Interview with Sam Altman from the High Growth Handbook - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/interview-with-sam-altman-from-the-high-growth-handbook/ <comment><USER3>
      For example, I do think figuring out compensation
      structures is really important and something the
      CEO should spend time on. And it's something that
      most CEOs don't.

This. I've been a part of three startups and in all three, the CEO didn't take compensation seriously. In today's economy, you can't sit on your hands and assume that 3-5% annual pay raises and the promise of future stock payouts will keep talent in-house, year over year, when the big guys are pushing the pay bar higher and higher.

For example, in my last job, 3 years of startup caused my annual pay as an iOS dev in the Bay to drop ~30k below the average for someone of my tenure. I loved the company, but I couldn't justify the loss in income, especially with housing prices being what they are. CEOs should consider compensation as critical to their company health.

<comment><USER4> Pay raises that rise faster than inflation are unsustainable, rather, you're pointing at a specific asymmetry between the BigCos and startups in the Bay, which is definitely causing strain.

Outside the Valley and specific centres, this isn't quite so much an issue.

Inside, it's an intractable problem ...

Though your point might be valid from the Dev's perspective, consider the other side for a moment and you see how tough it is - i.e. to have the expectations of ever increasing normalized outflows.

So we need to look at this kind of objectively (i.e. not from just Exec/Dev perspective) to figure out how to deal with the situation.

<comment><USER5> Pay raises that rise faster than inflation are sustainable as long as revenue — or at least expectations of future revenue — are also rising at a similar rate. It's not at all an intractable problem. If that situation doesn't exist then you're not managing a _start-up_ , you have something else such as a value business, small business, or lifestyle business.

But at the same time if you're just building iOS apps then it would seem foolish to locate the majority of the engineering team in Silicon Valley. There are plenty of talented iOS developers all over the world now in lower cost areas.

<comment><USER4> It's definitely an 'intractable problem'.

A) The issue is specifically pay rates at 'BigCos' are rising quickly, making it harder and harder for startups to keep up. This is 'intractable' to the point where many simply stay away from the Valley, which was less the case before.

B) Companies with lofty margin increases over time are _extremely rare_ and such inside wage inflation is totally unsustainable over any period - <USER2> business cycles. Only at a rising Google, or the very rare lucky startup growing the customers is this not a problem. Very, very rare. And it creates the 'A' problem above for other companies.

<comment><USER5> I don't see anything intractable. There is abundant investment funding available to pay employee compensation at start-ups with the potential to scale up with increasing profit margins. That just means founders will have to recalibrate their expectations on early stage valuation.

On the other hand, for businesses without the potential for high margins it never made sense to locate in high cost areas. There are plenty of other suitable areas. For example Cleveland would be an excellent location for a health IT business. The tech industry as a whole would be healthier with more geographic diversity.

<comment><USER4> "There is abundant investment funding available to pay employee compensation at start-ups with the potential to scale up with increasing profit margins."

No, there is not an abundance of capital floating around to just pay developers ever increasing (above inflation) salaries commensurate with the massive profitability of other major companies in their immediate vicinity.

To the point wherein even Peter Thiel wants to opt for LA, with his statement: "I'm spending all of my money on Silicon Valley landlords"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I consider sama to be an extraordinary investor and thinker (I know this is the most consensus thing one could say on HN). The personal bets on Boom, Helion Energy, Cruise and many others are really phenomenal (even the _re-_ bet on Reddit) -- not just for being early/contrarian for their time, but also necessary for the world for these companies to succeed.

The highlights of this interview imo are the following pieces of advice:

1) get a coach sooner than later

2) always keep revisiting what is urgent vs important and keep prioritizing; if in 'war-mode' then users, team, revenue above all else; ignore things that don't amount to much (potential candidates: investor updates, press, conferences etc -- they are not more valuable than users)

3) don't get too far away from the product (some things cannot be delegated early on)

4) "boards hate surprises...and boards hate feeling like you're trying to hide bad news". Be open. Ask for help.

Really great points.

I feel that the point about the role of the CEO in a downturn is under- explored in this interview (felt rushed). This is rich territory (and relevant). The discussion about specific examples of things that don't merit CEO time veers into 'made-up territory' quickly and doesn't feel relevant -- e.g. some "[CEOs] then stop going to the executive team meeting (that's a very bad idea)" \-- I don't see as many companies as these two, but no CEO stops going to an executive team meeting (infact, bad CEOs go to too many of those! as they enjoy 'playing CEO' :)). If a CEO stops going to an executive team meeting, that is quite counter-intuitive and interesting in many respects in of itself (e.g. there is a fire; CEO doesn't want to be CEO etc) :-) I feel Elad should have pressed more as an interviewer rather than rushing to the next point.

Overall, always good to hear sama's views -- he is an incredibly important investor of our age (my prediction). And Elad thanks for working on this book. For a few $$ everyone can get this wisdom -- you did a great service for entrepreneurs. Congrats on the launch.

<comment><USER7> > I consider sama to be an extraordinary investor and thinker (I know this is > the most consensus thing one could say on HN).

Yeah I'm gonna disagree with you there. These are some of the things he's said over the years

"I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco"

"This is uncomfortable, but it's possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics."

[http://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si-muove](http://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si- muove)

"US growth has stagnated while Chinese growth has continued to do pretty well. The US has become less competitive globally"

"The current business model of the US requires the dollar to be the world reserve currency, though the Chinese currency is rapidly becoming a viable alternative"

"The other stark contrast is how much harder people in China seem to work than people here, and how working hard is considered a good thing, not a bad thing."

[https://blog.samaltman.com/china](https://blog.samaltman.com/china)

<comment><USER8> It's not self-evident that any of those things are wrong. Could you explain what you believe instead, and why? Perhaps in a blog post so as not to pollute this discussion.

<comment><USER9> It isn't particularly reasonable, one might even say dismissive, to suggest that someone explains themselves, off site no less, when you aren't adding much to the discussion yourself. Plenty of people have already written about these comments. Most widely after Mike Mortiz made similar ones in the Financial Times.

[https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/11/what-sequoias-mike- moritz...](https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/11/what-sequoias-mike-moritz- doesnt-understand-about-startups-in-china/) [https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/19/moritz-sabotages- sequoia-a...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/19/moritz-sabotages-sequoia- again/) [https://twitter.com/dhh/status/954319522151976960](https://twitter.com/dhh/status/954319522151976960) [https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-is-an- idiot-1821327260](https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-is-an-idiot-1821327260) [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-15/appraisal...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-15/appraisal- rights-and-tech-fears)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sam Altman has definitely done great as the head of YC, but how many high growth startups has he successfully started, run, grown and sold?

Can we please get advice from people who're actually currently doing that instead?

</comment><comment><USER11> What does "High Growth" mean? Based on the kindle preview this is a book containing startup advice which includes how to scale up your business in terms of hiring and acquisitions but not in terms of growing revenue and profits.

In a way this advice optimises large portions of Silicon Valley where large companies in terms of employees and venture capital funding produce very little profit. A case in point being Stripe itself. Stripe employees can't tell you how to grow into a profitable company because they haven't achieved that yet. But they can tell you how to grow your HR department and how to acquire other companies because Stripe has done that.

<comment><USER8> Companies like Stripe can become profitable in a simple way: by cutting R&D. And they'd stay profitable for a while, before fading into obsolescence.

For most tech companies, the right long-term strategy is to spend heavily on R&D and growth, using up all profits and some investor money to do so.

The exception is established companies in a declining industry, where the right answer is to cut R&D and growth to nothing and try to extract as much profit as possible in the remaining years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The relevance of some of this advice seems like it best serves an VC track company dealing with SV ecosystem pros and cons - especially commentary around investor behavior and availability.

Some of the points around distractions, planning, and tactics do apply outside the bay, but in general the term "High Growth" feels like "early high valuation large cash infused startup", which while interesting, isn't terribly relevant to an extremely large portion of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Given that - does anyone have any recommendations for reading in this space that are a bit less "valley flavored"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback and for taking a look.

Outside of financing and M&A, most of the topics in the book are core to most fast growing companies - Silicon Valley or not. They key is whether the company needs to grow rapidly, or is a rapidly growing division of a company. "Grow rapidly" means "scaling revenue (and if the right time for the company, profits), and growing headcount and organizational complexity". If it is a 12 person org that is not going to grow, only a smaller subset of topics apply.

Key topics include things like hiring and managing an executive team, your role as CEO, organizational topics (re-orgs, choosing what executive owns what etc.), marketing and PR, product management, managing your board, building a recruiting pipeline and recruiting organization. Many of these are reasonably universal topics. To your point, what I know best is silicon valley technology companies, and the book reflects that experience (versus that of an industrial company).

Thanks again for taking a look!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Any chance this turns into an Audio book?

I'm sure there are plenty of others who find it hard to find time to sit down & read a book. When I do, I tend to read the kind that don't work as audio books or just aren't available.

Also, there is something nice about being outside & walking while listening to a book.

<comment><AUTHOR> We submitted the audio file yesterday, so hopefully it goes live within a week or so

<comment><USER14> anyway to get a physical copy of this book in the UK?

<comment><AUTHOR> Working on it! Unfortunately it will likely take a few weeks.

<comment><USER14> Okay, thanks for your response. Is there a way I can subscribe to an update about it? Really want to purchase the hardcopy

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love generic advice :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there any chance this book will become available on Amazon.co.uk? It's cost about double the price for Europeans to buy it from Amazon.com due to high shipping costs and import taxes and fees.

<comment><USER17> The Kindle edition is available on .co.uk for 11.21 GBP including tax:

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Growth-Handbook-Elad-Gil- ebook...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Growth-Handbook-Elad-Gil- ebook/dp/B07DRPGGQ7/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any chance this will get back in stock on Amazon? I don't feel like signing up with Kobo but I would purchase this book. Also a softcover version would be awesome!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the issue - Stripe's printer is shipping books to Amazon ongoing.

You can still order via Amazon - as of now it will just take a few extra days to ship. So not a huge delay if you are willing to wait.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Congrats on the book launch Elad! What in your eyes is the most insightful part of the book for understanding High Growth?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a ton!

I think two sections might be most generically interesting or useful:

1\. The interviews. There are 14 interviews with Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Patrick Collison, Joelle Emerson, Erin Fors, Reid Hoffman, Claire Hughes Johnson, Aaron Levie, Mariam Naficy, Keith Rabois, Naval Ravikant, Ruchi Sanghvi, Shannon Stubo Brayton, Hemant Taneja.

In some cases, their advice is at odds with my own. So I think the richness of perspectives and experiences are valuable.

2\. The sections on executives, recruiting, people, onboarding, re-orgs, etc.

Startups are a team sport, and getting the right team together and helping them be effective is really the key (assuming you already have product/market fit).

A big part of that is also the role of the CEO, and the CEO managing their own psychology, not burning out, etc.

<comment><USER20> Are you willing to share snippets on HN?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure! I will drop some in the next week. Focused on launch today. Any priorities?

<comment><USER21> Hello Elad. Thank you very much for being so open to sharing. Do you have any snippets or content about traction? To me, that seems to be the most difficult part about team-building and startups in general. I have a lot of brilliant friends with whom I have an easy time bouncing ideas around with. Every couple months, an idea will be fleshed out enough to justify starting to work on it, but it's the groundwork that translates to long term growth that I have the most difficulty with, assuming that the problem is worth solving, the product is "good", and the product-market fit is there. Of the people you interviewed, did someone provide any insight into that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately my book focuses on the stages right after that - i.e. you have traction and need to scale.

There are some good things written on this topic that you have probably seen - e.g. Paul Graham has some great posts on this as do Sam Altman, Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris.

On the non-YC side Peter Thiel's Zero to One, Marc Andreessen's archives (on the A16Z site) and Chris Dixon's pre-crypto writings are all great on this topic too....

<comment><USER21> Hello Elad. I appreciate the response. I'll be checking out your book regardless. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Free but Shackled - The Java Trap - <AUTHOR> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html

<comment><USER2> Notice Stallman's revised comment at the head of the article:

 _"Since this article was first published, Sun has relicensed most of its Java platform reference implementation under the GNU General Public License, and there is now a free development environment for Java. Thus, the Java language as such is no longer a trap."_

This case is among few high-profile instances in which the GPL may not be free enough -- that is, Oracle may have a strong claim despite Sun's licensing of much of the JVM and JDK under the GPL, because the provisions of the license only extend to VMs which fully implement the Java spec. The license grant for the Java specification explicitly does _not_ apply to VMs implementing a sub- or super-set.

See the patent grant released in Dec 2006 [1] – specifically the portion where it's stated that the implementor must "not modify, subset, superset or otherwise extend the Licensor Name Space," and that the VM must "[pass] the Technology Compatibility Kit." Under this interpretation, Google's App Engine platform might also be considered non-compliant, depending on the underlying VM.

While I personally choose to release code under BSD or MIT-style licenses to avoid the GPL's viral restrictions, it is interesting to consider cases where liberal licensing alone is not enough to ensure the liberty of a platform.

[1] <http://java.sun.com/javase/6/jdk-6u21-doc-license.txt>

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems as though licenses these days, to be truly free, should contain a clause giving up all rights to patent claims against said code.

<comment><USER3> The GPL version 3 includes a similar clause. You don't have to give up your patents. You just have to license them to anyone who has rights to use the code from a copyright perspective. If I understand it correctly, this gives the GPL sharper teeth, since someone who violates the GPL not only loses the distribution/derivative rights from the copyright license, but also the patent license.

<comment><USER4> Hmm... so you could use patents as a club to enforce dual licensing with GPLv3 then. Violate the GPL and you lose your patent license, so now you're a patent infringer too. At the same time, you're FOSS-friendly since your patents are meaningless to FOSS projects.

<comment><USER5> The GPL is one of the most brilliant hacks ever.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


On Shuttle Drivers, Chocolate, and NP-Completeness - <AUTHOR> http://www.theconceptsproject.com/on-shuttle-drivers-chocolate-and-np-completeness/

<comment><USER2> WTF? Access denied? Banned IP? Because of my VPN? What a crock.</comment>


DJI About to Release Cheaper 'Mavic Standard' Model - <AUTHOR> http://www.droningon.co/2017/03/10/dji-could-release-mavic-standard-model/ <comment><USER2> There's nothing wrong with your article, but the community here usually doesn't take kindly to being used for press releases. If you continue, your account will likely be banned --- but worse for you, your site may be blacklisted as well.

I think you would be much better off continuing to publish good articles (like the excellent one on Lily) and hoping that readers will submit the best of them. I say this just as a user of the site who wouldn't want your publicity efforts to backfire. The admins (email@example.com) are very responsive by email if you want official guidance.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> But the limited specification may put off consumers, although the price-point being lower will help!</comment>


What The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNN are doing wrong, online and off - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/10/02/what-new-york-times-wall-street-journal-and-cnn-are-doing-wrong

<comment><USER2> So the NY Times suffers from not being part of thestandard.com? It seems to me that they're one of the few companies from its era that _does_ get the whole internet thing.

They don't charge for web access to current issues, they have archived material from 1851-1922 and 1987-today for free, and they did the creative advertising bit: Times Reader (joint NY Times/MS venture for a digital newspaper) camew ith a video game awile ago.</comment>


WireGuard for Windows Pre-Alpha Is Available - <AUTHOR> https://www.wireguard.com/install/ <comment><USER2> Wireguard for Ubiquiti EdgeRouter here [https://github.com/Lochnair/vyatta- wireguard](https://github.com/Lochnair/vyatta-wireguard)

<comment><USER3> 3rd party or something official out of ubiquiti? Sorry, not super familiar with ERL despite owning one.

<comment><USER4> This is a third-party extension, but it looks like the owner is still actively maintaining it, and pretty active on GH in general.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a completely unscientific test, but I saw about 35mbps down on tunsafe vs 45mbps on the new, official wireguard implementation. I imagine this will get better with time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does this work in the Middle East (Dubai) where we have DPI as good/better than the Great Firewall? Nothing but Shadowsocks [1] seems to be consistent there. Unfortunately I have had poor/no UDP performance on SS even when enabling the UDP Relay on my Mac.

[1] [https://shadowsocks.org/en/index.html](https://shadowsocks.org/en/index.html)

<comment><USER3> Probably not. Wireguard doesn't aim for VPN DPI bypass. It might work for now just because it's new but it's not difficult to dpi.

<comment><USER6> Will this be an eventual goal?

<comment><USER7> I fail to find the post on the mailing list right now, but iirc the author prefers WG to be the secure part of the equation, with use cases like Dubai/China relying on other tools to mix up/obfuscate the data hitting the wire.

<comment><USER8> I do hope the author takes this up too. They're extremely talented. Could make a big change in firewall systems.

Iran sometimes does data per endpoint analysis and is able to block any VPNs since they're all single endpoint VPNs. If we were able to split the data to, say a few hundred unique ips it would be extremely difficult to block it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been using the pre-alpha builds since I saw them posted a week or two ago. They've been reliable so far for my simple use cases, and it's nice to move off of a third party Windows client.

</comment><comment><USER10> What are some reputable VPN services using WireGuard?

<comment><USER3> Not answering the exact same question, but it's fairly easy to set up on a cheap cloud VM as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Same here. Running of a $5/mo VPS and works fine. Wireguard is particularly helpful here, as I get about double the speed compared to openvpn (server-side CPU bottleneck).

<comment><USER11> Any ready to go setup instructions? For IPsec or OpenVPN it's a single bash script, hiding the complexity and the internal mess

e.g. [https://github.com/hwdsl2/setup-ipsec- vpn](https://github.com/hwdsl2/setup-ipsec-vpn)

<comment><USER12> The good thing about WireGuard is that it doesn't really have any "complexity and [...] internal mess". A simple WireGuard setup with one client and one server has a 10-line configuration file on each side, with each side knowing their own private key and its peer's public key. I have not used WireGuard for the public VPN scenario, so I don't know if additional firewall rules are required to route traffic from VPN into the public internet, but I would guess as much.

<comment><USER13> From my limited experience of setting it up the complexity is not in the configs files (also not with OpenVPN as you usually just copy paste some template anyway) but in setting up the routing, iptables etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does this compare to the TunSafe windows implementation?

<comment><AUTHOR> I got about 35mbps down on tunsafe vs 45mbps on this one. Not a scientific test, but seems to be faster.</comment></comment>


Why no intelligent central HVAC yet? - <AUTHOR>

Why has nobody designed an intelligent consumer central hvac system yet? We have a furnace and an air conditioner, they both pump hot (or cold) air throughout our house via a system of floor vents, each of which can be opened or closed.
What hasn't changed in decades, is that there is a single central thermostat on the main level in a hallway, that controls the whole house. So essentially the entire hvac system is heating or cooling based on measurements from a small section of a hallway.
Isn't this just a big system-identification problem? Why can't we have a thermostat in each room, and motorized controls on each floor vent (to open or close), so that any set of room desired temps can be achieved using a certain selection of room vent configurations?
Seems perfect for a machine learning system... to learn how a particular house's vents are to me opened or closed to achieve a certain set of room desired-temps, in combination with factors such as time of day, season, outside weather conditions, etc. <comment><USER2> There is a large cost to a system like this -- you would need to have sensors in different places around the building and sensors or motors on registers. You would need to give the system a layout of the building or run it through some sort of training regimen (because, I'm not sure about you, but I almost never adjust my registers).

I worked on the design of a cleanroom. Even there, in a single room where we just wanted to control temp and humidity and the internal conditions never changed, it took an incredible amount of tuning to get the system to run properly.

This is certainly coming, but today, I don't think most people would be willing to pay $000s for a system that still needs training and may or may not provide cost savings or comfort benefit.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, it's interesting, right?

Two parts: control of the rooms, and control of the overall system.

One the room side, what's the cost of installing those motorized registers? How do you run power to them? Where else in the room do you place sensors?

You could probably fish lines through the ducts, but that won't always work and also you've got fire issues to consider.

For new work, this is probably pretty easy, but for old work refits it could be a pain in the ass.

Also, what's the cost? You're looking probably at another couple dozen bucks per register, easy. Also, how often do you have return vents per-room? A lot of time you have outlets in each room and then a central intake/filter.

On the system side, this isn't that bad--a hardened little box or panel that talks to all these sensors and actuates the registers.

~

In a place like Houston or Texas we appreciate our air conditioning, so this makes sense--I'm not sure it'll be something everybody wants. Even then, the existing systems work well enough, and you can always find people to work on them.

It's a pretty good example of a system that is obviously improvable and yet one which is probably not worth the effort to fix.</comment>


Major Film Directors are talking to TV makers about killing motion smoothing - valiant-comma https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/9/12/17849560/tv-motion-smoothing-reference-mode-nolan-anderson <comment><AUTHOR> My Samsung Plasma TV has two modes I really enjoy:

One is the 24 frame, cinema mode. I bought "How The West Was Won" on Blu Ray. It is probably the most beautiful Blu Ray title I have. And it looks very different when the usual, normal TV modes are used for viewing.

The other one is "game" or "monitor" mode, and the TV actually does next to nothing to the signal, just blasts the pixels out as they come. That Blu Ray looks pretty good in this mode, but has motion jitter because the frame rates are not matched to the original.</comment>


CryptoCat rewritten from scratch, now a desktop app using the Signal protocol - <AUTHOR> https://crypto.cat/?2016 <comment><AUTHOR> The author states that there will not be a mobile client[1]. This seems crazy to me.

[1]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/4fyzyc/cryptocat_re...](https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/4fyzyc/cryptocat_rewritten_from_scratch_invitation_to/d2d935z?context=1)</comment>


Ask HN: Can't get .com or .net, what's the next best extension? - <AUTHOR>

Working on a startup and can't get the .com or .net of the company name. Which extension is best: .me, .ly, .co, or something else? <comment><USER2> Choose another name, not another extension.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hear you. Usually I'm not wedded to things like this, but this is one time that the name perfectly communicates the product to different user bases. People will instantly know what the product is for--instantly.

<comment><USER3> I was more or less wedded to a previous name choice for my startup but I couldn't secure the name or even a good variation of the name so I started thinking of a new name. I ended up with something way cooler that conveys my mission even better than the previous name. I'd never go outside of a .com for my business domain.

I think your best bet is to look for a new name. Really, you're only setting yourself up for issues with telling people your domain name/having people try to figure out how to type it in if you go with some country's TLD for your domain. Not to mention you're at the mercy of that country's policies. They could change their policies at any time and snatch your domain if they wish. Don't do that to yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll put some thought into this. Appreciate hearing your story.

<comment><USER4> I had the same problem a few days ago, maybe this little script will help you: <http://blog.o1iver.net/post/3216036200/python-domain-finder>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I also agree that it depends on if another extension makes sense.

For example:

If you are buying a .me (or other extension) just because .com and .net are gone and it doesn't relate then pick another name. If you are buying a .me (or other extension) and it relates like about.me then go for it.

<comment><USER5> Also its possible that soon we will have all sorts of custom extensions from custom providers / companies and then people will have to start paying more attention to the extension of the domain as well as just the name.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, ICANN is soon to offer customized domain extensions. It costs $185K to apply. Wonder what it'll be like to see .sports or .love or .cars?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Depends - .me for personal services, .info for information, .ly if you want to appeal to the hip crowd ;)

Kidding aside, it might be worth thinking of a different name. .com is the "default" internet extension, and getting people to use a different TLD is a bit of an uphill battle</comment>


Scotland's deer are changing shape due to hybridisation - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8413000/8413647.stm <comment><USER2> There are quite a few projects going on in Scotland which are attempting to restore species that were extirpated over the past few centuries. Beavers are being re-introduced and the waters are tested every few years to see if it is politically acceptable to try and re-introduce wolves - the red deer currently have no natural predators (apart from humans and possibly a few eagles that take fawns). Sitka deer messing up the gene pool of red deer may cast some doubt on the overall goal of this effort and it will certainly add to the cost if Red Deer are to be kept "pure".

The population of Red Deer is currently unsustainable - they are fed during the winter by the large estates to maximise their numbers for shooting. Hybrids might do some damage to this aspect of the economy by dimishing the trophy value to the estates. However there might some good from this if there are culls in the areas where hybrids are occurring. It would certainly improve the areas where the original pine forest is starting to recover by reducing the grazing pressure from deer.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't really see what the big deal is. Isn't this how most species have come about over time? I guess this is an artificially created scenario somewhat, but I'm sure there are plenty of species that have come about due to humans importing animals from one place to another.

It's not like horses in the US where there are no natural predators or anything.

Now if they start coming across variants that can shoot lasers from their eyes, I'll be worried.

<comment><USER4> I think the worry is the hybrid species might out compete the native red deer, or that fewer "pure" deer of either species will be left if hybridisation continues, as the hybrid offspring will be less picky about sticking to their own kind.

<comment><USER3> I guess I still don't really understand what the concern is. I'm not saying there isn't one, just that the article didn't really make it clear why this is a problem, other than the mongrels will take over. Is it a big problem if the "pure" varieties dissappear?

<comment><USER5> people dont really like entire sub species being wiped out, which was close to happening with native red squirrels with the introduction of grey squirrels.

theres an elements of playing god, but considering the effect we have already had on the planet I think making efforts to sustain what we currently have can only be a good thing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tenacity - <AUTHOR> http://avc.com/2016/01/tenacity-2 <comment><USER2> Tangential, but:

> _I don't mean sticking with a failed idea for too long. That is a mistake I > see a lot of entrepreneurs make in the Seed and Series A stages. That does > nobody any good._

How do you actually know an idea has failed, though? Because I feel assessing this is harder than he makes it sound. If you are building it, unless it's a complete and utter catastrophe that attracts no users and makes no revenue, there's always room to improve it even if you are still living off ramen.

<comment><USER3> I wrote a response to this because I recently shut down my company, but when I was finished I realized that none of the advice was actionable, and I didn't know of a good framework for this.

I visited a lot of coworking spaces and met people working on things that had been doing so for years with no traction. Some of the people clearly didn't what problem they are trying to solve. Some really solid advice or a framework for when to know your business is toast would be an anti-sv culture thing, but could be extremely useful for helping people get their life back on track.

<comment><USER4> Here is a simple but opinionated answer:

If you are not growing by C% every month, you're a "dead" startup.

Now, do you want to pivot to being a small business, or traditional enterprise? Are you spending VC money that demands results? Is your business funding your own lifestyle?

Answer those questions and you know what to do next.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> RE: FourSquare. Very interesting to me that he doesn't mention that they just changed out the Founder/CEO this week and did a significant down round. I almost feel like the entire article was a camouflaged smoke screen for propping up FourSquare. Just odd.

<comment><USER6> That was announced after this post.

<comment><USER7> yes and four squares is in the union square ventures portfolio, he would have knowledge of and may have been part of the decision making process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Many great companies takes decade or more to build.

A lot of the most valuable companies have their founders/early employees as their CEO vs. someone who join later (usually a professional one): [http://www.bhorowitz.com/why_we_prefer_founding_ceos](http://www.bhorowitz.com/why_we_prefer_founding_ceos)

Though you may argue it is a survivor bias, I believe sticking longer with something that works give an edge vs. leadership changes every few years.

</comment><comment><USER9> _For the past three years the narrative around SoundCloud has been that it was stuck in the mud, that remixes and other derivative content were getting taken down, that labels were forcing artists to take their content off the service. All of which was true, but the real narrative was that SoundCloud was going through a difficult and complicated process of developing a new business model for audio content in partnership with an existing industry that has done things a certain way for a long time._

It's a shame that SoundCloud was forced to yield to the established music industry like this. The world doesn't need yet another way to play "artists as diverse as Avicii, Bob Marley, the Beatles and Justin Bieber" ([http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/13/soundcloud-universal- music-...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/13/soundcloud-universal-music- interview/)).

<comment><USER10> No, they were not forced to yield to the establishment, they chose the establishment because it is the path with seemingly less risk. There is a meaningful difference, by using well know and established music it becomes easier to gain the hallowed "traction" VC funded musictech startups want. Soundcloud has little to no interests in focusing on truly independent artist and productions the way Bandcamp has and is doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks like avc.com is down. Here is a cached version for now

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YSjjxaE...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YSjjxaEGetoJ:avc.com/2016/01/tenacity-2/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER12> I think what's interesting about this piece is that it again highlights that many companies are not 'overnight successes' and the true commitment and time it takes from a founder and/or CEO to develop an organization. It gives hope to people who still feel like they're in the trenches and not seeing as many deliverables as they would like.

The author also highlights the importance of a good Board. Often not enough thought goes in to selecting a Board. A Board that believes in the idea and the people, has a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds, and has a relationship with the founder/CEO where there's room for disagreement and discussion can make all the difference.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a weak article.

1\. Soundcloud: 99% of founders would love to have the level of success that Soundcloud had leading up to these 3 years of "hard work" getting labels onboard.

2\. Foursquare: Got so much money and press for almost a decade now. The least they could do would be to go to work and figure out how to honor all the good fortune people bestowed on them.

Again, its not hard to keep working if you have massive traction in terms of users or money (VC or otherwise). What's hard is when you have neither of these things.

This reads as a motivation piece because Foursquare has shat the bed and like anyone, AVC wants to get out of it what he still can.

</comment><comment><USER14> Myself and a few friends still use swarm a bit. Who still uses foursquare itself?

<comment><USER15> I recently started using Foursquare a bit after mostly abandoning it for Swarm. It's actually really good. By far the best feature for me is the "trending in your city" bit which is fantastic at letting me know about good newly opened places. If there's a better tool than Foursquare for figuring out what exciting new businesses have opened in your neighborhood I don't know what it is.</comment></comment>


Cloudflare was down - <AUTHOR> https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/?hn=2020 <comment><USER2> Discord is entirely down right now, both the website and the app itself. Amusingly, a lot of the sites that normally track outages are also down, which made me think it was my internet at first. Downdetector, monitortheinternet, etc.

Lots of other big sites that are down: Patreon, npmjs, DigitalOcean, Coinbase, Zendesk, Medium, GitLab (502), Fiverr, Upwork, Udemy

Edit: 15 min later, looks like things are starting to come back up

<comment><USER3> Discord attempted to route me to: everydayconsumers.com/displaydirect2?tp1=b49ed5eb- cc44-427d-8d30-b279c92b00bb&kw=attorney&tg1=12570&tg2=216899.marlborotech.com_220.127.116.11&tg3=fbK3As- awso

(Visit at your own risk.)

Hack?

<comment><USER4> Sure you didn't misspell discord?

<comment><USER3> I've never even heard of the site before. Nor have I searched for "attorney" any time recently.

<comment><USER5> We operate that site and are using Cloudflare to prevent DDOS attacks. Probably some sort of hash collision...

<comment><USER6> Crazy stuff!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It really defies the original vision of the internet to have so many services depend on a single company. Almost every news site I was reading dropped off at once. I thought for a second that I lost internet in my own house.

<comment><USER8> I consider DNS and the way how top level domains are handled to be one of the weakest parts of our current Internet design.

We REALLY need a truly decentralized, distributed DNS system that is not owned by private entities.

<comment><USER9> [https://handshake.org](https://handshake.org) is pretty interesting.

<comment><USER10> The "decentralized internet" folks always talk a lot about fighting corporate control. I think they should spend more time talking about resiliency and blast-radius reduction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "All systems operational"

What's the point of a status page if it doesn't reflect the real status...

It's either the status page goes down with everything else or the status page is wrong. Great.

EDIT: Looks like it's accurate now, 20 minutes later.

<comment><USER12> Let's start a betting pool. How many upvotes do you think OP will get before the status page acknowledges a problem? I say its going to be 600.

<comment><USER13> You lost. ;) 476 points, status page says it's down now.

<comment><USER14> As one would expect, it says "degraded performance" instead of "down" lol

<comment><USER15> Tested with tor and it's right. Some exit nodes aren't affected.

<comment><USER14> Hm, maybe it's just the SRE in me talking, but if major chunks of the internet being entirely inaccessible doesn't count as an "outage", what does?

<comment><USER15> I mean, I guess your entitled to look at it that way, but I don't think it's dishonest of them to distinguish between "nothing is working" and "some regions aren't working".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't think it's just Cloudflare; I just had a fun 10 minutes seeing servers start flipping on my Server monitoring service[1]. This has only happened once or twice per year, and is usually due to weird global DNS issues.

[1] [https://servercheck.in/](https://servercheck.in/)

(To give an update, I'm seeing from my monitoring systems (about 15 points around the globe) sporadic outages for Microsoft, Apple, Reddit, Bing, Node.js, Twitter, Yahoo, and YouTube. And my own servers (not behind CF at all) are also flipping up and down. It started around 21:14 UTC.)

<comment><USER17> a DNS issue wouldn't cripple all of the internet at once, with all the caching.

<comment><USER18> Most sites set the absolute minimum TTL for every record, for no reason. There's a lot less caching than you're thinking.

<comment><USER19> Eh, what? There are many good reasons to have low TTL DNS...this exact outage being one of them. Update your records to go direct to your servers, and not through Cloudflare and bam you're back up. Doesn't work if your TTL is 86400

<comment><USER20> Doesn't help as cloudflare wants you to host their name servers with them, so you can't flip any records if the DNS itself is in trouble, like it is now

And changing DNS servers often takes many hours (or days, if .net is involved apparently)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This was a problem with our backbone network; wasn't caused by an attack. The effect was regional and not global. Naturally, we'll write it all up.

<comment><USER22> Was it a problem with a provider you use?

<comment><USER21> Looks like problem with one of our large routers in Atlanta.

<comment><USER23> I am in Nashville, and lost 18.104.22.168 and 18.104.22.168 completely. Also one of my sites went down according to statuscake, but not all of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> We were down (downforeveryoneorjustme.com) completely, but back up now (as of a few minutes ago). Our domain wasn't even resolving; we use Cloudflare for frontend and DNS.

We had a surge of people checking if Discord was down on our site, then I noticed everything went down shortly after. Discord is still the top check right now.

I can't ever remember hitting these kind of traffic numbers before.

<comment><USER25> I enjoy your service. Have you ever thought about expanding your offerings? I would love to see a recreation of "Internet Pulse"

<comment><USER24> Thanks! Yep, we have a lot of things on the todo. We want to add more user- focused / location-based outage information since our site is still too reliant on simple HTTP checks to report downtime. This is especially a problem with a Discord outage, for example, where the frontend website is not down, but there might be problems with the API, apps, or other components.

And I'd like to be able to have our site communicate outages like this Cloudflare one, where more than one site might be affected by a larger provider. Automating that is difficult.

This is still a side project, though, so I mostly work on it when I get the urge :)

<comment><USER25> That would be pretty interesting. Being able to drill down into individual pieces of a stack would be very informative, especially from a parent source. I bet a lot of services would even have that information readily available in their documentation for APIs.

How comfortable are you with open source? If you were willing to release your stack on Gitlab/Github, it might be worth your while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Something's wonky, because it's not _just_ Cloudflare. One of my personal sites is down that uses nothing but a VPS, and I noticed my Unifi AP disconnect from its controller a little bit ago. Fiber cut? Routing issues?

<comment><USER27> If that VPS is on DO they're down too cause of CF. Or if you set the resolver on your VPS to 126.96.36.199 that's also down.

<comment><USER26> Why are digital ocean VPSes down due to a Cloudflare outage? Hoping for a clarifying post mortem...

<comment><USER28> My Digital Ocean load balancer went down. I think there's probably some internal routing? Would be interested to understand more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> We can't keep going on like this. The vulnerability of centralised internet infrastructure is a huge problem for everyone. Somebody, somewhere, really ought to sort it all out

<comment><USER30> 10-20 minute router misconfigurations and subsequent fixes are sometimes a fact of life. big network infrastructure is complicated, and sometimes the best laid route tables of mice and men do go abloop and die.

Outages happen no matter what the infrastructure is. There's no solution, they're just something you need to recognize and handle, which Cloudflare seemingly did relatively quickly here.

<comment><USER31> Yes, but other providers are not a single point of failure for a significant percentage of the internet.

Level 3 or Telia going offline is perfectly survivable for any customer who has multiple upstreams.

<comment><USER32> Remember the big Dyn outage? Or when AWS-US-East was severely disrupted by a hurricane?

It may perhaps be an exaggeration to say that there are not other providers that are similarly critical for a significant percentage of the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Yesterday I noticed most of their lava lamps are out (which generate random bits). Perhaps these are a critical component.

[https://photos.app.goo.gl/g6eR8V2PSY3EVjCLA](https://photos.app.goo.gl/g6eR8V2PSY3EVjCLA)

<comment><USER3> I'm sure you were joking but they actually are: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-in-production-the- nitty...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-in-production-the-nitty-gritty- technical-details/)

<comment><USER34> Despite them actually mixing it into their entropy pools, the lava lamps are still entirely for show. The noise of the camera sensor itself is going to contribute orders of magnitude more entropy than the slow movement of the lamps. It's not completely a fake stunt, but it's certainly headline- optimized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> A tweet from Cloudflare's CEO:

> _Appears that the router in Atlanta announced bad routes (effectively a > route leak). Only impacted our backbone. Not all of our PoPs are connected > to our backbone, so some would not have seen an issue. Appears to have > impacted about 50% of our traffic for a bit over 20 min._

[https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1284259895475236865](https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1284259895475236865)

</comment><comment><USER36> I am probably the only one who cares but even [https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/](https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/) is down

<comment><USER34> I personally find sites like [https://outage.report](https://outage.report) or [https://downdetector.com](https://downdetector.com) which tally up the number, regions and history of people saying it isn't working for them more conclusive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> That page still shows "Cloudflare System Status: All Systems Operational" for me, but it's _definitely_ down for me. Along with 188.8.131.52, which is... _bad_.

<comment><USER38> For me it says "Minor System Outage" for about 0.1s and then shows "All Systems Operational".

<comment><USER39> Everything works fine for me (Canada), am I missing something or is it over already?

<comment><USER40> Also in Canada. Shit's fucked, yo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Having DNS issues. Had to switch to Google's DNS (188.8.131.52/22.214.171.124) as 188.8.131.52/etc were not resolving anything.

<comment><USER42> Same. Even then, a bunch of sites are down. Maybe only ones behind Cloudflare? So far I've been trying to hit the various down detector sites and none of them will load. Google, Reddit, Hackernews are all fine.

<comment><USER43> From what little I've been able to gather, anything using Cloudflare's DNSes are down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Monday Morning RCA: "We pushed out some routine code updates, but this really weird thing happened causing a resource utilization spike on our DNS systems. Because of this other really weird thing, this affected all of our global infrastructure simultaneously. Here's a deep engineering dive into this one weird thing that brought everything down."

</comment><comment><USER45> Cloudflare's DNS (22.214.171.124) is failing to respond to most/all queries, which I'm observing as the root cause of a bunch of connection issues (name lookup failure).

Interestingly the same domains don't show up on google's (18.104.22.168) DNS at all.

<comment><USER27> 184.108.40.206 is a caching resolver, it still needs to talk to CF's nameservers for authoritative records.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Lol, talk about timing. I'm currently working on a TLS library and was pulling my hair out trying to figure out why tests against CF sites suddenly failed. Can't even ask my cohorts on Discord because they are behind CF, too!

<comment><USER47> No kidding! We had literally deployed a major page redesign and started watching our analytics drop off on it's way to zero. My heart is racing still. I wouldn't normally be happy for a cloudflare outage but in this case it's better than Google deciding to remove us from their index.

<comment><USER48> That's unfortunate timing dude. Good for you, it's probably not your mistake :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I can't change my NS records to point to a different DNS provider because my registrar, Namecheap, also uses Cloudflare. Didn't expect that.

</comment><comment><USER50> Yep, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean and 126.96.36.199 down for me. I thought it was my internet and was so confused for a bit there.

</comment><comment><USER51> Friendly reminder (and notes to myself):

Don't use Namecheap and Cloudflare at the same time.

Namecheap is using cloudflare. So if cloudflare is down, you can't change DNS settings on Namecheap as well!

</comment><comment><USER52> Reminder for firefox users: Firefox uses DNS over HTTPS and the default is cloudflare. If you're having DNS issues, you need to disable it until cloudflare is back up.

</comment><comment><USER53> Oopsie Daisy half the internet goes down

<comment><USER27> Eggs and baskets etc etc

<comment><USER54> Good DNS practice (at least when I did system admin 10 years ago) was ALWAYS having a secondary at some other location/network. Why do we just put some info in Cloudflare and call it good these days?

<comment><USER55> It's hard to use Cloudflare as a reverse proxy without using them as your delegated name servers (maybe you can use CNAMEs on paid plans?), and fancy dynamic nameservers make it hard to run secondary servers with zone transfers.

<comment><USER54> This is definitely the answer I needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> What luck, I chose today to install a new piece of network gear. I thought I had managed to totally FUBAR my network. DNS was failing, "ping 1.1" (my current goto test "Am I connected to the internet?" as it requires the fewest keystrokes and hits the Cloudflare DNS 22.214.171.124) failed and I just assumed it was _my_ fault. Backed out my changes, and discover in fact, the internet was down.

<comment><USER57> Ping 1.1... thanks for that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I was trying to fix my router the last 15 minutes :)

<comment><USER59> Same here. Only figured it out because just one of the computers uses Cloudflare dns and the others were fine...

<comment><USER60> Ditto except visa versa. My machine is set to the router which uses cloudflare. Other machines use whatever is default for mac(I try not to touch those). Once I realized they were working and I could access internal network from outside, I started diagnosing DNS. Came here via 126.96.36.199.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Our TPU management page is also down: [https://www.tensorfork.com/tpus](https://www.tensorfork.com/tpus)

Seems cloudflare took out a good chunk of the internet temporarily.

Doesn't HN use cloudflare? Why did it survive? (I haven't looked for about a year, but I seem to remember HN being proxied behind CF at one point.)

<comment><USER62> Is there a status page for HN?

<comment><USER61> EDIT: Yes: [https://twitter.com/HNStatus](https://twitter.com/HNStatus)

HN is so reliable that's it's almost never needed one. I'm extremely curious how HN survived this; almost positive they used cloudflare at one point.

I think the official status page is @hnstatus on Twitter, or something like that.

<comment><USER63> They did use Cloudflare, but also haven't for some time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Is it me, or has this been happening way too frequently for them lately?

<comment><USER12> Honestly at their scale once a decade would be too frequent. Too many eggs in this particular basket.

<comment><USER65> Once a decade doesn't seem realistic. At some point you get diminishing returns chasing as many mines as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Appears to be working for me now

; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> discordapp.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<\- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 8092 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION: ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;discordapp.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION: discordapp.com. 140 IN A 22.214.171.124 discordapp.com. 140 IN A 188.8.131.52 discordapp.com. 140 IN A 220.127.116.11 discordapp.com. 140 IN A 220.127.116.11 discordapp.com. 140 IN A 22.214.171.124

;; Query time: 69 msec ;; SERVER: 126.96.36.199#53(184.108.40.206) ;; WHEN: Fri Jul 17 14:37:40 PDT 2020 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 137

</comment><comment><USER66> 22.214.171.124 is not resolving anything for me at this time.

</comment><comment><USER67> For people who reports this is down, which country are you in? Because all the reported sites works flawless from Norway (Europe) :-)

<comment><USER67> I put my bet on some peering fuckups, causing outrages since people are having packet loss etc.

<comment><USER67> "Update - This afternoon we saw an outage across some parts of our network. It was not as a result of an attack. It appears a router on our global backbone announced bad routes and caused some portions of the network to not be available. We believe we have addressed the root cause and are monitoring systems for stability now. Jul 17, 22:09 UTC" \- [https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/](https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> > * This afternoon we saw an outage across some parts of our network. It was > not as a result of an attack. It appears a router on our global backbone > announced bad routes and caused some portions of the network to not be > available. We believe we have addressed the root cause and are monitoring > systems for stability now.* Jul 17, 22:09 UTC

</comment><comment><USER69> A lot of unusual internal traffic seems to be around Thailand (you might have to select "UNUSUAL"):

[https://www.digitalattackmap.com/#anim=1&color=0&country=ALL...](https://www.digitalattackmap.com/#anim=1&color=0&country=ALL&list=1&time=18458&view=map)

<comment><USER70> been pretty large numbers from thailand this month according to that tool

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Update - This afternoon we saw an outage across some parts of our network. It was not as a result of an attack. It appears a router on our global backbone announced bad routes and caused some potions of the network to not be available. We believe we have addressed the root cause and monitoring systems for stability now.

</comment><comment><USER72> Their status page says that everything is operational. So much for a status page when half of the internet breaks down.

</comment><comment> rv-de What I found particularly interesting is that my MacBook Pro (work laptop) didn't start up anymore properly and I wasn't able to start applications ... sorry, but wtf. Now I hate Apple and their shitty, overpriced products even more.

</comment><comment><USER73> What was interesting and scary is that our monitoring system didn't notify us. Our email was down because we use cloudflare for DNS and our monitoring provider's SMS gateway was down. So we didn't get sms messages.

</comment><comment><USER74> Another useless status site.

DNS is completely broken.

"All systems operational" in nice soothing green.

No, not so much.

</comment><comment><USER64> FYI, PagerDuty is not loading!

Time to go back to the drawing board, for a lot of us, to re-assess points of failure.

Edit: many websites are failing to DNS resolve but the services they provide continue to function fine behind the curtain.

<comment><USER75> This is likely your computer's DNS resolver (if you're using 126.96.36.199 you're down. I'd switch to 220.127.116.11 temporarily. We've had pagerduty alerts coming in since the start (a whole bunch of DNS errors from pingdom) and when I click on the slack link, pagerduty works for me

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Interestingly this seemed to only affect resolver service. I use Cloudflare pretty extensively on all my sites, but only in DNS mode (no CDN / proxy). The hosts continued to resolve fine during the outage (following root DNS resolution chain, no recursive resolver involved). I imagine their CDN internally uses their resolver service which explains the outages, and some unrelated 3rd parties who don't use CF on their domain at all still created a hard dependency on CF by using their recursive DNS server.

</comment><comment><USER77> Those poor Firefox users who enabled DoH

</comment><comment><USER78> Happy Friday, everyone!

</comment><comment><USER79> Ironically [https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/](https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/) is also down. HA

</comment><comment><USER80> I'm having real problems with DNS, is this Cloudflare too? They say "All Systems Operational", so maybe not?

Half the damn internet is not currently resolving.

<comment><USER81> Yes, same here. Changed DNSs to level 3, all better now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> More like the Internet is down.

<comment><USER83> When you depend on a single company for much of the internet, such things happen :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Site that use Discord, Linode, Patreon, npmjs, DigitalOcean, Coinbase, Zendesk, Medium, Gitlab (502), Fiverr, Upwork, Udemy and many more including 18.104.22.168 dns down. Ref: [https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1284239374809395200?s=19](https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1284239374809395200?s=19)

<comment><USER85> Seeing a lot of people mentioning DO, but it has been up for me without any issues (small VPS in SF-2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> My Pagerduty's been blowing up so I tried to go to their dashboard to pause the notifications for now and pagerduty.com is down XD

</comment><comment><USER87> 340ms average latency to 220.127.116.11 and 47% packet loss. Many sites are down. But I guess that's the problem with CDNs.

</comment><comment><USER88> It's unfortunate that both the primary and secondary cloudflare DNS is down. I just switched my secondary to google.

This allows my internet to "work" during this time, but adds about 1s latency to resolutions. Presumably that's the time it takes my internal DNS resolver to try the secondary.

<comment><USER89> Considering running your own full resolver like unbound. Then you don't have to rely on a DNS provider like Google or Cloudflare. It's really nice not having the whole internet go down when Google or Cloudflare DNS is down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> DNS seems to be dead, if you have stuff in your cache and the site isn't low- TTL things still kinda work

<comment><USER91> Yeah this is absolutely killing us right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Looks like Digital Ocean is reporting an issue with their upstream provider:

[https://status.digitalocean.com/incidents/6wtmldty17g1](https://status.digitalocean.com/incidents/6wtmldty17g1)

As big as this is, any chance a major hub/backbone went down?

</comment><comment><USER93> I don't use Cloudflare, but I do notice Cloudflare services being down.

Right now, I can't get to my own website (hosted on DigitalOcean, not through Cloudflare), but Oh Dear claims it's up. So I suspect that the problem is closer to me than it is to DigitalOcean (or Cloudflare).

<comment><USER52> DO uses cloudflare for their DNS... both for digitalocean.com and for their DNS service.

<comment><USER93> Good to know! That makes perfect sense based on what I saw during the outage. I had no idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Aside from this one issue, is switching to 188.8.131.52 a good idea in your guys experience? Right now I just realized I hvae the DNS for my ISP which is probably how they inject bullshit 404 pages full of ads. What is the fastest/best public DNS in your guys experience?

<comment><USER94> I've been pretty happy with 188.8.131.52 (before now). Might be worth using something like 188.8.131.52 as a backup (Google).

<comment><USER95> You could also use 22.214.171.124 as your backup, if you're avoiding Google ([https://www.quad9.net](https://www.quad9.net))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> Looks like it's back. No longer getting issues with 220.127.116.11 and domains are being resolved!

<comment><USER97> Not for me, `dig @188.8.131.52 google.com` is returning SERVFAIL still. Their anycast config may be broken in some way (ie. the backends for some regions are down, but still advertising routes)

<comment><USER98> Resolved as of a minute ago, still having an issue now?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> I thought my issue was with Comcast, then I realized I'm using CF's DNS entries for my home network. I removed those 220.127.116.11 entries and some sites are working.

Dang, I'm pretty disappointed in CF. I've never experienced this much an effectful DNS outage.

</comment><comment><USER100> From what I can see externally this looks like DNS.

I wonder if that includes the roots that Cloudflare operate.

</comment><comment><USER101> It's worth mentioning here that 188.8.131.52 is also affected by this outage which initially made me think my internet was gone completely.

Changing back to an alternative (such as 126.96.36.199 from google) restored my access to the areas of the internet not using Cloudflare.

</comment><comment><USER23> This was especially bad because I use Cloudflare public DNS exclusively at my house and it went down as well. I didn't even think to check DNS, I just assumed it was AT&T being shiest AT&T.

I should probably run a blend of 18.104.22.168 with 220.127.116.11 instead.

</comment><comment><USER102> Last I read about 7 million hosts are behind Cloudflare. Maybe around 3% of the web, but who knows if that counts for critical assets etc rather than pages served.

Shameful that so much of our decentralised web is so centralised and breakable in one place.

</comment><comment><USER28> Just got a whole bunch of alerts that my services are down. Tried logging into Digital Ocean (who it seems uses Cloudflare) to get it fixed. Could not access their dashboard to reroute things.

</comment><comment><USER103> RIP someone's weekend

</comment><comment><USER104> Guess that explains Discord vanishing from the net a few minutes ago.

</comment><comment><USER105> I'm surprised so many people still use them. They took my business down (along with half the internet) a few years ago and I learned that they were to large of a point of failure.

</comment><comment><USER106> Ah Shit, Here We Go Again

</comment><comment><USER107> Vercel also appears to be dropping out and coming back in intermittently over the last 30 minutes or so. Not aware they're using Cloudflare, although they do mention using AWS.

</comment><comment><USER108> NextDNS got taken out by this, id been really happy with it up until now. And unfortunately "dns service went down" has a wide enough blast radius at home now that it's a real pain.

<comment><USER109> How did you verify that? I determined the issue was with Cloudflare's DNS by toggling on NextDNS, which worked and continues to.

<comment><USER108> Most of my devices went belly up and was trying to figure out what it might be (I run NextDNS on my router), switched off to cell and noticed discord was down too so started thinking about NextDNS. I toggled dns to google and noticed it immediately work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> this is great, i already have bad enough internet (rural area with 3 to 6 digits latency and average 4 digits, barely a few kilobytes of speed) and having both google smearing everywhere their recaptchas that are not really friendly toward low speed internet / non chrome users and cloudflare proxying half the internet but lately not really doing a great job at keeping a consistent uptime does not help much

at least i am glad hn exists, it is the only thing that loads everywhere

</comment><comment><USER111> I was trying to play video games but couldn't connect. Amazing how connected the web is now - one big hub goes down and brings the whole house of cards down with it.

</comment><comment><USER112> Did anyone else see their ATT internet go down? The DNS issues started and then the Pace 5268AC rebooted. I don't use cloudflare for dns. Does ATT's backend?

<comment><USER113> On the contrary, ATT actually squats on the CloudFlare DNS IP address. IIRC that modem is one of the affected ones where it uses 18.104.22.168/24 internally. You shouldn't even be able to use CloudFlare DNS normally.

<comment><USER112> Thank you for the response and information. Unhappy coincidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER114> It shows "Minor system outage" when I load the page, but it switches to "All systems operational" immediately. Same behaviour on several attempts.

</comment><comment><USER27> The status page linked shows "All Systems Operational" for me. Tested in private browsing and on my mobile.

Looks like DNS issues, their nameservers aren't reachable.

</comment><comment><USER115> A lot of people are saying AWS. I'm having intermittent network connectivity issues intra-AZ, so perhaps they lost a data center or route flapped one.

</comment><comment><USER116> What's all this about "building a better internet"? Wide-reaching general service outages that are invisible to your status page are really not great.

<comment><USER117> I wonder if they'll cover why their status page is a steaming pile of garbage in the post-mortem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER118> Yesterday CloudFlare took down some of our products because they (not us) misconfigured some DNS thing. Kind of funny to see it happen again a day later.

</comment><comment><USER119> This is hitting my production environments as well :-(

</comment><comment><USER120> Twitch.tv channels are like 50/50 right now. Some are ok, some aren't.

Basically all Riot Games (League, Valorant, TFT) are down, dunno about LoR.

</comment><comment><USER121> That would explain why Patreon is down. I was going to post a little frog I took a picture of on Lens. Went down just as I opened the app.

</comment><comment> rob-olmos Hopefully with this outage Cloudflare will finally provide non-Enterprise plans a CNAME record, allowing us to quickly bypass Cloudflare.

</comment><comment><USER122> Thought I was going crazy for a second.

This affects so many things it's scary, and Cloudflare status page has still not updated. HN got there first.

</comment><comment><USER123> Interesting. They had an outage in the midst of a negotiation I was a part of. Are they less stable than Akamai and the others?

</comment><comment><USER124> My modem also disconnected with signal problems, which was interesting. I'm not sure Cloudflare could have caused that?

<comment><USER70> maybe your modem uses 126.96.36.199 dns?

</comment></comment><comment><USER125> I was paying a bill in a bar in London about an hour ago and they couldn't process any payments. Seems likely related.

</comment><comment><USER126> Must be regional or some other factor involved. Various sites others are reporting as offline load for me as does 184.108.40.206.

</comment><comment><USER127> Oh, did hacker season just start? * Grabbing popcorn! * So this was an accident, or is it connected to the Twitter hack?

</comment><comment><USER128> Will we take this as a much needed lesson about putting all of the internet's eggs into one basket? Probably not.

</comment><comment><USER64> WebGazer.io managed to shoot me an email about my site being down. This in spite of their site being down too.

<comment><USER129> Hi @heliodor, WebGazer founder Gokhan here :)

Actually the site is running but not accessible due to the issue. Glad you got the heads up, after a while I had to pause monitoring to prevent side effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER130> Yup. 126.96.36.199 stopped responding as well.

</comment><comment><USER131> DNS resolution at 22.214.171.124 seems to have gone down and come back up for me in the course of 10-15 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER132> Also breaking a bunch of deploys because npm and yarn are heavily dependent on Cloudflare, it would seem.

</comment><comment><USER133> Remind me to check and see that I have 220.127.116.11 and 220.127.116.11 on my networks, not just one or the other..

</comment><comment><USER134> It's back now (at least for me).

</comment><comment><USER135> The uptime tool I use (StatusCake) is itself down... Was wondering why I didn't get an alert.

</comment><comment><USER136> Seem to be localized issue. Cloudflare is up here in my country, but down for many people in US.

</comment><comment><USER137> People talk about a single point of failure then go on to depend on a single point of failure.

</comment><comment><USER138> The status page is now showing degraded performance for the Cloudflare API and Recursive DNS.

</comment><comment><USER139> Cloudflare status site is also partially down. Some resources are not loading properly.

</comment><comment> kube-system Of course, I read this _after_ I spend an hour debugging some strange DNS issues.

</comment><comment><USER140> Thank you for the early Friday.

</comment><comment><USER141> I noticed Udemy was down when I wanted to go to the next video I was watching.

<comment><USER141> And now it's back up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER142> I can only see the dashboard down, all my sites with Cloudflare are up.

</comment><comment><USER143> Looks like it's resolved -- we're coming back up at Repl.it.

</comment><comment><USER144> Cloudflare DNS is down too

</comment><comment><USER145> Is this US specific? Everything seems to work fine here in Europe.

</comment><comment><USER146> Centralising on a single host suddenly not a good idea any more?

</comment><comment><USER147> Seems like they managed to break half the internet for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER148> how can I have cloudflare plus something else as a DNS failover? We are afraid to set a long TTL and have our IP changed for some reason. What do you guys recommend?

</comment><comment><USER149> DNS is also (partially) down with my ISP (xs4all.nl) it seems

</comment><comment><USER150> Ironic, isitdownrightnow.com is down.

All my DigitalOcean instances are down.

</comment><comment><USER151> Yep, the DoorDash app is affected currently, my burritos!

</comment><comment><USER152> Finally we see how much we depend on this single company.

</comment><comment><USER153> Looks like it's starting to come back in the SE US.

</comment><comment><USER154> Boats. People. Stop putting them in one single boat.

</comment><comment><USER155> Back online for me.

</comment><comment><USER99> Dns issues for sure

</comment><comment><USER156> Well, sheit. This is all around the world. Press F.

</comment><comment><USER157> Seems to work again for me in germany (Frankfurt)

</comment><comment><USER158> League of Legends down too, not sure if related.

</comment><comment><USER152> Most pages mentioned here seem functional again.

</comment><comment><USER159> So THAT is why the Internet was acting weirdly!

</comment><comment><USER160> DNS seems to be resolving for me in the UK now

</comment><comment><USER161> Back online just now for me in Midwestern US.

</comment><comment><USER162> 2:36 PM PST - status.discord.com is back up.

</comment><comment><USER155> NPM is down too.

</comment><comment><USER163> Seems like it's starting to come back.

</comment><comment><USER164> Was wondering why my DNS wasn't working...

</comment><comment><USER20> digitalocean.com DNS (on cloudflare) is now resolving again. looks like several things are coming back now.

</comment><comment><USER165> I was having troubles with overleaf.com

</comment><comment><USER166> How does Cloudflare compare to Akamai?

</comment><comment><USER167> Ironically StatusCake is down as well.

</comment><comment><USER168> who deployed on a friday afternoon?

</comment><comment><USER169> Cedexis gets another lease on life

</comment><comment><USER170> Jesus. Does anyone know anything?

</comment><comment><USER171> Having issues with gitlab myself

</comment><comment><USER172> Seems like it's back right?

</comment><comment><USER173> Can confirm for taskade.com

</comment><comment><USER174> Friday

</comment><comment><USER164> 188.8.131.52 is back for me now

</comment><comment><USER175> League of Legends, Valorant and Discord both down. I took today off to play games...

</comment><comment><USER176> Felt like a BGP issue.

</comment><comment><USER177> Looks like CF is up!

</comment><comment><USER18> Some POPs are fine.

</comment><comment><USER178> Five nines uptime?

</comment><comment><USER40> Back online here.

</comment><comment><USER179> the internet was built

to withstand a nuclear war

brought down by cloud flares

</comment><comment><USER180> lmao it even took down my local stack

</comment><comment><USER181> hn algolia search broken

<comment><USER182> yes hn.algolia.com is powered by Cloudflare /o\

</comment></comment><comment><USER183> more like Cloudflared

</comment><comment><USER184> itch.io down

isitdownrightnow.com down

</comment><comment><USER185> yes

</comment><comment><USER186> Given that the US is basically in a non-shooting war with China, I wonder if this is something technical or part of some kind of attack. Something that I'd keep in mind.

<comment><USER187> There are enough ways for bits of the Internet to go kablooey on their own that "it's an attack!" is a pretty big jump to a conclusion. If this turns out to be something other than Cloudflare tripping over a weird bug, my first guess would be that someone fat-fingered a BGP table yet again.

<comment><USER187> Update: Yep, BGP issue, though I was thinking it would be something on the public Internet rather than CF's backbone.</comment></comment></comment>


Play "Take Away" - <AUTHOR> http://www.erickarjaluoto.com/blog/play-take-away/

<comment><AUTHOR> We're doing this with the sites we build, and I felt the approach worth sharing. It's all too easy to add more; but the best designed experiences are often that way, as a result of what the creators took away.</comment>


Maurice Sendak Picture Book Discovered - <AUTHOR> https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/74181-new-sendak-picture-book-discovered.html <comment><USER2> For those unfamiliar, a great Maurice Sendak interview is with Stephen Colbert:

[http://www.cc.com/video-clips/gzi3ec/the-colbert-report- grim...](http://www.cc.com/video-clips/gzi3ec/the-colbert-report-grim- colberty-tales-with-maurice-sendak-pt--1)

No interview discussion complete without mention of the true master Terry Gross:

[http://www.npr.org/2011/12/29/144077273/maurice-sendak-on- li...](http://www.npr.org/2011/12/29/144077273/maurice-sendak-on-life-death- and-childrens-lit)

</comment><comment><USER3> I grew up in the town he lived in and he would participate in the yearly school book fairs. I loved his books as a child - but as a child would. As an adult introducing my children to them, I find them even more refreshing and meaningful.

<comment><USER4> He was also known as a bit of a terror in Ridgefield.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Call me jaded, but whenever I hear a book from a famous and long-deceased author has "been discovered", I assume that it has been known for decades but the publisher only now thought it would be economically propitious to make it available. That is, after all, what we have seen innumerable times in the case of Tolkien and many classic science-fiction writers.

<comment><USER6> For Tolkien, at least, none of his posthumous books are accurately described the way you characterize them.

<comment><USER5> Not so. The material in "Unfinished Tales" was known since at least immediately after Tolkien's death, but publication was delayed for years until "The Silmarillion" had been published and allowed to soak up bestseller attention for a while first. The same is true of "The Tale of Beren and Lúthien", which Christopher Tolkien was aware of all those years since his father's death, but it was decided to save them for a rainy day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Didn't ring a bell with me 'til Wikipedia. He's the illustrator of _Where the wild things are_ ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Sendak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Sendak)

<comment><USER8> Also the author ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This made me smile. Great to read something nice like this for once. We pretty much grew up on his books in the school system here.</comment>


Password fatigue - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - daniel-cussen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_fatigue "20% of customer service calls are password-related."
Adding passwords to a site would make customer service increase 25%.  This is brutal considering it's hard to automate, and according to Joel Spolsky, one of the first jobs a startup hands to a dude who works on an hourly wage.
Then there's the larger cost of turning users away. <comment><AUTHOR> This is a perfect example of where the theory/practice divide comes back to bite us. In THEORY enforced entropy, scheduled changes, "blind" passwords that don't echo back a character, etc. all make our users way safer. In practice, most of the time they just piss them off and the users just recycle the same "entropic-enough" passwords on all sites, which they rotate through whenever bothered to do so.

Users haven't read the security texts and, if they have, they probably don't care.

Which isn't to say we SHOULDN'T design systems like that, it just means that we shouldn't be surprised when users circumvent our well-intentioned password policies.</comment>


Learning to code?  Tired of feeling stupid?  Try Bloc (use code 'LNCH') - <AUTHOR> http://www.trybloc.com/

<comment><USER2> Why would I give my email address to someone in exchange for something I know _nothing_ about, and cannot find any info about?

<comment><USER3> Use a throwaway. It is worth checking out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those of you wondering what exactly this site is/does:

It seems to be a ruby set of ruby tutorials/lessons. There is a quick tutorial on how to use the interface (pretty simple). Then you're presented with 3 tabbed panes:

\- your goal/task

\- your editing area

\- the output of your code (complete with ruby error msg if present)

I've completed the first couple of tutorials and it seems to be fun. However, I STRONGLY suggest the creators put some more info up to incite people to actually sign up. I had no idea what I was giving my email address for.

</comment><comment><USER5> On the first letter of the invite code entry fields, I see a box character, as if there's a character that I don't have on my system.

I took a look, and I saw a whole bunch of this in the CSS:

        .first:before{
            content:"\e04c"
        }

        .last:before{
            content:"\e04d"
        }

        .fullscreen:before{
            content:"\e04e"
        }

        .fullscreen_alt:before{
            content:"\e04f"
        }

        .fullscreen_exit:before{
            content:"\e050"
        }

        .fullscreen_exit_alt:before{
            content:"\e051"
        }

        .equalizer:before{
            content:"\e052"
        }

I wonder why they're adding a bunch of private use area character in the CSS? It's not like there's a custom font on the page that uses those characters. The only thing it can do is cause problems for people, like me, who must have some font on their system that covers one of those characters.

</comment><comment><USER6> I still remember the first time I opened teamtreehouse.com, you immediately get a sense what the website will do for you if you sign up. This is very vague and I am not willing to provide my e-mail.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the layout, the 3 tabbed areas are intuitive.

Is it aimed at complete beginners?

The tasks were easy but the videos made them sound hard or described actions using vague terms. After completing a chapter I didn't feel rewarded just a little confused. The feeling of progress & logic is a key essence of learning to code.

What you explain in the videos doesn't quite link with the task so I think for a total novice it would be confusing.

Just a few points compared to other in-browser coding tuts that I've tried in the past.

I found the video tough to see what you were typing even with the vid at full screen. The text on the sketches was also a little small.

Success message should be clearer. I only could tell I had got a chapter right by the green tick, the 'success' message was " Your app should respond to web requests. Display "awesome" somewhere on the page" - (even though I had written "My awesome URL shortener") I was left feeling as though I had missed something.

The errors it throws up when you get things wrong don't point the user in the right direction. e.g

"RSpec::Expectations::ExpectationNotMetError: expected #has_selector?("title") to return true, got false"

The clicking/highlighting of text on your example pages during the video gets really distracting, especially for users who will watch the videos several times over.

I think if you refine the videos a little more it will become a great resource. Even if they become a little scripted it becomes more formal structured learning and less friend to friend chatter.

I'll keep checking back to see what other stuff you add!

</comment><comment><USER8> I played around with this for a bit, it seems okay.

It seems to me like a potentially better way to do it would be more so in a Khan Academy style of doing things, where there's a video that you follow along with, and maybe have your text editor in a separate window so that people can work on the code while watching the video, and then exercises that you do after the tutorial video that people can comment on and get help with from other users and the creator potentially.

I personally think net.tutsplus.com does a pretty good job at this, but I think your site could do it better if it offered a more personal experience.

</comment><comment><USER9> I know I'm going to get flak for this but I have to wonder and ask: Even though I know it's 'new' and in 'beta', but just from the login page, I can already feel the effort and care to go into the design – alot of custom graphics and colors, especially the lessons themselves. But then I start the second lesson, I see the dreaded blue button. Yeah, that button. My eyes were having such a grand time too! Why leave the default button in there when everything else looks great :(

Back to finishing up the lessons, everything else is great!

</comment><comment><USER10> Is feeling stupid so bad? Must everything be fun and game-ish these days? Hard things are hard; learning to code is hard, I'll give you that.

Maybe I've just been taken aback recently by the number of "learn to code" sites recently, but if you don't love it, no amount of "fun and easy and social and badges!" is gonna make you stick with it.

That being said... for people who do, in fact, love coding, this (and the others) may be an excellent resource for learning, so good on you. It's not my method of choice, but who am I?

</comment><comment><USER11> I think this is a great product. Just out of curiosity and if the co-founders see this comment, how often do you think you'll be releasing new courses to learn? Great job otherwise!

<comment><USER12> We've been focused on our launch (demo prep, design) but expect to see many more lessons in the coming weeks.

<comment><USER11> Awesome! That sounds great; thanks so much!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can't see what my code does; I can only see the test results. I find this really off putting, and I don;t really get a sense of creating code that does something.

RSpec::Mocks::MockExpectationError: # received :puts with unexpected arguments expected: ("Hello, world!") got: ("") Is not the sort of error I'd expect someone learning to program to find helpful.

The second exercise needs me to watch a video, and I personally hate learning from watching videos so I stopped there.

</comment><comment><USER14> So learning how to code _something_ is the opposite of not feeling stupid?

Since when learning to code is something everybody HAS to do nowadays? Let's all also learn how to use a crane or how to perform surgery and get badges while we're at it.

<comment><USER15> Programming is unique in that it applies to a huge variety of information related tasks...which ate fairly ubiquitous these days. I'd love it if everyone learned to program at least at to the level that most learn typing and word processing

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very cool. For those of us who already know how to code, I think this would be fantastic way to learn new languages and platforms. I hope more of the advanced courses are on the horizon.

</comment><comment><USER17> Fun stuff.

In chapter 1 of the Url shortener, the task is to display "Awesome" at the root path, but the validator checks for "awesome." Took me a second to notice the discrepancy.

</comment><comment><USER18> Erk, guess you are being slammed. All I get (once signed up) is: <http://cl.ly/1S2N1S3E3F0C0u1q1M2C>

<comment><USER18> Oh interesting, its actually due to JS errors...

        application-71068890f8bda49419c67853f237bf0a.js:23 Uncaught SyntaxError: Variable 'a' has already been declared

        course-771fc9e799f30f078b9e4dba51fba678.js:1 Uncaught ReferenceError: CodeView is not defined

        course-771fc9e799f30f078b9e4dba51fba678.js:1 Uncaught TypeError: Object #<KontagentApi> has no method 'trackEvent'

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is excellent. Teaches tests first... I'll be sharing. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is this site intended for newbies?, I can give my opinion as one.

<comment><USER21> We would love to hear all opinions. Message me or post here.</comment></comment>


Vote to have Atlassian's Confluence trial back at $5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlassian.com/starter/its-over.jsp

<comment><USER2> We're using Confluence, Crucible, Fisheye, and Jira at our non-profit startup (no one says profits have to be all about the money :) and can't praise them highly enough. They're must-haves and motivate quality software development.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hate that I missed announcement... My usability-expert friend speaks highly of its collaborative features. I sure wouldn't mind test-driving it for a year for $5 ... so if any of you are willing to put in a vote on that link it'd save us a bundle - and maybe give a boost to a still-young start-up.</comment>


Announcing the New York Times Congress API - <AUTHOR> http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/introducing-the-congress-api/

<comment><USER2> Sweet. Now cross-reference this against OpenSecrets and we're getting somewhere.

Then, if we can just get version tracking on the edits to bills we might find some fascinating correlations. The politicians would probably be partial to git, the Senate being full of them.

<comment><USER3> The WaPo has this already: <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/> [Edit: I was wrong; it does not include contribution data. Boo.]

(Adrian Holovaty did this when he was there.)

<comment><USER4> I maintain this Congress app and others. Contributer data would be nice, but it's not something we're currently planning.

Ideas welcome anytime, though. They all go on the big todo list that makes us feel tiny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is cool.

I used Hpricot to parse the House floor feed a couple months back, but it slid to the side as more important tasks came up. Maybe I should get back to that old side project...

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, this is really really nice. I've been waiting for something like this for a very long time. I had plans a while ago to make a website and rss feed which would inform you of upcoming votes, and vote decisions made by your congressperson and locally elected officials. This would allow you to be informed on the issues you care about, as well as being able to quickly send notice to the elected official before a vote takes place, either through thumbs up/down, quick comments, twitter, SMS, etc.

If done well, the site would become a treasure trove of information on the concerns in particular districts thus enabling any would be competitor to quickly campaign on the issues that a district cares about. Thus ensuring that the representative is working for the people, otherwise a competitor would quickly arise with their campaign points generated for them, as well as where they should stress those points.

Now that the times has this API maybe I'll get started...

</comment><comment><USER7> Something similar to this has been available for a while on <http://www.govtrack.us>

The entire website is open source, including the data files(and some of the tools used to gather/create the data files) so if you require something more powerful than the api provides you can create it yourself.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's stuff like this made me sad to hear they'll be re-mortgaging their building.

</comment><comment><USER9> I find it interest that a commercial organization like the NYT is doing this.

In the UK there are a number of projects like this, mostly headed up by one group. Mysociety (<http://www.mysociety.org/>) have set up sites to see what your MP does in Parliament, write to your MP, work with local government to get potholes fixed, etc.

While it's good that the NYT are providing tools as well, I like the idea that Barrack might invest money in more small Web 2.0 style NGOs like mysociety.org in the U.S. to help get e-gov moving.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> How restrictive is 5000 queries a day on a scale from 1 to 10?

<comment><USER10> If you outgrow 5000 queries per day, I'm sure you could negotiate for more.</comment></comment>


Things I learned from my startup journey - <AUTHOR> Startups are the best educational institutions to learn about business, technology, life, people, and the world. You'll get lifetime worth of knowledge in mere years of building a startup.
Here I've noted down the learnings I got from building startups, back since when I started my first business at age 12. I hope this will help aspiring and current entrepreneurs in their startup journey.
https://www.arbob.me/startup-learnings/ <comment><USER2> A few years ago my friend and I had planned to start a new textile venture, initially, in the short run there are no much so returns on investments, investors also lost their confidence, and we had experienced the major downfall of sales too. The textile industry generally takes time to get penetrated in the market but we found it difficult to use quality material for the product as we had a low budget, could not think of expensive marketing strategies, And the logo of our company was also not so attractive. we began to look for investors. I came across some customized reports with in-depth analysis( Alcor funds) of our textile venture. I changed my value proposition, product-market fit, team management etc... It took us an extra 3 years to get on track and to get everything in order. Maybe it can save you time.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.arbob.me/startup-learnings/](https://www.arbob.me/startup- learnings/)

</comment><comment><USER2> The 35 points that are mentioned in the article are really helpful and motivating, could you also share your experiences of funds and investments.

<comment><AUTHOR> The only thing I can advise anyone in the funding aspect is to try to avoid as much as possible, at least until you get PMF. If you try to raise funds before that, then you'll be disappointed most of the time. Fundraising takes time. A lot of time. Better spend it improving the product.</comment></comment>