How can JavaScript be stopped from spreading like a cancer? - berserker-one https://medium.com/@richardeng/an-open-letter-to-ecma-cb60ee917da9 <comment><AUTHOR> Yet another"Edgy hyperbolic developer opinion"

"Cancer" really? I'm sorry, but cancer is really fucking scary.

The article wasn't funny, insightful, or high quality.

It was crude. Photos of a woman handling giant pig testicles?

This just isn't good enough for hacker news.

<comment><USER2> My mother died from breast cancer, so yes, cancer is fucking scary. So is JavaScript, which is metastasizing into nearly every other application domain in IT, including the mobile space, the server side, the Internet of Things, video gaming, etc. I've made it my personal mission to evangelize _against_ this language. (Previously, I was a Smalltalk evangelist.)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you read? - <AUTHOR>

I've recently gotten back into reading and I'm curious to hear what HN recommends.
I'm also working on a small side project that helps connect tech/startuppeople/nerds with books they'll love, and getting a gauge of what HN reads would be rather awesome.
What do you consider "essential reading" in the following categories:
Sci Fi Fantasy Classics Contemporary <comment><USER2> Sorry, I can't answer you per se. But I have to explain something.

I don't read fiction anymore except for one particular author. I used to (and _lots_ of it when I was young!) but for some reason that I still haven't figured out why I stopped getting anything from fiction. I just did and I really don't miss any of it.

I do read non-fiction.

I have a few topics ongoing at a time that I explore. The topics might last for months or years until I eventually branch into something else, often semi- related. The books describing these real world things or explaining new views or ideas or angles are, to me, so endlessly fascinating that I find myself totally immersed in these subjects that I haven't even considered borrowing or buying fiction anytime soon.

I just sometimes wonder if I'm the only one like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would specify that I only read science fiction, and occasionally fiction that most would classify as "classics". Beyond that, I don't read any fiction.

Exploring one particular topic with a series of books sounds rather interesting to be honest. I think on HN in particular it wouldn't surprise me to find that most people are reading more non-fiction than fiction.

Can you give an example of a topic and some related books that you enjoyed?

<comment><USER2> In the recent year or two I've been reading dozens of books about urban planning, suburbia, traditional neighbourhoods, modern neighbourhoods, traffic planning, pedestrian planning, cityscape and from there I'm slowly moving now especially to the roots of modernism and its various derivatives in architecture and city planning.

There are lots of books about the former, with a huge number of various angles. Dom Nozzi has a couple of books with critical analysis on traffic planning and suburbia; well, he's not against all that per se, he just carefully points out the planning patterns that do _not_ work for humane living. Then everybody probably knows Kunstler who has been a vocal author on the subject for years; I can recommend his TedTalk[1] to sum up many of his books. On the contrary, a delightful book about the appeal and history of the British suburbia by Paul Barker is the book 'The Freedoms of Suburbia', to be enjoyed slowly over the cup of hot tea.

[1] [http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...](http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In the classics category, I'm re-reading (for the tenth time or so) the memoires of Giacomo Casanova, "L'Histoire de ma vie" ("The History of my Life"), 12 volumes or so, in Dutch translation. Fascinating stuff and a interesting insight in the 18th century. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casanova>

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the link. I envy you your reading material.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm on a David Foster Wallace kick right now: Working through The Pale King, his collected essays and his short stories. Already read Infinite Jest. It's hard to say what qualifies as "essential reading" when it's impossible for a human being to read even one tenth of the great, all-time classic books. There just isn't enough time. My advice would be to read at least a few books that have reputations for being difficult. _War and Peace_ , _Gravity's Rainbow_ , _In Search of Lost Time_ , _Ulysses_ , etc. (The reason I'm only listing near- undisputed classics here is because these books _are_ difficult, and in some cases very, very long [looking at you, Proust], and the assurance that it is all worth it helps you keep going when your brain hurts.) These books survived despite their difficulty because reading them is a mind-expanding, sometimes life-changing experience. Reading shouldn't be essentially passive.

<comment><USER6> There's a forum[1] that got started last night for reading Infinite Jest at a leisurely pace (75 pgs/wk) over the summer and discussing it weekly starting Juneish by anons in /lit/ on 4chan, if you're at all interested.

[1]: <http://www.litinfinitejest.org/forums/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recently have been reading Hugo Award Novels and recommend Roger Zelazny's _This Immortal_ which is good enough to have shared the award with _Dune_ in 1965. _Lord of Light_ is also a great read and won a Hugo in 1968. Clifford Simak's _Way Station_ , Phillip K. Dick's _Man in the High Castle_ , and Walter Miller's _Canticle for Leibowitz_ are other great Hugo novels from the early 1960's that tend to be overshadowed by more famous authors from that period such as Heinlein (not that I wouldn't recommend _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ if you haven't read it).

</comment><comment><USER3> In the Scifi category, I'd recommend "The Languages of Pao" [1] by Jack Vance, which is inspired by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis [2]. I've re-read it five times now, which means this book deserves the space it occupies in my bookshelf. Books that are only worth to be read once, you might as well throw away.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Languages_of_Pao> [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir%E2%80%93Whorf_hypothesis>

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure about "essential reading", but I like most anything besides Science Fiction or Fantasy (probably the opposite of most folks here)

Some of my top choices would be:

Anything by Bulgakov (Heart of a Dog and Master and Margerita are both pretty widely available in English)

Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood

Burmese Days by George Orwell

Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham

Color of Summer by Reinaldo Arenas

Williwaw by Gore Vidal

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey good luck with your project.

Personally I'd love a good place to get recommendations on contemporary fiction. Good Reads just has a "ask for recommendations" section which I can do myself with friends, y'know?

That said, I recommend Arthur Nersesian. And I've been re-reading the old Fletch series lately. Man those were fun.

Also, I'm squarely in the aforementioned "nerd" demo.

</comment><comment><USER10> I read a ton since getting a Kindle (and dumping my TV). Almost purely sci-fi.

Finished the Culture series, Hyperios Cantos, Ilium/Olympos, Book of the New sun. Gonna re-read the original 6 dune books at some point. Anything by Paolo Bacigalupi (up and coming) or Larry Niven.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seconding the dumping of the TV. I've heard nothing but good things about the Culture series so that's something I'll have to get to soon. And I can never recommend the original 6 dune books enough, simply legendary.

<comment><USER10> I'm just curious, why you wouldn't upvote me? (I don't mind, I'm just genuinely curious). It is possible you did upvote me and someone else downvoted..so apologies ahead of time if my assumptions are wrong.

Culture was meh...By the 2nd or 3rd book you realize that the Culture is so powerful that nothing presents a risk. It's like Superman without Kryptonite (or his lack of pragmatism). Aside from the first book, Consider Phlebas, Excession was probably the best - largely because it focused on ships rather than people. Just my $0.02 of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> I upvoted you, not sure why someone would downvote though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can recommend <http://www.authorslawyer.com/savage/reviews/032s1.shtml>

</comment><comment><USER12> The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes</comment>


Part Two of a failed parking startup's postmortem: a new perspective - <AUTHOR> http://chrishoog.com/the-helloparking-postmortem-a-look-back-and-a-new-perspective/ <comment><USER2> One of the toughest things for younger people and engineers to understand is how crazy complicated most businesses are these days. Growing up and going to school, everything is explained in a few sentences. Insurance is a bunch of people pooling their money to deal with risk. Logistics is the process of getting something or someone from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

So a couple smart young men thinks, "Let's make AirBnB for <industry>. At a high enough level of abstraction, it's just matching buyers and sellers." Then one of two things happen.

(A) They talk to a bunch of people in <industry> and realize that people have spent decades learning these industries and it's going to be a long slog to even understand what's going on in <industry>.

(B) They don't talk to anybody and build a simple marketplace in a few months and get very little traction. Then they either do (A) or go out of business.

A lot of good startup advice these days can be summed up as "talk to customers." Hopefully all that talking means you're actually learning something.

<comment><USER3> I agree with talking to your customers, however one thing you wish to avoid is talking _too_ much with your competitors and other "industry people".

Some industries are broken because all of the players have the same mindset. If they can keep things this way they can keep new competitors from being a large threat and their old customers paying too much for substandard product. You still need to innovate even if your competitors say it can't be done.

Balancing knowledge acquisition with a desire to change things can be difficult thing.

<comment><USER2> Good point. If the first step is learning, the next step has to be asking, "Why is it this way?" and "What's inessential?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here in Chicago, SpotHero is taking off like crazy.

What do you think they have done differently to be so wildly successful in the same space?

<comment><USER5> SpotHero spent A LONG time very quietly struggling to line up initial supply, deals and product. Years. During that time they seem to have figured out that commercial spots, and making the commercial parking experience 10x better was the opportunity. Then they went after it.

<comment><AUTHOR> You beat me to it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Worst, we rarely got out of the building."

Reading that line made me buy the "Get Out of the Building" t-shirt: [http://lean-startup-machine.myshopify.com/products/get-out-o...](http://lean- startup-machine.myshopify.com/products/get-out-of-the-building-t-shirt)

</comment><comment><USER7> It's really interesting that the OP came back 2 years later to analyze why they failed. I think it takes a lot of time to discover the root causes of a failure (or a success) as opposed to what you think are causes, but are actually symptoms.</comment>


When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China - <AUTHOR> https://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/ <comment><USER2> I live in China, and resisted using wechat for a year or so, until it became clear that I was essentially removing myself from the majority of China's online world. I'm still highly annoyed when I get seven minutes' worth of 30-second voice clips from someone, or when people insist on using it as a replacement for email (essentially, using it as a replacement for all internet-based communication, period), but it's impossible to ignore.

And I'll admit, finding the wallet thing was a bit of an "a ha" moment for me.

And lastly, it became obvious that the _only_ way to promote my company and its business to a Chinese audience was to run an official wechat account for it.

So there we are. I just got a new phone, and wechat was the first thing I installed.

<comment><USER2> Seriously, the wallet thing is both amazing and terrifying. Apparently the only thing standing between me and sending all my worldly wealth to a wechat contact is a six-digit PIN. Two-factor whut? Given what I know of the Wild- West Chinese internet, this is deeply worrying.

<comment><USER3> > Seriously, the wallet thing is both amazing and terrifying. Apparently the > only thing standing between me and sending all my worldly wealth to a wechat > contact is a six-digit PIN.

Indeed. My internet banking account (that my employer gives me) has the same PIN as internet password. Change the PIN at the ATM, and the internet banking password also changes. Change the internet PIN, and the ATM pin changes. Damn, they're the same.

BUT...

Do as locals do and maintains multiple bank accounts with different banks, and multiple credit cards with different banks.

This is not unique to China, but is also the case here. And it doesn't come from internet security, just from 'this is how it has always been done' via various banking promotions and access to local branch (China's banking network is, by policy, branch and region based). But it works here. I know no one that even keeps all their money in the same account, let along allows access to the same account via WeChat.

The big issue: WeChat is Tencent's bid to become a bank with full suite financial services. It will work against monoliths like Visa and MasterCard, even UnionPay. Because they don't bother with charging a transaction fee. What merchant doesn't like that?

<comment><USER4> Without a transaction fee, where do they make money?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It sounds like a world where AOL won and we all accessed the internet through keywords and paid everything through AOL, or very similar to France's old Minitel, except for mobile.

Having everything in one app is interesting if only because it offers some powerful integration opportunities, but otherwise this sounds like a proto- Internet for a developing economy.

$5 says they evolve past this in the next 3-5 years and their app ecosystem looks a lot more like ours.

<comment><USER6> Or the mobile messaging ecosystem in US will look a lot more like wechat in 3-5 years. China can be ahead in some areas.

<comment><USER7> If china is ahead in this, then humanity might as well pack it in. China's sandbox model works well when you've got a few hundred million uneducated peasants, but an educated populous (Which china is having more success stopping than I care to admit) wants diversity; It wants options, differing opinions, choices that cater to them, not to what people want to offer them.

<comment><USER8> China has an educated urban population about equivalent in size to the entire population of the US, and they're all using WeChat. My wife is a Nurse, has a 2:1 degree and although born in China has lived and worked in the UK since 2000 and she uses WeChat all the time, as do our kids. Educated non-techies don't want diversity, they want functionality and community.

<comment><USER9> Yup. My English sister has been using it because she gets better quality voice than Skype. Maybe Wechat is winning because it's the better product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think a great deal is being attributed to "leapfrogging" which should instead be attributed to idiosyncrasies in the Chinese market. Like that it's big, and that a great deal of software is bundled.

For starters, surely there are other places around the world with nation- dominating highly-integrated platform apps. I mean, they name LINE and KakaoTalk. Is their point that China is 3x bigger than Japan and 10x bigger than Korea? Those factors are certainly accurate with respect to their national PPP (3.7x and 9.9x), and explains the data they observe really well. But Japan didn't have a leapfrogging experience, as they claim. Korea is a bit more complicated, but nonetheless, not cut-and-dried.

Why WeChat in particular? The other apps compared—LINE and KakaoTalk—arguably became dominant in their countries the same way WeChat did: bundling. It just comes with your phone. By that logic, do we label the Apple App Store, bundled with every iPhone, a "service" that takes a 30% cut of many of the transactions that occur there? Again, the App Store absolutely fulfills all the roles described in the article, notwithstanding their particular points about UI.

A16Z just isn't getting rich off Apple, so they're not going around hyping up an arguably the platform to end all platforms. Apple made $4.8 billion in iTunes and software on 1 billion iOS devices total by Q1 2015. It's not WeChat's estimated "$7 ARPU", but honestly, I bet Apple's is actually higher.

<comment><USER11> "became dominant in their countries the same way WeChat did: bundling"

This is false. WeChat became big because it is a good app AND because it provided a seamless on-ramp for users of QQ (the previous dominant instant messenger, also owned by Tencent).

<comment><USER12> Giving away $81 million in cash probably didn't hurt either.

<comment><USER11> This was in February 2015. WeChat hit ~400MM MAU about a year before that. You've got the causality the wrong way around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The beauty of WeChat is not it has tons of features, it's the tons of features are well hidden. As another user said, it's very natural to have used WeChat for quite some time and doesn't know all these existed. People always say it's not just a chat app, but if you use it just for chat then it's a pretty good one with good voice and video chat quality, supports group chat well and has a clean UI. All the other features are opt-in, hidden in several level of menus. There are no flashy confusing buttons, no daily reminder asking you to try some new feature, no distraction. For me and my friends who has long abandoned the bloated and flashy QQ for simple gtalk (before google got banned), WeChat is a breath of fresh air.

</comment><comment><USER14> I am in China right this instant and (like everyone) I have wechat on my phone. Perhaps the services mentioned don't have much use/appeal to expats, but I have never heard of any of the stuff mentioned in this article. Wechat to me is just a texting app because data is cheaper than texts (thanks China Mobile).

At first I couldn't even find any of the features mentioned. some of the stuff (taxi's, planes) are hidden in some submenu called "bank cards" which I originally thought was for unlocking emoji and stuff. Perhaps I need to run an update, but I can't even find a "sub app store" of 3rd party verified accounts.

<comment><USER15> > Wechat to me is just a texting app because data is cheaper than texts > (thanks China Mobile).

Well, I used China Unicom, but I noticed something similar. I got a SIM card about two years ago with "no internet plan". It turned out to have data connectivity anyway, so I just used it for that. Every month I'd get messages stating "you have used X amount of data, of which X is in excess of your monthly limit". And yet... I was spending much less money on phone service than even the cheapest official data plan, so I left it that way. Any idea how this sort of situation came about?

<comment><USER14> I have no idea. TBH I haven't paid my phone bill in a while. I don't know how I even have phone service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The post fails to mention that WeChat is protected from competition against other major global apps. If Google, Facebook, et al, were allowed to operate freely in China, WeChat would get picked apart.

Yes, there are a lot of cool things about WeChat and certain features that it arguably does better than its foreign counterparts, but it is still a mess. It is slow, cluttered, bloated, and full of crimes against design. The lack of competitive pressure really shows.

I imagine that if and when some real competition shows up, WeChat will evolve into a full-blown mobile OS.

<comment><USER17> Yes, quality alternatives and things exported from other cultures are very important here. Like I indicated in my comment MSN was the choice for groups more open to western cultures. Communication, sociality and tools used could be very culture sensitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like how "official account" are lightweight apps. They are like the web with push notifications, online identity, and payment integrated into the web browser. The usual web can fulfil the features of official accounts in theory, but it's awkward. 1\. push notification -> email 2\. online identity -> login to fb, twitter, github, or website specific login 3\. payment -> authorize paypal, bitcoin, amazon, bank

Whenever u want to do something on the web (e.g. buy a ticket), u have to figure out how to login (worse if you have to create a new account), how to make payment, and check your emails for confirmations and updates. That's enough friction to make a user hunt for alternatives. On top of that, the website make not work well on your mobile phone.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've traveled to China about 2-3 times each year for the last few years. I strongly recommend that people who travel to China install WeChat. Not only is it guaranteed to work in China, but it gives you instant street cred when you're there.

It's very, very common for people to say to me, "Wow, you have WeChat? You are so Chinese!" (I don't look Chinese at all, and my Mandarin is still at an elementary level, so this is clearly a cultural compliment!) It's the easiest, fastest, and cheapest thing you can do to make a connection with any hosts, friends, or business colleagues you meet there.

WeChat does indeed have tons of features. I've used it for personal and group communication, but also for video chats (when Skype went crazy on me), and it was solid. My Chinese teacher and I use it to exchange messages and photos, either when I'm visiting China or when we're outside of class time. I'm on a few groups, and it's a surprisingly clean and easy-to-use program for group chat.

I also use WhatsApp, and while that has a much nicer interface, it's not obvious to me that it's superior to WeChat.

</comment><comment><USER17> Isn't it just users with QQ numbers pick a slim version (which is more adapted to mobile use cases) of QQ on mobile devices? QQ number is something almost everyone on internet owns back in early 2000s in China. The number became the utility. As long as one has internet connection, one does not need a phone number to get connected.

I don't like WeChat. But that's what you have to use since that's where everyone you know are. MSN once had the chance to complete with QQ, but it gave up. And everybody had no better choice but picked up their old QQ number.

From another perspective, it's also accompanied with the rise of local business, which shifted the attitude towards local society recognition.

Money makes then ugly now pretty.

</comment><comment><USER20> It seems like the opportunity here for Firefox OS and Android in the future is to have an API layer that's even simpler and allow for apps that are lighter weight. As I read the article I thought, hey wouldn't it be nice if my apartment building let me reserve the tennis court or report issues with an app? But then I thought...it would take them 3 months to put together something that just barely works and then another 9 months to make something that works well and it'll probably still have a shitty user interface.

</comment><comment><USER21> WeChat is so much better than other messaging platforms that I'm willing to get on it in spite of privacy concerns. I have never noticed an ad and I'm in complete control over what messages I receive. It just feels so much better than Facebook or Twitter where it's obvious that my data is the product. I have no idea what kind of things WeChat does with its massive amounts of data, but at least they have legitimate revenue streams that don't involve shoving unwanted content in front of me.

</comment><comment><USER22> I guess by using this app, you basically give up all your info to chinese authorities. I would never used that

<comment><USER23> Just downloaded this app and activated it. Now I can give all my info to chinese government instead of NSA.

<comment><USER24> Pretty sure you're still giving it to the NSA too.

<comment><USER23> I am a equal opportunity app user. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I use Wechat for years. I was totally unaware of its power. Speechless.

</comment><comment><USER26> At least Wechat had pushed two things powerfully, one is QR Code, the other one is HTML5.

<comment><USER27> Who in their right mind uses QR codes!?! As a human you have no idea where that thing is pointing, so why on earth would you trust it? At least with a URL I have half a chance of knowing if I'm about to be hit by a phishing attack.

<comment><USER25> A) Trust is not an issue in these regards in China. B) when your chat app generates a QR code that the chat app of the friend or the payment tool from a shop uses it's quite clear what the QR code means. It's not that there are random QR Codes everywhere on the street and you have to trust them. If you want to add me, I don't tell you my nick name but just show you my QR code on my phone and you add through your app, not the web browser.

<comment><USER27> Oh no. Here's how an attack might go. I'm a shop assistant and show you a QR code to scan to make a purchase. Unknown to you, I'm not actually showing you the real app, but a fake app with fake QR code that will redirect you to a malicious website, which in it's turn will load the proper URL _after_ having executed an unpatched zero-day on your device. You are sad because your device has just been pwned.

You are at the mercy of the source of the QR code, with no real way of being able to validate it before scanning.

<comment><USER28> What you say is true, and makes no difference. QR codes are very popular and in very common use in China.

<comment><USER26> Yup, now when I wanna pay for some drink, I only need to take out my mobile, then open wechat, then scan the QR code showed on the vending machine screen.

Like this: [http://i.imgur.com/mlIr3QP.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/mlIr3QP.jpg)

<comment><USER23> Vending machines in the US only take coins, like a post-apocalyptic stone age world. So ahead of time...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wechat is shit. why Line has been blocked in China?

<comment><USER30> The usual bogeyman, "terrorism":

[https://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/07/us-southkorea- chi...](https://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/07/us-southkorea-china-apps- idUSKBN0G709E20140807)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Mobile IM is the new browser.

</comment><comment><USER3> The elephant in the room is WeChat and mobile. Has been for 3 years.</comment>


My WakeMate: 1 year, 4 months, 12 days in the making. - <AUTHOR> http://plc.vc/post/4417166850/wakemate-review

<comment><USER2> I was going to order one of these last year but being in the UK I wouldn't have got it, with the announcement a few days ago I backordered one and should have it within a month I think. I look forward to this guys review of the actual products usefulness, he has a nice writing style.

Also with regards to the icon, reminds me of something I made a while ago: <http://i.imgur.com/8uOVh.png> for a subreddit style.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know about the rest of you but I didn't expect the packaging to be any better. Let's be honest, while the packaging will be nice to see when the product arrives, after that one initial time it probably doesn't serve much of a purpose. Plus this is a hardware start-up. I'm working at one and our packaging is actually the same, except instead of the WakeMate we obviously have our product. As far as I'm concerned I'd rather have a startup spend all of it's time and resources into the product they are building, because that's what will matter in the end anyway, since the first few thousand users will be early adopters and plain geeks who won't be interested with the box anyway. I mean it's not like the Apple I was a sexy beast or anything. When you get to version 2.0 or get a bigger cash stash, then you switch to fancy packaging.

I also hate it when people say they rarely dreams, but that's just a pet peeve of mine. You always do, you just don't remember it. As a matter of fact you have multiple dreams a night. It's in fact quite great if you are able to perform lucid dreaming, as that gives you a bit more time to think about whatever issues you are dealing with.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm in the UK and still waiting for mine to be available, they sent an email a month or two back saying I could order but retracted it 10 minutes later :(

<comment><USER2> [http://blog.wakemate.com/2011/04/04/wakemate-is-shipping- int...](http://blog.wakemate.com/2011/04/04/wakemate-is-shipping- internationally/) :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Description from OP

"Inspecting the WakeMate bracelet, it's nice. I have exceedingly manly wrists thanks primarily to YouPorn and long nights of StarCraft 2, and the fit of the bracelet is snug."

</comment><comment><USER6> You do not have exceedingly manly wrists, though I agree with the rest of the post :)</comment>


Overturn laws that limit auto manufacturers from selling their vehicles directly - <AUTHOR> https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/overturn-franchise-laws-limit-auto-manufacturers-selling-their-vehicles-directly-consumers/rlShbLzr

<comment><USER2> Like many petitions on We The People, the executive hasn't the power to do what this proposes. The president simply doesn't have the power to rewrite state laws. The judiciary could questionably overturn state laws as overreaching into interstate commerce, but even that requires a case. I'm sure if Tesla believed that it was worth it, they would be bring such litigation. So, I'm curious what impact a petition like this has on the various actors who have the power to do something: state and federal legislators. Given that there is no way for a legislator to tell how many people in their district support a petition, I would guess very little.

<comment><USER3> The executive does not have that power, but if Congress should pass a law regulating it, I'm pretty sure that Congress can override state commerce laws. Doubly so if the commercial transaction counts as interstate (as would happen if you bought the car on the manufacturer's website).

However that said, even if this passed, every manufacturer is so embedded in its web of dealers that any move to reconsider that relationship would cause a lot of conflict. In fact fear of that exact conflict is how we got the state laws in the first place.

<comment><USER4> Actually Congress cannot pass a law regulating it per the 10th amendment. They can pass laws governing other things that effectively regulate this--often by withholding federal funds from states that do not comply--but have no power over this specific issue.

If Musk wants the US Congress to interfere, maybe he should sell liquor in the most lavish and expensive and functional "bottle case" ever conceived. But selling liquor in a car "case" might not be the best PR move. hehe.

<comment><USER5> That may be a plausible reading of the commerce clause in conjunction with the 10th amendment, but it is not the one currently in force.

In cases such as _Wikard v Filburn_ and _Raich v Gonzalez_ , the Supreme Court has held that Comgresses power to regulate extends to any activity which, in the aggregate, substantially effects interstate commerce. Such a test is trivially met by state laws forbidding the sale of automobiles directly from manufacturers to the public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interestingly there was a great podcast on archaic dealership laws on NPR's Planet Money in February. Worth a listen for some context.

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/12/171814201/episode-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/12/171814201/episode-435-why- buying-a-car-is-so-awful)

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it me or are these petitions almost worse than doing nothing? These petitions show over & over again that they don't actually do anything to change policies.

It's almost like a release valve so people feel like they're being democratic without even really doing anything at all.

<comment><USER8> In what way is any of that worse than doing nothing at all?

<comment><USER9> It's easier to "sign" an online petition than to send a letter to one of your representatives, if people click once and then feel like they have had their say then much of the people's voice will be lost.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it's obvious that someone who clicks on a petition either would have otherwise sent a letter to a representative or would be discouraged from doing so in the future after the fact. Maybe engaging in small scale participatory democracy actually encourages people to engage in larger scales, for all you know.

Frankly, I hear so much of this "oh that'll never do anything and it just makes people disillusioned" nonsense about ALL levels of engagement ("protesters are hurting their own cause!" "it's just a staffer who reads your letter!" "no one cares what you say!") that I'm extremely skeptical of all such claims.

Maybe rather than tell people who engage that they're failing it would be more useful to encourage them to succeed more.

<comment><USER7> > Frankly, I hear so much of this "oh that'll never do anything and it just > makes people disillusioned" nonsense about ALL levels of engagement > ("protesters are hurting their own cause!" "it's just a staffer who reads > your letter!" "no one cares what you say!") that I'm extremely skeptical of > all such claims.

But there are examples of those types of protests working. Have the petitions ever done anything (other than the death star one which gave the gov't some PR points)?

The activism that happened last year with SOPA actually took effort & targeted the people who were able to act on it. Right now, the petition site seems to be handled exclusively by the White House's PR team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ignoring the debated effects of petitions, laws that limit auto manufacturer's sales are there for varied reasons state to state.

I love Tesla, but this isn't going to do it.

Finally, really nit-picky but you're petitioning the White House here, please proofread.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why were the laws enacted in the first place?

<comment><USER12> You'd get 50 different answers because those are state laws.</comment></comment>


Build and maintain your website. No SQL. CouchDB, Werkzeug, Couchdbkit - <AUTHOR> http://couch.it/ <comment><USER2> I'm confused how a text box with no indication of what you should type in it qualifies as a simple and intuitive interface. It gets (somewhat) better after that, but the landing page is extremely confusing and off-putting.

I do like the concept though.

<comment><USER3> I agree it may be too minimal. For next release I would like to keep the site minimalist but more open. I'm not sure how to to it right now though ....

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can you put some templates to get started...Starting with a empty page is kind of pain..

<comment><USER3> yes that is a definitely good idea. I was busy with a lot of stuff since last update but new release is planned later this month. Among other feature you will have templates. But in a wiki way so you could edit them, reuse them, inherit & co (like mostly I think on mediawiki). Also semantic and linnks between docs will be improved. It's opensourced (<http://bitbucket.org/benoitc/couchit/>) so anyone can participate :)</comment></comment>


Review my startup - Lean Domain Search: The fastest way to find a domain name - <AUTHOR> http://www.leandomainsearch.com <comment><USER3> This is a great start. I built Instant Domain Search (IDS) almost 7 years ago, and have learnt a lot from the experience. Some quick thoughts:

1\. There are no margins in the domain industry. Start thinking about building a hosting company. Your site is cool, but weebly.com and heroku.com are real businesses. I work full-time for Facebook, not IDS. (BTW, Facebook is hiring people like you, message me at <http://www.facebook.com/beau> if you're interested.)

2\. It needs to be faster. For example, to squeeze another few hundred milliseconds out of our search, we built a distributed search infrastructure described here: [http://instantdomainsearch.com/articles/faster_domain_name_s...](http://instantdomainsearch.com/articles/faster_domain_name_search/)

3\. You should search names listed in the aftermarket and include them in your results. I've worked with <http://www.buydomains.com/> for several years, and am happy with them. I can make an intro if you'd like.

4\. Consider extracting words and doing a basic thesaurus search. We're doing something like that at <http://instantdomainsearch.com/suggestions/>

Hope this helps!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Beau, thanks for the feedback. I've always admired your work with Instant Domain Search and appreciate you taking the time to give me feedback on this.

When you say "there are no margins in the domain industry", I assume you're talking about registrars and how domain names don't make them money, hosting and other services do, yes? LDS is not a registrar; revenue is purely through the affiliate links. Assuming people use them, the margin on this should be decent. It's no Heroku or Weebly, but that's not necessarily the goal either.

There's definitely room for speed improvements; I'll be work on that over the next few weeks.

I'm not sure I want to partner with any of the aftermarkets just yet, but that's not a bad idea long term. And I definitely want to add thesaurus results.

Again, appreciate the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I see stuff like this, I always think "feature" not a company. There are two directions you can take this to avoid the "but its just a feature" issue -

a) build it so that you can license the technology to people that have made a company out of selling domains (domainsbot.com is a great model to take a look at)

b) become a reseller or registrar so that you can fully deliver the service and collect the recurring revenue.

There's still lots of room for innovation in this space and I think you are leaving a lot on the table if you don't flesh out the business model a bit more.

(obDisclaimer: I work for a registrar.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair points --

There should be a lot of value in being the first site people visit when searching for a domain name though. We'll see.

<comment><USER4> Possibly, but then it feels like you are betting your brand awareness against Godaddy's. That's a tough battle to fight. And there's nothing stopping them from implementing something similar.

<comment><USER5> I will say from first-hand experience that, technically, you are correct. However, much cash is generated through the friction of their purchasing path.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, totally true. That still doesn't make it easy for an unknown to come in an topple and established brand. That said, Google did it.. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys,

About three years ago I built and launched Domain Pigeon, a web app that listed available web 2.0-style domain names each day [1]. The site did fairly well, but it was my first foray into web apps and I lacked the experience to grow it into something bigger. Eventually I moved on to other projects and closed Domain Pigeon down, which has been one of my biggest regrets.

My original vision for Domain Pigeon is what Lean Domain Search now is: you type in a search phrase and the app would pair it with hundreds (in this case 1,000) keywords to generate domain names and show you which were available. I lacked the technical skills back then to do bulk domain search quickly, which is why I settled on simply generating web 2.0-style domain names. Fast forward a few years and I've picked up those skills so I decided to take some time off my other apps and finally build this tool.

Hope you guys like it. Let me know how I can make it better.

[1] [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=domain+pige...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=domain+pigeon)

<comment><USER6> How are you bulk checking now? I've been in the industry a long time and it's always been a pain in the ass to do anything in bulk. I've had lists so big registrars didn't want to run them for me :( Using APIs really isn't an option when you have a million names and 1 per second limit. Automating a bulk checker, most of them disable/play with it after a certain number of times (so even at let's say 500, i might be able to get 20 tries in there before they mess with it).

The best solution I've found is checking against the zone file, but I am curious what you're doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Magic (and a lot of experimentation).

<comment><USER7> Good answer, don't give away your secret sauce. Having said that, your magic isn't working too well. I searched for <http://www.leandomainsearch.com/search?q=apps> and literally EVERY SINGLE GREEN hit isn't really available after double-checking it. Seems like you'd need a 2nd secret sauce to further distill whatever the 1st run returned.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey -- there was a production bug that caused every result to come back as registered when you clicked "Double check availability". I fixed this a few minutes ago. Sorry about that.

<comment><USER7> Great! Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> First impressions: <http://i.imgur.com/gOeyj.png>

Superior in practice: <http://www.bustaname.com/word_maker>

Though I prefer where you've started.

Also, your favicon is... suggestive of something entirely different. Perhaps a less literal image would be better?

<comment><AUTHOR> I like your first impressions -- I laughed.

Anyone else seeing very faded sidebars like that? I don't know what would cause that; if you have the technical skills do inspect it on your end to find out, please let me know.

Can you elaborate on what specifically you like better about bustaname?

<comment><USER5> Sorry to worry you, I darkened the sidebars so as to suggest that they are a bit "loud" compared to the primary content. They only contain tertiary tasks, though I suppose that's arguable for the legend.

I like BustAName's AJAX-powered containment of the features, though a redesign is in order.

Aside from design considerations, you may want to look at how you can point users in the right direction before they arrive at the results page and then have to starting filtering or start over to achieve more desirable results.

For example, you could offer corrections to potential typos. If a typo is not detected (or disregarded), provide some likely criteria for the eventual results, starting with common scope limiters for domain names.

I acknowledge that your product name is "lean" but there are possibilities for domains that I can safely opine that a significant majority of users will be uninterested in, and I'm not sure from the results page effectively communicates whether those have been sifted out or not.

Seems there is still demand, and room, for simplified domain search. Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here are a few people doing similar things.

There are also a few patents on this concept if I can find the link to the patent I will post.

<http://www.dotomator.com/web20.html>

<http://blungr.com/>

<http://www.domainnamesoup.com/>

One comment I have on your site is that you give to many choices (it's not lean) on one page and there is no organization to the choices. Also similar to what others do there should be a way to enter a secondary characteristic.

Oh, here's a bonus benefit to your site that I just noticed and a new place to market using the site.

The ratio of red-registered to green-available is helpful in determining how valuable or in vogue a domain name is that contains a particular word. I would compute a ratio of green to red.

(see as a test "search" or "social" vs. some other less popular word like "opthamology")

Also you don't appear to be checking the actual word that is entered to see if that is available. And you aren't indicating which TLD's so I'm assuming all your suggestions are in .com

Example: "Found 1000 available domains containing "ycombinator""

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm working on something VERY similar to this actually, so I'll refrain from any critiques in lieu of just saying "I'd do some things differently."

Regardless, it's quite nice, and I'm already very jealous of how quickly you're doing the bulk lookups. It is much faster than my implementation.

There's a surprising amount of overlap, which tells me we're either both very right in a lot of aspects, or both very wrong. I'll take the optimistic route and figure we're both doing things right.

Best of luck. It's certainly a needed tool (IMHO).

</comment><comment><USER10> Great job and super fast results.

It's great to have tons of inputs and tons of results, but we need a tool to get all these great results into a funnel that at the end you can easily spot a great name.

Suggestions:

1) Modifiers to minimize results like max chars in the domain name.

2) Take the word or phrase the person typed in and throw it into reverse dictionary [1] and then take those results and re-run them through your site (ditto for thesaurus.com).

3) Option to remove a result when one word ends and another starts with the same letter and try reversing to see if available (ie ramppart.com).

4) Option to include tons of different mythology dictionaries [2] and include names where definitions include the user's inputed word/phrase.

[1] <http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml>

[2] <http://www.ventrue.net/GSA/myth.htm>

<comment><AUTHOR> Great suggestions -- thank you.

I just added an option to sort by length, which should take care of #1. #3 is also a great idea -- I'll see what I can do.

Can you walk me through how #2 would work in practice?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wouldn't call your service a startup.

So, this is like my unfinished domsrch.com, my experience is that people don't really need this service this much and there are some others that already fill the space.

I definitely wish you to succeed where I failed :). I just wouldn't leave my day job which is why I am saying it isn't a startup.

</comment><comment><USER12> One modest suggestion—I would remove GoDaddy from the default list of registrars that appear when a user selects a name they are interested in.

<comment><AUTHOR> I knew this would come up :)

I am relying on affiliate revenue for income and like it or not, GoDaddy is the largest registrar in the world. That doesn't mean its inclusion is automatic, but IMO GoDaddy is not evil enough to warrant removing it. Thoughts?

<comment><USER13> _IMO GoDaddy is not evil enough to warrant removing it._

IMO, they are evil enough to warrant removal.

<comment><USER14> True, but he's controls whether its removed or not so it's best to give a more persuasive reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really like it, but it's giving me plenty of results for domains that are already taken: <http://www.leandomainsearch.com/search?q=commerce>

<comment><AUTHOR> Some searches only result in a few available domain names. There's not much I can do about that other than generate and check more domain names (which I will in the future). It's the nature of whatever you're searching for; commerce (and most other money-related searches) will be saturated.

<comment><USER16> I don't think that's what the parent is saying. It would seem that domains that you say are available for the .com gTLD actually are not.

Maybe you count as "available", domains for which the .com is taken but other gTLDs are not?

Personally when I search for a domain I'm only interested in .com, but maybe you could let users choose what TLDs they care about?

<comment><AUTHOR> Gotcha -- I misunderstood.

For complicated reasons, sometimes a registered domain will show up as available. This should only happen in less than 1% of cases and I'm working on reducing it to zero.

<comment><USER17> Seems to be happening much more than 1% to me, every link I have clicked so far (6 or 7) has resulted in an already registered domain.

<comment><USER18> Same here, when I searched for "rpg".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I always feel more efficient just doing the search myself with <http://instantdomainsearch.com>

<comment><USER20> If you're going to spam, at least be more subtle about it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it's spam. Instant Domain Search is a great site, but you still need to be creative in order to know what to search for. Lean Domain Search does it for you.

<comment><USER21> It's spam. The search goes straight to godaddy to check using an affiliate link.

<comment><USER22> It's not spam:

a) IDS does searches as you type and displays the availability immediately. Yes, it displays affilate links, but you can find an available domain and register somewhere else if you like.

b) pilom isn't affiliated with the site

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's certainly useful, though it looks like it's just attaching choice-words to the beginning and end of the word I entered.

It's not clear from looking at the results what TLDs\ each result is, though it appears to only return .com. What about all the other cool TLDs like net/om/us/etc.

Also have you seen this: <http://domai.nr/>

Was fast, which is appreciated!

</comment><comment><USER24> Very cool. How are you getting the results? I've seen this happen with domainr too but there seems to be some errors.

For example, "fotoflow" is listed as an available domain name but it is actually taken.

In any case, this is a very useful tool - thanks for posting.

</comment><comment><USER25> Looks like a useful tool. I get an "Oops, something went wrong ..." when I enter "shop". Besides that I really like the concept of <http://stylate.com/> to find domains for startups.

</comment><comment><USER26> Nice tool, I was looking for something like this a few weeks ago and most didn't "just work".

A few things I noticed while using other services -- none had all of these in one place:

\- It would be handy to be able to sort by number of characters, etc.

\- some places allow adding of common prefixes/suffixes

\- Can you do a search of more than 1000 keywords via button to do the next 1000?

\- In the case of searching a common word, I only got ~30 available domains out of 1000, it would be great if you automatically threw another 1000 behind it.

\- Another registrar a lot of people use is moniker. Whatever I register through your site I'll use the referral link because you're saving me time

Nice app, I've bookmarked it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great ideas. In the last few hours I:

\- Added sorting options (alphabetical, length) \- Added filtering options (starts with, ends with) \- Added a Moniker registration link

Will eventually add more search results; want to make sure this holds up first.

<comment><USER26> Wow, those were quick changes, I'm already using it again.

Another thing that crossed my mind you might want to think about. When I go to alot of sites, I wonder if they're one of the offenders that steal people's searches (by tracking which generated domain they click on how many times), and then go register the domain behind the persons back after a few hours if they don't do it right away... only to make it available for sale at a profit.

Maybe a clear definition of "How we make money" is a good idea. Maybe it's just me, but I think that might not be the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I just did a search for $string and it returned 1000 available domain names that were all $something+$string or $string+$something. However, ($string).com was not returned as an option even though it is available!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update from the author here:

There was a bug that caused the "Double-check availability" results to show that every domain name was registered. I just pushed an update that corrected this so it now returns the correct results.

</comment><comment><USER13> At first glance, looks pretty cool. However, I find the green of the available results to be quite painful to look at. Something like #B8FC9F looks a lot better, to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting color. Anyone else have any recommendations on what to change the green domains to?

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure what color scheme you'd like to go with, but as a colorblind user, the green and yellow colors that you're currently using are very similar to me.

Perhaps you could do a colorblind mode that uses red, blue, and yellow (out of simplicity's sake) to indicate availability? It'd make your service way more useful for me :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Hey there....

I think I may have found a bug - either that, or I don't understand what this site is meant to do. I searched 'media' and one of the available domains it found was 'medialounge.com'. Thinking, 'holy crap, that sounds like the kind of domain that I would like', I took a trip over to my registrar. Turns out that that domain is not actually available. Let me know if you need some system info and I can email it to you....

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm seeing something odd with the way you're building the results HTML - <USER2> Safari 5.1.2 text search doesn't pick up the majority of instances of a string.

For example, the term you're searching against is only showing up 4 times, when it appears over 1000. It works fine in Chrome 16.

It's useful for times when you see a name you like but want to find the reverse combination.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nice tool, although the results seem to be a bit incorrect in some situations. I've searched for "hotel" and got a nice list of "available" domains, but some of them were already registered (eg. hotelbit.com, hotelartist.com, buzzhotel.com)

Good thing is I also got some very interesting domain names which were indeed available, so kudos for the nice work.

</comment><comment><USER32> Hey hey, wait a minute.

I searched out Code (<http://www.leandomainsearch.com/search?q=Code>) and tried to register codejet.com ,which was shown available by you , but, it was already registered. Similarly, I tried to get Codehit and again, it failed. Could you please explain?

<comment><USER33> This is a case of his fast, DNS-based checking method not providing accurate results. You can see the difference by running nslookup and whois on the domain. Nslookup just uses DNS, whereas whois goes to the registrar/internic.

$ nslookup codejet.com

Server: 22.214.171.124 Address: 126.96.36.199#53

 __server can't find codejet.com: NXDOMAIN

$ whois codejet.com

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered with many different competing registrars. Go to <http://www.internic.net> for detailed information.

       Domain Name: CODEJET.COM
       Registrar: GODADDY.COM, LLC
       Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
       Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com
       Name Server: No nameserver
       Status: clientDeleteProhibited
       Status: clientRenewProhibited
       Status: clientTransferProhibited
       Status: clientUpdateProhibited
       Updated Date: 20-may-2011
       Creation Date: 01-jun-2000
       Expiration Date: 01-jun-2012

>>> Last update of whois database: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:34:42 UTC <<<

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I like this. It's really cool. One idea that could be really beneficial is if you crawl auction sites/domain selling sites, and create a subcategory for domains that are for trying to be sold. You've got the registared domains already, but it would be so helpful to see which of those are "available to be had" so to speak.

</comment><comment><USER35> Overall, nice execution. I tested a couple nouns and I could definitely see myself using this in the feature.

I do think the mass of green at the top of the results is a little... too stunning. Do you think the same thing could be achieved with colored text and/or colored borders for each div and/or something else along those lines?

<comment><USER36> I agree the black on bright green text is intense and not very readable. I like the idea but I think you need to tweak the design a little. The layout is pretty good just need to play around with the colors a little bit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks -- I've heard this from a few other folks too.

Any recommendations on the shade of green/red to make it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Does this work? My search for my new recipe site noshpoop.com turned up 1000 variations but noshpoop.com was not one of them. It is clearly available though - though I am sure hacker grabbed it by now ;) Seriously though, the results didn't show my request as the 1st option.

</comment><comment> angry-hacker I searched for "player" (<http://www.leandomainsearch.com/search?q=player>) and every free (green) domain I click and do double check it says "Doh! Looks like makeplayer.com is actually NOT available"

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, there was a bug that caused every result to come back as "registered" when you clicked "Double check results". I fixed this so it shouldn't be quite so dismal now. Thanks for reporting this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Hey guys,

I'm not sure what your backend looks like but I wrote this python script that uses a thesaurus lookup to find similar words for further name inspiration. It also has support for dropping vowels if the user wants.

Pass me your email address if you'd like a copy, I'm not doing anything with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to check it out. email@example.com

FWIW, I plan on adding an option to automatically search for synonyms down the road.

<comment><USER38> I just pushed it to my github in case anyone else wants a copy. It uses commandline whois so it's not really useful for a website implementation.

<https://github.com/gravitronic/DFind>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is awesome, Giving an option to add custom strings to all searches would be cool.

Eg: current searches doesn't append the word "get" before domain string. But, I sometimes do that, while I search for a domain.

So it would be nice to have an option where users can add optional strings they want.

</comment><comment><USER40> With regard to being a viable business not sure, but on a personal note, I really like it. Very impressed by the speed. I don't mind that it's not 100% correct. It's a great tool to get your creative juices flowing when looking for an available domain.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, appreciate it. And I'm working on the accuracy issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I like the site :) but I wouldn't buy the domain from you via the affiliate link, I'd use my usual domain registrar once I'd used your service to check it was free.

I agree with the others saying this is a feature rather than a company. It's an awesome feature though :)

</comment><comment><USER42> I get an error when I try 'shop': <http://www.leandomainsearch.com/search?q=shop>

Otherwise, very nicely done. I tried several searches and had a few reasonable-ish domains come back.

</comment><comment><USER43> Here are two very useful things that you could add:

1\. For registered domains check to see if there's actually a live site. This would narrow the list of domains that could be purchased.

2\. Also for registered domains check to see if the domain is for sale or auction.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks --

Even if there's not a live site, that doesn't mean you can simply purchase the domain name.

Also, my gut says that most people don't want to pay a lot for their domain names and would not use the sale/auction availability indicator.

That being said, if more people are interested in it I can look into it. Would you mind adding it to the suggestions page?

<http://leandomainsearch.uservoice.com/forums/144111-general>

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Wow, this is the most useful startup I've seen in a while. Bookmarking it. The only issue I encountered was that your domain search is not real-time, so some of domains under the 'social' search have already been taken!

</comment><comment><USER45> Great tool. I could see this being really useful when it comes time to register a domain name. Great design too.

I am impressed with how quickly it checks 1000 domains. Care to share any of the technologies used to build it?

<comment><AUTHOR> 90% perspiration. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Very useful service, I'm adding it to bookmarks. This and <http://instantdomainsearch.com/> really make choosing domain names a lot easier.

</comment><comment><USER47> The search input box is long and it's not clear if you can but when the input box is long I suspect that I can type multiple words. I'd love to be able to write "fox or news" or "fox news or paper"

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea -- will do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is really useful, but is there a reason why you are limiting the maximum length of the input to 20 characters? I already came across a few cases where I wanted to use a longer phrase.

<comment><AUTHOR> As a website operator, you should not use domain names that are that long. And the search results don't render well :)

<comment><USER48> :) I agree. However, you might be losing "sales" to people who don't agree. Maybe that is a small group, idk.

But I see how you would need a two column layout (or something) for the results of longer search terms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here again, for anyone still following along:

Lean Domain Search now tracks the false positives (registered domains that show up as available) and will no longer show them on subsequent searches.

</comment><comment><USER49> Not a bad tool. I'd get excited if it let me also see results for .org and .net domains. Seeing information about search volume for exact match searches would also be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is exactly what I need. I have been having difficulty looking for viable domain names that contain good keywords and that I can use as a business name as well. Great help!

</comment><comment><USER51> I typed in a word and I got a bunch of domains that were already registered and not enough domains available.

So obviously, get more domains available.

It's a great service though, if you can make it more useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for the feedback.

I added an option to doublecheck the availability when you click an available domain name. Hopefully this will save you a bit of energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Nice tool.

The lookups may need to be fixed -- the first two "green" domains I clicked when searching for "mobile" were actually taken. However, "green" means available, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks -- some registered show up as available and vice versa, an unfortunate side effect of the way I'm doing the searches. Am looking into reducing the error rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Very useful, but I'd like it to show more suggestions. Searching for common words results in only a few available domains, and hundreds of taken ones.

</comment><comment><USER54> 10 out of the 10 "available domains" for the term I entered ("cloud") showed up as _not_ available when I clicked Double Check Availability.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed -- the site will now track double-checked domains that come up as registered and not show them again as registered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> The site works pretty well. I like the number of options available. It may not be a cause for a company but it is a useful website. nice work.

</comment><comment><USER56> It looks great, it's fast, and the keyword combinations for my query were excellent. Great job and I hope this takes off for you!

</comment><comment><USER57> the quality of the names it comes up with seems pretty meh. there is a lot of room for improvement.

for example, use tricks from poetry: assonance, consonance, alternate spellings, break the provided words into syllables and return names with multiple words that overlap on the last syllable one word and the first syllable of the next, do connotation analysis

</comment><comment><USER58> WARNING: this site is dangerous for anyone with the propensity to buy domains they don't need, but are too good to pass over.

</comment><comment><USER59> Worth considering adding social handle search to this (for example twitter handles and facebook pages to see whats available)

</comment><comment><USER21> Is this using twitter bootstrap? It looks like it is, but not sure...either way, love the design!

Also, why did you shut the pigeon one down?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not using Twitter bootstrap.

I shut it down for a few reasons, primarily because Preceden (<http://www.preceden.com>), the tool I built after it, was doing quite well and I wasn't disciplined enough at the time to run two sites at once. Live and learn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I'm sorry but this is freaking awesome. I don't care if it's a feature it's a great idea and dam you need some credit!

</comment><comment><USER61> I would enjoy being able to sort by color (availability etc) so I can quickly see a grouping of which ones are taken.

</comment><comment><USER62> It would be great if the whole result table was searchable. Love the concept. Maybe add option for .net?

</comment><comment><USER63> The moment this site suggested I register a domain with GoDaddy I closed it as fast as I could.

</comment><comment><USER64> nice, I works fast and very user-friendly for me :)

Though it wasn't clear to me, that it only searched for .com domains (until the 3rd time I tried, where I saw the note to the right of the results).

A nice feature would also to filter on the max. length of the suggested domain names.

</comment><comment><USER65> Cool, but, ouch. My eyes really hurt after looking at black-text-on-green- background.

</comment><comment><USER66> These services miss the point - spend a little more and buy a name off someone.

</comment><comment><USER67> How about showing up instant results (if possible) to make it more interesting?

</comment><comment><USER68> Nice, but I can't enter numbers? Example 'HTML5'

</comment><comment><USER69> Listed a domain that was taken :p

</comment><comment><USER70> Domai.nr is a similar example

</comment><comment><USER71> just realized a "great" add-on business idea for you. let people search, register the domains yourself in the background. sell them. you'd go to hell, so that's something to consider though.

i wonder if amazon predicts their supply chain based on search results.

</comment><comment><USER72> what if I want the word "tv" in my domain...?

</comment><comment><USER73> Black text on green background? Zee goggles, they do nothing!

I always use <http://instantdomainsearch.com>

I have no time waiting around for POST results.

Consider AJAX as the next item on the TODO list.

<comment><USER74> If you know what you are searching. Lean domain search gives thousand suggestions at a time so it's faster than typing them one by one in IDS.

<comment><USER73> A the same time I'm totally turned off by getting like a 1000 results.

It would make more sense from a usability if I could then continue filtering the list down more and more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Awesome. Bookmarked.

</comment><comment><USER76> I'm afraid this doesn't stack up well to the existing tools our there. Here's a comparison of your results with the tool I use most often when searching for a domain:

<http://www.leandomainsearch.com/search?q=big+daddy> [http://www.domaintools.com/buy/domain- suggestions/?q=big+dad...](http://www.domaintools.com/buy/domain- suggestions/?q=big+daddy)

Domaintools' name spinner just gives better results, and immediately tells me about availability for all the .tlds as well.

So I guess step one would be to get your tool at least as good as that.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

Excluding the other TLDs, how are Domain Tools's results better? Looking through the 20 that you linked to, they seem much _poorer_ than Lean Domain Search's, though I admit I am a bit bias.

Also, IMO other TLDs do not make good website names. They confuse normal people, which is why I did not include them in the Lean Domain Search results.

<comment><USER77> The results are much poorer on Domain Tools, and other TLDs are generally worth less than .com's. Since your tool is called LEAN domain search. I would assume its for .com's which is mostly what 90% of the community looks for when looking for a domain. Otherwise they wouldn't turn to a tool like yours for help in finding a domain. Thus the whole comment that he made is mostly irrelevant. I think your tool does an extremely good job of displaying a lot of good names at a very fast pace. I wouldn't clutter down and slow the results with other TLDs.

Great work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, agreed on all points. Appreciate it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you communicate the gravity of tech debt to a new team? - <AUTHOR> When joining a new team, upon finding loads of tech debt left by past developers, which nontechnical members of the company's leadership are not aware of, what methods have you used to convey the scale of the issue (For example, code that is deeply flawed in many ways, like 1600 line templates with many inline jquery scripts and further dozens of links of un-minified script calls to 500+ line Jquery scripts, not to mention, no build system for the frontend, and seems about 15 years behind current conventions and best practices)? <comment><USER2> I have the exact same problem, i'm pretty curious about what solution will be proposed.

From my experience it is really case dependant. I went throught several "legacy" codebases, and everything depends on the willingness of change in the company. I think my 3 last experiences are revelant of different situations :

1 - Peoples want to change A few years ago I went to a company with some code from 5+years, with poor quality. It was quite easy to explain peoples we were facing troubles maintaining the codebase in descent state, since it was a small company with people involved in dev process/ selling the product.

2 - Clueless people After that i moved to a company with terrible codebase. I put everything on git and set a dev environment on my first week. It was in 2017. The legacy was unmaintainable, and by speaking with the ceo/cto, we managed to explain the risks for the company. It took month, but they understood the urge of refactoring, rewriting, etc. They just were not able to find a solution by themselves and our help to rationalise the problem and find effective solution was sufficent to give them understanding of the problem and willingness on moving forward.

3 - Conservative peoples I moved a few month ago in a really conservative company with totaly insane codebase. For the moment I have no clue on what to do to make people understand at what point the code is in a sinistred state. Tech people understand it but not the rest of the company. Company is economicaly wealthy and it's really hard to make people understand that it does hide terrible technical reality.

I personally think the most important point are : \- Explain to your boss what are the most dangerous problems (unencrypted passwords in DB, that kind of things) \- Explain what is tech debt \- Explain that current techs are solutions to those problems \- Speak about the costs

Everything is easier if you are in a small company, wether ir not peoples around you does have thech background or not. It's easier too if you can prove what you're saying: with examples of dangerous things understandable by non tech people, and with POC. For the moment i just does not figure out how to push the need of purging tech debt when company is wealthy. People feel that everything goes well and you're just too much of a geek/perfectionnist

</comment><comment><USER3> Try to find a way so that you don't have to communicate the gravity of it. For example start fixing it slowly and quietly.</comment>


Qualcomm allegedly bribed Apple into not making a WiMAX iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/17/14303910/qualcomm-allegedly-bribed-apple-wimax-iphone-ft-complaint <comment><USER2> Interesting, but let's not overstate whatever impact this might have had. WiMAX was pure snake oil. The enormous cells had far too little bandwidth to support a significant number of subscribers. Also for most of the cell area the signal was too attenuated to penetrate buildings.

You could roll out a network quickly, but the network would become saturated just as fast. At the time I worked for MSI, a vendor of cellular radio network planning systems. We implemented a WiMax planning module but as soon as you simulated the network with significant subscriber maps, it became pretty clear it wasn't workable.

So I'm not saying this deal didn't happen, or that Qualcomm aren't culpable, just that we shouldn't take this to mean that Qualcomm was responsible for killing WiMAX. It was doomed anyway.

<comment><USER3> So was there ever an actual time when 802.16 was considered to be even in the same game as LTE? The people I know who were messing with it were specialized in underserved areas, where the cell size was a plus. Mobile was an afterthought.

Where LTE was the DNA of a handset protocol stack that has been pressed into service as a MAN, 802.16 was the other way 'round.

And no, I have no idea what Sprint was thinking.

<comment><USER2> >specialized in underserved areas

Arguably WiMAX did useful work in Africa where it's long range was a particular advantage and it was better able to address the relatively low subscriber density. It filled a gap before being supplanted by more capable LTE networks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Even IF Apple did make a WiMax iPhone, it wouldn't have helped WiMax one bit. The tech wasn't ready for prime time, Intel being too greedy and NO one wants another x86 monopoly on the Telecoms market. Remember that was before the era iPhone took off and ARM has won the SoC race. Now all there is for Intel is X86 on Desktop and Server.

Although in many ways, WiMax do live on as TD-LTE, which is 80% similar to WiMax.</comment>


Ask HN: Stop the abuse of flagging - <AUTHOR> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10532062<p>This thread was flagged from #3 to #97 in three minutes after a moderately critical Google comment was made. <comment><USER2> You're right that it dropped off abruptly, but it wasn't due to your post, it had already dropped before you posted: [http://hnrankings.info/10532062/](http://hnrankings.info/10532062/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I could swear that it was at #3 when I posted, but perhaps you're right. Anyway, there was no flame war or excessive incivility it that thread...</comment></comment>


Eric Schmidt Defines Web 3.0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/eric_schmidt_defines_web_30.php

<comment><USER2> Does anyone else think that he's starting to look like Bill Gates, literally.</comment>


Show HN: iPhone app to visually track daily habits - in CoffeeScript / Backbone - <AUTHOR> http://chaincalapp.com/

<comment><USER2> Such a simple interface and design but provides a new take on solving a classical problem, really cool app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, glad you're getting some value from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What technology was used except backbone/coffeescript? Something like PhoneGap?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, PhoneGap is used to tie it all together and to create a bridge to the local notifications API in iOS.

I'd recommend it to anyone looking to bring their web oriented skills to mobile apps.

I plan on porting this to Android soon since PhoneGap allows almost complete code reuse (except for dealing with notification scheduling).</comment></comment>


Vico Editor source code released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.vicoapp.com/2012/07/Vico-is-dead-Long-live-Vico <comment><USER2> Thank you _so much_ for doing this. There's been a recurring theme with text editors on OS X and I'm glad you've avoided it.

A new editor comes out, it's a great editor, but it's closed-source and costs money. People are fine with paying money, so it thrives. Eventually, the developer(s) slow down or lose interest. Maybe they're working on a rewrite. Meanwhile, bug fixes don't happen. Promised features never show up. You end up with a community of developers using a piece of abandonware as their main editor. If they had the source code, they could improve their editor. But they don't so they can't.

I doubt he'll do it, but it'd be nice if Allan Odgaard took a hint from you and released the source for TextMate 1.5.

<comment><USER3> If he did it would probably kill off Textmate 2 unfortunately

<comment><USER4> He's killed it himself by taking so long on it. :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Genuinely glad I bought a copy before it went open source. :)

It's a pretty awesome editor. A lot of the editing power of VIM but behaves like an actual OS X app. Also: built in scripting with a Lisp-like language.

Being open source immediately vaults it ahead of Textmate/Sublime Text for me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Very classy move; not only did you release the source, you picked a permissive license (2-clause BSD) which means it can now take on a life of its own on in many forms.

Nice to see a dev giving back.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yet another program that uses some of the vi keyboard commands that is not actually vi (and is thus only a cruel tease).

Why do these exist, again?

<comment><USER8> Rather than being an editor with Vi emulation bolted on, Vico is an attempt to do Vi in Cocoa. Of course it is not Vim, with support for plugins, but for someone who is interested in some of Vi's power in a native Mac UI, it is an interesting proposition. Vico is also a way to learn Vim, commands available in the menu are shown with the Vi commands as shortcuts, rather than Alt-key combos.

I can see however as a paid Mac App Store product, it would have been a tough sell. Most people who seek out an editor in the MAS will likely be looking for something with more form than function. But as an open source app, like Vim, I hope it will see some renewed life.

<comment><USER9> Have you looked at Macvim? <http://code.google.com/p/macvim/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are plenty of other text editors on the Mac App Store - what about Vico makes it incompatible with the sandboxing?

</comment><comment><USER11> I tried Vico when it came out and liked the UI even if the "like Vi but not compatible with any of its plugin" and such that made it unable to take advantage of the whole ecosystem around Vim put me off.

But despite that it seems to be a great text editor and I'm glad the author took the very wise choice of open-sourcing it instead of letting it slide into abandon-ware status. It's a classy move that I wish developers would make more often.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wise decision of Martin. I hope development will continue even stronger than before!

</comment><comment><USER13> I installed it and I got this message:

 _This is a trial version.

Vico will expire after 15 days of use._

<comment><USER14> Try again. I just download r3132 and it doesn't give me that message.

<comment><USER13> I didn't get it immediately after downloading r3132. It prompted me to upgrade, so of course I pressed OK. The upgrade must've been to the paid build though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Vico will be removed from the App Store

Probably a good move, we should encourage professional mac software to stay well away from MAS. The sandboxing and slow updates just don't gel with a professional workflow</comment>


Why Friday's Massive DDoS Attack Should Be Terrifying - <AUTHOR> https://www.truevault.com/blog/massive-iot-ddos-attack.html <comment><USER2> Ok, dumb question:

Why can't a list of addresses of all the devices in the world of the type used in the attack be created, and all packets from any address on the list be trashed? At least, for the duration of the attack.

If such lists were made ahead of time, they could be turned on rapidly.

Is anything like this done?

<comment><USER3> You are speaking of basically an IP-based version of the spamhaus blacklist. For general http or TCP protocol.

I, for one, would be fine with a general internet citizen losing access if they have a compromised device. I suspect this is how we will go -- your home security cam was used in an attack, now every single website you visit for XXXXXXXX days gives you a CAPTCHA.

I maintain the crucial element is informing people why they have that hassle. Add extra friction, but not inhibit what they can do, because they are unable and unwilling to secure their devices.

Yes, this affects the internet-uneducated disproportionately. Yes, I think it is the responsibility of anyone with a broadband connection to understand the responsibilities that come with it.

No, I do not expect grandma to learn this. I expect her to deal with a crippled internet because they are not able to fix their pollution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reddit, Netflix, Github and Airbnb all appear to have switched from Dyn to AWS DNS for their primary .com domains by now.

<comment><USER5> I can understand the instinct to move, but I think the answer is to split your eggs among many baskets, not just pick a sturdier basket. I don't think the Dyn team is necessarily bad, it was an enormous assault.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> /etc/hosts saved the day for me.

<comment><USER5> I found a really really stale name server that didn't respect TTLs.

<comment><USER7> I found a HN post that recommended switching my nameservers to OpenDNS, which uses SmartCache. Seems like a better approach in general.

<comment><USER8> Same. I use OpenDNS and I had no idea there was an attack happening until I asked a co-worker to review something on GitHub and they couldn't access it. SmartCache saved me a lot of hours that could have been lost Friday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not aware of all the technical intricacies here, but could this kind of attack be preventable by having local DNS caches in the OS itself, kinda like a dynamic hosts file?

</comment><comment><USER10> It should be terrifying because the government's complete lack of ability to regulate anything has allowed the so-called "internet of things," more accurately called the "internet of corporate things that the user is locked out of," to develop into a national security threat.

<comment><USER11> I'm trying to understand your position. Are you saying this is partially (or fully) the government's fault because they didn't regulate the IoT device market to force it to be open source? And if they had done so this attack could have been avoided?

<comment><USER5> There's a very strong argument to be made that regulation is the only way to improve this situation. A negative externality like this is unlikely to correct itself. Cheap manufacturers will continue to save money by cutting security features, and unaware or price-driven consumers will reinforce that behavior. What else can we do?

Note: this isn't something the US can solve. A lot of this traffic came from overseas. It's needs a coordinated response.

<comment><USER12> The problem with most regulation is that it tends to be quite a bit behind the current trends.

You also need to acount for the fact that these devices are going to be alive for years maybe even decades which means that their security measures would become obsolete.

DDoS needs to be solved on the infrastructure level at this point, securing endpoint nodes is a game you are going to constantly lose.

<comment><USER13> The same backdoors that owned the devices as a botnet, should be used to brick the devices. And the courts should support that purchasers are entitled to refunds and damages. Your IoT refrigerator got bricked? You can sue for $500 worth of spoiled food. Encourage class action lawsuits and watch how fast this is fixed.

[https://github.com/jgamblin/Mirai-Source- Code](https://github.com/jgamblin/Mirai-Source-Code)

<comment><USER14> You can build secure devices. All it takes is putting quality engineers in charge.

But paying quality engineers isn't fun and they won't work for idiot management. So as long as management doesn't have to pay for the cost of disasters they cause, nothing will be secure.

It's the same thing that happened at Hillary's State Department.

So I agree: Brick those refrigerators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do we know who is behind this?

<comment><USER16> "The Russians™"

<comment><USER15> :) you want me to fall for that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 90 miles from Chicago. Didn't notice a thing.

Note: I'm not dismissing the validity of the concern. I'm only reporting that I didn't even know about it as the attack was happening. I'm sure others were much more severely affected.

<comment><USER18> I'm along the North Western New Mexico/South Western Colorado border and didn't notice a difference either. I'm not saying this is shouldn't be a major concern. Just some areas are effected quite a bit more than others, it appears to mainly effect high metro/coastal regions.

<comment><USER19> I'm in Denver. Couldn't get to github, and our site is hosted on Heroku and was down for most of the day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Friday's massive ddos attack barely registered on my day-to-day, the only annoyance was that Github was slightly slower than usual. It has been amusing though to see all the hundreds of news articles trying desperately to sensationalize the event.. and it simply didn't even matter.

<comment><USER21> Just because it didn't effect you directly doesn't mean it wasn't a big deal. I'm in Nashville and was not effected, but I'm not writing it off as a non- event. The worrying thing is hacked IoT devices were militarized (just using this as a term, not saying this was a state actor, though it very well could have been.)

Imagine if the hack occurs again, but is more targeted towards things that aren't just minor annoyances, and maybe happens on election night in the U.S.; I mean just earlier this year a repo on a package manager being deleted caused mass failure across the world of applications. A targeted attack on certain assets or dependencies could be very bad indeed. I would argue that GitHub being effected was more important than the other consumer based services in this attack. This is the first of many similar attacks in the coming years.

<comment><USER20> Militarized? You were as affected as I was which is not at all, don't you wonder if this is just mass media trying to incite bullshit?

<comment><USER22> For reference, I wasn't able to access any of the affected sites until around 5pm on the day of the attack, and I don't even live in a big city, though I do live on the east coast.

If you look at HN comments from posts about the attack while it was ongoing you can see plenty of people who were also affected by the attack (for example, people looking for name servers that cached longer than allowed, or opendns' smartcache). I understand why you think "the media" sensationalizes things, but in fact it is absolutely not complicit in saying things that are not true, even for the sake of embellishment (i.e. look at what happened to Brian Williams).

<comment><USER20> ddos attacks are script kiddy bullshit. I bet whatever kids behind it are absolutely loving the attention. Completely sensationalized stupidity to say our entire infrastructure could be "taken out" in such a way and wild speculation about it being a state sponsored attack. If a state wants to actually take out some infrastructure they have fucking bombs and missiles for that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


East German Security (Stasi) Training Film on Clandestine Apartment Search 1984 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bba3tryTJbs <comment><USER2> also available in funnier form in the Tom Hanks movie: the man with one red shoe

</comment><comment><USER3> This video isn't available in Germany because it features content from UMG.</comment>


Hackers Jammed Chicago Police Scanners with Internet Classic 'Chocolate Rain' - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/889nw4/hackers-jammed-chicago-police-scanners-with-internet-classic-chocolate-rain <comment><USER2> Incredibly stupid. Police are there to serve, to rescue, and to protect. (Yes, yes. There are some bad ones.)

What if there was a domestic abuse situation? Couldn't reach the cops.

How about a group of racists beating a minority victim? Couldn't reach the cops.

A break-in in a black neighborhood? Couldn't reach the cops.

etc, etc, etc. This was childish. And stupid.

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this technically possible by anyone? My understanding from what little I've read on HAM radios is these are frequencies that are just set aside for police, people can technically broadcast to them, it's just the FCC will hunt you down. Nothing overtly special, though I presume regular radios try to block out those frequencies.

Any true HAMs care to chime in? I'm more amateur than amateur radio.

<comment><USER4> Not a licensed HAM, but you are correct. Technically the radio waves remain generally useful because we go to such great lengths to minimize incidental noise emission sources. Get enough pissed off people with spark gap transmitters just blasting RF noise on across the relevant frequency band, and you will significantly degrade the capability to separate meaningful signal from all the noise.

However, using regular noise (repetitions of a well known signal pattern) is not the best way to go about it, since you can set up signal processing to cancel out any aspects of the signal you can safely predict, making it easier to recover the underlying information.

Overlay high intensity more-or-less random noise makes subsequent information extraction difficult, but as far as I'm aware, you can also still potentially scrounge signal by looking for improbably regular variations against the background noise. So as long as you agree to certain signaling conventions out-of-band, you still maintain some ability to communicate/signal.

The ideal jamming setup is a combination of the two. Seed false instances of communique you expect your opponent to send, and swamp the channel with high intensity random noise.

Long tangent short, the radio waves as a useful communication mechanism are a byproduct of multiple layers of gentleman's agreement and only really enforcible if the majority of people do not become capable of organizing such that malicious actors are the norm rather than the exception.

This is why licensure is such a big deal as a control construct. If you can keep the unlicensed afraid to emit on penalty of prosecution, then you significantly decrease your policed population to more compliant license holders (they got the license after all), and what non-compliant folks are still undeterred by the thought of flaunting the law.

You can look at it from the other way that most people are naturally not criminal hooligans; however, as I've gotten older I've come to realize that lack of hooliganism is contingent on the abscence of widespread civil unrest. There comes a point where collective jimmies have been rustled where the threshold to act ends up a great deal lower.

Still not seeing that being realistic in terms of outcome with current events; but I've been wrong before.</comment></comment>


Samsung attaches screen to semi-truck to show the road ahead - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2015/06/22/samsung-truck-camera/

<comment><USER2> Previous submission from another source, with comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9762463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9762463)</comment>