When investors treat us like toys - <AUTHOR> http://www.founderdiaries.com/2011/03/when-investors-treat-us-like-toys/

<comment><USER2> He's probably talking about people with Narcissistic personality disorder and I recall an expert mentioning them gravitating toward VC, Law and management consulting: where they have power over people.

You are their horse, and they ride you into their own perceived sunset, with everybody applauding. When things go sour they put you down. Look out for hissy fits when things don't go as planned, like not being "in on that deal."

Two types of people give them narcissistic supply, and sustain them: people that actually believe the grandiose self-image they project, and others who just try and ride their coat tails, even if they know them to be fake.

Narcissists can get very nasty and use their positions of power to outcast, betray, or wrongly portray anyone that stands in their way, or show them up. Narcissists are very unlikely to change. Keep well clear - you are just a cardboard cut out.

I've noticed that they thrive on taking the credit of others, because deep down they feel deeply insufficient. They act over the top of these feelings. I've found it may have something to do with unloving, competitive, or conditionally loving parents. President may well be a Narcissist.

<comment><USER3> Thank you, that was very enlightening. Am I right in suspecting that one can use their Narcissism against them? If they really take their self worth from others, they would be very easy to train to do as you want (in pretty much the same way cult leaders does).

I realize that this isn't exactly what hackers normally do, but maybe it is worth starting to do?

<comment><USER4> No. Narcissists are usually quite smart, and very dangerous. Just stay away from them at all costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _We put our entire life and livelihood at risk for the startup._

I hear this a lot and it bugs me because in so many cases it's just not true, and I think it actually stops more people from starting companies.

Founders don't risk their _lives_ to start companies. In the Silicon Valley, they don't risk their careers either. At most they risk a few years of below- market salary and a bruised ego.

<comment><USER6> You may be right for a small subset of VC funded companies, but finding myself in a similar position to the author, I find your statements rather insulting. Yes, it discourages people from starting companies, and I think this may be a good thing. Is your contention that the foreclosure of his home is not a big deal? Have you been through this, or are you repeating what you've read?

I have great worry that trying to start a business in the US is the largest mistake that I've ever made, and think I have legitimate fear that if it fails, there will be no legal way to recover. Suggestions for how others should avoid this position would be useful, but blanket statements that say that it really isn't a big deal aren't that helpful.

<comment><USER7> Not to mention the healthcare situation. I guess most people can afford cheap catastrophic coverage, but not everyone is so lucky to be able to draw that line.

All the more reason to do it while you're young and healthy, I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I want my five minutes back. I'm sorry if this isn't the popular opinion, but I thought this read like whiny drivel.

You knew what you were signing up for, or if you didn't, you have had every opportunity to bail.

 _how wet the pillow gets at night when times get tough_

I sure hope you weren't being literal here. Cry me a river, man. From where you are now, the level of fail it would require for you to even approach the realm of the suffering and the downtrodden would be truly epic.

Your point is that it makes you sad that investors don't get more emotionally invested in the ventures that they back. The backers have their own secret war to fight. It's not all rainbows and unicorns for them either. I think you are fundamentally missing something. Treating the whole experience like a game is exactly the right approach. It is the only way that you get out of this with any sanity left intact.

This is coming from someone who has been right there in the trenches, over several at bats. I know what it's like to feel as if the walls are closing in on you. Embrace those darkest of days! That is where your power comes from. There is freedom in knowing that your worst case scenario is not only survivable, but it is a blessing in disguise.

As critical as I'm being here, you know that I'm still on your side. The bind of entrepreneurship ties us and when you win, we all win. So, I'm rooting for you. I just think you will look back on this post in a couple of years and realize how sophomoric it all sounds.

But don't forget Roosevelt:

 _It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat._

</comment><comment><USER9> 'Toy' isn't quite right. Closer to 'status symbol'.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing for entrepreneurs. When angels are investing for any reason other than 'make more money', valuations go up and terms improve.

Seed equity in early-stage companies is on the verge of becoming a Veblen good - the more expensive and exclusive the deal is, the more satisfying it is to be able to nonchalantly say "yeah, I'm in that deal."

</comment><comment><USER10> in the comments there, i showed a misunderstanding of a concept of _lean startup_ , which, as far as understand, keeps us from paying that big price (like selling arm and leg and cry in the pillow) for an idea by easy pivoting, inexpensive concept proving and even failing fast.

if Dave McClure doesnt bother to enlighten me there, maybe i'll get some info here?

i personally support the OP and have the same attitude to my venture.

</comment><comment><USER11> The author appears to have wandered into the playground of the idle rich and is somehow shocked to find that the idle rich treat their toys like toys.

I don't really understand the indignation.</comment>


Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft disclose data about NSA requests - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/02/03/facebook-linkedin-google-microsoft-reveal-data-showing-range-accounts-requested-nsa/?fromcat=all <comment><USER2> How about a magic trick?

Watch this hand, which is issuing specific requests for data.

Ignore the other hand that was snooping on (until Google started encrypting last year) Google's inter-datacenter links, almost all Yahoo! traffic since they only enabled ssl for non-premium accounts last year, most Hotmail/Outlook.com traffic since their defaults had ssl disabled until recently (last year?), and anything else we can (everything of interest that's not encrypted or that we can break[1]).

Ignore that restrictions on spying on our own citizens are weakened since they're not citizens to the other 4 "5 eyes" countries, and in some situations they can share back that data or they can query it for us.

Ignore that we don't consider collecting metadata on phone calls to be a 4th amendment violation. Because knowing if you called Bill Ayers or an abortion clinic or an HIV clinic is not private personal data at all.

Ignore that the data we collect, although nominally for national security purposes, is being used in criminal prosecutions having nothing to do with national security, and that we encourage law enforcement agencies to use "parallel construction" to avoid revealing the true source of the data that jumpstarted their investigations. Since we've been caught doing this, the Dept of Justice is now revealing in court when this occurs, but please ignore that these domestic criminal cases may not have been possible at all without the mass data collection we do for "national security" purposes.

Ignore our attempts to compromise internet infrastructure and subvert public cryptographic standards.

Ignore that the DNI lied to Congress. Ignore, ignore, ignore.

[1] RC4 maybe; see [https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/398059565947699200](https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/398059565947699200)

<comment><USER3> The google-inter-datacenter links is nothing but plausible deniability. You will not see the end of "breaches" like this, since both sides knew what was going on (even if joe-sysadmin at google was "shocked, shocked!").

<comment><USER4> I don't think this is the case.

OTOH, I'm surprised Google, after being the victim of known hacking by an intelligence agency (in pursuit of a religious extremist group, presumably), consisting of malware, targeted malware/spearphishing, attacks on staff (presumably inserting trusted staff into Google in various roles), etc., didn't include bulk encryption within its network as a way to compartmentalize things.

They certainly pulled out of the world's largest Internet market, locked down their employee workstations across the board (essentially banning Windows, IIRC), adopted 2FA internally, and generally have better internal security than banks or virtually any large enterprises. On the customer-facing side, they're leading in cert pinning, "ssl everywhere", etc. So not doing bulk encryption between datacenters was an oversight -- it's technically expensive to implement, which was probably a major factor.

(In case it's not obvious, this isn't Google v NSA)

<comment><USER5> > OTOH, I'm surprised Google [...] didn't include bulk encryption within its > network as a way to compartmentalize things.

You mean this?

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google- enc...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-encrypts- data-amid-backlash-against-nsa- spying/2013/09/06/9acc3c20-1722-11e3-a2ec-b47e45e6f8ef_story.html)

<comment><USER4> The whole point of my comment was drawing a parallel between when _China_ spied on Google (and Google's response, and this one lacking element), and what happened after NSA.

<comment><USER5> Right. Clearly, like they did with China, Google should just stop doing business in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 0-999 ....Ridiculous.

The USgov/NSA thinks we're fools. This range tells me nothing. I can assume the worse and conclude they send 999 requests every 6 months, but then I'd be a conspiracy-nutcase. They know what they're doing. Ed Snowden's data is more valuable to the public than this PR stunt. If there are anymore of you people out there with info like Snowden considering doing a leak, please do it. I understand it's a very personal decision to kinda ruin your life and be unable to support loved ones around you; that's something only you can decide.

But if what's holding you back is _" duty to your country"_, look to Ed Snowden. His actions gave true duty to the country... and the world.

</comment><comment><USER7> If they're already snooping on the links between data centers and picking the data up using other means then they don't need to make any requests from the companies while they're actually "investigating" things. The only reason they would need to give them a reason why they have information they shouldn't have- basically, when they need to bring something to court.

These reports are useful only in that they show how much the company is in bed with the government versus how much they're just getting abused. You don't see these types of reports from the phone companies, for example, because they've been helping the government snoop for years.

</comment><comment><USER8> Instead of complaining, or even in addition to complaining, every one of these services could have built secure messaging and real time communications into their products. Loss of ad targeting data? Fine, charge me for the difference in the value of ads.

And yet, so far, nothing, not an announcement, a rumor, a hiring ad, nothing, nothing, nothing.

<comment><USER9> It's not possible for a web application to be secure against the host of the web application. If the host renders the HTML, then they need to access the user's data. If the host serves the Javascript, then they have the opportunity to acceess the user's data. If the user doesn't manage their own private keys, then the host manages them and can compromise them.

Arguing that {Google,Yahoo,Facebook,LinkedIn} should implement secure communication is equivalent to arguing that they should shut down their existing products in favor of secure client-side implementations. The moment they do this, the resulting product gap will be filled by some other company and nothing will have changed.

The corollary is that any web-based service that claims to offer secure communication is almost certainly not doing anything of the sort, and should be treated with great suspicion.

<comment><USER8> Most of these companies provide some client-side software. Google provides a whole OS, it's middleware layer, and many apps published open source. The Android SDK runs on all three major PC OSs, as does Google Earth. Chrome runs on all the major PC OSs, and has an open source "sister" project Chromium.

Web software is convenient, for sure, but it isn't so difficult to run ad- supported services with client-side software.

<comment><USER9> Lets consider Gmail as an example.

It's trivially easy to configure a local Gmail client. Install Thunderbird, type in your username and password, and you're good to go. The result is a Gmail experience with an excellent UI, no ads, and the user is running only open-source software.

Installing the Enigmail extension, GPG, and generating a GPG key provides a secured communication channel. The user need only tick a checkbox to send emails that are impervious to known interception methods.

Thus it's already possible to use Gmail for secure communications. No changes on Google's part are required to enable secure emails in Gmail. So what are you actually asking for?

It sounds like what you're saying is that Google ought to shut down the Gmail web UI because you don't think hosted services are sufficiently secure. But the thing is, almost nobody (excluding HN) actually cares. If Gmail moved to a secure model tomorrow, it would be effectively the same as shutting down the service because the userbase would migrate to Yahoo or Hotmail overnight. What benefit has the new "secure" Gmail then achieved?

<comment><USER8> Using Thunderbird is not a solution. If Google or any of the other services had their own client that properly integrated with back-end services like key exchange, key signing, etc. you would not have to understand and implement identity verification yourself.

You are setting up some straw men for demolition. As Skype showed, before it was nerfed, there is no need for a client interface, especially a mobile client interface not to support security that is so easy that it is equivalent to an unsecured product.

<comment><USER9>
      > If Google or any of the other services had their own
      > client that properly integrated with back-end services
      > like key exchange, key signing, etc. you would not have
      > to understand and implement identity verification yourself.

If key exchange and verification were handled by a third-party service, then a compromise of that service would threaten the security of all communications. To be secure, key exchange and verification must be handled offline at the level of individual users.

Pre-acquisition Skype was not a secure communications system, any more than iMessage or Hangouts are today. If you believe it was, then you have not spent sufficient time considering how to compromise such a system.

<comment><USER8> Apart from meeting in person and exchanging keys, what other way do people have of finding someone else's public key? Securing that is what key signing and web-of-trust are for.

Also, Skype in unlike iMessage or Hangouts in that messages traversed nodes that could capture and attack traffic. Skype had security requirements these other services did not have. A modern, verifiable service could be built that, to end users, resembled Skype in simplicity. Or, for that matter, Hangouts could open source their client and enable verifiable security that, to the end-user, would be no more complicated than using Hangouts is currently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's great to get more openness about the numbers, but it's hard to know what to make of them. One "advantage" of snooping on traffic is that you can issue far fewer requests for data. If you already know the contents, you only need to go through the legal process in the cases where you need to legitimize your knowledge for further use. Should this make us more or less comfortable with relatively low numbers of legal requests?

</comment><comment><USER11> Yeah, okay. You're not fooling anyone with these numbers guys. If you want people to believe you care about their data privacy, then actually build secure systems where even _you_ can't access the users' data, and therefore the feds can't ask you for the keys either. This should especially become a priority if this comes to pass:

[http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/02/courtint/](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/02/courtint/)

</comment><comment><USER12> < With regards to Facebook, it says that within the last six months of 2012, only a "small fraction" of one percent of its users were the target of any government data requests

So with 1%, they mean that over 10 freaking million Facebook users were under surveillance?

<comment><USER13> Only if you interpret small fraction to be 100%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Those numbers mean jack shit. End of story.

</comment><comment><USER15> The number of accounts impacted is a very deceitful number, and don't say anything about the nature of the intrusion of users private data.

Let me try it: Let me run code to sieve through every politician mailbox. I won't go after all of them, so only a handful will be "impacted" on.

And this is only first-order of impact. What happens with second order impacts when a mail account by a person like Jacob Appelbaum is "impacted"? Is every dissident that emailed in danger, and what if their organization is not in favor of current US politics?

</comment><comment><USER16> I assume these companies were honoring NSA requests for long time. These requests are made public only after Snowden revelation, just because these companies are scared about losing their customers.

</comment><comment><USER17> How is this really helpful? Random numbers on a page. The only number you really care about is when YOUR number has been called and the government has snooped on you.

</comment><comment><USER18> [0..some big number] is not disclosure.

</comment><comment><USER19> Amazon is mysteriously absent from any list in the news.

Given the number of virtual servers they have in the cloud right now, the amount of corporate data stored and passing through those, and the NSA's interest in SSL, I would REALLY like to know where Amazon stands.

</comment><comment><USER20> Number of NSA/Law Enforcement data requests without any number of breakins/intrusions detected vs intrusions/breakins prevented is somewhat very dubious non meaning number.

This is PR stunt..

</comment><comment><USER21> It would be more concerning if these numbers decline, indicating a more efficient 'grey' approach.

Btw: How can I boycott NSA and still use the Internet?

</comment><comment><USER22> If I may ask something offtopic: I try to host my own email in Iceland. I go everything working so far. My server is not powerful enough for spamassassin but I can live without it. One last problem: I don't get SSL to work. Does https require lots of server resources?

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't think those numbers are "NSA requests".

</comment><comment><USER24> Damage mitigation?</comment>


The immaturity of silicon valley - <AUTHOR> http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2014/12/14/the-immaturity-of-silicon-valley/

<comment><USER2> This seems to be an ignored article at the current time, but I'll chime in.

The author admits to having only been to San Francisco three times; and then proceeds to write a tech piece on Silicon Valley. While SV is part of the SF Bay Area, the 2 are pretty different places as far as tech job culture goes.

Some of his main points given in the article:

> To me, an office filled with bean bags and 'zany' things is a lot like > someone who wears over-sized brightly colored glasses and a loud bow-tie > everywhere. In other words, its a desperate attempt to compensate for the > fact that you know you don't have any creativity, and convey a tragic, > almost pleading message to the outside world that convinces us otherwise.

Is such a general, sweeping projection really a good argument against a group? First, you have to look at the crowd these companies want to attract. A lot of companies in SV that I've worked with have employees around 25-30 years old. While having cubicles and grey walls may feel more professional to some people, others prefer a more comfortable environment that reminds them of a lounge or living room. It's a sort of freedom of expression as well. Not everybody wants to be restricted to sitting down at a desk, to only get up for meetings and coffee. Freedom of movement, to walk around, to sit in a big comfortable chair, can help break up monotony and stress. I don't see how something being different from the norm has to equal being "different for the sake of difference" or flashy. It's a bit insulting to draw a parallel between people who the author thinks are not creative mentally, and tech workers from a company with beanbag chairs.

> Silicon valley focuses purely on people whose main problem is that they > think their smartphone isn't bendy enough, or that a 2048 resolution for > their TV isn't good enough. Social problems are largely ignored, especially > if the start-ups actually contribute to them. Ifd there is a massive > property price problem and inequality being caused by the tech workers, no > problem! just bus your workers past the poor people so they don't get in the > way!

I highly doubt that every company focuses purely on First World Problems. The fact that we have companies such as Khan Academy, as well as a host of others in the education, environmental, human rights, animal humanity, health, and other fields says a lot about the diversity going on here. Maybe having been here only 3 times may have not been enough to show, but technology is not just the main focus here in SV and SF. A lot of times technology is used as the tool and method to accomplishing other goals, not as the just the focal point.

> As an environmentalist, I'm really sick of business people with short term > thinking. Many silicon valley types just want to be rich. They don't care > how, or why. The product is irrelevant to them.

Summoning a title such as "environmentalist" should be used in arguments related to environmentalism, sustenance, etc. Complaining about people who sell their companies too quick because they just want to make a quick buck does not show any relation to the group you espouse. The actual argument is valid, though. There is a huge temptation to people who don't know better and most likely haven't done much business or traveling in the valley. However, actually bootstrapping a company and getting it to the point where it can even be considered at a valuation in the millions is a difficult enough road. I think the issue here is also, "many silicon valley types". Without defining what this term _actually_ means, it's hard to clearly understand who the author is talking about.

> You need to know that driver is paying tax, you need to know that driver > isn't someone with a history of violent assaults. You need to know that > vehicle is safe to drive, and taxed. These regulations exist for a reason. > The same applies to regulations about renting out a house or flat/apartment. > There are regulations on fire escapes and insurance and safety for a reason.

A very valid point. Anytime you have companies trying to shake up an industry, you also have growing pains. Safety laws are put into practice for a reason, and we need thigns such as thorough background checks to prevent future occurances of events like Uber saw happen in Delhi. There is a fine line to walk here. Laws will need to be created to handle things currently happening now with these kinds of companies. However, waiting on laws to be drafted also hampers the progress that can be made in these fields.

> And yup, Positech pays all the tax it should, as a normal company registered > in the UK, and paying UK corp tax levels on every penny it earns. It's > really not that difficult to do the right thing.

This is a good thing. However, most companies want to keep any money going out down to a minimum, as that is the definition of a company. I would not voluntarily pay more money for a car or a house. Why would I volunteer more money than is needed by the government. Just the same, why would a company; especially if they have people who understand the laws that dictate how much they should pay, and why—and understand the loopholes that exist within those laws. I would not put full blame on the companies, as they are protecting their own neck and trying to ensure their future success; I would rather say this is a clear indicator that tax laws need to be reformed in cases related to these kinds of companies.

Over all, there are some very good points made here, but the arguments come off as a bit ranty. I agree a lot with the idea behind the arguments, but also feel the author could do better if he tried to see things from the point of view of others (such as those uncreative beanbag sitters). I also would recommend him to actually truly see Silicon Valley, rather than try to ascribe everyone here to a certain way of acting or believing for just our location.

<comment><USER3> You work for Google? Are you in the Google Brigade?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's your preferred output format? - <AUTHOR> Do you prefer JSON, XML, Plaintext, CSV, XLS, YAML, etc? And why? <comment><USER2> What is it supposed to be the output of? I think that it would depend on that

SQLite includes an extension to deal with JSON, and the command shell can also deal with CSV, and I also wrote a JSON parser in PostScript, so that means it can easily be used with PostScript codes too now, and of course JavaScript also has JSON built-in.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends heavily on the data.

If it's human-readable, read-only, and almost completely unstructured, plaintext.

If it's human-readable, read-only, and structured but formatting doesn't matter, HTML.

If it's human-readable, read-only, and formatting matters, PDF.

If it's intended for humans to read and write via hand-editing, and then subsequently have a machine work with, then TOML. (Never YAML.)

If it's fundamentally tabular, CSV. (Never XLS.)

If it's an API result from a web API, reluctantly JSON; as much as I'd prefer TOML, JSON is more universal.

</comment><comment><USER4> this is the best in my opinion

[https://hjson.github.io/](https://hjson.github.io/)

xml is too wordy

yaml, well I don't like indentation based formats, hard to see clearly</comment>


Ask HN: How Would You Build an Ethical Facebook Replacement? - <AUTHOR> If the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook incident[0] is an example of Facebook's negative affect on society it doesn't appear too far removed from its standard business model. However, With over 2 billion users worldwide, Facebook clearly provides a very useful service. I understand that Facebook being replaced by an ethical competitor is tremendously unlikely, that said, how would you do it?
How would you build a Facebook replacement without a Faustian deal with surveillance capital?
- Wikipedia: has built humanity's largest encyclopedia without it
- signal: has built a whatsapp clone without it
- mastadon: has built a twitter clone without it
- peer 2 peer: has solved many distribution and scale problems
- federation: has solved many single points of failure problems
- GNU & FOSS: has provided many thoughtful approaches to similar problems
I would love to try and keep this discussion positive and fairly technical.
Please don't just:
- list all the obvious obstacles
- point out that this will never happen
- get stuck too deeply in the 'what is ethical?' conversation.
Technically, how would you approach solving this problem.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/17/facebook-cambridge-analytica-kogan-data-algorithm <comment><USER2> Each of your examples is headed by an individual who's both passionate about openness in their respective domain _and_ who has a source of income that's made them rich enough not to really need to sell out (or by groups of people who don't need to in the case of P2P and OSS).

Even if you could find someone who fits the bill though, each of the examples is either irrelevant to the government or too small to have a significant impact on what the government do. I strongly suspect that any ethical Facebook alternative would find it very hard to operate if it got big enough to complete with FB and still refused to sell out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Signal does 90% of what Facebook did that mattered, the only thing I miss is topical groups. I probably travel in unusual circles but everyone is on Signal and only half are still on Facebook.

<comment><AUTHOR> I disagree.

Signal does a very important part but not 90%.

what about news feed, events, calendar, status updates, groups, pages, profile walls...

These are all mega useful tools that are used by 2 billion people for a reason!

I <3 Signal and I've converted many non-techies to it but I cannot easily inform everyone that I'm having a baby and they also cannot do this.

But I'm glad you're using it. it's a wonderful tool.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to properly license software? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, My company was recently approached by another company to license some of the software we have built. The software they want to license is complex and very hard to build. It would take a good hacker at least 9 months of 12 hours days to build it (that's how long it took us).
They want license it white label, not sure if they want access to the source code though (I'm opposed to allowing source code access).
We're interested in licensing, but we're not sure how much to charge for it. Do we do it on a yearly basis? Do we charge 80K/year (the going rate for an engineer)?
What has been your experience with licensing software? If I missed any critical points, let me know and I'll post them. <comment><USER2> I am not a businessman and have no experience in the area, but a couple of things come to mind.

The white-label requirement suggests that they want to put their own name on it which suggests they will become a competitor to your company, or they see a market for it that your company does not. Perhaps your company should charge per user and/or per copy shipped in addition to the basic rate.

Charging an annual rate may not work if they use it internally. They could tell you that they are going with another product and keep using yours without telling you. You could start with the expectation that they will replace it in 3 or 4 years and make the contract for so many years.

If they want new features or configuration assistance, your company already has the experts and can bill them heavily for the work. Your company might end up using them as a continuing source of revenue in this way. They might also recruit your developers.

The software has different values: what it is worth to produce, what it is worth to a company to have it, and what that company thinks it is worth. If they are smart, #3 is close to #2 and that is the number you have to bid towards. It is worth more to the other company to have working software immediately than to wait a year developing the software itself. To repeat old advice, start with a high bid that is more than you expect to get and allow the other side to negotiate downwards.

You will be expected to supply good documentation and to fix any glaring bugs in the product, so finishing the sale may incur a $10k-$20k cost.

Whatever you get for it is a revenue that you did not have before. As long as it does not hurt your business for the other company to have the software, that should be a good thing.

If this one company wants the software, there might be other companies that want the software.

Get advice from someone more knowledgeable before following any of mine.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you still use "view source" to see how web pages work? - <AUTHOR> <comment> core-questions It's been a while. Time was this was an excellent way to learn, but now everything is minified and obscure and outputted by compilers to make CSS and Javascript out of things that aren't, and all of the idiomatic ways of working with things (replete with limitations) have been replaced with abstracted ways of working with this (ostensibly with fewer limitations).

It's clear to me that this is a shit sandwich, and what we should really do is start replacing HTML/CSS/JS with a new app development mechanism that embraces the significantly refined requirements we have now over our 1990s predecessors.

Ideally the end result is as easy to build and take apart as the old web used to be.

</comment><comment><USER2> Sure, I do it quite often. Chrome will format the code if it is minified so that is easy, and you can quickly jump around and see what is happening. If you know your front end frameworks you can pretty quickly tell what they are using and how it is all put together even when code has been obfuscated.

I definitely use view source when debugging my own code or testing layout changes I am playing with since it is easy to still adjust the css and view the changes etc. The javascript console is valuable too.

I guess for me it is usually less about finding out how things work now so much as debugging an issue or finding a vulnerability. I have found a number of vulnerabilities using view source on products out of China that have built in web servers, like ip cams and the such.

*edit -- When I think of view source I think of the complete dev tools, not just the single "view source" tab.

</comment><comment><USER3> These days I tend to use the built in element inspector instead to view live state, unless I specifically want to see the original state - from before JS got involved :)

</comment><comment> c-smile Quite frequently to get URL of particular image on the page or to get an ID of element to make precise reference URL.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's less "view source" and more the network tab in the inspector but I'm using that one a lot to find APIs to use.</comment>


WikiFYD - Mediawiki For Google Apps (w/30day free trial) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ossfyd.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> My company, OSSFYD (Open Source Software For Your Domain) is offering a 30-day trial of our latest service, WikiFYD.

It is professionally secured, maintenance free and integrated with Google Apps.

Please let me know if you have any questions!</comment>


Snow in the Sahara - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/world/africa/snow-sahara.html <comment><USER2> Well ackchyually,

While it isn't a week-to-week winter norm, it isn't all that too unusual from a long term perspective. There are snows and frosts every year across the region, with heavy low altitude snows every few years. The area is fairly dry, and low dew points make it pretty easy to keep the place cool and the regions covered in snow are the same latitude as northern Texas and even higher in elevation.

</comment><comment><USER3> I live in Algeria. There's yearly snow in a lot of places in the north (mountain chains, [http://bit.ly/2ErueEU](http://bit.ly/2ErueEU)) and we hear about snow in the desert.. It's when it snows in Algiers that everyone goes nuts, especially when there's snow on the beach.

To give an idea why: it's winter here at 17°C/62°F and everybody complains all the time about how cold it is, including my sister _as I am typing this_.

<comment><USER4> I live in Australia, in the South East sub-tropical Queensland state. Originally from the UK and I complain about it being too cold in winter when it gets to 15 degrees.

10 years ago I would have been running to the beach in the UK at anything above 12. How times have changed.

<comment><USER3> > 10 years ago I would have been running to the beach in the UK at anything > above 12.

I often joke "a Brit would swim at that temperature." when someone complains about the cold. Turns out I was spot on the money.

Here: [https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2010/sep/04/algiers- city-...](https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2010/sep/04/algiers-city-break- algeria)

<comment><USER4> 100% on the money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "15 inches" \- none of the photos I've seen show more than 15 mm.

<comment><USER6> 15 inches horizontally...

<comment><USER7> Go to reddit please

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apparently it happens quite often, and record low is -10 degrees Celsius

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

<comment><USER9> 4th time in 37 years for this part of the Sahara according to original article.

<comment><USER10> Tree falls in the forest etc etc ...

"The Sahara is as large as the United States, and there are very few weather stations," he added. "So it's ridiculous to say that this is the first, second, third time it snowed, as nobody would know how many times it has snowed in the past unless they were there."

"Not observed by a human" does not mean "did not happen". Humans measured things where humans lived or traveled during almost all of their existence. E.g., see Giarabub[1].

The methods we have today of inferring past events from remaining physical indicators tend to mash together decades to hundreds of years of events.

One must keep these things in mind.

[1]: [http://climate.unur.com/ghcn-v2/124/62176.html](http://climate.unur.com/ghcn-v2/124/62176.html)

<comment><USER9> And that is why I/they specified that we where talking about this particular corner of the Sahara, not the whole desert.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Snopes take on it is worthwhile and adds more context about previous snowfalls:

On 21 January 2017, flurries from dawn until late afternoon left most of the area blanketed in snow...A month before that, there was a brief flurry of snow lasting only a couple of hours...

snow was documented over the desert in the Bechar region near Aïn Séfra in January 2012...

Before 2012, the most recent significant Saharan [sic] in this region appears to have occurred in February 1979, though it bears mentioning that a lack of social media and widespread digital cameras during these years would have made a light dusting far less global a news story.

[https://www.snopes.com/sahara-desert- snowfall/](https://www.snopes.com/sahara-desert-snowfall/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I can't be the only one who noticed the similarity to the planet in The Last Jedi.

[https://fsmedia.imgix.net/b8/50/91/5c/de5d/4948/8e51/fdf72b2...](https://fsmedia.imgix.net/b8/50/91/5c/de5d/4948/8e51/fdf72b24dcdb/screen- shot-2017-04-17-at-51527-pmpng.png?rect=0%2C0%2C955%2C318&auto=format%2Ccompress&w=650)

<comment><USER13> Maybe we're all just characters in a movie the Galactic Empire is producing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone have more pretty pictures of this event? It looks gorgeous!

<comment><USER15> the linked article in french from an Algerian website has more pictures: [https://www.tsa-algerie.com/la-neige-tombe-a-ain-sefra- pour-...](https://www.tsa-algerie.com/la-neige-tombe-a-ain-sefra-pour- la-4e-fois-en-37-ans-photos/) and the link to the page of the photographer who took most of them: [https://www.facebook.com/kbouchetata](https://www.facebook.com/kbouchetata)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It reminds me of a nice song with a similar title : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpj3ra3AeJk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpj3ra3AeJk)

<comment><USER17> Was expecting "Do they know its christmas"

<comment><USER18> "…or do we have to dump snow over the Sahara for them to get it?!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I lived in Mauritania for five and half years and on two occasions a friend saw snow flurries in northern areas of the country. It's probably more common than we know.

<comment><USER20> My brain turned Mauritania into Marijuana.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> [http://archive.is/qaoXy](http://archive.is/qaoXy)

</comment><comment><USER22> So global climate change is going to further dry out the southwest US and make the Sahara more wet?

<comment><USER23> Yup. Here's an article from 2009 [https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-gree...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green- sahara.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It reminds me of the salt planet in the new Star Wars movie.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup, tasskr.com - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone!  I made a list maker app and would like your feedback.  A few months ago I went looking online for a todo list to help me get things done.  I eventually decided to write my own and learn rails (and put things off even more).  Tasskr is a simple list maker with due dates, time estimates, recurring tasks, reminders and graphs.  I'm hoping it could be profitable.<p>http://tasskr.com <comment><USER2> If you're really serious about making money on it, then you should do the following:

1) Add a couple more features that are geared around integration with people's workflow, like phone reminders, and maybe some ability to, oh, I don't know, send a grocery list to a husband, or a parts list to a delivery guy.

2) Research, research, research, where people are spending money on the internet for something like this. You'll find the usual suspects, like Basecamp, and you'll want to avoid being like that. Instead, you'll want to find underserved markets niches, dozens of them.

3) Once you've identified the markets, build a list of them, and outline the contents of a landing page for each niche. Do this on the computer, so that you can programmatically create all these landing pages and capture some of the long tail traffic.

4) This should really be #1, but get someone to start paying, anyone. This will force you to scratch someone's itch who has money. Make whatever changes they need so that the service is valuable to them. You really need to find one person out there, who's saying "I wish I had an online task list that met my needs! If I only did, I could make $X more this week/month/year."

<comment><AUTHOR> So go after business users. Do you think they are more likely to pay for an app like this?

<comment><USER3> Because "business users" = dumb, lots of $, willing to pay for anything, right?

Sorry to snark, it just bugs me when people assume that because you slap a "for business" or "pro version" onto something, that business users will want to use it. Businesses like saving money just as much or _more_ than people.

If there's not a compelling profit purpose, businesses won't buy it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Aren't there a ton of apps that do this, or something very similar. I did a Google search and found a pretty solid top 25 list [http://www.solutionwatch.com/450/25-to-do-lists-to-stay- prod...](http://www.solutionwatch.com/450/25-to-do-lists-to-stay-productive/)

I am just curious how this one stands out?

<comment><AUTHOR> Months ago I went through that list and couldn't find one I liked. Half are not todo lists, a lot of them are downloadable which I didn't want and most were way too complicated. The few that had the features I wanted were too complicated. Do you use one of those?

<comment><USER5> That's why you will do well since people will try it.

It's also why you are doomed as they will try something else.

I wish you luck in getting a stable customer base to launch something bigger. You could use this product to start building pagerank and your brand. Look at <http://www.6wunderkinder.com/> for ideas on how they are doing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm more of a pencil and paper guy, but at first glance it looks very nice.

A couple of quick thoughts:

1) You might want to make it clearer which features are in the basic model and which are in the "Pro" version on the landing page

2) I'd maybe change the wording around the "More Features" section. Maybe I'm being hyper-critical, but it sounds more like "here's my project, what do you think?" rather than "Here is my professional piece of software that is being actively developed and having new features added daily".

Maybe something like:

"Taskrr is under active development, with new features being added on a daily/weekly basis. Please feel free to suggest new features via [feedback form link?]. You can see our current roadmap here [link to dogfooded dev roadmap using Taskrr!]"

Hope that helps.

Mark

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that helps, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really like: the up-front-and-center screenshot of what the interface looks like, before I even sign up.

Personally, not a fan: forcing me to Sign Up before I get to see any more information. Why only one page? I looked around briefly for a pricing page, About, or FAQ. Couldn't find any. Maybe it's intentional - that's a different discussion I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks great! Like the theme and after a couple of minutes trying it, I can see its uniqueness.

Do you mind mentioning what gems you are using? The hide/unhide of the child tasks looks good, and also like the dragging to reorganize.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, here are the gems.

nested_set, devise, jquery-rails, dynamic_form, chronic, chronic_duration, easy_dates, lazy_high_charts, recaptcha, rspreedly, redcloth, delayed_job, workless

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd like to see something to trank time spent on a task. Perhaps in 15 minute increments?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's on the long list of things I'd like to add. If you have suggestions on best way to implement let me know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Clickable:

<http://tasskr.com></comment>


A Tale of Two Town Houses - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/a-tale-of-two-town-houses/6334 <comment><AUTHOR> This submission inspired by this post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1590060> .</comment>


Even the military may not be enough to protect an endangered Amazon tribe - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/even-the-military-may-not-be-enough-to-protect-an-endangered-amazon-tribe/2015/11/07/676c72f2-4789-11e5-9f53-d1e3ddfd0cda_story.html <comment><USER2> >> That is a problem because the "non-contacted" tribal members have low immunity to infections such as the flu and can die after exposure to outsiders.

"Washington Post journalists were given rare permission by the tribe to visit the Awá reserve."

That's part of the problem.</comment>


Why We Need to Better Understand Psychosomatic Illness - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/sv/article/zngzbw/understanding-psychosomatic-illness-724 <comment><USER2> Apologies for the off-topic, I was unsure how to reach you privately, so I'm posting here in the off-chance you see this.

Is there any chance you would be willing to share some information on how you dealt with the stress you mentioned on the CFS thread?

I suffer from a combination of vestibular and CFS symptoms, very similar to yours, and your message (and /u/tomhoward's comment) gave me some hope.

If it's easier, my email address is in my profile.

Thank you so much, it would really mean a lot to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just replied. (I have also just added an email address to my profile).</comment></comment>


The NewsBlur iPhone App - visual feed reader with intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsblur.com/iphone/

<comment><USER2> I fail to see what this does that Reeder doesn't do 10x better with a way nicer interface, nor do I see why a writer would need a different type of RSS reader that seems significantly less elegant and devoid of any notable features to set it apart.

You need to be way more specific when explaining what "helps you follow authors" actually means. Also, I'm not aware of any RSS reader in existence that won't give you an option to view the regular site, so I'm not sure you are capturing the uniqueness of that one either.

It's much more than possible that I'm missing something, but that website does an absolutely terrible job of telling me what is unique about this app. Honestly, all I see is six screenshots riddled with design errors.

EDIT - Besides being open source and free. Those might be unique selling points to a handful of users, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of iOS users have a buck or two to blow on an app and couldn't care less about whether an app is open source or not, if they are even aware of the concept.

</comment><comment><USER3> What does "with intelligence" mean in this context? The website has that tagline, but there's no explanation of it, or why this is a better feed reader. Given that there's no dearth of feed readers, they will hopefully do a better job of selling it on that page.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sorry, but why is this on Hacker News? The app looks like crap! Yellow folder icons? Come on! It seems as if it was written at the time where iOS 2 was new. Not bad, but just totally not able to compete with fancy apps like FlipBoard or even Reeder. If this would run on Android, maybe. But iOS? The bar went up.

So, do I miss something here?

<comment><USER5> Have you tried it? NewsBlur isn't your average feed reader.

Also, Flipboard et al serve different use cases. NewsBlur is a writer's reader. Flipboard is a news reader. NewsBlur, with its intelligence, helps you follow authors, and on the web it shows you the Original Site. It's also entirely open-source, being developed solo by me: <http://github.com/samuelclay/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been using newblur from 2 months and absolutely loving it! An easy transition from Google reader after their design disaster.

Great work Sam.</comment></comment></comment>


Mercury Colonization - <AUTHOR> http://einstein-schrodinger.com/mercury_colony.html <comment><USER2> > Humans are part of a universe where time is measured in billions of years > and economics is largely irrelevant.

Only if you have a narrow understanding of "economics".

Economics is the study of scarcity and how to deal with it. For example, arguing that energy is less scarce on Mercury than Mars is making an _economic_ argument about which is a more desirable place to be. Given the myriad constraints on a colony, the only way to make an apples-to-apples comparison between two possible colonies is to invoke economic concepts.

The survival of the species very much depends on economics. We're in a race between the capabilities of our growing capital and the risks that could destroy us.

Much of what we do and have today would seem totally impractical to people from poorer eras. Likewise, solutions to problems that seem impractical to us (like geoengineering and space colonies) can become very practical given enough economic growth.

<comment><USER3> It's physicists bias. Economics doesn't make very accurate or precise predictions. I mean, economic systems are complicated, it's not really possible to foresee all of the influences on a system. It's not an attack on economists, it's just how it is.

Physicists, however, expect 5 digits of precision.

<comment><USER4> Physicists are just as stumped by complex and chaotic systems as the rest of us.

<comment><USER5> At least the physicists' models let you land on Mars.

<comment><USER4> And an accurate, predictable model of economics would pay for the trip.

<comment><USER5> I don't think interplanetary travel will ever make economic sense. It's for other reasons that we reach for the stars.

<comment><USER6> Depends on your definition of economic success. If you define it as the ability to distribute resources necessary for survival, and extend that to the species, then interplanetary travel is the only eventuality that makes economic sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I need to.find.the article.proposing Venus colonization,.but.in short: Venus has very dense atmosphere, it.was figured out that a balloon filled with Earth air at 1 ATM will float high enough in Venus to have a reasonable temperature, and can.be driven as needed to follow sun and shade as required. The only problem with that setup.is that mining would.require some tether technology we don't have, but that Venus idea is still.better than mars, because it is cheaper to do, have more energy available, and the expected conditions of the balloon is closer to here than anything we can figure on mars

<comment><USER8> Isn't Venus described as a "living Hell" ? With very high temperatures, high speed winds, toxic atmosphere and so on? If Mars is deemed inhospitable, it's nothing next to Venus.

<comment><USER9> The idea is that one would live in Venus' atmosphere, not on the surface.

<comment><AUTHOR> Conveniently, floating cities would go a long, long way towards ensuring that we'd survive any Venusian impactors...

<comment><USER10> IIRC Venus doesn't have active plate tectonics, but does have a molten core. Meaning every so often it undergoes a massive global resurfacing event. Several things support the theory, and we can't date when or how often it happens, just a while longer than we've been actively watching it and the next one is due: well we don't know yet, so whenever. Not to mention the crushing pressures and temperatures hot enough to have molten lead on the surface.

Floating cities are really the only way to do it on Venus.

<comment><USER11> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Kim Stanley Robinson's recent '2312' has an interesting colony on Mercury. Tracks are built encircling the entire planet along a line of latitude, a huge city—'Terminator'—rides on these rails like a train. It's pushed along by thermal expansion of the tracks at dawn, the city slides perpetually ahead of sunrise. Interesting stuff!

<comment><AUTHOR> 2312 is loosely a sequel to his Red/Blue/Green Mars series; Mercury was colonized, and Terminator built during that era. It's been a while since I've read the series, so I don't remember if there was any significant discussion of other kinds of potential settlements on the planet.

<comment><USER12> IIRC Mercury does get a mention in the trilogy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Deep underwater colonisation hasn't been properly tried yet and we are thinking of Mercury and Mars. Sounds a bit unreasonable when the best we've tried is this <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2>

<comment><USER14> I see it as decoupling our survival as a species from the planet earth. Growing our access to resources and land is a secondary consideration to me.

<comment><USER15> Wouldn't a self sustaining underwater colony protect us from all but the worst asteroid impacts? If you go even 100m down surely you would be protected from pretty much everything but the earthquakes?

<comment><USER14> Depends on the size and location of the event just like land. Being underwater didn't protect the water based dinosaurs from the impact that ended the dinosaur's reign over the earth.

<comment><USER15> It would have been the biosphere collapsing, that killed off the water based dinosaurs. But if our hypothetical colony was self sustaining (perhaps as some sort of precursor to space colonies) it should be ok.

<comment><USER16> Well, access to energy via sunlight is easier in space... otherwise you need some other unlimited source of energy.

Also, 1 ATM of pressure is a lot easier to build for than 10 or 100.

<comment><USER15> Well, you could use geothermal energy or make use of the temperature gradient between the top of the ocean and the 100m down.

Its true the that pressure difference between vacuum and sea level is much greater than between sea level and deep underwater. However you have the advantage of not having to lift everything up to orbit. You you can build a really heavy steel tank using relatively 'simple' construction techniques, then just tow it out to position, before sinking it and anchoring it to the seabed.

The more I think about it, the more it sounds like like a self-sustaining undersea colony would be a affordable and useful way both ensure species Survivability and act as a prototype for a space colony.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> But the goal isn't to just colonize any old planet. It's to colonize a place we can successfully terraform. Mars is the clear winner in that respect, and it's not close.

Mercury needs basically a planet's worth of water and atmosphere to be imported. Mars on the other hand could be (we hope) good to go. The only question for Mars is whether there are abundant amounts of nitrogen locked up in the soil. But even if not, the amount of stuff we'd need to import by bombarding the planet with asteroids would be orders of magnitude less than for Mercury.

<comment><USER18> Mars has no magnetosphere which makes it a non-starter due to radiation unless you live underground or in heavily shielded dwellings.

If you have to do that you might as well start at either the Moon or my personal favourite Europa - a vast ocean of water kept warm by tidal forces underneath a thick protective crust of ice. Power would be a challenge, but there might be a way to harness either those tidal forces or the radiation from Jupiter.

<comment><USER17> Mars is a non-starter? I think you've received some bad information.

Average radiation on the Mars surface is 10-20 rem/year. With a thicker atmosphere it will be less. And for people spending 12-15 hours a day indoors in shielded dwellings it will be a lot less. It's not a showstopper at all.

<comment><USER19> The low gravity may not be enough to hold a thick atmosphere, no?

<comment><USER20> Not for more than 100 million years or so. But then, Earth will also become uninhabitable within the next few hundred million years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Asteroid impacts and stray planets colluding with earth make great movies and special effects. Yet, P(human environmental damage irreparably damaging the ecosystem) >> P(10km asteroid hitting earth)

How would you like to spend your money? Based on how often you see one in movie theaters, or based on reality?

<comment><USER22> "colluding?"

<comment><USER21> Yep, the end of the world :-)

<comment><USER22> Thanks for showing your standards so openly and sincerely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> >The magnetic field of Mars is .1% of Earth, and its atmosphere density is 2% that of Earth, so protection from ionizing radiation would require underground habitation, the same as on Mercury.

Curiosity has gathered data that suggests radiation on the surface of Mars is actually tolerable to humans [1], comparable to low-earth orbit, and presumably not too difficult to deal with for long-term surface habitation. I presume this article is a few years old due to the mention of Spirit and Opportunity but not Curiosity.

[1] [http://www.marssociety.org/home/press/announcements/curiosit...](http://www.marssociety.org/home/press/announcements/curiositydatashowsmarssurfacecosmicrayradiationdoseacceptableforhumanexplorers)

</comment><comment><USER24> I like the way this guy thinks about it. The thermal stability is a huge win from an energy requirement perspective.

</comment><comment><USER8> Instead of thinking how to colonize other planets while we have really low tech capabilities to do that, it is probably more effective to design efficient Asteroid defense. There are several interesting ways to do that (such as having something orbiting around the Asteroid to progressively change its course).

ANd anyway I seriously doubt people living on Earth are going to be OK with their politician telling them: "Oh, there's a huge boulder coming our way, but don't worry! The Human race is safe, we have 10 guys and women living on Mercury! Aren't you glad we planned for this?".

<comment><AUTHOR> Ten people is an outpost, not a colony, but your point that we should also be working on impactor defense is well-taken. In fact, colonies _along with_ impactor defense is an example of the concept of "defense in depth".

<comment><USER8> Well, you know what I mean. Even if you had 1000, it would still look pretty bad for the billions of people living on Earth. And let's not talk about genetic diversity in a population of 1000, oh no, let's not talk about that.

EDIT: since you modified your post. Well, agree with you. Just like everyone here should have good offline and online backup strategies for their data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Couldn't we do a practise run on earth? I'd expect an underground colony built to specs to survive indefinitely on Mars or Mercury could also do so on Earth even in the event of a large impact (assuming it isn't a direct hit on the colony itself).

<comment><AUTHOR> An extinction-level impactor on earth would opaque the skies for decades. Unless you have a power source that's going to last that long without refueling, and that's sufficient not only to supply the direct needs of the human occupants, but also their indirect needs, in the form of light for their crops, then no; probably not.

That's one of the more compelling points about Mercury, according to this argument: pretty much nowhere else in the solar system is power going to be that cheap and abundant.

<comment><USER26> > Unless you have a power source that's going to last that long

Geothermal, nuclear, tidal. Perhaps wind, I'd think heating the upper atmosphere would still cause turbulence?

I'd say the main reason is that it's not as cool. Which at the end of the day is why we do stuff. Living on Mercury would be dam cool.

<comment><USER27> I've got to say "cool" is not the first word that springs to mind when I think about setting up shop that close to Sol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Also, concentrated uranium deposits are probably less common [on Mars] than on Earth because they depend on sedimentary and hydrothermal processes which are much more prevalent on Earth."

There is some evidence otherwise: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor#Mars)

To me, the obvious reason to look outwards rather than inwards in the solar system is that it is easier to heat an environment that is too cold than to cool an environment that is too hot. The possibility of underground areas on Mercury being the just-right temperature is intriguing, though.

<comment><USER29> The thing is, though, to cool something in an airless environment you just put up some sunshades and suddenly everything is a ridiculous -100 C or so. No convective or conductive heat transfer to speak of, so it's entirely radiative, which means a couple layers of tinfoil reduce it to functionally zero. Assuming your tinfoil doesn't melt, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://einstein- schrodinger.com/mercury_colony.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> This is fascinating and a really compelling argument. He makes a manned Mars mission sound crazy by comparison.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. I've read a lot of SF, and whenever a Mercury colony has appeared, it's always been in the context of, "Well, now that we've figured out this colonization thing on Mars, and some of the gas giants' moons, and the asteroids, and, and, and... we'll try the hard places, like Mercury."

This article makes a powerful case for that thinking being exactly backwards.

(Well, except the asteroid part. I've thought for a very long time now that the easiest set-up for an offworld colony, in terms of overall expenditure of effort and resources, would be to tow an asteroid to a Lagrange point, hollow it out, and spin it up for centripetal "gravity".)

<comment><USER32> agreed Lagrange point asteroid is much easier than any of the other options. you don't even need a big one, you just need enough of a continuous supply of resources to build a really big space station. centripetal gravity really doesn't work for this scenario though since most practical arrangements for overcoming bone loss require ~1km radius which means carbon nanotubes.

<comment><USER33> First, we would need some time to get the experience to reach that rock.

Then, considering the effort spent acquiring experience, it would be better to focus on a large asteroid.

In fact, it would be even better if we could find a way to spare some of the effort to put it on a stable earth orbit.

Wait then, couldn't we put this big rock already in stable earth orbit called "the moon" to some good use?? It's not like we've never been there tens of years ago!!

EDIT: gravity and chemical composition are valid reasons to mine an asteroid, you are totally right. Yet if we wanted not to mine but to have a colony to edge our bets for a meteor strike, IMHO the moon seems to be a better choice. However, I should have been clearer with my thoughts, I stand corrected :-)

<comment><USER34> The biggest strike against the Moon is gravity - its gravity well is deep enough to make rocketry expensive, even if nowhere near as expensive as on Earth. Even very large asteroids are mostly much less massive than the Moon.

For the same reason (mass), asteroid mining is probably more lucrative than Lunar mining (barring materials similar to Helium-3). The Moon seems to have a less diverse composition, with some useful minerals (which are mostly more massive) buried beyond easy reach.

The truth is that the Moon is more like a planet than like an asteroid. It _is_ easier to reach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> A substantial problem with a Mercury colony is that the planet is much deeper into the Sun's gravity well than earth - about a factor of 2.

IANARS, but I think the rocket equation is exponential for the gravitation that needs to be overcome. So sending anything back from Mercury would require at least 4x the propellant.

<comment><USER36> I decided to do a bunch of numbers about getting off each respective rock:

Using a = G * M/r^2, we get the following: For Mercury:

AMercury = G * 3.29e23/2.44e6 = 3.68 m/s^2

ASun@Merc = G * 1.99e30/5.79e10 = 0.039 m/s^2

Atotal (if you launch off the dark side) = 3.68 + 0.0039 = 3.719 m/s^2

For Earth:

AEarth = G * 5.97e24/6.37e6 = 9.81 m/s^2 (duhh)

ASun@Earth = G * 1.99e30/1.49e11 = 0.0059 m/s^2

ATotal (off the dark side) = 9.81 + 0.0059 = 9.816 m/s^2

So even if you launch the 'hard way' from both planets (shooting away from the Sun), the gravity well you're in to get off Mercury is less (37%) than that of Earth, thanks to Mercury's far smaller mass. This isn't surprising, given that the local body completely dwarfs the influence of the Sun in both cases.

I don't have my lecture notes at work so I can't do it fully, but off the top of my head this is a rough first pass at the relative difficulty of transfers between each planet:

Earth orbital velocity: 29.78 km/s

Mars orbital velocity: 24.08 km/s

Mercury orbital velocity: 47.87 km/s

Venus orbital velocity: 35.02 km/s

d(Earth-Mars) = 5.70 km/s

d(Earth-Venus) = 5.24 km/s

d(Earth-Mercury) = 18.09 km/s

So in short, you need to change your velocity by 3x - 3.5x as much to get between Earth-Mercury, as you would between Earth-Mars or Earth-Venus (which are quite similar). Given that kinetic energy = 0.5 _m_ v^2, that's a 9x - 12.25x factor of energy to get to Mercury vs. the other two.

In summary, to get off Mercury is easy compared to Earth (duhh) and the Sun doesn't make any difference there. To get between the planets however is a huge difference and will be the limiting factor on regular Earth-Mercury transfers of matter.

Regardless of which way you go (towards or away from the Sun), you need to either shed or add the respective velocities to change from a circular orbit at Earth's orbit to a circular orbit at the other bodies' orbits.

<comment><USER37> Most of the "velocity change" in your math is done by the Sun as heliocentric potential energy converts to kinetic energy or vice versa. The minimum energy trajectory from Earth to Mercury is about the same delta V as Earth to Mars.

The problem with Mercury is you can't aerobrake, so add either a Venus slingshot or significantly increased delta V requirements to decelerate and land.

<comment><USER36> Sure, but you still have to shed that kinetic energy, which is what I was getting at the end. It's no use gaining a huge amount of kinetic energy if it just means you're on hyperbolic trajectory past the body. You need to still shed all of that energy with (traditionally) rocket thrust or equivalent which is completely equivalent to accelerating by that amount.

I was also basing it off a standard Hohmann transfer because sling-shotting and all of that jazz was out of my reach without my notes :) I am sure you can get a lower delta-v transfer from more exotic paths than just a Hohmann transfer but it's been a few years since I've crunched those numbers!

Nevertheless, aerobraking is one option of shedding energy when approaching smaller-orbit bodies but I neglected it when doing this first-pass analysis. However I agree with you that approaching smaller orbits gives you benefits that approaching larger orbits does not, by way of using the Sun's gravitational well.

<comment><USER37> My point is simply that you can't subtract the velocities of the two planets and call that your delta V. Delta V is the amount of actual powered acceleration your rocket does, which is only very indirectly related to the differences in velocities between the origin and destination planets.

For example, to get from an Earth-like solar orbit to an asteroid orbiting the sun very far away, at nearly 0 velocity, you'd need nearly solar escape velocity at 1 AU, or about 42 km/sec, minus the Earth's 30 km/sec. Even without taking advantage of gravitational slingshots or the Oberth effect, the delta V requirement is 12 km/sec, not 30 km/sec. So subtracting velocities has nothing to do with delta V.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I, like many others, find this whole area deeply fascinating. I'm particularly perturbed by the Fermi Paradox [1]. On that note, another commenter mentions a KSR book that has a city moving around a latitude to keep a certain place relative to the Sun. Alastair Reynolds certainly had that earlier (in _Absolution Gap_ ).

I'm also reminded of Iain M. Banks' Outside Context Problem [2] in a number of different ways.

The first is that space seems, from the human perspective, to be impossible big with even the nearest things being almost impossibly distant. The optimists argue that technology will solve that problem (probably whilst imagining a Star Trek like future) but the laws of physics paint a far bleaker picture if you look at just the energy cost to get to our nearest neighbour even assuming you solve the reaction mass problem and have perfect mass to energy conversion, the problem that even the smallest piece of matter (and eventually even _hydrogen atoms_ ) become deadly obstacles at even a modest %c and so on.

The second is that given the abundance of planetary systems we've already detected, the size of the galaxy (and its age) and the very real possibility of constructing self-replicating machines with something not _that_ much beyond our tech, it seems strange that we haven't seen evidence of this.

Anyway, back to interplanetary colonization... given the relative distance to Mercury (6-7 years at current tech for an orbital intercept) such a colony would of course be essentially cut off from the Earth so would need to be self-sufficient (saying nothing of the problem of building a colony ship that could even get people there and keep them alive for such a long period).

I think about it this way: what is the "footprint" of a single person in the developed world? By this I mean we all need food, power, material things and the like. For each of those things, add in all the people required to produce, deliver and service those and keep adding those people until you have a group that is independent and self-sustaining.

Primitive people have a relatively small footprint, requiring a relatively small group but a large amount of area per person.

In the developed world, to maintain anything like our current existence seemingly requires a good portion of the planet. That's a problem for any kind of colonization effort.

But at the same time that interdependence reduces (IMHO) conflict. Imagine a world where 100,000 people could be self-sufficient and effectively cut themselves off from the rest of the world? It seems like a recipe for disaster. It seems like a recipe for creating a technocratic elite and the kind of social divergence that would ultimately create a new species (at first culturally).

So for a Mercury colonization effort you'd need to take enough to establish heavy industry in a hostile environment (assuming you'd mine what you need rather than carry it there), build habitats, food production and so on. It quickly spirals into an impossibly large effort.

Colonization in human history to date has happened at far lower technological levels where transportation and communication were (compared to space travel) ridiculously cheap.

What we probably need is automated, self-replicating heavy industry. This way we send an initial package of robots to Mercury. They build energy sources, habitats, mines, etc without the huge cost of keeping humans alive. Need more robots? They build those too.

Sound familiar? You're only one step away from the self-replicating robots that can (and apparently haven't) colonized the galaxy.

So yes investing in impact defense seems prudent. I don't know what we could really do against something that's 20km across though. That's an awful lot of mass to move out of our way.

What we really need is something that is a large part of artificial intelligence and self-replicating machines to do our work for us. This seems to me like the key to our long term survival and something we'll need to spend significant effort into developing.

As an aside, I tend to agree that the desire to colonize Mars is somewhat misguided but, mistakenly or not, Mars shares a lot more in common with us than Mercury does. It has an atmosphere (although not a terribly useful one). The cold is something that we, as humans, can and do deal with. It's also closer to Earth (~8 months at the right time).

I personally find the rover effort to be useful as the basis for building machiens that can survive in hostile environments for long periods of time, if nothing else.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox>

[2]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Probl...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Problem)

<comment><USER39> So basically turn a nearby planet into an AI and hope that it includes us in its Dyson sphere?

<comment><USER40> Ceteris paribus, it would build its Dyson sphere out of us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> If an extinction level event is the justification for colonizing another planet, I wonder if the scenario we should prepare for should be nuclear annihilation, and not an asteroid event? Seems like nuclear war would be much more likely. The relevance to the discussion is that unless the nuclear annihilation is complete, then the colony only has to survive for 200 years on its own (or however long it takes for Earth's survivors to rebuild civilization) rather than forever.

</comment><comment><USER42> I like to daydream about space colonization too. Each world has its own challenges:

* Mercury

Advantages: There's rocks we can mine and water, no need for a heating system in the underground cities, strong-enough gravity and magnetic field.

Inconvenients: Spending over 6 years in a small spaceship is quite insane, the water may be irradiated, underground cities are extremely expensive to build compared with surface cities, there's only room for two megacities at the poles unless we do a Death Star kind of urbanization (then there may not be enough water).

* Venus

Advantages: less than a year of travel away, good gravity and a big atmosphere that compensates the lack of magnetic field, rocks we can mine, the high pressure and heat are manageable with our technology (the Russian probes had insufficient protections against heat), no need for underground cities.

Inconvenients: No water (there's H and O in the sulfuric acid but the collect and transform process may be expensive), there may be no nitrogen sources to cheaply make our air, the cooling system is a critical infrastructure.

* The deep sea of Earth

Advantages: only a few hours of travel away, warm (5 to 0°C), cheap geothermic energy, extremely resilient to asteroid impacts, more than abundant water and rocks we can mine, no need to build underground cities.

Inconvenients: much worse pressure than on Venus, total darkness and the layer of sand/dust make it hard to find potential mines.

* Moon

Advantages: only a few days of travel away, rocks we can mine, gravity may be sufficient.

Inconvenients: water is expensive to extract from the dust layer, requires underground cities (or does the Earth act as a shield?), there may be no nitrogen sources to cheaply make our air.

* Mars

Advantages: less than a year of travel away, water and rocks we can mine, no extreme temperatures thanks to the atmosphere.

Inconvenients: sand tempests, no magnetic field so underground cities may be necessary, the heating system is a critical infrastructure as with all worlds beyond the Earth (but we know how to heat stuff), there may be no nitrogen sources to cheaply make our air.

* Callisto

Advantages: the only Jovian moon we can colonize (it's away from the radiations of Jupiter), water and rocks we can mine, would enable the robotic mining of all Jovian moons.

Inconvenients: several years of travel away (5?), requires underground cities, extremely cold.

* Titan

Advantages: abundant water, nitrogen and hydrocarbons, a thick atmosphere, no need for underground cities, may host life.

Inconvenients: at least 7 years of travel away, there may not be rocks we can mine on its surface (which would make it impossible to build cities), extremely cold.

Those are the low-hanging fruits of our solar system, and they're all hanging higher than we would have liked.

<comment><USER43> Near-Earth asteroids are the low-hanging fruit, almost literally.

<comment><USER44> But they have no water and it would never be possible to live there.

<comment><USER43> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonaceous_chondrite>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> A recent novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, 2132, featured an equatorial on city on Mercury, built on rails that circle the entire planet. The thermal expansion of the tracks on the day side propel the city permanently into the night side.

I thought it was a neat idea.

</comment><comment><USER46> Read <http://advancehumanity.com/winter/> and <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11875131>, and you won't feel -40 degrees to be so bad anymore.

</comment><comment><USER47> Food for thought: Rather to colonize another planet, wouldn't it be easier to build the telescopes to spot a 5-20km sized asteroid and then deflect it?

The deflection would probably need less fuel than putting a colony on mercury (or mars or the moon) that could survive independently...

<comment><USER48> Well, the deflection system would still be a single point of failure for the human species. Colonising another planet of the solar system would reduce SPOFs to events affecting the entire solar system - the sun becoming a red giant, a neighbouring sun going supernova, a pulsar setting up shop too close.

Settling on another planet removes species-ending events such as asteroid strikes, global nuclear war, a really bad virus getting out, nanotech grey goo getting loose. The deflection system would only remove one of these.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm curious what the affects of the Sun's radiation would have with people on Mercury. It might not be conducive to vegetation or habitation even if it is underground.

</comment><comment><USER50> First time I have heard of the pressence of ice on the surface of Mercury.

</comment><comment><USER51> I'm sold. Lets go for it!</comment>


How Netflix evacuates regions in less than 10 minutes - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/project-nimble-region-evacuation-reimagined-d0d0568254d4 <comment><USER2> Excuse me potentially asking a question that's daft in the context of TFA, but relevant purely to the headline...

The disaster warnings that interrupt TV broadcasts, like tsunami evacuation orders, does Netflix display them?

I've not seen anything about it, and my Google-fu is struggling because they have a show called The Warning, and a lot of disaster movies.

Many of my friends don't even have a TV for anything other than consoles. Only one of my friends doesn't have Netflix.

If the Netflix app displayed "TSUNAMI WARNING - If you are in _insert place name_ , head to high ground immediately", they're far more likely to see it.

<comment><USER3> If you use Netflix through something like Xfinity's over the top system, it should go to a live EAS alert. If you're using it through a browser, it will not. If you feel this deserves attention, I'd suggest contacting your legislator to introduce legislation to require it (as Netflix and other streamers aren't going to implement it without regulatory requirements).

You'd probably want said legislation to cover any over the top device (Chromecast, Fire stick, Roku).

<comment><USER4> > If you use Netflix through something like Xfinity's over the top system, it > should go to a live EAS alert. If you're using it through a browser, it will > not

If you are using it through a smartphone, it won't, but the phone will, so there's that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > We also considered simply abandoning autoscaling altogether and pinning to a > calculated value, but this would hide performance regressions in the code by > absorbing them into a potentially enormous buffer intended for regional > evacuation absorption.

I'm probably missing something here, but why wouldn't performance regressions still be detectable via utilization metrics? I understand the difficulty of determining resource allocation a priori, but I'm not sure how this relates.

<comment><AUTHOR> What you propose would catch many changes by looking at things like cpu and latency, but the space of potential hidden resource constraints is vast enough that without empirical verifician, we cannot have high confidence that performance regressions have not occurred (eg: lock contention can be not a problem at all until it is a huge problem...)

<comment><USER5> That's a good point. Out of curiosity, how do those constraints get surfaced with hosts running in ASGs?

<comment><AUTHOR> as the new version gets deployed and starts to take more traffic it doesnt keep up and is scaled up accordingly which establishes a new performance curve for the failover prediction system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They mention that the solution remained cost neutral. Given that they're now running a huge number of additional instances, I'm curious as to how that could be the case. I wonder if they e.g. put a dollar figure on downtime, based on expected lost subscriptions?

<comment><AUTHOR> We already had reserved the failover capacity to ensure it was available during failover so running more instances is just taking advantage of that.

<comment><USER3> Are those reserved instances used for preemptible tasks (transcoding, analytics processing) when not experiencing a business continuity event? Or is just considered a sunk cost?

<comment><AUTHOR> The dark capacity is dynamically scaled throughout the day to handle anticipated failover needs. Depending on the region and time of day, the live, dark (and total) usage increases and decreases. When not being used for live or dark capacity, the resources are utilized for other tasks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Latest update from our team. AMAA. Also, we're hiring: [https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/866321](https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/866321)</comment>


Ask HN: Our big competitor wants to merge with us. What should we do? - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN, I am a startup founder and we have a very strong technical & design team. We have been able to build a very useful product which is different and better than any of our competitors' offerings in an otherwise crowded market. We haven't launched our product yet but we have received extremely good feedback from our private alpha users.
Today we got an offer from one of our competitors, a very well known VC-backed company in the market. They are interested in a merger since they believe we have better execution capabilities and they have a great brand.
They have a lot of users and have a decent revenue rate.
In my opinion this could be a double edged sword for us since culturally we are very different from that company. At the same time, this offer is very tempting because potentially we can make it very big together.
I am soliciting advice on this issue. FYI, we raised a decent seed round recently and investors are quite interested in us.
PS - Throwaway account for obvious reasons. <comment><USER2> It looks like they have a great brand either because they raised a lot of money or they are backed by a famous VC. It does not seem to be because of the product.

If the merger offer is not confidential then you can take it to investors. In this active fund-raising market with great technology, an offer from a very well known company and a market whose size has been validated by the number of competitors and the funding of other companies can only be attractive to other investors as well.

If you have the apetite for risk then it would be very well worth taking a swing in this case.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you want to be the king or to be rich? Ask yourself that. If you merge with the company, you'll have a better shot at becoming rich, but dramatically lose your stake in your current product. If you want to be the king, then keep pursuing your own endeavor.

So think it over, and talk it over with your partners and determine your priority. If it's money, it'd be a better choice to choose to merge, if not, then why not take on more risk if you really believe your product? Your odds of getting venture backed is definitely higher since your competitor's offer, but at the same time, since your launch is no longer in stealth and you have raised your competitor's awareness, it'll be much tougher to grab market share.

</comment><comment><USER4> FWIW, every time I've had one of those meetings, it's felt more like an excuse to find out how the other company was handling shared problems, with only the remote possibility of merger.

</comment><comment><USER5> Happy to chat with you about my own experiences merging Pinch Media with Flurry in late 2009, if it'll be useful. My e-mail is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER6> When you are in doubt always raise the valuation!!!</comment>


Ask HN: message board projects? - <AUTHOR>

What are some interesting open-source projects in the area of message boards?<p>I would could count stackexchange as an innovation in this area. I do believe there will demand for more open social graphs. HN is very roughly such a network. <comment><USER2> discourse.org? pivory.com? vanilla forum?</comment>


Would Google make more money if they charged 1 cent per search? - <AUTHOR> https://capitalandgrowth.org/answers/2981153/Would-Google-search-make-more-money-if-they-charged-1-cent-per-search <comment><USER2> I would pay more than that for a version of Google which searches exactly for what I input like in the old days, and doesn't try to guess what I'm trying to search for with some nonsense NLP while ignoring half of my query

<comment><USER3> Do you have proof they're applying NLP?

<comment><USER4> This is their stated goal and intent for the platform.

It's also pretty obvious. These days Google ignores basic operators like quotation marks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They would until someone replaced them with a free service.</comment>


Giving Mars a Magnetosphere - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/our-space/an-artificial-martian-magnetosphere-fd3803ea600c <comment><USER2> ok, so do that and then you're only left with the simple problem of terraforming!</comment>