Was Godaddy Caught Registering Domains Names After Availability Lookup? - <AUTHOR> http://www.billhartzer.com/pages/godaddy-caught-registering-domains-after-availability-lookup/ <comment><USER2> This proves nothing.

They say they aren't front running and never have, and yet how many times have people looked up a domain on GoDaddy only to have it registered minutes or hours later by a GoDaddy account.

That doesn't mean that GoDaddy itself is doing this, but their employees certainly could be, or they could sell domain query data to a 3rd party to keep their hands clean. Some Godaddy employees certainly have access to the data of who is looking for what.

It would not be hard at all to have an algorithm that looks that those domains for dictionary words and possibly look at Google keyword search volume on each one and only buy the ones that pass some minimum criteria. That would be smarter than Network Solutions and harder to prove.

I personally stopped doing domain lookups on GoDaddy because they would register domains I didn't pull the trigger on fast enough and I've been moving domains away from them as well.

Just because some VP says they don't do it doesn't mean they aren't lying or there isn't some low level tech or manager who isn't doing this on their own.

<comment><USER3> This phenomenon is disgusting. Happened to me for a thirteen-letter domain name with fairly low search popularity. I presumed this was one of the reasons why Godaddy is considered evil. Nowadays the domain is parked @ domainbrokers.com

If a 3rd party is involved, shouldn't we move to stop Godaddy from providing this information to them? If it is a case of rogue employees domain squatting, shouldn't Godaddy act to put a halt to this practice?

<comment><USER4> This _is_ disgusting, but everything is fair in love, war and business :(

I don't think any domain registrar will willingly _not_ do it. There should be some kind of law, that makes this practice illegal - both the registrar doing it themselves, and giving the data to others so they could do it. In fact, there should be a law prohibiting the sale, sharing or even saving of this data completely. If I search for a domain at a registrar's site, that shouldn't be logged _anywhere_.

Not directly related, but - it would be nice if there is a law that says "any domain name can be sold only for a maximum of 10 dollars" - that would prevent the disgusting domain squatters. It would upset those who spent millions already, but it might have some affect on the future squatting of domains.

<comment><USER5> > This is disgusting, but everything is fair in love, war and business :(

Um, no. That's not true. Sending armed men into your competitor's retail store to trash the place and scare off customers is not "fair". This is also why, among other reasons, it's illegal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Previous discussion/accusation here (~ 2 years ago): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326790>

ICANN investigated (generally, not godaddy specifically) 3 years ago, no evidence was found: <http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090807/0048175795.shtml>

GoDaddy's own support background here: [http://support.godaddy.com/godaddy/you-can-trust-go-daddy- wi...](http://support.godaddy.com/godaddy/you-can-trust-go-daddy-with-your- domain-searches/)

The current CEO of GoDaddy is not Bob Parsons (the "elephant hunter"). GoDaddy was sold to a group of investors this year and Parsons stepped down shortly after: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230458400457642...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304584004576420372308902058.html)

Warren Adelman took over for Parsons last year, followed by current CEO Scott Wagner who took over this month as interim CEO: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/30/godaddy-ceo-steps-down- scot...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/30/godaddy-ceo-steps-down-scott-wagner- named-interim-ceo/)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a very interesting discussion. I've been flipping domain names as a side-biz for years and I've had ALOT of discussions with other guys who say that GoDaddy sniped a domain from them. In some cases the people have checked on 3rd party sites (like NS), found that the domain was available, then went to Godaddy for cheaper registration only to have GD report that the domain is unavailable. In a couple of instances guys would then go back to NS or their other favorite registrar only to find that the domain was registered by "Domains by Proxy", which is GoDaddy's anonymous registration partner/subsidiary.

I haven't personally had it happen to me, but too many people I trust say that it has happened to them for me to ignore it.

<comment><USER8> GoDaddy is the largest registrar, and anyone can use their anonymyzation. So 'checking other sites' and THEN seeing that some anonymous someone registered via GoDaddy provides little negative evidence against GoDaddy.

<comment><USER7> I agree. You couldn't go to court with this type of evidence, but you have to admit that for the site to be available, then within minutes of you searching for it on GoDaddy, it then becoming anonymously registered would raise eyebrows.

<comment><USER8> But that scenario -- searching _only_ through GoDaddy (preferably HTTPS), and seeing that domain gone minutes later -- is not described in the comment I responded to. Nor in the parent linked article. Nor was it in the prior report this article mentions.

And yet, even if that did happen, GoDaddy gets millions of registrations per year, and many times that in lookups. So losing a domain minutes later is certain to happen many times per year for strictly innocent/coincidental reasons.

And some of the advice being given in these sorts of threads -- use DNS/whois lookups, use other random website services -- could be _increasing_ the risk. (Those protocols are eavesdroppable, those services have less to risk than GoDaddy.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sorry guys, I'm pretty sure you're chasing ghosts. I was a development manager there a few years ago, and they go to extremes to avoid anything that even comes close to looking like this. The capability doesn't exist in their software, and it would be a massive effort to enable it.

In high volume systems, low probability events happen very frequently.

<comment><USER10> > The capability doesn't exist in their software, and it would be a massive > effort to enable it.

What makes this a massive effort? I assume that GoDaddy has existing software to register a domain name given the name, and some fixed configuration like who should be listed as owner, contact, etc. So we need to call that logic, passing as input each domain that has been searched for.

Upon every search for a domain name, enqueue the search term to a queue. (This can happen e.g. after the page load completes.) The search results already indicate whether the name is registered, so only write unregistered domains to the queue.

Set up a fleet of workers to pull items from that queue and call the functionality that registers a domain.

It seems feasible to have a basic prototype of this functionality operational within a day or two of effort (e.g., a dumb implementation that simply registers every search term that's a valid domain). I'm sure the production version will need to be smarter, like not registering every single search, or estimating the value of a prospect and only registering high-value prospects - but wouldn't a basic flagrant implementation be fairly simple?

<comment><USER11> >What makes this a massive effort?

Well for one, if you have ever worked on a well established high traffic site, even to add a "simple feature" without breaking something is not that simple.

Going with your logic: User Searching for a domain; Godaddy adds it to the queue; Pulls out the domains one by one from the queue and registers it for themselves. Although it might seem simple there are few flaws in it.

a) What happens if the user want to register the available domain, wait but we already added it to our queue for automatic registration. So we need to check if the user goes through with the registration or not.

b) We are going to make millions $ holding domains hostages. But since every registration will cost goddaddy atleast $5.50 to ICANN and that there are millions of searches of domains in a month, well it certainly is one way to tank your company.

c) Alright lets then try to filter out only the popular domain name searches. But how do we determine what is popular and what is not popular. Common words? Trends? Hyphenation? Numbers? TLD? User Profiling?

d) Lets hold the domain hostage and make the user wait until they agree to backorder it from us. That will always work out for user retention.

Given that I used to own a lot of domains from Godaddy, I can attest to the fact that they have much simpler ways to hold your domains hostage if they wanted to. For example: When a domain is about to expire, the sheer volume of emails you get from Godaddy reminding you to renew is outright annoying. If they had to score better money, cut it down to just one and sent them about 4 weeks before the expiration. When most people forget to do it, go ahead and charge them $80 to get it back from redemption!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Am I just missing the sarcasm in this article? How on earth is "We can now honestly say that Godaddy is not involved with domain name 'front running'" a reasonable conclusion from that one sentenced email? The sender is someone we'd _expect_ to deny this.

 __Edit: __The author has since edited the post. The part I quote was a direct copy-paste of the last sentence from the original version. He's since made a half-hearted attempt to qualify this.

<comment><USER13> "Can we now..." not "We can now". It's a rhetorical question, not an assertion.

<comment><USER12> He's since edited it. My initial post was a direct quote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Back in 2008 I did a test on a couple of sites. I found that Easily.co.uk claimed a made up domain name "nobodywantsadomainnamewithlotsofnumbers1231891904817401" - used as a one time test string for this registrar alone - was already taken on 3 TLDs (I've got a screenshot saved) ... the chances of that being a random collision seem pretty low.

</comment><comment><USER15> Very appropriate in this situation: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines>

<comment><USER16> +1 came here to say the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Recently, I was checking whois for a 5-letter domain which had just expired. It was available, but seconds after I checked it with Godaddy's whois (checked the update timestamp), it was taken by Domains By Proxy, LLC (Godaddy's company). So for anyone checking this out, consider they may only do it with recently expired domains or short domains.

They may also turn off this code if this blows up in public.

<comment><USER18> They offer a domain snapping service, so if something expired they might have bought it for a customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Pretty poor investigative journalism in my opinion... No testing, or planning to scope them out... just one email, and he can "honestly say" that they don't do it. Weak.

</comment><comment><USER20> The better question: does GoDaddy offer data services that allow other parties to check anonymized domain availability search histories?

</comment><comment><USER21> Even worse, godaddy will routinely pick available domains and mark them as "premium" domains and hold them hostage for outrageous prices.

They are not selling them on behalf of anyone - they, the registrar, are illegally marking them up.

<comment><USER22> Sincerely, why do you think it illegal? Aren't they allowed to speculatively register domains to resell?

Please understand this is a sincere question. I'm asking because I think it's legal. If it's illegal, I want to know about that, and especially how the law might view a register's squatting and an individual's squatting differently.

Edit: Just so it's clear, by "register" I mean truly register the domain for a year -- not "taste" it for a few days and then cancel the registration, if that is even still allowed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This has been happening for many years now. They sell the stream to other companies who register the domain for a few days for free. They stamp the for sale page on it and wait, drop it and maybe register it again.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have had two domains, months apart (back in 2009?), that I looked-up via GoDaddy and then were gone the next day when I went to register.

These were obscure names, one with numbers.

This is just my experience, could be plain bad luck/timing. However at the time I wondered about this (nice to know it has an actual term) - emailed them angrily and got a placating response.

This makes me reconsider.

</comment><comment><USER25> This absolutely happens. Only with GoDaddy? Not sure.

I have searched for some obscure domains in unpopular niches (imagine <extremely obscure keyword><extremely rare/popular suffix>.com> to find them registered mysteriously 24 hours later to someone on.. you guessed it.. Go daddy. This has happened enough times to me that I now only search for domains after I login into the control panel at the domain provider I use.

Many domain/whois tools do the same things.

My semi-educated guess is all searches are queued, sorted by popular keywords, and most likely hand picked off by an official employee, or someone who may have access to the data.

OTOH, I'm surprised no one has done a honeypot experiment to catch this type of behaviour in the act.

</comment><comment><USER26> I had EXACTLY this situation with GoDaddy earlier this year. I was looking for a good domain name, found it (intelface.com), but decided to sleep on it. Next morning it was gone. I know you can't prove anything, but it looked very suspicious at that time.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why is anyone relying on a 3rd party to check domain availability? You can do DNS lookups and whois searches from the comfort of your own machine. There's no need to let anyone else know you're interested until you're actually ready to pull the trigger.

<comment><USER8> That might be more dangerous. If you trust GoDaddy, and do a search in an HTTPS session with them, there's little risk a third-party could learn of your interest/idea and snap up the name.

OTOH, dns and whois are unencrypted protocols. Eavesdroppers could see your lookups. Depending on which DNS or WHOIS servers you are consulting, their administrators may be untrustworthy. For example, many whois installations default to asking NetworkSolutions, who at one point (2008) was definitely front-running by their own admission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This once happened to me about 2 years ago. I got furious and called up godaddy wanting to talk to someone that could give me an answer. They said we don't buy domains but when a domain is looked up on our website sometimes it is publicly available and sometimes other people end up buying them on speculation.

I searched for the domain godaddysucksbigbigballs.com multiple times and it ended up being taken after 10 mins.

I assume that since there was a grace period where people could simply drop a domain and get a refund after a couple days that squaters somehow obtained the information and weree buying domains that people were searching in hoping to profit.

</comment><comment><USER29> Searching for some made-up names on GoDaddy. Will check them tommorow.

* now-why-would-they-register-such-an-obscure-domain-122828178327

* now-why-would-they-register-such-an-obscure-domain-211278327

* now-why-would-they-register-such-an-obscure-domain-218398211

<comment><USER30> You might have to try a larger number of things that would score higher in terms of domain value. If I were front-running, I might concentrate on domains that were likely to have resale value beyond the original purchaser.

Also, given that GoDaddy is being accused of this right now, they'd be smart to stop any front-running for a few weeks.

<comment><USER29> Yep.

They weren't taken today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Yet again an article that fulfils Betteridge's Law of Headlines[1].

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines>

</comment><comment><USER32> One point of data, this has happened to me personally with GoDaddy.

</comment><comment><USER33> Isn't that something you could investigate and prove? Look up 1000 randomly- generated domains from different IPs, check later if any of them are registered, done.

<comment><USER34> I suspect they would only register names that look somewhat "good". There are plenty of automated ways to valuate domain names -- then just pick the unregistered ones that exceed some value.

<comment><USER14> You _could_ run a list of available domain names from a domain name suggestion service as lookups using an automated system. You'd want a botnet to avoid getting your IP blocked.

Wasn't the problem that the registrars could retain the domain names without having to pay for a few days? I thought that ICANN had addressed it but am pretty hazy on that point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Probably not a strong case for OP, but in any case GoDaddy is evil and should be avoided in all shapes and forms. A bit of Googling will show why.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm shocked that anyone is surprised that this still happens. The author claims he broke the news in 2008, but NetSol has been doing this for a very long time. I remember using a service that let you do wild card domain searches before going anywhere near a registrar. "Domain Surfer", I believe. These days I just pull the trigger instantly when I find an available domain. Pull the trigger!

</comment><comment><USER37> I could have sworn this happened to me. I looked up my own name (.com) one day, and it was available. I checked back a week or so later, and it was taken.

I monitored the domain for a year and saw no activity. At the end of a year it became available, and I snagged it at a base price. Seemed like too much of a coincidence. I don't have that common of a name. I can't prove anything though.

<comment><USER38> Happened to me as well. I can't remember if it was Godaddy or some other web lookup, but now I only ever use CLI tools to do domain lookups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This has happened to me a couple of times, but it doesn't prove that GoDaddy are the ones who are actually registering them.

</comment><comment><USER40> Wouldn't it be trivial to perform some sort of analysis on this? That is, write a script to test an appropriately sized sample for domain availability. Then after some predetermined time, check the availability again. I'd imagine if GoDaddy is registering domains, then we'd find that our data was statistically significant.

</comment><comment><USER41> Back in 2009 and 2010 when I was a novice (And I am still consider myself as a novice)in the field of web development, I do not remember how many times I have searched for a domain name (with a scientific terminology in it) to find that it is available but gone after few days and parked on a place such as Sedo.

</comment><comment><USER42> Its quite easy to do a sting operation on them to prove the practice. I searched for a random domain name now. Silly name: YABODABODOODIDA.com. Took screenshots of the search and its availability. Lets see in a couple of days who owns this domain name.... Then rinse, and repeat the process...

</comment><comment><USER43> Well, I'm glad I don't use GoDaddy - I'm always paranoid when searching for a domain name, though - if I find a good one, I tend to register it right away out of fear that it might be taken right after the search. Guess there's some truth to that.

</comment><comment><USER44> I had such an presumption many years ago with another Registrar. My guess is that they check manually all searched (yet free) domains and register the best ones after a while, it wouldn't even surprise me if this is the standard.

</comment><comment><USER45> İ personnally experienced those kind of issues with GoDaddy and this was the main reason of switching to name.com. They don't front running all domains but I believe they do for some keywords which is relatively valuable

</comment><comment><USER46> This happened to me. I checked if a domain was available, it was, I went out of the house to tell my friend. We went back to register it and it was gone.

damn!

Now, I just use whois from the terminal.

</comment><comment><USER47> Isn't this domain tasting?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting>

<comment><USER47> Or maybe it's domain name "front running":

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> With the massive amount of backlash they got from SOPA, I seriously doubt whether they would be doing this sort of thing.

</comment><comment><USER48> Let's test this.

WECHEATPEOPLEOUTOFDOMAINSFORFUNANDPROFITANDWEHATEKITTENSTOO.COM is available. Just $12.99*

I wonder how long that will stay available?

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm just another soul that experienced the same despicable behavior from GoDaddy. Far too many coincidences, I say.

</comment><comment><USER50> Hell, GoDaddy didn't even bother registering my domain after availability lookup. They waited until I paid for it and then 6 months later parked the domain with their bullshit. I never changed any settings or anything, and yet if you go to my domain, all you see is GoDaddy's bullshit.

<comment><USER51> I'm not one to defend GoDaddy, but it sounds like you just never did anything with it. If you don't point the domain to a hosting account or change the nameservers, GoDaddy always displays the parked domain page by default. You can turn it off in your account settings if you want.

<comment><USER52> When I used GoDaddy they automatically park your domain until you configure the nameservers like you said. This is the most likely explanation of his/her account.

<comment><USER50> No. That is not the explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Could someone with an amazon turk requester account please test this?

</comment><comment><USER54> Hmm, I can only speak from my experience where I checked domains with GD and when I came back one week later to register them I was greeted with a "this domain has been registered. but you can buy it for $50"-type message.

This was around 2003 and since then I'm avoiding godaddy.

</comment><comment><USER55> Yet another reason to bookmark <http://geektools.com></comment>


Petition to support Apple and other manufacturers against backdoors - <AUTHOR> https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/apple-privacy-petition <comment><AUTHOR> I am not sure this could change current administration's stance on the matter, but I've signed.</comment>


Behind the scenes: Highrise marketing site A/B testing part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2977-behind-the-scenes-highrise-marketing-site-ab-testing-part-1 <comment><USER2> Most interesting that signups increased despite the only route to sign-up being 'below the fold' - users didn't mind scrolling through the whole thing to see the call-to-action.

Some gaze plots on Nielsen's site show people only allocate 20% of their attention 'below the fold'* <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling- attention.html>

* yes, I hate typing that phrase!

</comment><comment><USER3> The biggest difference that I noticed is how much more clearly the sales letter describes what Highrise does. It also does a better job of explaining how it benefits users.

From a design perspective, I'm really impressed with how they managed to adopt the sales letter format without it seeming spammy/scammy. A lot of that probably has to do with the typography.</comment>


Show HN: Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration - <AUTHOR> http://mewo2.com/notes/terrain/ <comment><USER2> I have nothing super valuable to add except to say: this is totally awesome. Good for you for exploring this and sharing it with the world. I just emailed it to 3 non-techy friends who will totally love it.

Keep making, keep sharing!

</comment><comment><USER3> If you like making fiction maps by hand (but not fantasy maps) - have a look at this great mapping project: Open Geo Fiction: [http://www.opengeofiction.net](http://www.opengeofiction.net)

From the about page: "This world is set in modern times, so it doesn't have orcs or elves, but rather power plants, motorways and housing projects. But also picturesque old towns, beautiful national parks and lonely beaches. "

It's essentially a fictional OpenStreetMap, and actually uses all the same stack as OSM, with all the data as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike

<comment><USER4> I was just randomly zooming in and found a city called Auflington ([http://www.opengeofiction.net/node/19913404](http://www.opengeofiction.net/node/19913404)) --- that's a work of art!!

Update: And there are so many like that --- incredibly detailed, ordered and organic!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Your [http://mewo2.com/notes/naming-language](http://mewo2.com/notes/naming- language) is equally interesting, great work!

<comment><USER6> my desire to tweet this article and have my followers click on it led me to write a forwarder: [https://medium.com/@kevinkimball/building-a-tiny-node-app- to...](https://medium.com/@kevinkimball/building-a-tiny-node-app-to-add- twitter-cards-to-your-links-56007491ee92)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool! This reminds me of Amit P's polygonal map generation project, which you should look at if you're interested in this kind of stuff. [http://www-cs- students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...](http://www-cs- students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/polygon-map-generation/)

<comment><USER8> The OP actually cites that project as the method they use for initial polygon generation, and tells everyone to go read it.

<comment><USER9> If you want to lose a few weeks hacking away at something kind of fun, then turn around and try to implement the Fortune's Algorithm[1] Voronoi region/Delauney Triangulation method that underlies Amit's map generator.

Somewhere I have a WinForms app I built a while back that animates the process and draws everything out step by step.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune%27s_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune%27s_algorithm)

<comment><USER8> This is actually what I did in my first internship -- generating Delaunay triangulations (or more often, tetrahedralizations) of points, and then adjusting the underlying sets of points to help ensure that the corresponding Voronoi cells have good properties (generally reasonable surface area to volume ratios).

We didn't use Fortune's for historical reasons (the first versions of the code were in Fortran 77, and written well before he published his paper). Instead we generated triangulations and then flipped edges until they were Delaunay, and then used the corresponding Voronoi diagram. It turns out that flipping edges to produce a nicer triangulation is reasonable in two dimensions, but intractable in 3D and up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The tricky task of label placement could be outsourced to a SAT solver.

The way it works is that for every city, town etc you generate a few placement candidates (4 positions around the point like you do seems fine) and then calculate all the pairs of placements that collide. For each collision you add a clause to a SAT formula that forbids this combination from occurring. Every solution of this formula will be a clean labeling of your map.

<comment><USER11> That seems like a way of changing a nice, convex problem into a much harder to solve NP-complete problem...

<comment><USER10> I think you underestimate how hard the original problem is. Small decisions can cascade and have effects very far away on the map. Also, in what exact sense do you mean convex?

Furthermore, SAT is hard in theory but the kind of very structured instances found in practice tend to respond well to heuristics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of a bit in one of Neal Stephenson's books where a MMORPG company hired a team of geologists to generate a geologically plausible map for their game. The hardest part of their job was finding ways to integrate the parts of the world that had been made up without any regard geology and made no sense in their model.

<comment><USER13> Reamde was the book if any are interested.

A cool part was one of the engineers complaining when a powerful user cast a spell that deformed the landscape. The whole world was a huge finite element simulation so that one spell cause CPU usage to spike as whole world had to be updated.

The book was fun, sort of a thriller, but I felt Stephenson could have done more exploring the world of the MMO game. A rare complaint for him.

<comment><USER14> Cast in another light, it was standard Stephenson fare -- the first half of the book explores a topic deeply and interestingly, then the second half basically sets it aside to trail off into some weird no-man's land. Seveneves was particularly obvious version of this issue.

<comment><USER15> I thought Seveneves was more like two "first half of Stephenson novels" smushed together; I found myself wishing there was more exploration of the "second" world. I thought the cultural evolution stuff was super interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If I had this as a kid I would have buried myself in the basement playing D&D for the rest of my life.

<comment><USER17> For an RPG you can simply take anything from his Twitter bot [https://twitter.com/unchartedatlas](https://twitter.com/unchartedatlas) :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well done, thanks!

BTW, this is a quick way to generate an higher resolution map on the site. Open the developer tools, remove the width from .note (it's the container of the column), inspect the map at the bottom and set the height and width of the canvas to suit your needs. Then click on the Generate button.

Maybe the page could be changed to extract that canvas from the column layout and make it fit the viewport.

<comment><USER19> He gives you his source on github. I think that's enough right there.

EDIT -

Oooo and it's MIT...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is such a great tool for hobby world designers. I know for sure that I will use this when I create adventures.

I made multiple tools for random world generation but never come close to this kind of quality. I'm impressed!

</comment><comment><USER21> This belongs to the class of _teleological_ algorithms and is very cool! I appreciate the links to some of the source material the author learned from... and the interactive elements on the page are great. I'd like to do the same for my blog.

Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER22> I found this entire post to be completely awesome, but laughed in particular with this line: "I have a programmer's superstitions about always using powers of 2, which are more pleasing to the spirit of the machine." Also, I share similar fond memories of those maps from cheap, grocery store fantasy books!

</comment><comment><USER23> This is really cool. I'm going to bookmark this and look in to it more in- depth. I've always wondered about how to generate maps for a game. Good job.

<comment><USER24> reddit.com/r/worldbuilding is an excellent community for such things as well

<comment><USER25> Has that improved lately? I stopped reading it ages ago, when it was turning into /r/PhotosOfSplotchyWallpaper - lots and lots of low-effort pareidolia with no filtering (downvotes disabled IIRC).

And don't get me _started_ on the rivers...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If the novels were as bad as he says they were, maybe he can crank out some random(ly bad) prose to go with it, and get Amazon-rich.

(And/or, this might make an interesting companion project.)

<comment><USER27> I like it. If we assume that schlock fiction is objectively worse in some measurable way, then that suggests it should be easier to generate than works of high literature. I bet with some concerted effort, it would be possible to build an algorithm which digests a bunch of generic fantasy books and produces a tale of an unlikely group of heroes questing for the $object to turn the tide of $conflict.

<comment><USER28> For generating the epic campfire poems: [http://dmatoso.com/manowar-lyrics- generator/](http://dmatoso.com/manowar-lyrics-generator/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Would be neat to give it real topo maps and then have it generate the towns and see how well it matches reality. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER30> That is super sweet. It looks sort of similar to how Dwarf Fortress generates its geographies.

You should look at how that game does it because it also involves creating a whole mythology and history to help generate civilizations and their fall/rise.

</comment><comment><USER31> Cute. Usually this is done with fractals, as with VistaPro and its successors. You generate a coarse random height field, then subdivide, making smaller random changes locally, until you have all the detail you want.

An ambitious project: take in fantasy novels and extract location cues from them, then draw a map. Find text which mentions a place, then try to recognize phrases which express distance and direction.

</comment><comment><USER32> Your post is really helpful. I recently tried to create procedural algorithms for medieval maps. I started with path-generation and circular city layouts.

Here is my try on paths generation: [http://imgur.com/CUs6P4S](http://imgur.com/CUs6P4S)

<comment><USER33> If you like pcg maps, have a giggle at my pirate-themed maps and the awful js code behind it.

[https://github.com/wlievens/scallywag](https://github.com/wlievens/scallywag)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is an amazing use of Python. I'm OK with .py but terrible with images so this random generation amazes me. I will be passing this into my DM!

</comment><comment><USER35> Now I want to make a vector rogue-like with Tolkien-ish world maps...

</comment><comment><USER36> The "improved" blue noise random points at the start would probably be more efficiently generated with Poisson disc sampling.

[https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~rbridson/docs/bridson- siggraph07-pois...](https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~rbridson/docs/bridson- siggraph07-poissondisk.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER37> It's great for creating your own world. However if you play D&D, chances are you play in Forgotten Realms. In that case you already have the large-scale map, and you want town- and city-scale maps.

Does anyone have a nice pointer toward those?

</comment><comment><USER38> very cool. tried to see if it could make sense of islands and such, and the results are extremely convincing: [https://i.imgur.com/LXNtZLH.png](https://i.imgur.com/LXNtZLH.png)

</comment><comment><USER39> This is insanely cool! I'm totally making a conversion of this into Elm my next pet project. One nice thing to see would be generation of terrain types (such as deserts or tundras) and the affect these have on the algorithms that place cities etc.

Will definitely share if I manage it

</comment><comment><USER40> Wow. I might need to spend some time making a clone of this but geared towards worldmaps like [https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/](https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/)

</comment><comment><USER41> Or I could just visit a random planet in No Mans Sky and use that as my model.

</comment><comment><USER42> This is truly fantastic, both the project and the interaction. If you want to continue with it, it seems there's so much more you could do, too: roads, forests, altering namelists for different regions...

</comment><comment><USER43> Sierra Nevada. So basically completely limited access highway with no at grade crossings or notable traffic. Not exactly stressing the system there.

</comment><comment><USER44> Even as a child, I found Tolkien's maps of Middle Earth geographically implausible, in terms of river flows and mountain placement.

<comment><USER45> I only really had a problem with the convenient 'box' of mountains around Mordor.

Well, that and the fact that everything was so far apart that the main trilogy spent more pages talking about walking than talking about events :D

<comment><USER46> They didn't have automobiles, you know. b^) As I understand it, one of Tolkien's primary concerns was to resist the easy shortcuts of modernity, both in transportation and in thought.

<comment> Null-Set He also just really liked writing about landscapes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I too, like the author, often was more interested in the topography and maps of fantasy stories. This is awesome!

</comment><comment><USER48> That's really cool, now just let the community create stories around these maps. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER49> mewo2, I am immensely grateful to you for devoting the time and energy to a task I've been meaning to undertake (and thus value), but have yet to find the time.

Your success is inspiring, and I've forked your repo(s) to try and continue your work. Thank you so much!

</comment><comment><USER50> This is amazing! This motivates me to do so many things... alas, none related to my day job.

</comment><comment><USER51> This is very neat, I hope I will have time to dig into this at some later date. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER52> Everything looks great except the rendering of the mountains.

</comment><comment><USER53> Well done. I need to explore this later but well-done

</comment><comment><USER54> This is sooo cool! Thanks for sharing!!</comment>


Hate PHP all you want but the fact of the matter is PHP makes money - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/duyaz/hate_php_all_you_want_but_the_fact_of_the_matter/

<comment><USER2> I don't know that I'll ever love it, but it is handy to know.</comment>


Launch HN: Scaphold.io (YC W17) – GraphQL Backend as a Service - <AUTHOR> Hi, we're the founders of Scaphold.io (https://scaphold.io) in the YC W17 batch. Scaphold is a GraphQL backend-as-a-service platform that helps you build apps fast. We built Scaphold because we were app developers and we were frustrated by how long it took. We started building apps together back in college, and every time we started a new project we found that we spent a lot of time doing the same things. Whether it was setting up the infrastructure, integrating APIs, managing REST endpoints, or even implementing something as simple as pagination it took a lot of time. BaaS platforms have existed before but we were disillusioned by the lack of flexibility they provided. This all changed the day we first found GraphQL in an article posted here about a year and half ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10217887).
At the time, we were working at Microsoft and started hacking on what eventually became Scaphold at night and on weekends. We were driven by this vision to be the foundation for people's apps, the scaffolding of their masterpieces. We were lucky to get accepted into the YC Fellowship program last April and launched our first version of Scaphold last May. We learned a lot. The Fellowship program helped us gain initial traction and after several months of focusing on product and strong growth, we reapplied to the YC Core program and were fortunate enough to be given an opportunity to join the winter batch and to continue the dream.
Since then we have been hard at work improving the platform and have reconstructed it from the ground up. Today, Scaphold powers thousands of apps and we think it solves a lot of the problems of BaaS platforms that came before it. We're really excited about what we have built and would love for you to try it out. It's free to sign up and development tier stays free forever so you can get straight to building apps.
We'd love to hear your feedback and are happy to answer any questions. Thanks! <comment><USER2> I just don't believe in the 1 backend to rule them all approach. Services like Stripe, Algolia, Datadog, Pusher, Mapbox, Imgix etc all make a lot of sense. It's easy to plug them in to your existing backend and extend your app's functionality. Using someone else's backend for your app is a terrible decision though, the lock-in is just too large.

For this to succeed they'll need to add a lower level interface to the mix. Something like AWS' Lambda.

Question for the founders, will there be an extension platform, something like Parse cloud or the Heroku app store?

<comment><USER3> "Services like Stripe, Algolia, Datadog, Pusher, Mapbox, Imgix etc all make a lot of sense"

Yep, and that's because they solve a really really challenging problem you can almost never solve yourself, whether it's payment processing or search.

Creating a simple barebones back-end may be tedious (though I'll argue it's trivial), but it will never be an unsolvable problem for many. Maybe for pet projects, but never for any critical production applications.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment!

It is true that companies can often build their own backends but it is often extremely time consuming and expensive. It takes time to develop these systems and build them to scale and often they run into a problem where early assumptions change while the underlying system is hesitant to.

One of the core value props of a platform like ours is the speed at which you can iterate and develop something while also being given the tools to pivot when you need to. We are focused on building features that allow you to extend the platform to make it achieve what you need so that you can spend more resources developing the value that is important to your customers instead of the pipes underneath.

Of course our solution cannot work for everyone but the companies that we have worked with thus far have told us that increased their application throughput by 8x compared to when they built backend themselves with frameworks like rails/django/node.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congratulations on your launch!

Please take this constructively, but I can't help but think that the prevalence of GraphQL in your messaging is a huge distraction. It seems like the real value in Scaphold is letting people build applications faster, with less effort. In fact, in your post's description of the problem you're solving, you don't mention GraphQL at all (until you start talking about solutions). Right now, the (gorgeous) site feels similar to if Shopify had launched with messaging focused on its use of Rails on the backend.

It feels like you could also be targeting the type of less-sophisticated business programmers for whom VBA is often a weapon of choice. However, when I read your site, the fact that I don't use GraphQL makes me want to move on.

Anyhow, best wishes again on your launch!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for that note. I think there is a lot of room for improvement in our messaging and we will take this to heart. I'm glad you were able to understand the value prop from our description and you are exactly right that our core value is rapid application development. We are solely focused on a building a platform that is both easy to start and that is capable of growing with your business. Thanks again.

<comment> le-mark So many great questions and well wishes in this thread, allowing them to explain and _market_ their product in detail. Am I alone in finding this attention to be totally contrived? Other products are launched and get zero attention. Or is it a benefit of being in the YC machine that you get so much FREE support?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a developer, and the lead for our GraphQL efforts since the day the JS codebase was released, I applaud your efforts. To us, GraphQL offers a smarter way to frame API contracts and gives a significant competitive edge by increasing our dev agility. Spread the joy around!

As a businessman, I am concerned at the commercial realities of building persistence-level products for developers. There is a 'Death Valley' in pricing: you have to be _very good_ at $0/mo (i.e. usable in production), and virtually infallible at $1,000/mo (and even then the first CTO's task will be to replace you). Being that good costs _a lot_ of expensive engineering cycles. You guys a clearly smart, or you wouldn't get Scaphold to this impressive point so quickly nor get YC to support you. Yet other brilliant teams had crashed and burned in this 'Death Valley', with the most recent one being RethinkDB - also backed by YC, and among the most impressive ones for me. I wish you all the tailwinds in the industry, and encourage you to read the RethinkDB post-mortem to harness those winds better -> [http://www.defstartup.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb- failed.ht...](http://www.defstartup.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html)

<comment><USER6> Hi there, thanks for the support and feedback! I believe someone earlier on this thread raised the same concern and as a matter of fact, linked the same resource about RethinkDB :)

The question was framed slightly differently in that that person asked about TAM, so this is what I responded below and I think it's still a valid explanation to repost here:

"Great question, that's something that we've been thinking about for a while and I want to start out by defining what our market is. Given the various categories of offerings in the market today amongst managed hosting, DBaaS, and PaaS, Scaphold falls under the PaaS side of things. We do offer plenty of value-added features that attempt to make server-side development a lot more hands-off.

However, at second glance, you could argue that Scaphold actually creates a new take on PaaS. Previous services have faltered at trying to do too much in one platform by essentially wrapping and containing all the services you need underneath one shell. So we're treading in unfamiliar territory where we think there's actually a lot more value in providing an interface for all your data across the web, as opposed to a complete wrapper around it in a self-contained manner. This way, developers can actually get the best of both worlds:

1) Having the benefits of using a backend as a service platform that offers value-added services like hosting, performance monitoring, tooling, app management, etc. And...

2) Flexibility in picking and choosing what services you need (like Auth0 or Stripe), tying in your own custom logic (through a provider like AWS Lambda), and even perhaps the database layer as well.

Essentially, the vision is to allow developers to think as if they were rolling their own backend, while stripping out the time-consuming aspect of connecting these pieces manually. It's a much more modular approach where we sit as the hub of all your data across the web.

To bring this back to the original point about TAM, this would ultimately open the door for us to a much larger market that includes any cloud service customer since they're not married to Scaphold as a backend. Scaphold essentially becomes an extremely versatile way to tie in your data that's hosted just about anywhere and combine it with the existing services you already use. That also reduces the pieces that we have to manage as well. My answer is by no means supposed to be a definitive way of thinking about TAM, but merely one way that we're evaluating it. If you or anyone reading this has any thoughts on this, we'd love to talk more privately about this and the direction we're taking Scaphold."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How did you find your first customers, and how did you get them to trust you enough to build their apps on your infrastructure?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey that is a great question. Our very first customers were actually some of our friends. We promised them free service for their trust which helped us identify pain points and iterate before we initially launched last May. Since then we have seen a lot of our users find us through tutorials and other educational content that we've written. In terms of how we got users to trust us, Slack has been an invaluable tool. We have a really friendly community of developers that we speak to every day and I think that has gone a long way to developing trust. It wasn't always smooth sailing and the platform has grown a lot but we try to be as transparent as possible and address problems as soon as they arise. We've dedicated a lot of time to building out our architecture, security, and scalability and I'm happy to discuss that with those interested. We are really passionate about what we are building and we hope that our customers see that and can rest easy knowing that we are working around the clock to make sure their applications run smoothly.

<comment><USER6> Feel free to join our Slack as well if you haven't already. You can invite yourself here: [http://slack.scaphold.io/](http://slack.scaphold.io/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My team and I have a medium sized dev shop from Southern California. We've been using Scaphold in production now for several months, and have been absolutely blown away by how much more efficient we've become. All projects in the pipeline will be using Scaphold going forward. Take my money.

<comment><USER6> Amazing! It's one of the most heartwarming things to hear someone like yourself talk about how Scaphold truly helps you in your job with real production workloads. And it sounds like many of them as well! Happy to chat more with you on Slack about your future apps ([http://slack.scaphold.io](http://slack.scaphold.io))

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congrats! The website looks great!

Forgive me if I am simply uninitiated, but what are the general advantages of graphQL over a typical backend powered by a SQL database?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thats a great question! These things are actually not mutually exclusive. You can think of GraphQL as REST 2.0. GraphQL provides a type system and standardized query language that make it much easier to consume APIs from the perspective of the client application. For example, the GraphQL language itself is very powerful and essentially eliminates the need of SDKs making GraphQL a great choice for any platform including embedded systems, VR, and more. GraphQL does not make any assumptions about where your data lives however. In fact, we run multiple databases (including SQL) each of which serves a specific purpose and we are able to expose all them to you via GraphQL. This is also how we are able to pull in things like Stripe, Algolia, Push Notifications and more into the same API that powers the rest of your application.

One of the biggest promises of GraphQL is in its ability to consolidate disparate data and this I think is how we are going to stand out from the BaaS platforms that have come before us. This is just the beginning. The GraphQL type system opens up so many possibilities in the types of developer tools that people can build. Apollo ([http://www.apollodata.com/](http://www.apollodata.com/)) is already building amazing tools and expect to see more from many more companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you code while working for another company dont they own that IP? Unless specifically stated on your employment contract? Just curious! Thanks

<comment><USER11> not if you code outside of working hours with your own equipment

<comment><USER12> My apologies for contradicting you, but this is too simplistic an answer. The answer depends on the laws in your state, whether it was coded on your own time, whether it was coded with any resources of their company, whether ideas in your product can be shown to possibly have come from the work you did for the company, and what your NDA/employment letter/employee agreement states. Unless you run that document by a lawyer and get specific set asides carved out, they might very well be able to take you to court. Some states are really good for you though, like CA. FWIW, I am not a lawyer, and this does not constitute legal advice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The new website looks pretty cool but I wasn't blown away by the product. The API feels very weird when actually building an app and unfortunately most integrations didn't work for me.

We've tried all available GraphQL BaaS and now use Graphcool which doesn't have all the features Scaphold provides but the ones they have are very stable and mature. Also their API seemed by far the best one we've tried yet (e.g. they are providing an extra endpoint for Apollo client).

<comment><USER6> Those are great points you make and we'll take it to heart to assuage your concerns. If I may ask, what in particular was weird about the API? We're built to the Relay spec, which has become the open standard for GraphQL APIs.

To your point about the extra endpoint, I know they have different ones for simple, Relay, files, and from what you're saying not Apollo Client. To me personally, it seems a bit counterintuitive that they offer so many different endpoints when one of the premises of GraphQL was to have a single endpoint that was decoupled from the client. Open to your thoughts here to see how we can improve your experience as a developer from the client perspective!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't buy into the GraphQL hype. Actually it is a rehash of older technologies like RDF & SparQL, but marketed to a newer generation who didn't know that old things exist. I'd wager that the 20-something "engineers" who designed it didn't give a shit about prior art either.

I'm sure that Facebook employees think it solves a lot of problems for them. But I'm not convinced that a single vendor technology is going to be viable on the web. Web standards come about through standardization processes, with multiple stakeholders reviewing and revising drafts. Facebook one day puts up the GraphQL spec out of nowhere and defines the "standard" by themselves, based on their own implementation.

A little history: Facebook tried to subvert HTML with FBML, a proprietary markup language designed for use within the Facebook ecosystem. Long story short, it didn't work out. The various SDKs and APIs by Facebook have been notoriously unstable.

People tend to excel at short-term thinking, kudos to Facebook for that, and lack the foresight for long-term thinking, except for a few visionaries. The architecture of the web has lasted a few decades already, it will outlast a single vendor specification.

<comment><USER15> The GraphQL ecosystem has grown amazingly quickly over the last year. It's definitely not a single-vendor technology at this point. Check out this list of GraphQL libraries, tools, and implementations: [https://github.com/chentsulin/awesome- graphql](https://github.com/chentsulin/awesome-graphql)

The majority of people who are using GraphQL are using an implementation from someone other than Facebook (on either the client or the server, or in many cases both).

(And for what it's worth, I did see a "Why not RDF" slide in one of Lee Byron's decks, and those of us at Meteor who are working on GraphQL are definitely aware of the RDF/SparQL roots. I think what's driving GraphQL's growth is, first, it addresses a very timely problem - fetching all of the data for a screen in a mobile app in a single round trip without coupling your backend to your UI - and second, the focus on tooling and developer experience which has been a weakness for SparQL.)

<comment><USER14> I didn't say that Facebook's reference implementation is the only one (it is in fact the most popular based on downloads), everyone else is performing free labor for Facebook. The point is that they can make any change they want to the spec for themselves and imposing their will, bypassing standards processes because there are none.

>fetching all of the data for a screen in a mobile app in a single round trip without coupling your backend to your UI - and second, the focus on tooling and developer experience

There is no reason why one can't do this with existing web technologies as an additional feature. There was no reason to ignore what already exists and works for the web at large.

I think you should disclose that you are founder of Meteor and have a vested interest in GraphQL. So when is the Facebook acquisition?

<comment><USER16> While I also have a vested interest in GraphQL (competing in the same space as Scaphold) I agree partially with what you stated above but it's not all that bad as you seem to imply.

Yes, FB does have the power (now) to change the spec over night but so far it was mostly stable and whatever changes were added were only for the better. No new technology comes to life as a standard, it needs someone inventing it, maintaining it, promoting it up to the point where people can get behind it and form a group and make it a standard. Let's give FB a chance, so far it has done an excellent job with the GraphQL standard. On the other hand, graphql-js and Relay are not that stable yet and their interfaces are changing very fast and probably for people that use them it's a bit frustrating but it's only been a year and i bet they will get to a stable interface in 2017 enough for people to be able to really depend on them.

>There was no reason to ignore what already exists and works for the web at large.

GraphQL came to life (and a lot of people adopted it practically over night) precisely because the things that "already existed" did not work really well (REST for SPA/Mobile). When a lot of your business logic (whatever that means :)) moves to the frontend (browser/mobile), the backend API tend to become very complex in order to support the frontend and REST can not express very well that complexity. Whenever people "sell/promote" GraphQL, they bring up 2 main benefits, fetching the data you need in a single request and integrating multiple backends/microservices. If you look at GraphQL only form this perspective i would agree with you that it brings nothing radically new to the table. You can have a REST api flexible enough to be able to get only the data you need in one request (see [http://postgrest.com](http://postgrest.com)) and you can integrate multiple microservices behind it, we've also seen in the past "typed" schemas (WSDL and things like that).

Imo what makes GraphQL so nice is the the simplicity (Rich Hickey's definition), how you immediately get what a query does, how it relates to JSON and the shape of the response you get back. Making something "simple" is very hard work and i think FB nailed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Congratulations on launching Scaphold. I tried my hand at founding a Node.js PaaS startup (NodeSocket)[1] in 2011, and while promising in terms of attention, silicon valley media, VC meetings, there was never a path to a sustainable PaaS business. Howerver, things have changed. Technology and mindsets have evolved, and Firebase, Parse, and Serverless.com have shown there is perhaps a future in BaaS.

My only words of advice are focus on the business and finances just as much as the coding. Unfortunately the best engineers and technology don't always win (see RethinkDB). I'll be tinkering around tomorrow with Scaphold, might work out well for a side project of mine. Best of luck!

[1] [http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/10/nodesocket/](http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/10/nodesocket/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for those words of advice! We'd love to talk more about this and hear more about your experience with nodesocket. If you're interested please feel free to email me at email@example.com and we can setup a call!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How do you solve the problem of different clients needing different permissions (i.e. one user shouldnt be able to query for a different users data)? Took a quick look through the website and didnt see anything about that, sorry if I missed it. That aside, it looks pretty cool! Good job!

<comment><USER6> Great question. We have a variety of ways to implement permissioning. You can get pretty granular with how you wish to implement your rules whether they be role-based or relational. Feel free to poke around our docs here to learn more about the use cases for each with examples: [https://scaphold.io/docs/#permissions- authorization](https://scaphold.io/docs/#permissions-authorization)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is exactly what I've been looking for to backend some of my projects - awesome service guys!

<comment><USER6> Thanks! Really appreciate the support. Feel free to test drive the service and let us know what you think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Congrats on the launch, the new website looks really nice!

I think the focus on integrating with a variety of services really plays to the strengths of GraphQL, and addresses some of the concerns people usually have with backend as a service platforms!

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the support! Agree with your sentiment, we talked to many users about how best they like to extend their API, and found that the modular approach was best for popular services like Stripe, Auth0, and so on. And for the rest of the custom workflows, we've provided the ability to extend your API with your own custom logic through synchronous and asynchronous hooks that can call out to any web service that you may have hosted anywhere, whether it be on AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Webtask, or even self-hosted. If you're in the portal, you can check it out under the "Logic" tab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I spent some time with the founders and they are really great. Without parse and google owning fire base they way has been paved for a new IAAS/PAAS. I hope Michael and Vince can lead the way.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the support! Really appreciate it. It's an amazing time to be in this space right now with all the opportunities and directions to take the product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This looks really interesting. Thanks for sharing! I checked out the Projects page, but they look mostly like tutorial or hackathon types - is anyone running scaffold.io in production?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Yes we have an number of larger production apps on the platform. We actually power 4 National Geographic domains in Europe as well as some cool new startups like [http://cheddr.com/](http://cheddr.com/). We are working on getting more in depth customer profiles that will go on the community page soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Big fan of what you are doing! But can you elaborate a bit on TAM? Isn't the possible market too small? [https://github.com/coffeemug/defstartup/blob/master/_posts/2...](https://github.com/coffeemug/defstartup/blob/master/_posts/2017-01-18-why- rethinkdb-failed.md#what-about-the-cloud)

<comment><USER24> At a glance it does sound like a very small potential market which makes me curious as to why YC would fund them. Perhaps there's a belief that the market will grow as these tools lower the barriers to entry (facilitated by GraphQL) for building applications?

<comment><USER6> The fast-growing cloud service market at large is one we're trying to tackle, and you're correct in that GraphQL does indeed provide a lot of value in helping us get there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Have been trying BaaS lately - few questions.

What databases are supported - like can I use oracle database with Scaphold.

Is there support for websockets.

Why Scaphold ? I see there are many companies in this space since last few years - what unique selling points will help a customer choose Scaphold.

Dont you think rise of PaaS will make BaaS redundant easily going ahead. Since BaaS is now a very small layer on top of PaaS.

<comment><USER6> Hey those are great questions. To answer them in list order:

1) You currently can't use Oracle DB with Scaphold. We have a hosted database that comes along with each app right from the get-go.

2) There is support for websockets through GraphQL Subscriptions. Each new type that you create in your schema will expose the ability to subscribe to events of that type.

3) There are a bunch of PaaS services that exist out there, but the speed at which you build apps on Scaphold is undoubtedly faster. We give you the ability to think about your data in a modular way by appending large pieces of functionality to your app without having to write any server-side code. But you also get the flexibility to bind your custom logic to the same API through your own hosted microservices. Out of any BaaS platform on the market, we provide the most feature-rich platform that can actually help you launch into production and scale to large workflows. So far we already have a few large customers aboard and growing fast.

If you're interested to hear more about our feature set, I'd love to chat with you more directly about your specific use cases and see how we can address those. Feel free to join our Slack and PM me directly ([http://slack.scaphold.io](http://slack.scaphold.io)). I'm @vince

<comment><USER16> Hi Vince

You said each app comes with a hosted DB, do developers get direct access to this db or is it a big shared one? Are you planning on providing this direct access in the future? Can you disclose the exact DB (MySql/PostgreSQL/MongoDB)?

Congratulations on the launch, you are doing a good job education developers in regard to this new way of building APIs which helps everyone competing in this space (myself included) and the YC backing helps with credibility to this domain. Keep up the good work.

<comment><USER6> Hi there, great questions. Developers currently do not get direct access to this db, and we are thinking about ways to allow you to do so in some fashion in the future.

The db that we use is Amazon Aurora MySQL db.

Thanks for the support!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is the name pronounced "scaffold"?

Also, is this a special type of post to allow links in top level story description? Regular Ask/Show posts don't get [http://](http://) links auto formatted into links.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes the name is pronounced "scaffold" with the "ph" for GraphQL. When we first started the project we liked the image of scaffolding going up around a building. In our case the buildings were your apps and we wanted to create the foundation upon which you build them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I initially parsed the name as 'scaphoid', one of the carpal bones. I thought they were making a joke about reducing typing...turns out I just can't read properly.

<comment><AUTHOR> We fight with the scaphoid bone on google every day ;). The name comes from the original vision to build a foundation upon which others can rapidly build. We saw the platform as a sort of scaffolding. One that helps you build your application and then melts away so you can focus on what is valuable to your customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I was just looking for something like this, great timing!

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! Let me know if there is anyway I can help!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think the "Customer stories" section needs to be updated. The bio picture and link for the Nat Geo reference points to Bonnier.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the feedback. We didn't want to be misleading though since we actually run several of Nat Geo's domains in Europe through Bonnier. They own the licenses to them in that particular region. Here's a piece that explains their relationship: [http://en.bonnierpublications.com/national- geographic-0](http://en.bonnierpublications.com/national-geographic-0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If we were to build an app, how portable is this application if we were to self-host it later or move to a similar provider?

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the nice things about GraphQL is that it is the same everywhere. This reduces vender lock-in significantly over previous BaaS platforms. We also adhere our API to the relay spec so it will look familiar to most GraphQL users. That is to say that if you grow so large that you want to move to a self hosted solution then we can help you with that. of course you will lose our admin features, integrations, analytics and logic but if you're building it yourself things must be going well and we won't prevent you from growing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice work. Excited to give it a spin in prod

<comment><USER6> Glad to hear it. Appreciate any and all feedback after you've checked it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Have been following you guys for a while, really excited to see what's next for Scaphold

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the support!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Congratulations on the new website and launch!

The new custom logic feature is looking great but what if I want to implement a custom query or mutation that isn't necessarily tied to a `Node`?

For example, what if I wanted to add a query that ran a ranking algorithm and returned a feed?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for the kind words! That is coming soon. You will be able to use the same Logic infrastructure to create you own custom queries and mutations!

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the prompt reply! I'm currently refactoring our GraphQL API and if you guys had this feature I would've gone off our infrastructure and used Scaphold. Will definitely keep an eye out for when you guys add this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Do you fancy an intern this Summer?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! We're preparing to start hiring so very possibly! You can reach out to me @michael on our slack (slack.scaphold.io) and I'll keep you in the loop!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> when do you plan to start the referral program?

<comment><AUTHOR> Referrals should already work. You can find them here: [https://scaphold.io/referral](https://scaphold.io/referral). Let me know if you have any problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've been using a similar service [https://www.graph.cool](https://www.graph.cool) for a while and it's been amazing. Good luck guys.

<comment><USER35> Thank's for the support bh13731! If anybody has tried both Graphcool and Scaphold I would love to se an objective comparison between the two services.

<comment><USER36> The UI of graph.cool is a bit clunky.

But the generated Schema is nice if you don't use Relay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Edit: on reflection, I reversed this and put the original comment back ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13476120](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13476120)).

I don't think it's in very good taste to promote your thing in someone else's launch thread.

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13474424](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13474424) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER36> I think it's bad taste to do this kind of moderation.

We want to get the best information from HN and not advertisements.

<comment><USER37> On reflection, you're right—that was a mistake on my part. Sorry! I've put the comment back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "Launch HN"? That's new.

<comment><USER37> Yes, it's something we're trying out for YC W17.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13366964](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13366964) was the first one, and this is the second one, so far.

<comment><USER39> So, it's preferential access to the front page in the same way as YC job ads, but no special comment moderation?

<comment><USER37> Yes, assuming I'm reading you correctly. We'll make it so there isn't a launch post and a job ad on the front page at the same time, once I get time to write some code—that way there won't be any more slots reserved for YC than before (i.e. one at a time). Since launches are more broadly interesting than job ads, this feels like a win-win.

They'll still have voting and commenting like regular stories.

Edit (2020): in the end, I didn't get around to writing that code and users didn't turn out to mind the occasional case where a launch ad and a job ad are on the front page at the same time. If it becomes an issue at some point, we can still implement that bit.

<comment><USER39> Yep this makes total sense. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: How to Host, Secure, and Deliver Static Websites on Amazon Web Services - <AUTHOR> https://kylegalbraith.com/learn-aws <comment><AUTHOR> This is the first product I have ever launched and I am really excited to share this project with all of you.

About 5 months ago I was working with a group of developers and entrepreneurs that were trying to learn Amazon Web Services. But they were struggling with the vast sea of information out there. They didn't know where to start, what to focus on, and couldn't make any progress.

That inspired me to start putting this course together. The purpose of this course is to focus on learning AWS by actually using it within the context of hosting, securing, and deploying static websites. I want to give people a framework for learning complex platforms like AWS, cut through the sea of information and help others accelerate their learning.

Of course there is a dozen different ways to host, secure, and deliver static websites nowadays. But it is actually a great problem to focus on when it comes to learning AWS. It provides a context that allows you to focus on a handful of services at a time and dig into them as you are building out a solution.

You can check out a sample screencast here: [https://youtu.be/NkTpqrq5g1c](https://youtu.be/NkTpqrq5g1c)

You can also signup to get a sample chapter here: [https://www.kylegalbraith.com/learn- aws/#sample](https://www.kylegalbraith.com/learn-aws/#sample)

A special thank you to the incredible community of makers here on HN, Twitter, and IndieHackers. Please feel free to ask me any questions or provide feedback about the course.

<comment><USER2> Your site isn't loading.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the gracious catch. Should be up and running now :)</comment></comment></comment>


LA follows NY with e-cig ban - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/5/5473064/los-angeles-joins-new-york-in-banning-e-cigarettes-in-public-spaces

<comment> atom-morgan This is such a horrible idea for so many reasons. We're seeing what really happens when drugs are legalized (enough). E-cigarettes have improved greatly over the past year and are offering a safer and more health conscious alternative to consume a drug.

Increase freedom for entrepreneurs to innovate and they'll find ways to make it safer to consume drugs like nicotine because it's beneficial for them to do so.

</comment><comment><USER2> I am completely missing to see the point in this ban.

You have e-cig's that do not create "smoke" so no second-hand smoking, they don't contain additives and other crap, it's almost pure nicotine and no tabacco, only water vapors.

It looks more like a push from tabacco companies than a state concerned for it's citizens well being.</comment>


After Paris, Europe may never feel as free again - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/14/after-paris-attacks-europe-never-same-terrorism <comment><USER2> As De Villepin mentionned, France has never switched to a security-focused mindset. As long as we have our social net to circunvent the disastrous drawbacks of neoliberalism, I highly doubt we will ever have to. Even the problem of young poor french extremists will be solved. The basic idea is to explain to these "social losers" who consider radicalism as their last option that they are just breaking their toys.

Basically, we have to take care of our 15-20 years old youth. And give them hope. But that's true of every nations, western or not.

</comment><comment><USER3> I already don't feel free and not because of the terrorists.

</comment><comment><USER4> the end of the eu seems awfully close, first pigs now border closures.I never thought it would happen in my lifetime

<comment><USER5> And the rise in Euro-skeptic political parties, can't forget about those. I can almost see the UK referendum leading to a chain of other countries trying similar things, especially given the growing attitudes towards the whole open borders thing due to events like this.</comment></comment>


Arduino projects that require major hacking skills—or a bit of insanity - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/11-arduino-projects-that-require-major-hacking-skills-or-a-bit-of-insanity/

<comment><USER2> I've actually started a few of those projects myself. When I was a teenager, I started building a sprinkler system for my family (didn't finish because I got distracted by the modeling software).

I wouldn't say they require "major" hacking skills, but they're definitely non-trivial. Got lots of great ideas for summer projects.

<comment><USER3> I have started sprinkler and HVAC control system projects as well. I also have one, that should be a working prototype shortly, to build a device to automatically keep my pool topped off. I may ultimately build that one without a microcontroller, though.</comment></comment>


The Fox, Only Better – Minimalist Firefox UI - <AUTHOR> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/the-fox-only-better/

<comment><USER2> Nice work! Love the flexibility and extensibility of Firefox... That's quite impressive</comment>


Show HN: You can now mine for Pizza in your browser - <AUTHOR> https://mineapizza.com/ <comment><USER2> I honestly may have tried to mine the pizza but there is no info about how I'd actually get my 'za so... I left.

<comment><USER3> It's still being put together, we have an order form now if you want to give it a shot

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> what brand is the pizza? do i get a coupon or like, do you have to know my mailing address for delivery?

i've registered and logged in, how to I "invite friend to help me mine for pizza" as the header says?

thanks i love it

<comment><AUTHOR> Coupon is probably the easiest route I reckon.

Pizza is fully transferable (though you'll have to wait for a UI for that) so you friends will be able to send you their Pizza. We are also thinking about a short link that will allow you to get them to directly mine your pizza.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Presumably we're mining for a pizza for the site owner?

<comment><AUTHOR> Once you hit 1 pizza, you can trade that for a pizza voucher. Though I may make that form visible when you don't have 1 pizza minimum also.

<comment><USER6> Not trying to knock you. I think it's a fun idea, and I think you've got a decent shot at making some good money. But isn't this just costing the av rage user way more in electricity than just buying a pizza?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> very cool. how did you come up with idea?

<comment><USER3> Well while trying to get our vape-shop startup off the ground we considered the idea of having a page where you can mine a vape, and this evolved into the more achievable "mine a pizza"</comment></comment>


Refactor #16 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/stephenmathieson/node-tlds/pull/16 <comment><AUTHOR> node-tlds has almost 500,000 weekly downloads on NPM. This PR has a little bit of everything and brought some joy to my evening.

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/tlds](https://www.npmjs.com/package/tlds)</comment>


Ask HN: What should I do? Leave or stay? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a guy 24 years old and also a freelance front-end developer. Beside doing my freelance work I also work in small design studio that I found with my friends. Now the design studio is growing, got more income monthly (from contract with a client with NDA project) make us think again to hire some people who want to join with us and spread our wings to make products or get new clients.
Now we have 3 new guys joined with us. We will make an app with beautiful design and I'm happy when I saw the design that made by them. But the problem is me. I began uncomfortable work with them when we decided to recruit more people. I don't uncomfortable with the new guys, I enjoyed work with them. I don't know exactly where is the problem that make me feel perforce to do my work. I just feel uncomfortable to work with them anymore, sometimes we have different opinions and I always give in.
Now I also do collaboration with other developer to make our passive income solution (making theme). When we are chatting or talking while doing our collaboration, I feel we have same opinion about everything. That's one of my reason why I want to leave my current team, even though I don't know he want to join with me to make a new team or not. The other reason are I want to be more famous, collaboration with other people who have same direction with me, share freebies and share everything from my head without any wall that can stop me.
When I decide to leave my current team (design studio) so I choose to be a freelancer again and leave my monthly income (it makes me doubt to leave, but maybe I have to). I have a wish to make a small team with just 3 guys who have same direction like a guy who collaborate with me now.
Because of that problem I want to ask HN what should I do with my current condition?
Many thanks. <comment><USER2> When you lost a viewpoint in a discussion was that worth? Were they correct? If yes then you shouldn't be thinking of it much. If they are not, you should go and talk to them or may be in next discussion bring this up and try to win the argument. If they all are aggressive then you should take different direction else not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes I feel the problem is mine. Because sometimes they are right, but I still hold my opinion, selfish maybe. I just want to be free and meet new people who have same viewpoint with me. But doubt always come when I want to leave them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why don't you work with the other developer you enjoy working with and the others can do other projects? You are more or less in charge I'm assuming, considering you said you founded the studio.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll try, but I'm not sure he wants to make a team with me. I think I'm less in charge at this moment, because of this uncomfortable condition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> \- I say that you should stay and work out your differences. Why do you feel uncomfortable?

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you tell me the reason why I have to stay? I don't know exactly why I feel uncomfortable. Maybe because we often have different opinions. And sometimes I want to be free and make a small team with other people who have same think like.</comment></comment>


An Open Licensing Organization for Open Source Software - <AUTHOR> https://www.petekeen.net/asacp-for-open-source-software <comment><USER2> Congratulations, you just came up with a proprietary license concept. That's great, but don't misuse the phrase "open source" or "free software". Perhaps a better alternative to the absurdely complex system you've proposed is to simply exchange software licenses/units/subscriptions for cash, the way it's normally done. Other people can contribute to your software through "contracting" and "being hired". This is the easiest and most straightforward way to handle proprietary software.

If you truly believe your concept deserves the name "open", you should research the concept at [https://opensource.org/](https://opensource.org/) and reevaluate.

Open-source software is for _everyone_ to use, not just those advantaged enough to have free time to contribute to projects in a secret club.

</comment><comment><USER3> no, No, NO.

We're programmers. If you can think of it, we can do it. But it takes someone who has the motivation and the time. Motivation is easy to find but time is not. Because Time is Money (as I'm sure you've heard). So the real issue is open source funding.

I've spent the last 18 years trying to get Axiom funded.

I tried the NSF. They will not fund Axiom because there is a "competing commercial product" (aka Mathematica).

I tried the Air Force (AFOSR). They cannot give grants to open source work because it requires financial tracking. Somebody has to managed the funds and the receipts. When I was at City College I did get a grant but they have a Provost (who took 55% for "support").

In order to handle accounting open source needs an "accounting office" with professional, certified accountants. I approached several companies (e.g. IBM, TI, etc.) with the idea of "donating a certified accountant or two" to an organization that would "manage open source grants" with services like funds management, receipt clearance, taxes, etc. That way an open source project could accept grant money. So far, nobody wants to donate people. I think such an office could completely change the whole open source funding issue.

I've tried setting up donations for Axiom. The idea was not to pay people to work on Axiom, just to support things like setting up a conference or paying to attend a conference. I was the only donor.

Open source is not free. I estimate that I spent about $3000 per year on things like travel to attend a conference and paying for hosting services. I now have the Axiom server under my desk on a $1200 dollar computer. In order to ensure Axiom runs everywhere I have to buy computers like the Apple (used to be a non-Intel processor), the PowerPC, a Windows machine, a Linux machine, etc. It all adds up to a lot of money.... not to mention the cost of books to keep up. Oh, yeah, and my time is written off as "free".

<comment><USER4> > They cannot give grants to open source work because it requires financial > tracking.

There is nothing special in open source work that would preclude financial tracking. Sure it takes effort, and there are costs related to getting all the paperwork done so you need to think twice if it is worth it. But still, its just normal part of the business.

<comment><USER3> Yes, you can set up a business to handle everything. And you can pay an accountant to handle the grant. And you can do all the receipt tracking. And you can get your busiess certified by organizations that issue grants.

All of which means that you don't spend time programming. The fundamental idea is to centralize that "overhead" so that open source programmers can program, not run a business.

We're not trying to make and market a traditional product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The OSCC license would be a variant of Apache 2.0, BSD, or MIT, with the > additional clause that the rights granted by the license are also predicated > on paying for annual OSCC license fees.

Then it's not Open Source.

I agree that funding Open Source software is hard, and I want a solution as much as anybody: It's not even a theoretical problem for me, I am currently self employed and would _really_ like to fund myself with just Open Source software.

What you're describing is a really bad idea though, it isn't actually FOSS. Heck, it's actually considerably worse than many of the other licensing models out there, because it basically boils down to being a subscription service. Many of us are involved in Open Source because we specifically hate the 'software rental' model.

Better ideas that I've seen people kicking around that I wouldn't immediately dismiss:

\- putting a paywall in front of issue trackers

\- dual licensing under the GPL and a proprietary paid license.

\- requiring upfront payment for new features (ie Kickstarter/Patreon)

\- open core models (ie Gitlab's strategy)

\- advertising and sponsorships via READMEs and official sites.

Many of these ideas also have problems, but at least they don't require us to completely abandon FOSS licensing.

<comment><USER6> Do you know if projects that use the patreon style? Successfully or not?

<comment><USER5> Funding OSS on Patreon-like sites is really stinking hard[0]. There are not a ton of people making it work, although a few are close[1].

I suspect this is because OSS software on Patreon usually doesn't come with many actual benefits. One of the models I'm interested in playing with in the future is having Patreon-specific issue trackers and access to separate development repositories.

In any case, you should not be trying to fund yourself purely through Patreon unless you have a good reason to believe you're going to be different.

Kickstarter and crowdfunding on the other hand has been real promising.[2][3][4][5]

I think there's strong evidence that OSS developers should consider charging upfront for feature development. It probably doesn't work for every type of project, but it seems to work for _many_ types of projects.

[0]: [https://liberapay.com/explore/teams](https://liberapay.com/explore/teams)

[1]: [https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/fund/](https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/fund/)

[2]: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit- th...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit-the-magical- git-client)

[3]: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-m...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft- mark-ii-the-open-voice-assistant)

[4]: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost- just-a...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a- blogging-platform)

[5]: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbs348/diaspora-the- per...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbs348/diaspora-the-personally- controlled-do-it-all-distr)

<comment><USER6> Thanks. What do you think of a subscription that gives you access to suggesting and up voting/down voting features?

<comment><USER5> :) Is there a hosting service that supports it?

This is the other problem I ran into trying to figure out how to get Patreon set up - Github and Gitlab have pretty broad permissions.

It would be good to see people experiment with a wide variety of permissions surrounding issues, from access, to commenting, to creation, to upvoting. A lot of Open Source projects aren't even really looking for funding, but still want something in front of people who are just showing up to complain.

I don't know of a public issue tracker that supports that kind of granularity though (if you do, let me know), so the next best thing I could find is to make a private group on Gitlab for development branches and issue tracking, and then to mirror everything to a public repo for stable releases with issues disabled.

If anyone who works on Gitlab/Github is lurking around, it could potentially be a really cool differentiator to have those kinds of granular permissions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Y'all are right, using the words "open source" for this model is a mistake because it doesnt fit the existing definitions well.

The core of the idea is to centralize the complexity from the perspective of both the developer and the business that uses the developer's software, such that businesses fairly compensate developers without developers having to develop a separate, unique business model. Musicians banded together a century ago to make this happen for them and it's worked well for everyone concerned. It seems like we should be able to do the same.

<comment><USER7> I've read of some horror stories around ascap suing various bars and restaurants [0], and that seems like something that I would want no part of as a developer, user, or company. As a music lover, this seems like a system that causes much harm and has been opposed to file sharing and free information sharing.

[0] [http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/news/ascap-sues- peninsula-...](http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/news/ascap-sues-peninsula- bar-for-copyright-infringement/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The easiest, fairest sliding scale I can think of for charging corporations for this is __per employee __. Charging based on revenue or other accounting metric allows for monkeying and funny math.

For example, $500/yr/employee. That's minimal for small startups. For a company with 50,000 employees, that's $25m/yr.

Realistically you can't start charging that much initially but as more developers and projects use an OSCC license, the value increases and you can raise the royalty rate.

<comment><USER7> That's great for companies, but bad for organizations. I run into this with commercial vendors who try to explain how all 10k people in my org would benefit, whereas I know only 100 would use it.

Just because something is easy to verify, doesn't make t fair.

There's very little software that I would ever think warrants $500/employee/year for a small startup.

<comment><USER8> You're misunderstanding. You pay $xxx/employee to buy a license to use ALL software with that license. You aren't buying one thing for N employees.

Let's assume Linux, Apache and PHP all licensed via the OSCC. $xxx/employee means you can use all OSCC projects in production for your org. Royalties would go back to those projects based on usage tracking (which itself is a major complication).

<comment><USER7> There is software not using your system that I would need. Even if this covered all OSS products I use, I wouldn't pay $500. The price is kind of ridiculous. If it's for every employee in the org

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd like a dead-simple and globally accessible way of donating.

Like github/gitlab/etc allowing to easily deposit money via CC, Paysafecard, Google Wallet et al. The projects could have a "donate" button by default.

I often clone and browse projects and absolutely wouldn't hesitate to donate a few dollars here and there if it's just a click away.

<comment><USER7> Flattr does this, sort of. I pay a monthly fee and it distribute it to whatever repos I star that month. They distribute to more than Github as well, but not everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So, I have gone down a similar mental experiment trail also, before. I like this direction of thinking, although I haven't arrived at an ideal solution.

What I could not avoid with your type of thinking, was ending up with something that seemed like a patent/copyright shell company. If someone can be excluded from licensing by not paying a due, then is this truly open? I understand your intention is to re-use open source licenses and add a small clause directing payment for use to this open licensing organization, but ultimately, I think that such an organization may become a threat not a benefit.

I might be wrong - the Apache Foundation works pretty well for humanity, and Apache licensing works well also. And, they seem to raise at least enough funding to keep the lights on from their supporters.

I personally always get stuck debating between the concepts of for-profit [1] / non-profit [2] and public [3] / private [4] goods.

I think the tendency in these discussions is not to get specific enough about what we are talking about. For example, the traditional confusion between "free" and "open" source software... e.g. the "free as in beer" vs. "freedom of speech" [5].

In a sense, your proposal would solve that problem because it would create a clear organization supporting a clear license, with a clear compensation mechanism. However, how would this organization run? As a non-profit? As a for-profit? Maybe a social benefit corporation [6]? I think the choice is everything, if it can work at all. There's a reason, I think, that open source is especially associated with the rise of the Internet and networks, and decentralization, and sharing. Perhaps there is not a perfect legal model for such a thing.

I think in a naive sense, the concept of "open source" is sometimes thought to be analogous to able to be saying that a copy of the intellectual property can be used and/or modified without restriction, the copy can be owned by anyone, and can be shared with anyone, in any situation (commercial or not). Of course, depending on the specific license (GPL, AGPL, MIT, Apache, etc.) there are differing degrees of how open "open" really is.

There is a desire to make something.. truly open with literally no restriction. Ironically, many companies and organizations might not touch such a thing out of fear of the origin, they worry if they use it they might get sued. It's almost as if we cannot have a situation where there is just a piece of intellectual property, openly shared, without a license (for example, "common knowledge".. a gray area term as well, but, do you have a license for it?).

This again is an area that clarification may help... if you know that you have access to this huge portfolio of IP and source, as a member of such an organization as you propose, you don't have to worry about the license anymore as long as you pay your dues. But, what risk would such an organization carry? We need look no further than to the recent acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft to see an example, we'll have to see how that turns out.

I think I'm rambling now, but I hope some of these thoughts come together to help. I'd be willing to chat more about this.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For- profit_corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For-profit_corporation)

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER8> Apache committers are almost all employed to work on the projects, a patronage model. Nothing wrong with the patronage model as long as you realize you work at the behest of the King. Mozart and Bach, for instance, spent much of their life searching for jobs and/or patrons to support their musical efforts.

<comment><USER10> I have to admit to not knowing exactly how the projects and people for Apache Foundation are compensated, so thank you for sharing that.

I think you're absolutely right and perhaps I brought up the example of the Apache Foundation as one that seems to be working, but even it too is quite different from the model that OP was proposing.</comment></comment></comment>


Roto Jam – casting physical objects with particle jamming - <AUTHOR> http://monograph.io/cheewee2000/roto-jam

<comment><USER2> .... but why?</comment>


Google Profit Advances on Overseas Sales - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aJFqMuSwXDII&refer=news <comment><AUTHOR> Google is nice answer why the US recession does not matter in the long run: the best diversification is to stay global.</comment>