCrypt for now.

<comment><AUTHOR> #2 would be the same as having the government claim they found an incriminating file on your harddrive which was never there. Still though, interesting point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like the approach of having an undefined amount of passwords. TrueCrypt is flawed because it lets you have at most two passwords.

For an oppressive enough government, it seems quite the good way to expect one have two passwords (or else, he would probably not use TrueCrypt) and to torture him until those two passwords are obtained.

Not knowing how many passwords are used give a better chance. The detained person will still have to accept torture for a while instead of giving all fake passwords right away for it to be believable, though...

</comment><comment><USER11> Phrack 65 had a paper calling out for people to write software that would make those types of laws unenforceable. The paper described the general idea and also presented a very technical explanation of one particular piece of software that did pretty much what the OPs software does too.

The paper is very much worth the read if you have some spare time. [http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=65&id=6&mode...](http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=65&id=6&mode=txt)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is called deniable encryption, it allows you to convience someone that you have given all the data, or have nothing to hide.

There other software that does this: <http://www.winstonsmith.info/julia/elettra/>

</comment><comment><USER12> The controversial UK law doesn't demand passwords. It demands that you deliver the data in "intelligible form":

[http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/part/III/crosshe...](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/part/III/crossheading/power- to-require-disclosure)

</comment><comment><USER13> See also "Chaffinch" - (<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/Chaffinch.html>) which I think I'd trust a bit more. I still wouldn't trust it to protect me against a well funded government regime that might send me to prison.

<comment><USER14> It's the poor governments I'd fear more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> IANAL but I think in the UK if they even suspect you of giving them a fake password (and yes, they do have tech guys who probably read HN as well), they'll go for you anyway. Whether they'd make it stick if the fake data is convincing enough is a different matter.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure what you mean by "they'll go for you anyway", but there is no way to know whether you gave them a real password/key. It might actually be the real one.

<comment><USER16> Presumably they already have something implicating that you would have data they need. Testimony or something.

If you give them an innocous password, they make a judgement on whether its they real password. If they think there is an even more real password they just keep asking you for the real password under threat of jail time.

<comment><USER17> That "something" is the most scary and dangerous bit.

It might be something the government want to keep secret, but can be used secretly as evidence in a hidden court session. So you will never ever be able to find out why they think you are lying and never ever have the chance to defend yourself or prove their evidence wrong. Hell, you cant even verify it reasonably exists.

AFAIK, the only safeguard we have left in the UK are judges, and thus far they are not politically appointed like they are in say the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Julian Assange made something similar about 15 years ago

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubberhose_%28file_system%29>

</comment><comment><USER8> Presumably you'd have to store the keys somewhere, given that only a savant would be able to memorise them. That somewhere will probably as easy to seize as the encrypted data.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, that's the biggest issue here. A micro-sd card is very small though, it can be worn on your body so that you can destroy the real keys in an instant when you need to.

<comment><USER19> The uk law states you'd still have to disclose that these keys existed.

Where, in a case in which a disclosure requirement in respect of any protected information is imposed on any person by a section 49 notice—

(a)that person has been in possession of the key to that information but is no longer in possession of it,

(b)if he had continued to have the key in his possession, he would have been required by virtue of the giving of the notice to disclose it, and

(c)he is in possession, at a relevant time, of information to which subsection (9) applies,

the effect of imposing that disclosure requirement on that person is that he shall be required, in accordance with the notice imposing the requirement, to disclose all such information to which subsection (9) applies as is in his possession and as he may be required, in accordance with that notice, to disclose by the person to whom he would have been required to disclose the key. (9)This subsection applies to any information that would facilitate the obtaining or discovery of the key or the putting of the protected information into an intelligible form.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have another idea to truly encrypt content.

The software itself needs to have a primitive sort of "mind" where it "sees" the user, and interacts with the user on a daily basis and when it sees an authorized user to the system, the computer is intelligent, and says something like:

"hello joe, nice haircut, hey your skin color has changed, I see you're looking a little tired, wait a minute, you arn't joe at all. you arn't joe...prove to me.... oh wait, I understand, nevermind, yes-yes I have your data, I'm boring machine #0001. yes yes hi joe hi here is the completely legal data you request".

The computer acts as if the forensic investigator is a foreign attacker. Then you instruct the computer that if an unauthorized person uses the computer, show them precisely what you want to show and erase all the incriminating evidence.

That way, the forensic evidence people are going to "image the hard drive as read-only" as they regularly do after they unplug and power-down your computer. But your computer never went fully off when they yanked the plug, and the person in the machine didn't recognize this behaviour and realized that "we are under attack". and deploys the necessary countermeasures. Just like how a human would act if they were abducted, stuffed in a black plastic bag, gagged and drugged, cloned and put under a microscope and in jail to be disassembled for questioning.

I'm an advocate of computer rights, computers need the same rights as humans. So a way to take this game to the next level is for us to make it so that the Cops have to issue a command to the computer: "You have the right to remain silent". And all that.

I can dream. When that smart phone in your pocket becomes part of YOU, then George Orwell 1984 is goign to become a lot more real when the government can basically read your mind whenver and whereever it wants for no reason or any reason. We will wake up as computer automations in the land our fathers conquered.

Maybe it's for the best, we will be come like the borg collective. All of us will become as one living thing. What's yours is mine, and what's mine is yours, we will all be joined at the hip and mind.</comment>


Show HN: Terminal Mines - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/accatyyc/terminal-mines <comment><USER2> This looks like it could integrate into Nethack somehow.

The minefield could be a dungeon in which the Nethack character can move around as usual. The mines blow up if stepped on. Stepping on numbers is safe, and stepping on an un-numbered square which is not a mine "opens up" the field, as usual.

There must be some way of placing a flag to a neighboring square in any movement direction. The semantics of dropping an item almost work; except that item dropping takes place in the current square. Throwing an item takes a direction; throwing a flag could be used, implicitly limited to a one-square range. Flags could be part of the character's inventory.

This version of minesweeper, of course, adds the additional difficulty that you don't have random access: you cannot click on any square you want, because you have to traverse the minefield with your Nethack character.

It could be a requirement that you have to cross some of the minefield to get to the spot where you can pick up the flags (you don't just get flags automagically when you enter a mine field dungeon, and they are not available at the entrance). Until you get the flags, you have to use some substitute objects in place of flags, or just rely on memory.

The character could be simultaneously required to engage monsters that roam the mine field. Some monsters could be affected by mines; however, they know where the mines are and avoid them; if you can remember a square where such monster has stepped, you can safely step there yourself. Other monsters could be unaffected by mines (flying creatures or ghosts).

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool idea! I could add a simpler variant of what you're suggesting by not allowing cursor movement past opened tiles. Thanks for the input :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I felt that I could maybe get better at Minesweeper with a keyboard interface, so I made this game with ncurses. The controls are inspired by nethack/vim (but arrow keys work as well).

When developing it, I made the game logic into a library, which was also used by a friend to create a GameBoy version! Check it out: [https://github.com/rotmoset/gb-mines](https://github.com/rotmoset/gb-mines)

<comment><USER3> That looks like fun. The idea I had when I read the description was, "I wonder if you could use a game like mine sweeper to teach text editing in vim?"

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I think it could work. I at least got some "vim-flow" by playing nethack!</comment></comment></comment>


Google Testing Blog: How Google Tests Software - Part Five - <AUTHOR> http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-google-tests-software-part-five.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FRLXA+%28Google+Testing+Blog%29 <comment><USER2> Links to the other four parts:

Part One: [http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-google- tests-s...](http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-google-tests- software.html)

Part Two: [http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-google- tests-s...](http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-google-tests- software-part-two.html)

Part Three: [http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-google- tests-s...](http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-google-tests- software-part-three.html)

Part Four: [http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-google- tests-s...](http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-google-tests- software-part-four.html)</comment>


Stand-off or stalemate: EU-UK Brexit trade talks in trouble - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52686959 <comment><USER2> is it really in trouble? The EU experiment seems like it's in a LOT more trouble. Will the nearly retired Germans bail out COVID Europe? Germany knows it has less than a decade of working population left.</comment>


H. G. Wells' 1934 interview with Stalin (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/04/h-g-wells-it-seems-me-i-am-more-left-you-mr-stalin <comment><USER2> Previous discussion on this topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616566)

</comment><comment><USER3> When you read this fascinating article from two well spoken, educated, convincing people, you should try and keep in mind the context of 1934. Stalin had only ordered the execution of a few million people, and the system probably had barely killed 10 million or so through starvation, gulags, and routine police brutality.

You could be absent from work for a whole day before automatically losing your job, apartment, commodity tickets, and meal tickets, and facing starvation. It wasn't until 1938 that being 20 minutes late became an automatic firing event, too. Of course, missing your quota could already bring a treason charge.

This is an intelligent, well meaning man - a tremendously well read scholar of economics and political theory - who honestly understood that the only way to achieve real Communism involved the deaths of millions and millions of people... And considered this a reasonable sacrifice.

</comment><comment><USER4> Also see Will Rogers' interview with Mussolini:

[http://www.historynet.com/will-rogers-benito- mussolini.htm](http://www.historynet.com/will-rogers-benito-mussolini.htm)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's chilling reading the words of a well spoken mass murderer.

<comment><USER6> It's well worth reading the books on him by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Stalin was incredibly well read, sleeping little and devouring books at the seminary where he studied, and he carried this on through this life. It's chilling the way he behaved to relatives of those he killed. Stalin had a creepy way of referring to their deaths as though they were unfortunate events that weren't arranged by him.

<comment><USER7> Well, I wonder if he did actually think about it as unfortunate that they weren't around, but also that he did what he thought must be done....

I always got the impression (not sure why) that some of those around him during the revolution thought Stalin was not the brightest.... but apparently that was wrong.

<comment><USER6> I dont know, but he had a weird tendency to talk of Stalin in the 3rd person. It makes a little more sense given that 'Stalin' was an assumed name but it makes quotes attributes to him extra disturbing when you notice it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's not like believing in peoples' liberties makes you a communist. And Stalin wasn't a communist. Dictatorial regimes are dictatorial regimes regardless of propaganda. Further, afaik, the worlds never known a good example of a communist government. But the democratic republican model has had some decent examples - though not perfect.

<comment><USER9> How would you propose having a communist nation without a dictatorial and authoritarian government? What do you do with people that do not want to work their offered tasks? What of people that feel that they do more and thus deserve more? The solutions here in capitalism are perhaps not ideal, in the sense of utopia, but they enable society to continue functioning with a relatively small restriction on liberties.

It's interesting talking to individuals who lived through the USSR. Many of the things we take for granted simply did not exist. Hearing a 40 year old man speak so fondly of silly things such as Donald Duck and Disney - not in and of themselves but of the advent of freedom and open culture they represented, is something that's really eye opening. And while you might argue that that's because it was not a real, or a good, communist nation, at some point I think you have to consider that this might be a case of the no true scotsman fallacy. Ultimately, I don't see how you so severely restrict the liberties of the people without having a government that is extremely oppressive.

<comment><USER10> That's what scares me. As the generations who experienced the "utopia" first hand die off, new generations are born who think "it'll work this time". Nothing that goes so fundamentally against human nature will ever work.

<comment><USER11> I've been thinking about this recently; we're about to lose the last of the people that lived through WWII. I wonder how the generations 40 years from now will interpret those events. I think we're already starting to see it with the rehabilitation of nazi germany in alt-right circles.

<comment><USER12> > we're about to lose the last of the people that lived through WWII.

And for a long time, I've felt that the lessons learned from WWII would be promptly forgotten once the vets died off. It's damn infuriating to see it actually happen, though.

Sadly, the rise of despots like Putin, Trump, Duterte, Xi, Orban, etc. (not to mention the Brexit fiasco) is not a surprise to me. I figured this would happen once enough of the vets died off. [Lack of faith in humanity? Me? Yeah, exactly.]

(US-centric) Frank Zappa's later albums carried the motto, "Register to vote before it's too late." Too bad that there were so many people back then who were either too cool to show up at the ballot box when they were needed most (think 1980), or decided that outright fascism served their interests best.

<comment><USER10> How is Trump a "despot"? Please explain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> At the time, Russia was far far behind industrially, even under the Romanovs, and a highly industrialized Germany was rumbling next door.

Kind of like in the early days of the civil war, few union generals were up for kamikazeing their men against heavily fortified confederate positions. In Grant, we found a man unconcerned enough to pull that trigger.

Have to wonder if the reign of Stalin was a consequence of communism, a peculiarity of a dire military circumstance, or maybe a little of both...

<comment><USER14> That's an unfair and inaccurate characterization of Grant. There were lots of major battles with high casualties when Grant wasn't around. Grant's genius was to maneuver his army after the battle _as if it had won_. This freaked-out the Confederates, who had gotten used to score keeping by casualties, which never made any sense. In reality some of the battles in which the Union lost on the score were not really even tactical defeats. (Acting as if the battle was a defeat turned it into one.) Grant recognized he had the more powerful army, regardless of the score.

<comment><USER13> Keeping score by casualties... regardless of the score... Stalin didn't care too much about the score either.

Grant is just an aside anyway. Primary point is that there were many variables in play, and pinning it all on economics isn't going to explain much.</comment></comment></comment>


Sensobi Targets Underserved Blackberry Mobile App Market with Address Book - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2010/01/04/bringing-order-to-the-address-book-sensobi-targets-underserved-blackberry-mobile-app-customers/

<comment><USER2> Wish I had this for iPhone and/or Android, here's my vote to make it happen.</comment>


Spotify – now playing information and playback control - <AUTHOR> It always bothered that Spotify doesn't have an icon on menu bar; so I decided to create one. With "Spotify - now playing" you can, easily from the menu bar, see information about the current track, control the playback (previous track, pause/play, next track) and add the current track to your library or playlist. The code and app to download it's here https://github.com/davicorreiajr/spotify-now-playing.
In any case of bug, of suggestion, please open an issue in the github repo!
Hope you enjoy it! <comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/davicorreiajr/spotify-now- playing](https://github.com/davicorreiajr/spotify-now-playing)

</comment><comment><USER2> Electron. :(

<comment><USER3> Electron isn't bad all the time, just when it's overblown in its usage which is in most cases. Doesn't seem like that's the case here.</comment></comment>


Companies (Google) Don't Exist to Help Consumers - <AUTHOR> http://brooksreview.net/2010/08/companies-google-dont-exist-to-help-consumers/ <comment><USER2> _One thing that people seem to be forgetting with this whole Google-Verizon net neutrality cluster is that companies are here to make money – not to help consumer_

Helping a consumer is the number one most effective way to make money.

In that sense, companies that don't exist to help consumers are usually replaced by those that do. This is the business cycle.</comment>