Mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-46898211 <comment><USER2> Very interesting! I had something that sounds similar to this a couple of years ago.

My Spotify had a new music "Device" listed with a weird name. Frequently the device would be selected and a song I'd never heard of would start playing, with no sound as it went to the rogue music device.

On my Spotify account I could see a new linked application that I hadn't ever setup. I deleted it, kicked out any logins that Spotify allowed me to do and the problem went away for a day or so. Then it magically reappeared!

When I set up my account I did so with my Facebook account. At one point, IIRC, you could have an account created via Facebook but that meant you always had to log in using Facebook. They later changed this to allow you to set a password and use either.

Assuming the worst I secured my Facebook account (password change/revoking access/etc). No luck. What _did_ work was setting up a proper Spotify password. I'd always logged in with Facebook and never bothered changing the password when they added that feature. Once I changed it I could delete the application, kick out any applications, and then it never came back.

Complete speculation: When Spotify allowed Facebook linked accounts to have a separate password, they generated me a password that was "guessable" and someone used it to access my account?

<comment><USER3> This literally happened to me. Unfortunately with both FB and Alexa. It's concerning to say the least

<comment><USER4> Well, concerning... I mean, it's Spotify, not your email account.

<comment><USER5> It is still their data.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps disorienting is a better word. It's really strange to see someone else play music on your account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's quite clear to me that this s a fraud to make money. Those tracks are produced by algorithms and played via access tokens gathered from sites like the playlist converters floating around. Be wary of your account data and check the access of 3rd party apps regularly.

[https://support.spotify.com/uk/account_payment_help/privacy/...](https://support.spotify.com/uk/account_payment_help/privacy/revoke- access-from-3rd-party-app/) for information how to do that for Spotify.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if those tracks have actually been played or if someone just found a way to game the play counters. Lesson for anyone who ponders the idea of open monetization models (the every-popular vision of giving X per month and having it automatically split up and distributed to creators proportionally to actual consumption): there will be bad actors trying to cheat.

PS: why is your username so perfectly on topic?

<comment><USER6> Haha, yeah, it really is! ;)

The other one is a good question as well. Spotify pays out when a song has been listened to for at least 30 seconds. This has been abused in the past as well: [https://qz.com/1212330/a-bulgarian-scheme-scammed-spotify- fo...](https://qz.com/1212330/a-bulgarian-scheme-scammed-spotify- for-1-million-without-breaking-a-single-law/)

The article says it is not clear if the fraudsters abused existing user accounts or set up a farm. But apparently, the songs have been played. They all were exactly 30 seconds long - this is the minimum play time for a song to qualify for a payout.

<comment><USER7> > They all were exactly 30 seconds

Talk about easy to spot! Maybe the defensive team is deliberately keeping their countermeasures low-profile (don't block anything except payout) to make it harder for attackers to iteratively adapt? Similar to the way shadowbanning is magnitudes more effective than banning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This happened to me - apparently I spent 34 hours last year listening to a song called "Bear Claws" by an artist called Andrew Brady. I did some digging and all I could find was an Irish guy on Twitter with 2 tweets to his name. The song and the artist no longer existed on Spotify last time I checked. The odd thing is that these songs never seem to show up in my play history.

I did link Spotify to Facebook at one point, although I disabled all of my external apps on the Facebook side a long time ago and have used my username / password to log in ever since. I've never used a "playlist converter" or linked anything else to Spotify, as far as I know. My password has always been unique.

It should go without saying that if these access tokens have been breached they really should be revoked. I imagine Spotify will finally do something about it now that this has hit the mainstream press.

<comment><USER6> Did you disable your external apps or check them on the Spotify side as well?

[https://support.spotify.com/uk/account_payment_help/privacy/...](https://support.spotify.com/uk/account_payment_help/privacy/revoke- access-from-3rd-party-app/) for instructions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of a brief period (1 to 2 months) that I went through with Spotify where I'd always open my Spotify to find it playing some random music that I'd never heard of before. Usually some generic "Ibiza mix" stuff or something.

Yet, I tried everything to stop it, assuming I had my account compromised: I logged out all devices, changed my password, but nothing changed until one day it randomly stopped.

They did not change anything at all on my Spotify account, it's as if they just used my account to play music somewhere else. They also never hijacked it while I was using it to try and play their music, it was only when I'd log on it would be playing some other music.

<comment><USER10> It didn't show eg "now playing on Nexus" (or something like that)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Funny, to me this sounds like a hash collision. (For a map key, not the cryptographic kind.)

Knowing only that Spotify is a large distributed system, and seeing that the mystery tracks are short in title and length, as well as plentiful, it feels like a these tracks are ending up as collisions in a distributed hash table.

From there it'd be a matter of bubbling up top due to sorting order properties.

<comment><USER12> Are you suggesting that spotify is somewherre using a hash-table without a collision resolution method (like a linked list).

Is that something that is done in some industries? Hash collisions to me has always been a performance problem not a correctness one.

<comment><USER11> Goodness me, no.

They could be fetching all values for a given key (for performance reasons, since the seek for a read is surprisingly expensive). Depending on how they then use that data, these short and plentiful tracks can end up being included instead of dropped.

<comment><USER12> Sorry if I'm being obtuse but why would they be using a hash as a key instead of a uuid? I've never heard of any distributed system (or any system) that use hash as a key. Or are you saying there is somekind of auxiliary hash table in use for performance somewhere?

<comment><USER13> Is it not fair to say that git is a distributed system using a hash as a key?

<comment><USER12> I suppose it is. Though it's not the sort of systems I meant in my reply. Never even crossed my mind. P2P networks (like torrents) could probably also count as ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I guess it's like phone SPAM where you get a phone call from an overcharged number and they hope some of the called will ring back (and then be charged some euros or dollars).

Maybe they found a way to spam thousands of Spotify accounts, and hope that a part of them gonna try to listen some out of curiosity.

If there are enough doing that, they'll get royalties money from really played music, and not from pseudo played track, which might be what Spotify monitors

</comment><comment><USER15> Accounts are unquestionably being exploited (often via reused passwords). I, along with others I know, have found mystery people squatting in my family plan. I had assumed they were also what were contributing to these weird artists in my history, but perhaps not.

Why does Spotify still not have 2FA? I get that legacy connected devices will be a problem for them, but there are ways around that.

</comment><comment><USER16> To me it sounds like someone at Spotify messed up and ran dev experiments on the production system instead in the staging environment.

<comment><USER17> I initially thought the same but it's weird that some of these artists have twitter accounts. As far as I know Spotify doesn't have any twitter support, well, at least not on the current latest version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Could this be done if a bad actor finds a website that embeds the Spotify player/widget and also explicitly allows cross-origin requests?

</comment><comment><USER18> Recently mysteriously had all my playlists deleted and lots of tracks I never played had been played and weird playlists added in place of mine. Went and reset all 3rd party access and reinstated my playlists and it hasn't happened again since. I chalked it up to maybe logging in on someone elses mobile device while travelling to play my playlist and then forgetting and then they did it, but maybe it was bad actors over the internet. I'll never know.

</comment><comment><USER19>
        racking up thousands of listens and
        (perhaps) hundreds of pounds

I thought artists earn something like $5 per 1000 plays these days?

<comment><USER20> According to an expert in the article, you can expect almost double that.

"[...] one expert, Mark Mulligan of Midia Research, told BBC Trending radio that Bergenulo Five could have made about $500 to $600 (about £380 to £460) from 60,000 streams"

<comment><USER21> I love Spotify with two exceptions:

1\. They really need to pay their artists more

2\. They have no interest in their users organizing/tagging music, probably because they want more control over what plays next via algorithms/playlists

Both of these have now culminated in a malicious actor completely ruining the victim's user experience to make a couple hundred bucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Reused passwords that appears in breaches maybe?

<comment><USER20> Doesn't seem to be the case, as people have already tried changing their password.

From the article: >On Reddit, Callum Dixon wrote: "The same Bergenulo Five keeps being played on my account and I've tried everything - changed my password, logged out of everywhere. I can't stop it!"

<comment><USER6> Sounds like he enabled a shady 3rd party app on Spotify. Access tokens do not change when the password is changed.

<comment><USER13> Is that normal? Shouldn't they all be redacted when you change your password or is it a convenience feature that they are not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Maybe these are test accounts/artists created/used by Spotify developers? I don't know much about their culture but if there was an actual attack with actual consequences and these accounts were removed as a result, they would've said something.

</comment><comment><USER24> Something similar happens to me on YouTube 2-3 times per month.

I'll go to my subscriptions and there will be videos in there from channels that I never subscribed to, but I'm now subscribed.

</comment><comment><USER25> Off topic but somewhat related - my corporate overlords don't let us install anything on our workstations and the browsers we use are old and not supported by play.spotify.com.

Any bright ideas about how I can use spotify here?

<comment><USER10> On your account on your phone, make a playlist and download it (sth like "for offline use"), then go offline at work. Limits what you can listen to spontaneously, but you can simply take one of the "radios", copy to playlist, make offline at home so you download over wifi, then remove and repeat for each day. Nature finds a way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was hacked because at the time I set up a free account I used an old default password I'm pretty sure shows up in a leaked dataset. I suddenly noticed messages showing up that someone played music from a device I don't own. I changed my password and deleted all offline devices. It's entirely my fault, still it's odd that spotify wouldn't notify me of suspicious behaviour, since they kind of pay for it too.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is why I refuse to play the Discover Weekly playlist. I strongly believe that Spotify is getting money out of made up artists, with songs put up by algorithms in some way, and that's the best way to get them to you.

Regarding the 'hacking', it never happened to me, but it's easy to see how troublesome that may be. But that's what we get for trusting an application that promises to get us free music forever. It had to have drawbacks, eventually.

<comment><USER28> > This is why I refuse to play the Discover Weekly playlist. I strongly > believe that Spotify is getting money out of made up artists, with songs put > up by algorithms in some way, and that's the best way to get them to you.

Flesh this out for me, because it's hilarious. How are Spotify making money from that, exactly? I listen to Discover Weekly most weeks, and if Spotify is generating them, then:

A) They're creating some amazing music, so more power to them

B) They're putting a hell of a lot of work into creating back stories for these bands

<comment><USER27> They are not making money from Discover Weekly, but they make money from made- up artists, since they don't have to pay anyone to have that music up there. It's easy to do the math from there.

The work they have in making a few artists up is nothing compared to what they would have to pay for an actual artist to have their albuns there.</comment></comment></comment>


Covid did not escape from a Chinese lab - <AUTHOR> https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#conspiracism <comment><USER2> This isn't very convincing. And until we have evidence of transmission, it's hard to say anything about the origin of the virus other than: it came from a bat and started spreading in Wuhan.

Personally, I'd guess it's more likely the Wuhan CDC[1] as opposed to the WIV.

[1]: [https://project-evidence.github.io/#(part._whcdc)](https://project- evidence.github.io/#\(part._whcdc\))

</comment><comment><USER3> Inconclusive. It may be worth following this research group: [https://project- evidence.github.io/](https://project-evidence.github.io/)

<comment><USER4> "Research group" is a generous description for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most versions of the "virus escaped from a lab" theory imply that it was created as a bioweapon. We have really good evidence this is not true, with the genetic sequence placing it within a family of coronaviruses that infect bats.

What I don't understand is how you can believe this:

> China is an untrustworthy, paranoid, autocratic state with a history of > deadly epidemiological coverups (SARS), and it mishandled and lied about the > covid crisis early on.

and still not entertain the possibility that Chinese scientists were studying the virus and there was a lab accident that China then covered up.

Even if it was a a biohazard level 4 lab, "Biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) is the highest level of biosafety precautions, and is appropriate for work with agents that could easily be aerosol-transmitted within the laboratory and cause severe to fatal disease in humans for which there are no available vaccines or treatments." [0] It's not immediately clear to me that an unknown virus found in bats would immediately be treated as a BSL-4 human pathogen, but, even if it was, the possibility of an accident still exists. With this virus having a relatively long incubation period, and the possibility of asymptomatic transmission, it's entirely conceivable to me that such an accidental escape of a naturally occuring virus could have occured.

TL;DR: China has covered up similar situations in the past, so it's not a big leap to believe a naturally occuring virus could have escaped from a lab.

\---

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#Biosafety_leve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#Biosafety_level_4)</comment>


Does Price Matter? - <AUTHOR> http://bryce.vc/post/1384926351/does-price-matter

<comment><USER2> i went to complain but the first comment already called him out for the negative letter spacing. it burns!</comment>


Show HN: Nutritious meal delivery for bodybuilders - <AUTHOR> http://www.fuel.build

<comment><USER2> I really like the idea. As much as I try to batch process my food, it's a lot of work and really annoying. MyFitFoods is a bit outside of my price range. I know I can eat very inexpensively if I do the work myself.

However, I'm not a dietitian nor a nutritionist, but the "zero carb" components scare me. From the first page I got the impression this was for body builders and people trying to get in shape (hypertrophy). Maybe there is a trend I don't know about...I know people do really weird things right before a competition. I'm not a body building competitor. My point: make sure you're providing the right diet to the right audience. Is this an Adkins alternative or what?

I'm pretty sure the guy you have on your main page, shirtless, eats his fare share of carbs.

For your marketing purposes: I work-out 1-3 times a week. Previously took the national personal training program for personal education. Have studied, accredited: nutrition, anatomy and physiology, pathophysiology, and pharmacology.

<comment><USER3> Thanks a lot for your feedback. All great points, well made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice site and idea. I think this will hit a chord with a lot of people right now who are looking to save time and effort but still want to eat right. The second two images of food didn't load the same as the first two. I couldn't tell what they were.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks dalacv. We are still refining the product but wanted to get some early feedback. I appreciate the response

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting concept. How did you come up with your price points? I know you are using images, but I'd like to see more details about the weekly meal plans.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the encouragement. The price is based on market research combined with product costs.

<comment><USER5> Where are you looking to rollout?

<comment><AUTHOR> Bay Area first</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Things Rust shipped without - <AUTHOR> http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/218040.html <comment><USER2> > goto (not even as a reserved word)

I haven't done this for a while, but once upon a graduate program I wrote a compiler from a made-up-language (MUP) to C. MUP had some strange control structures, and if C did not have "goto", it would have been a lot more difficult to implement those structures. Since then, I have always thought languages should have a "goto" statement that human-written code is not allowed to use. :)

<comment><USER3> I've always defended goto and gotten a lot of flak for it. As soon as I say, "I wish I had X-language had gotos", I see jaws drop. Response: "Wow, haven't you heard the news?! GOTOs are considered harmful!"

I think goto should be in almost every language. It's one of the most primitive instructions, why shouldn't it be available when needed? Yes, it can be misused, _just like any other feature in the language_ , but it can also be used to great benefit. State machines, for example, can make good use of gotos.

Hell, look at any unix library your machine uses every day. The ones you don't even think about. Start with libncurses: I promise there's a few gotos where needed.

        $ find ~/ncurses-5.9 -name '*.c' -print0 | xargs -0 grep goto | wc -l
        70

Raise your hand if you plan to stop using ncurses because of how opposed to how "harmful" goto statements are.

Oh, here's tmux, if you're interested (one of the most beautifully written C programs): [https://github.com/tmux/tmux/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=goto](https://github.com/tmux/tmux/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=goto)

<comment><USER4> I do not use goto in my code. What do I do wrong? :) Ok, I have to admit that I used it on C64 in the 80s.

Anyways, exceptions are sort of gotos or at least they can behave that way.

<comment><USER5> If you're not implementing fast FSMs, fast bytecode interpreters (and dynamic dispatchers in general), and you're not using metaprogrming to the full power, not implementing multiple embedded DSLs - then you can live without a goto. Otherwise it is essential.

<comment><USER6> Metaprogramming to the full power sounds like Lisp. It doesn't have goto.

<comment><USER5> > Metaprogramming to the full power sounds like Lisp.

It does, yes, although many Lisps got a pretty limited backend for this sort of things. My preferred metaprogramming environment must have a fallthrough mode for allowing generating low-level code where Lisp semantics is not sufficient. Rust seems like a very good target platform in this sense, so the lack of goto really hurts.

> It doesn't have goto.

Of course they do (tagbody in Common Lisp, for example). And when they don't, it's often relatively easy to add one.

<comment><USER6> > Of course they do (tagbody in Common Lisp, for example). And when they > don't, it's often relatively easy to add one.

I was wrong, however it is much more limited than the goto everywhere from C, as where the labels are located is clearly defined in the tagbody and not in every possible statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What about things that Rust shipped without that _should_ have been included?

<comment><USER8> An effects system.

A safe stdlib - aborting on malloc failure is not safe.

<comment><USER9> I'd need to recheck my vocab, but I'm pretty sure aborting is always safe.

<comment><USER10> Not if you want to write an OS.

<comment><USER11> Then you won't use the stdlib anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> " Next time you're in a conversation about language design and someone sighs, shakes their head and tells you that sad legacy design choices are just the burden of the past and we're helpless to avoid repeating them, try to remember that this is not so."

I think rust is neat, but this is somewhat arrogant.

Rust is _amazingly young_. 10-20 years from now, when rust hopefully has bajillions of users, if this is still true, _then_ you can say it. I mean, do you really believe that Rust won't have things that turn out to be warts from 1.0 it can't remove 10-20 years from now?

<comment><USER13> I think you're misreading this. I read it as saying that these things are sad design choices in many similar languages, but that Rust has avoided them. Nothing follows about them not having included other sad design choices that they're unaware of.

The point is that you can at least try to avoid the things you view as sad design choices--you're not necessarily stuck with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used Common Lisp's goto (tagbody with go) to implement portable tail recursion: a "tlet" construct that looks like the "labels" syntax for defining a local function, but is just a stackless goto thunk with parameters.

[http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/lisp-snippets/tree/tail- recursio...](http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/lisp-snippets/tree/tail- recursion.lisp)

This also provides some facilities for doing cross-module tail recursion among top-level functions. Here, continuation to the next function is provided by wrapping the function call in a closure, performing a non-local exit which abandons stack frames up to a dispatch loop, which then invokes the closure.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd like Rust to be shipped without counterintuitive standard library function names and that book with all its style 'recommendations'. And I'd like the Rust compiler to be shipped without that non-snake case warning enabled by default.

Language creators won't endear themselves to me by ranting. The problem I have with Rust is _not_ the language itself.

<comment><USER16> This is the first I've heard complaints that Rust is too strict with formatting. If anything, the popularity of gofmt (which is far more opinionated than rustc's default warnings are!) is a testament to the fact that people want languages to be ruthlessly opinionated regarding style these days.

<comment><USER15> That's absolutely OK and I do understand that people want that. I actually like snake case and only slightly prefer camel case. I'd write snake case in large open source projects, if it's actually preferred. But it's very awful to type snake case code on my keyboard and I'm not ready yet to switch to a US keyboard. The worst thing about that warning is that I get some kind of a bad conscience by disabling it.

<comment><USER17> have you thought about binding underscores to some other key combination at the operating system level?

<comment><USER18> SHIFT+SPACE could be a good keyboard shortcut for underscore because snake_case's underscores represent spaces between words.

<comment><USER17> Oooh, I hadn't thought about this. I might want to try this even on my (US) keyboard!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> shawn-butler I would add Ropes: [https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/issues/653](https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/653)

Given the frequency of manipulating large bodies of text in contemporary programming I do not agree it is best left to a library implementation.

Without ropes as core std average rust developers will do what they did in java, c++, objC and simply use and abuse std::strings in all cases including those where it will perform poorly.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(data_structure)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_\(data_structure\))

[pdf] [http://www.cs.rit.edu/usr/local/pub/jeh/courses/QUARTERS/FP/...](http://www.cs.rit.edu/usr/local/pub/jeh/courses/QUARTERS/FP/Labs/CedarRope/rope- paper.pdf)

<comment><USER19> I think some progress will be seen in libraries first, namely things like tendril.

[https://github.com/servo/tendril](https://github.com/servo/tendril)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What does "unions that allow access to the wrong field" mean?

<comment><USER16>
        union foo {
             int x;
             float y;
        };

        union foo bad;
        bad.x = 100;
        printf("%f\n", bad.y); // undefined behavior (though usually works)

<comment><USER21> Which is actually a _useful_ feature in some obscure optimizations, like this fast (approximate) square root:

    		float half_r=r*0.5F;

    		union
    		{
    			float y;
    			int32_t i;
    		};

    		y=r;
    		i=0x5f375a86-(i>>1);
    		y=y*(1.5F-(half_r*y*y));
    		return y;

<comment><USER22> That hasn't been an optimization for 15 years now. Fast approximate inverse square root is a builtin operation on most FPUs-- on x86, it's RSQRTSS, which tends to be the same cost as a floating point multiply. (for Haswell, it has a 5 cycle latency, and 1 cycle reciprocal throughput)

<comment><USER21> Interesting, though not useful unless there's a good way to access it from portable C/C++. An __asm__ section or equivalent would work, but would only be useful on a particular CPU -- and different compilers use different syntax for embedding assembly, so that's not ideal either.

But where I'd more likely use that optimization at this point is on Arm or ATmega processors. ARM doesn't seem to have an approximate inverse square root, based on a quick check, and ATmega are frequently still stuck with software floating point, so I'd hardly say that the optimization is dead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't get why those are bad?

\- random-access strings

\- auto-increment operators

<comment><USER24> The first is bad because of UTF-8, basically. It's unclear what an index should even return: bytes, codepoints, grapheme clusters? Furthermore, because it's a variable-length encoding, it's not O(1) access, which is what [] implies, and since Rust tries to surface the cost of operations, it would be inappropriate for Rust.

(Note that Rust _does_ have a ranged syntax here, which returns bytes, and is O(1))

Pre vs post increment just leads to a lot of confusion, and doesn't give you much over `x += 1`, in my opinion. Not sure what Graydon's reasoning is here.

<comment><USER25> Just as additional context, since this seems to come up a lot - that does not mean that UTF-8 is bad. The main alternative is UTF-32, which provides random access to codepoints rather than bytes, but since Unicode graphemes consist of multiple codepoints, UTF-32 is effectively a variable width encoding as well for most purposes, just one that uses much more memory than UTF-8 most of the time and never uses less.

<comment><USER24> Oh yeah, I don't think any of this makes UTF-8 bad, in fact, I think it's the best choice.

It just reveals the inherent complexity in handling string data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How about stdlib-blessed async IO? Or even async/await keywords (simple CPS transformation) a la C#?

<comment><USER24> Well, it did, but these are things that are good _not_ to have, not things that would be nice to have.

If those are things you do want to have, well, we didn't have a design for AIO that we were happy yet, as even the most advanced Rust library, mio, is still a work in progress. [https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/issues/1081](https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/1081)

As for async/await, [https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/issues/388](https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/388)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Rust also shipped without reflection, which was available in the beginning. I was a bit disappointed as it was something I would have made use of for serialization.

<comment><USER28> Wouldn't it be better to create serialization functionality at compile-time?

In the Java space some libraries are moving to compile-time code generation instead of relying on reflection. It is a huge win, since a lot more can be checked beforehand. Dagger 2 is a good example how it can be beneficial. It provides dependency injection at compile-time, which will in turn check whether all dependencies are satisfied. I haven't seen this being done at compile-time before, but it is definitely a step up from reflection-based DI.

I'm not sure whether macros of Rust can provide such functionality, but the developers seem conservative when it comes to adding functionality. That seems like a good thing.

<comment><USER27> I was referencing at compile time, yes. How does Dagger generate the code? Does it run an executable first?

Yes, in C++ there is a similar library called ROOT which generates c++ files called "dictionaries" storing class information by running an executable over the files. I don't see (or understand) the downsides in providing the functionality for performing those steps at compile time though. The developers of ROOT are currently pushing for it to be included in C++17 (or beyond).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. \-- Antoine de Saint Exupéry

</comment><comment><USER30> How does one accomplish loop-unrolling as in Duff's Device in rust, if case statements do not fall through?

<comment><USER24> Well, you generally don't, because Duff's Device isn't generally regarded as a good idea anymore, in my understanding:

      > It turns out that with branch predictions and the relative speed of CPU
      > vs. memory changing over the past decade, loop unrolling is pretty much
      > pointless.

[http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0008.2/0171.html](http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0008.2/0171.html)

<comment><USER31> Still, there are cases where fall-through can be useful:

        int remaining = length % 4;
        switch (remaining) {
            case 3: h ^= (data[(length & ~3) + 2] & 0xff) << 16;
            case 2: h ^= (data[(length & ~3) + 1] & 0xff) << 8;
            case 1: h ^= (data[length & ~3] & 0xff);
                    h *= m;
        }

<comment><USER24> [https://github.com/pythonesque/fallthrough](https://github.com/pythonesque/fallthrough) can emulate the fallthrough style if you really, really want to have it. It seems like it hasn't been updated in a while, though.

<comment><USER32> In the post-1.0 world, a repository not having been updated for a few months doesn't automatically mean it no longer works :P

<comment><USER24> That's true but January 11 is in that weird grey area...

<comment><USER32> Let me be clearer: that repository works fine and doesn't rely on the standard library at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lack of `goto` is a _huge_ disadvantage for a language with macros. Pity they did not want to provide something like `unsafe` keyword which would enable all the dirty, dangerous, high-performance stuff.

<comment><USER33> One of the things Servo (the web browser engine written in Rust) has not decided to write from scratch is a (high performance) js engine. If they did, they might have more feedback on this kind of things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What is wrong with UTF-16 support?

<comment><USER35> It's an encoding that isn't good at anything: it's neither ASCII-compatible (like UTF-8), nor fixed-length (like UTF-32), but because most characters require only 2 bytes, developers frequently assume that none require more, leading to bugs when a character eventually is represented by 4 bytes.

<comment><USER34> I don't know much about Rust and Rust library, so I have a question: what if I what to develop Windows only software in Rust, will I need to convert back and forth between UTF-16 and UTF-8 (or whatever Rust uses in other parts of the library)?

<comment><USER36> Yes.

The Rust std library had to pick a string encoding, and it picked UTF-8 (which is really the best Unicode encoding). The String type is platform neutral and always UTF-8.

However, it does provide an OsString type, which on windows is UTF-16. Maybe there is a library - and if not, one could be written - targeting Windows only, and implementing stronger UTF-16 string processing on the OsString type.

EDIT: To be clear, Rust's trait system makes this very easy to do. You just define all the methods you want OsString to have in a trait WindowsString, and implement it for OsString, even though OsString is a std library type. One of the great things about Rust is that its trivial to use the std library as shared "pivot" which various third party libraries extend according to your use case.

<comment><USER37> I believe Rust uses WTF-8 as an intermediate format for windowsy things (cheaper), but I'm not sure.

<comment><USER38> What is... oh... UTF-16, the gift that keeps on giving... this is, at the same time, utterly hilarious and horribly depressing:

[https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/](https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/)

But there is actually prior art here - Java's contribution to perverse Unicode encodings is called "Modified UTF-8" and encodes every UTF-16 surrogate code unit separately.

[http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/io/DataInput.h...](http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/io/DataInput.html#modified- utf-8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm sorry, but I have a hard time being impressed by any of those. They're all just fixing things that were busted in C.

I mean good for Rust, but C is a pretty low bar. Does any language created in the last 20 years make those same mistakes?

<comment><USER40> Rust is the first language that fixes all of these things, can be used as a replacement for _all_ of C's use cases (including ABI-stable libraries, kernels, etc.), and has a sufficient community / mindshare that you can expect libraries to exist in the language for functionality that you generally expect to find in libraries.

Maybe we should be embarrassed as an industry that it took us 20 years to get there, yes.

<comment><USER41> If Rust misses 'goto', it is not suitable for translating SSA into it, which most compilers natually produce (also for LLVM, obviously). I.e., it is not suitable for being used in a compiler backend. Here, it can never fully replace C.

'goto' should not be daemonized, we know better today.

<comment><USER42> I don't follow, why would SSA need to be translated _into_ an input language?

LLVM used to have a C backend, yes, but that hasn't been maintained for a while now.

<comment><USER5> > I don't follow, why would SSA need to be translated into an input language?

Rust is a meta-language with very powerful macros in it.

What is a macro? Macro, essentially, is a compiler. You can have some petty macros implementing tiny syntax sugar on top of your language, that's totally fine, but that's not their purpose.

The real metaprogramming kicks in when you implement very high-level eDSLs on top of your macros. And for this sort of things, having a proper compilation pipeline is a must. Many eDSLs may end up being represented as an SSA. E.g., I'm doing this with a Packrat eDSL - it pays to represent its intermediate language as an SSA for doing some high level optimisations before spitting out the host language code.

<comment><USER43> The compiler implementing the macros (a form of compile-time meta-programming) should be the same compiler as that for the rest of the language.

<comment><USER5> > should be the same compiler as that for the rest of the language

Sorry, I do not understand what are you talking about.

Of course it is the same host compiler. But, _every_ macro itself is a small compiler. Sometimes, when your DSL is an elaborate, complex thing, the macro itself is a complicated, big compiler.

With all the bells and whistles of a big compiler - multiple stages, multiple intermediate representations, all that stuff. And SSA is one of the most efficient intermediate representations ever, suitable for a huge number of semantic classes of DSLs. So, making it harder to generate your _same_ host language code out of an intermediate, in-macro representation does not serve any reason, it's plainly conuterproductive.

<comment><USER43>
        But, every macro itself is a small compiler.

I'm not following you here. What does that mean? The macro gets expanded at compile-time into 'normal' source code, by the compiler.

<comment><USER44> A compiler takes a text from one language and translate it into text of another executable language.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple CEO Tim Cook Joins Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/20/apple-ceo-tim-cook-joins-twitter/

<comment><USER2> Title's a bit deceptive: he signed up as a _user_.</comment>


Ask HN: Reverse thinking Google+, what's still missing? - <AUTHOR>

So, while everyone is buzzing around the Google+ new effort into Social market and its amazing features I was asking myself instead: "has Google failed again learning from Facebook?".
Facebook has got us hooked up into it because it's a gigantic messaging platform (aka address book). Its "sharing" and "being open" part are not only lame but a well worked PR campaign. Facebook, still, has failed at taking over our Emails.
Now let's look at Google+, what's their solution?
We got Huddle for Group Messaging and as Google+ Cheat Sheet point out we can privately share messages. Is this really a solution for nowdays messaging? If you browse over people's profiles looking for some sort of PM what you got so far is a "Send an email" (I didn't signup with a Gmail account) widget. And that's only if you have people in your circles and they shared their address.
You might point out that they're trying to defend one of their good assets, Gmail.
OR
Looking at Gmail incoming new layout the next "Facebook's killer" App is really going to be an integrated Gmail-like system or Gmail itself (for existing Gmail accounts).
Think about it: Social == (layered) Communication != Sharing.
What's missing next? <comment><USER2> they have created circles or profile types, now they provide a option to switch to that circle. from office to friend mode to golf mode, context and priorities should change based on what circle you are in.

group behavior seems to be OK, but need to improve one to one context driven communication and collaboration tools</comment>


Loudspeakers used to make dead coral reefs sound healthy, so fish flock to them - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/12/01/scientists-used-loudspeakers-make-dead-coral-reefs-sound-healthy-fish-flocked-them/ <comment><USER2> Doesn't this just result in more dead fish, starved to death, because they spent all their energy flocking to a reef that can't sustain them?

<comment><USER3> Perhaps that's what helps the reef to recover - it attracts fish that die and feed the local ecosystem that way until it can grow again.

<comment><USER4> That's dark. Might be simpler just to dump nutrients over the side, then.

<comment><USER5> Or dump nutrients and start the iPod a few months later

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Up next: robotic fish used to make dead coral reefs look healthy, so tourists flock to them.

Related: [https://www.dw.com/en/great-barrier-reef-last-chance- tourist...](https://www.dw.com/en/great-barrier-reef-last-chance-tourists- flock-to-world-wonder-as-coral-disappears/a-46076098)

<comment><USER7> "Plastic corals look like realistic corals from the mid 21st century!"

<comment><USER8> I have to say, some of those ancient artifacts you can buy made out of resin are pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> But for how long? Won't the fish see through this ruse soon enough?

<comment><USER10> Never. Pacific salmon released in the Atlantic (or was it the other way around?) were touted as an ecological disaster. But they mistook the gravel bottom for their normal food supply, ate rocks until they sank, and all died.

Fish are not master tacticians. More like a bug with fins.

<comment><USER11> Have a citation for this? Sounds fascinating.

<comment><USER10> Niece at Thanksgiving - PhD fisheries and policy. I can ask her.

The issue hit the news when it happened: Ecological disaster! Salmon stocks at risk! Then when nothing happened, it wasn't news. So folks still cite this 'disaster' like it still actually happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This sounds like a bad idea.

<comment><USER13> >The researchers acknowledged that drawing fish back to dead or dying reefs will not reverse the damage by itself. But degraded reefs have a better shot at recovery if they have robust populations of fish, which play a variety of roles in keeping the coral healthy.

<comment><USER14> Welcome to the coral ghetto!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So, this could also be used to catch the fish?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Non-paywalled article: [https://www.cnet.com/news/underwater-loudspeakers- could-help...](https://www.cnet.com/news/underwater-loudspeakers-could-help- restore-damaged-coral-reefs/)

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://outline.com/DsZE2C](https://outline.com/DsZE2C)

</comment><comment><USER17> Like buying Yelp reviews, but for the environment.</comment>


Choose your Jekyll style - preview sites directory - <AUTHOR>

I was trying to find a quick way to choose a great style to fork from Jekyll Sites directory at: https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki/Sites
This is what I made:
1. get wiki page source 2. open textmate 3. replace all \* "([^"]+)":([^\s]+) with * !http://pinkyurl.com/i?url=$2&out-format=png&resize=640($1)! "$1":$2 4. preview html with ⌃⌥⌘P
Any better solution? <comment><USER2> Or you can just go for Octopress(<http://octopress.org>) ;D

<comment><AUTHOR> ahah! I've found my favorite jekyll fork: <http://waferbaby.com/></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Review my startup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.somethingtowear.com/introducing-the-best-damn-way-to-shop-for-clo

<comment><USER2> The boxes with all the pants, shirts, etc scroll very far, but only seem to have 15 or so items. After those items, I can keep scrolling, but there are no additional items.

Safari 4 on Leopard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that's next on my list of bugs to crush. Hope to have it fixed tonight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's kind of nifty. Not sure why I have to click on the orange thing though. Not smooth in Google Chrome on Mac. Not as polished as Polyvore. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

The idea behind the "orange thing" is to allow people to see some basic instructions right away. I'm currently trying to figure out how useful the instructions are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yet another clothing site where people who don't fit into model-sized garments are SOL? Yippy.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is to allow any online clothing merchant to be able to host their offering on the site. Currently we're only showing a small number of garments available from Amazon.com

We do however have a few plus-size shirts and one pair of pants, just search for "plus" in either of the sections.</comment></comment>


Baidu Leads in Artificial Intelligence Benchmark - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/05/12/baidu-leads-in-artificial-intelligence-benchmark/

<comment><USER2> Using bigger supercomputers to get marginal improvements probably involves overcoming whatever problems exist in training ever larger neural networks, and big nets are inevitably needed for classification of more than just 1000 classes. But the original breakthrough result by the SuperVision team from Toronto (15% error, not completely comparable) trained their net on just 2 GPUs for a week. It would be a pity if it's no long possible to beat the state of the art with your home PC and good ideas.

</comment><comment><USER3> We knew this in January when Andrew Ng mentioned both the depth and size of the computational layer. Again, the scale that Baidu brings to machine intelligence is remarkable. But I wouldn't put Google or MS out of the picture just yet. There is much not disclosed yet.</comment>


Why are America's top technology jobs going to Indian executives? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/08/11/why-indian-managers-are-succeeding-in-techs-c-suite/?mod=e2fb

<comment><USER2> Statistics.

India has 1 billion people and English is the only language that they can use to communicate nationally. There are many regional languages in India but if you want a higher education or to expand your horizons beyond your native region, you learn English.

So, all other things being equal, there should be 3 or 4 Indians for every Americans. But all other things are NOT equal. In the USA, Indians are immigrants which gives them an additional boost, especially for jobs that are entrepreneurial in nature such as senior management.

If China ever switched to English as the official language of higher education, Americans would be relegated to cleaning toilets. Unless they themselves, emigrate and therefore get the immigrant advantage working on their behalf.

Look at European companies and you will see that some Americans are doing exactly that.

<comment><USER3> I think that's too simple... It could also be:

1\. Randomness. The fact that a number of tech companies have Indian CEOs in 2015 does not mean this would still be the case in, say, 2018. Also we are tainted by the fact that these are highly visible cases. Facebook, IBM, Apple and many other tech companies are still run by non-Indians.

2\. Inequality in education - the current tech world favors education systems that are creating a pyramidal work force and are good at selecting a small elite that receive superior education + join the necessary networks. This favors people who are educated on the US top schools (or IIT I guess). The European system, in contrast, is more egalitarian (exceptions apply) and produces a huge number of mediocre specialists.

3\. Caste system - I'm not an expert in that, but I guess there are pretty good networks within certain castes in India. I'm happy if somebody proves me wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Better to put a dark face upfront and let the white boys rule from behind the curtains. This is not an uncommon tactic, and we'll be seeing many more of it in this day and age.</comment>


Israel/Gaza War and Data – why we should all support haaretz - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/i-data/israel-gaza-war-data-a54969aeb23e

<comment><USER2> We should all support HaAretz because...they're centrist? The author argues, "[HaAretz] has the most potential for bridging across biases and political barriers."

Bridging across political barriers is not necessarily a good thing. When the party on the other side of the political barrier is founded on a mix of anti- Semitic conspiracy theories [0] and a certain, profound religion-inspired racism [1], then it is good if such messages are suppressed.

[0]: [http://archive.adl.org/main_israel/hamas_facts.html#.U9_kdPl...](http://archive.adl.org/main_israel/hamas_facts.html#.U9_kdPldWIA) \- "Hamas Covenant 'echoes the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion and charges Jews with an international conspiracy to gain control of the world.'"

[1]: [http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp](http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp) \- Hamas Covenant calls for the killing of Jews to usher in the Islamic apocalypse.</comment>


Ask HN: How to take the leap mid-career? - <AUTHOR> I'm in my early thirties in a very-well paying non-tech career and contemplating a switch into the startup world. This is largely driven by hopes to tackle some of the more fundamental challenges of our world, the idea that small firms offer a better ground to contribute to/enjoy a positive working culture, and some idea to have more time for my family (compared to a lot of traveling and 70+h/w at the moment). While not working in tech, I do have an engineering background  and some limited dev skills and good industry insights. I'm also confident to be able to execute projects/products in agile environments and with challenging customers. I'm lucky to have accrued enough savings to sustain my family's down-to-earth lifestyle for ~4yrs, but still wary about long-term implications of disrupting my career.
I'm wondering how to best go about it:
1.) Find a CTO role at a startup of interest. However, early stage startups often require more hands-on dev skills than I'd be comfortable with. Later stage roles are exceedingly rare in Europe. Career risks would be a bit more limited
2.) Take a non-exec role at a startup and use it to test the waters and grow from there. Easy to get but a huge break for my career
3.) Found. The two ideas I have would be very heads-on against established players. I'd risk my capital. Alternatively, take time off and find other ideas (how to best go about it?)
4.) Stay and make the corporate world a better place
Anyone with experience in similar situations? <comment><USER2> Working as part of senior management of VC-funded startup will not allow you to work a reasonable work week. VCs loooooove long working hours, however unproductive and stupid they may be: [https://uncrunched.com/2011/11/27/startups-are-hard-so- work-...](https://uncrunched.com/2011/11/27/startups-are-hard-so-work-more- cry-less-and-quit-all-the-whining/)

As employee in startup it's perfectly possible to work reasonable hours at the at right copmany, especially if you're clear up front about your boundaries.

</comment><comment><USER3> Somewhere in the middle, but have you considered a role that combines both non-tech and tech? e.g. Tech Product Management. It requires a lot more though (Design as well), but can provide you with a taste of end-to-end responsibility of launching products or features - which can either lead to more satisfying corporate roles or be a good training ground for startup roles.</comment>


How companies use fake sites, backdated articles to censor Google results (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.lumendatabase.org/blog_entries/800 <comment><USER2> Interestingly enough, this Torrence Boone guy working now at Google seems to have had lots of success keeping his #1 SERP clean. His LinkedIN tells us he worked as "Global CEO" at an unnamed agency before, he got zero recommendations, but is now Vice President at Google.

Now comes the interesting part: Google won't even autocomplete "torrence boone enfatico" — Shame upon him who thinks evil upon it...

If you've been wondering about the moral decline at Google, this is the kind of people they hired as top management.

<comment><USER3> Is hiring privacy-conscious people a sign of moral decline?

I'd argue that it's a quite good idea to keep your LinkedIn profile looking exactly like that, unless you've decided that you _need_ a good-looking profile right now for "advertising" because you're looking for a job, and you're going to use LinkedIn for that, which many job-seekers won't do.

<comment><USER2> If you'd be working in defence or infosec, I'd be with you about being a little more diligent about too many details in your employment history.

Then again, it's not like he's shy about clearly lining up all of his jobs before the Enfatico disaster or his Harvard/Stanford alma maters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Somebody needs to take a stand against fraudulent DMCA notices. The escape hatch built into the DMCA to absolve the slimeballs of culpability doesn't nullify other applicable laws.

It clearly constitutes a form of libel against the victims falsely accused of a civil violation. The lawyers involved are violating their ethical duty as court officers and should be charged with barratry. The ACLU/EFF ought to be pursuing this tack to curb the abuse.

<comment> yoz-y Indeed. Currently it looks that many of the mechanism originally made for defense get turned around.

Another example would be reporting content or people for violations they did not make.

<comment><USER5> See: Sony music vs some guy playing piano on youtube.com.

<comment><USER6> I mean, SONY did have a reasonably valid claim to that copyright, even if the work SONY did to modernize the piece was obvious and trivial.

Copyright terms ought to be much shorter. This is the root of the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've had something like this happen to a customer of mine. Some of his content posts were being copied by random sketchy sites, then backdated by a couple hours. Google would show the copied content as the main link in Google news, and his actual article would be buried somewhere under "more like this" link (or whatever it was called in news).

<comment><USER8> Really interesting, this behavior implies that Google hasn't figured out a way to verify what a page states as its creation date.

<comment><USER9> Have you figured out a way to verify what a page states as its creation date?

<comment><USER10> Inside Webmaster Tools is "Fetch" tool. It allows you to submit any page to Google. You can then also have Google index the page. When you fetch a time stamp is recorded and a full HTML copy of the page too.

I am not sure if Google uses this to prove which is the original copy. Most website owners don't know this exists. So it's hard to use it as proof of the original, because the original creator may not even use the tool.

However, if everyone started to submit key articles, then it theoretically could compare the two fetches and decide which is earlier. It could be automated too with sitemap uploads as you post content.

Moreover, you could then use this as evidence in a DMCA take down that your copy is the earliest. Anyways, there are ways to prove earliest content.

<comment><USER9> That's my point. There is no way to verify the date assertion of an arbitrary page.

The problem is akin to standing in a crowd where some people hold a sign with their age on it and others do not hold a sign, then trying to verify the age of an arbitrary people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Google is crawling all over the web but cannot detect these as fraudulent requests? That seems like an easy check. Do we have an index of this domain? Was this backdated?

But they could be blocking it with robots.txt or some other excuse. It seems like an incredibly rare exception, what news site would block being crawled and indexed? They also are archiving domain info I'm sure. If they wanted to stop this, they have the data.

<comment><USER12> I don't know, is "we've never seen this page on your site before" a valid defense against a DMCA claim? If I understand DMCA correctly, ignoring the claim means risking a lawsuit if you're wrong about the content not being owned by the claimant.

<comment><USER13> I lost a domain a while ago. It was quickly snapped up by a squatter, who promptly repopulated it with the exact content it previously contained (harvested from the waybackmachine). They made a single change to the content, adding a link on the home page to some supplement blog.

So it's my content, on a domain I no longer own or control.

How could I prove to Google that the content is mine?

<comment><USER14> DMCA doesn't require proof. The fact you are attesting under penalty of perjury is enough. If they contest it then your only remaining remedy is a court order and that would require proof. The wayback machine may be sufficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Torrence Boone thing is quite remarkable.

Considering a fake DMCA carries the same penalty as perjury (correct me if I'm wrong) then I would have expected Google to have taken some action. A suspension pending an internal investigation or something similar.

Have they made any public statements on the matter?

<comment><USER16> _Considering a fake DMCA carries the same penalty as perjury (correct me if I 'm wrong)_

The only part of a DMCA takedown that's under penalty of perjury is the assertion that you are the copyright holder, or are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder.

The infamous _Diebold_ case -- where they did get penalized for a false DMCA notice -- involved Diebold more or less admitting openly in court "yeah, we knew it was wrong but we sent a notice anyway". Which means it's extremely difficult to get someone on a false DMCA notice.

<comment><USER17> > The only part of a DMCA takedown that's under penalty of perjury is the > assertion that you are the copyright holder, or are authorized to act on > behalf of the copyright holder.

But that's exactly the fradulent claim, and unlike other cases that are understandable genuine mistakes (even though the mistakes would be avoidable if the claimants put a reasonable amount of care into checking their claims), in this case, it's clear that the claimant knew the claim was false, and they falsified documents to support that claim.

I highly doubt courts would appreciate this sort of behavior, it's just that the victims of the censorship likely don't know, don't care, don't have the resources to fight, or don't catch it before the statute of limitations expires.

Unfortunately, it seems like the _maximum_ penalty for perjury is five years, and I assume it's rare that anything near that is imposed, so I guess someone decided it's worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I saw Scottsdale, Arizona mentioned and straightaway remembered that GoDaddy is based there. Coincidence?

Edit: actually, answering my own question -- when a domain is reg'd at GoDaddy and privacy is enabled, it's then "owned" (in the whois sense) by DomainsByProxy at GoDaddy.

</comment><comment><USER19> It seems almost impossible to reliably backdate articles, especially if supposedly original domain name wasn't even registered at the time the supposed copy was posted.

The only scenario I could think of is claiming Google didn't index the original because it was blocked by robots.txt. Apart from that, how could Google not know the original date of publication?

I guess Google doesn't have systems in place to do this verification and they just remove from the SERPS anything and everything that has a DMCA violation, just or otherwise.

Another scenario I've witnessed myself is someone using a copyright free image (Unsplash) and then someone else claims a violation, saying they are the actual copyright holder and it was fraudulently posted on Unsplash by a third party. Google removes your homepage from serps, traffic tanks, business ends and there's no way you can even fight the decision. In the end who knows who's the actual copyright holder?

<comment><USER20> > The only scenario I could think of is claiming Google didn't index the > original because it was blocked by robots.txt. Apart from that, how could > Google not know the original date of publication?

What if the article wasn't even online? I.e., some journalist "wrote" the article for some local newspaper without internet presence.

</comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 Would it be possible to content providers to send a URL to Google basically saying _I made this, here 's a timestamp_ to prove that you actually released it first, and whoever copies it and backdate it won't have any reliable proof they actually did publish it first?

Whenever I publish something I made, I submit the URL to the Wayback Machine so if it gets hugged to death at least there's a public copy somewhere else.

<comment><USER21> Yes, but not with Google. This can be done with the Bitcoin blockchain. Before you groan, hear me out. You can submit a transaction which contains a hash of your content. Once it's on the blockchain you can prove that the content was created no later than the date of the transaction.

<comment><USER22> .. Which does nothing against a backdated article. What stops me from copying a NYT article and posting it to the blockchain a few hours after, claiming it's mine?

What makes the bitcoin blockchain good for this? The bitcoin blockchain is good for posting transactions within the bitcoin network and kind of a shitty solution for "a generic blockchain"

Why a blockchain at all? Why not just a merkle tree? Surely there is somewhere better than the bitcoin blockchain for this. CT logging isn't done on the bitcoin blockchain for a reason.

So sure, you can prove that something wasn't created after the date of the transaction (assuming you're using a CS hashing function), but for this to work in this specific context, you'd need every publisher to be posting transactions to this log.

If I post an article and post a hash to $genericBlockchainWhichIsReallyJustAMerkleTree, what prevents someone from copying, backdating, and saying that I copied them? That they didn't post to the log as well?

<comment><USER23> Agree that bitcoin blockchain is unnecessary, but isn't there some merit in the idea that all major publishers in a juristiction would opt-in to posting to a single chain? Given the potential legal cost savings it would seem to be at least somewhat feasible.

<comment><USER22> Oh absolutely. But I don't know how much of a "blockchain" that really is depending on how you define it. When I think blockchain, I think miners/proof of work/etc.

Is a CT log a blockchain? Because really what we're talking about here is a signed ledger which may be decentralized but very well may be centralized as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The space before punctuation thing might simply indicate a European writer. Several countries in Europe do that deliberately and I notice it with a lot of my colleagues.

It's interesting to note also how they appear to use the Fox News trademark while having no apparent affiliation. Also, although I don't know suite numbers, it's interesting that the address on the domain registration looks to be very close to a UPS store.

<comment><USER25> Are you sure about that space thing?

I live in Europe and I have been browsing the Internet for 20 years now, and this is the first time I hear about it.

Also, I visit plenty of Eropean news sites, and none does that.

<comment><USER24> It seems to be pretty common among the French at least. I haven't seen it in print media, only from individuals.

<comment><USER26> In French, no space before a comma or a period (unless want to explicitly communicate your disdain for computery things or you're above 60) but we do put a space before : ? !

Example: « Pas de palais : pas de palais ! »

(^Quote from the Asterix movie that will be way more useful to you for making French friends in a bar than saying « I can't speak French » in French)

<comment><USER27> This is actually a really interesting example of the "space before punctuation" thing rather than " space before punctuation ".

Also: it looks like we're using colons differently, is that right?

<comment><USER26> We use colons for the same reason as in English, but there is a space before colons in French (Microsoft Word inserts it automatically for you in French), and no uppercase after the colon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > _Businesses have become increasingly creative in their attempts to misuse > the DMCA to remove negative reviews from the Internet. They have gone to > great lengths to falsely claim copyright infringement with the intent of > taking down content from Google's search results and review sites._

I dream of a world where companies doing any consciously shady shit like that are automatically slapped with a huge (1/2 their annual revenue would be a good start) fine, even if it's nominally legal, as long as a jury of experts decides their actions were harmful to society/transparency/the environment/etc.

<comment><USER29> Why have laws at all. Why not just let a "jury of experts" punish anyone in anyway they please. /s

<comment><USER28> Laws already codify experts' opinion of what should be punishable and how (both legal and domain experts).

The "jury of experts" role wouldn't be to punish "anyway they please" but to what is implied by their choice and description (as experts): to rule in accordance with their domain knowledge. And of course their job would be judged in turn.

If a society can't trust a jury of experts on a domain to clearly and effectively judge issues related to their expertise, then it has bigger problems, and laws wouldn't save it from them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Any settlement without first going to the court will be abused and exploited. DMCA is a just bad law.

</comment><comment><USER31> Practically all the links (e.g. the ones that were allegedly restored like the Adweek article on Torrence Boone) were still removed.

</comment><comment><USER32> Similar thing seems to be going on on Youtube.

</comment><comment><USER33> A lot of the direct DMCA problems come from improper use needing to be demonstrably wilful in application. When algorithms send out these notices, you get some plausible deniability.

But setting up a news site to inject a backdated and infringing article would seem to be several, moderately serious criminal offenses.

If someone does this to you, push back hard. They're facing prison and fines.

<comment><USER34> The DMCA has been abused quite a lot. How many people in history have been sent to prison? Can you find one?

The laws in the US are laws to control the behavior of the weak not the strong.

<comment><USER33> My point was this is very far beyond the typical takedown abuse.

Creating (itself infringing) content on a for-purpose site ticks the "wilful" requirement of the DMCA's defined requirements for perjury.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Links in the article are broken. Also DMCA takedown related?

</comment><comment><USER36> It happens because doing fakes is free but struggling with them costs money. This problem can be solved if Google search result would be driven by rules/smart contracts but not by the income of Google's shareholders.

<comment><USER6> > This problem can be solved if Google search result would be driven by > rules/smart contracts

How would that fix the issue? It wouldn't change legal obligations, AFAIK. Confused.

<comment><USER36> Yes, introducing SERP rules intends obligations. The obligations could be enforced by legals or by union of "angry" users who will stop fighting with each other for SERP but start fighting with Google instead who treats them as useful idiots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> To be honest I believe DCMA is a entirely negative law. Even the legitimate strike claims were used in ways that help noone, sometimes hurting even the person doing the claim in first place, for example Nintendo been so agressive on YouTube, taking down for example videos of conventions that happened to have a Nintendo trailer or game playing somewhere on camera, that journalist stopped covering Nintendo because doing do cause strikes against you.

<comment><USER38> DMCA notices are required to be sworn statements under penalty of perjury. It sounds like that that isn't being enforced at all by DoJ.

Just another example of how a corrupt government can selectively enforce laws to give its crony friends a leg up.

<comment><USER39> What if the company that have sent the notice is outside of US?

<comment><USER40> In my experience, what happens is the company hires a representative inside the United States to file on their behalf.

There is an organization inside Belgium that hired a law firm in New York to file claims against a web site I once owned in Texas to remove people's vacation photographs taken in Belgium, under threat of legal action.

(This was pre-DMCA. The web site was sold long ago and is now defunct.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Warren Blocks Trump's Pick for Antitrust Chief - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-07/trump-s-pick-for-antitrust-chief-is-said-to-be-blocked-by-warren <comment><USER2> The parties take turns, advocating for ordinary people when they're the opposition, and serving special interests when they're in power.

If only one could still vote for the people that broke up Bell.</comment>


Hilton Hotel Guests Will Be Able to Use Smartphones as Keys or to Choose Rooms - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/articles/hilton-books-upgraded-technology-1406503197

<comment><USER2> I look forward to reading the breakdown on how bad the security for this system ends up being.

I can see it now - each lock would be connected to the hotel's wpa-wps network (shared with the guests of course) and use a dhcp server without static routes to assign IP addresses. Maybe if we're really lucky they'll be using some consumer-grade cisco switch with last year's firmware update.

Snark aside, they have to be _really_ careful not to fuck this up. There's so many potential attack vectors in this kind of system it's nuts.

<comment><USER3> My favorite attack on hotel security is much simpler: the front desk will willingly print you a key for _any_ room.

Hold out your keycard and ask for a duplicate. Do they take your card and swipe it? No. They ask for your room number, type it into the magstripe machine, and print you a key for whatever room number you just gave.

No electronics, skill, or even malicious intent necessary (you just "forgot" your actual room number). Look and act like you belong, and make a run-of-the- mill request. Discovered this by accident when I was ~12 and wanted to go to the pool by myself. Never actually tried to get a card for another room, but never had the desk actually verify my rights to the room when requesting an extra keycard either.

<comment><USER4> Maybe if you're 12. This spring I had to present my ID to get a replacement for a dead key in Philadelphia.

<comment><USER3> No it still works. I mostly travel in the Midwest, though, so maybe security standards are just a little lower in Lawrence, KS than the big cities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> non-paywall link [http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fhilton- books-upgraded- technology-1406503197%3Fmod%3Dyahoo_hs&ei=f-nWU4eKIartigKe3YCYBg&usg=AFQjCNFcjyFQ8rmrFmCCsRcv2ITZdPu1hA&sig2=OT1a7qibk- SPLsD-VVyz9g&bvm=bv.71778758,d.cGE)

<comment><USER6> I use RefControl[1] and set it to always forge referral on online.wsj.com and send [http://google.com](http://google.com).

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I guess the obvious concern is with someone figuring out a way to turn any smartphone into a key to enter any room; I'm guessing it would be easy to do given access to the person's email? Hopefully they make sure that it's done right the first time before any kind of incident.

</comment><comment><USER8> OR not AND? Man I guess if I have to choose I'll choose to use it as a key, and pick my room via my laptop.

Now if you could use the smartphone to do both, You might be able to choose the room to have keys to, even if that room was not yours.

Ok, more serious. I like the idea of this. I have several AirBnB properties, and this could make my life a lot easier. Though at the same time my Girlfriend always finishes the night with her iPhone completely dead, so it could also make things a lot more complicated.

All in all I like the convenience, and fear the security.</comment>


Uganda's Tarantino and his $200 action movies (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32531558 <comment><USER2> The thing about movies like this is, as low budget and low quality as they are, effects wise, they're consistently so. The result is almost a comic-book aesthetic, and something like a helicopter pasted in to the scene doesn't seem out of place, because everything is ridiculous.

Bigger budget movies, meanwhile, can spend millions of dollars on CG and break immersion entirely.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish there were a lot more movies like Primer.

$7k budget. I'm not so interested in time travel but I have an unlimited appetite for normal people inventing things in garages. I don't need super- stars, exotic locations or special effects, just good ideas and good dialogue.

<comment><USER4> Everybody knows about the big blockbuster movies because half the budget is marketing. There a _lots_ and independent movies getting produces all around the world. But you will have to seek them out yourself to some extent.

<comment><USER5> Could you imagine a Hollywood film where the marketing scheme was "all the actors work for free but get to keep half the money they make selling copies of the film".

<comment><USER6> There are things like actors working for free with a percentage of the box office profit. Some top actors made more this way than if they actually got a salary.

<comment><USER7> SAGAFTRA rules do not permit actors to work for free, even if they get a percentage. (Despite claims that actors worked on the re-shoots for _All the Money in the World_ for free, all of them except Mark Wahlberg were contractually obligated to participate in re-shoots, so they were already paid for their work. Marky Mark was not contractually obligated to participate in re-shoots, and collected roughly $5 million for his...efforts.)

They can work for minimum scale, and get a percentage of profits (Sandra Bullock and _Gravity_ ). The trick with Hollywood accounting is to know to ask for a percentage of the rights-owning entity, since the production entity is a loss vehicle that earns no income, and the licensing entity only earns a small markup for its "work" licensing the movie.

The distribution entity is frequently a third-party company or parent company. Distribution entities might get paid a % of revenue (most common if third- party distributor), a fixed or calculated fee for distributing the movie (i.e., Fox and Star Wars), or it might effectively own the rights altogether and get all of the revenues (Disney and other parent-company distributors, otherwise unncommon). In rare situations, the rights-holding entity is the distribution entity (i.e. Blumhouse).

<comment><USER6> Contrary to popular belief, not all actors work in the USA, and are under SAGAFTRA.

And even for those, working for a minimum fee, non representative of their actual asking price, for indy productions or movies they believe in and want a share of profits, is common, and is more or less the same.

(If you get normally $5 million per movie, doing one for e.g. $200k plus part of profits is not that different from doing it for profits only).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Who Killed Captain Alex?" exceeded my expectations more than any other movie I've watched. I got the impression that everyone involved was genuinely passionate about making the best movie they could, which more than made up for the budget limitations. I'd rather watch something like this than a >$100M movie where it's all designed by committee for the broadest appeal possible. Even the VJ commentary, which I at first thought would be annoying, turned out to be entertaining.

</comment><comment><USER9> "As one of the few white men around, he's in demand as an actor."

A few years ago, I traveled around Africa, including Uganda, using public buses (an adventure in itself) and they would frequently show movies or music videos. Many of the music videos were local hip hop artists, rap music often blended with local traditions. The music videos were no different form the bling-bling videos in the US and you can tell they all needed at least one white girl. Obviously, there were must not have been many options, so for the majority it was some girl that I would not label as "music video" attractive. My assumption was that they must have been the local Peace Core volunteer.

Kampala, like most African cities, is incredibly hectic. Not sure how he found someone randomly.

</comment><comment><USER10> This sounds fun:

"Watching a movie can be a raucous affair - films are translated into local languages such as Luganda by VJs, or video jokers, who add their own jokes and improvised commentary, live."

<comment><USER11> It really is, and it's a very enriching way of experiencing art. For a long time, this is how stories propagated -- they were told and retold by various people, who sometimes added details or even entire story twists of their own. Improvisation was a natural part of storytelling which movies rendered somewhat unnecessary, but to which they do lend themselves to some degree.

<comment><USER12> This explains the appeal of RiffTrax and collaborative cult films like the Room.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Speaking of Tarantino and low budgets, Tarantino apprentice (I say this tongue-in-cheek) Robert Rodriguez did his first feature film El Mariachi on a $10k budget.

I distinctly recall that he for instance had only one guitar case on hand, so if you pay close attention, you'll notice that our protagonist (an innocent mariachi with a guitar in his case) and the bad guys chasing him (sporting lots of guns in their case) use the same guitar case! Now that's props on the cheap...

<comment><USER14> The director's commentary on the DVD is amazing, because it's mostly about all the shortcuts taken to get the film made. Most of the extras are people who provided locations in exchange for appearing in the film. There are short loops of frames of gunfire because they didn't have the right kind guns to film automatic fire with blanks. And so on.

<comment><USER15> The prison guards early in the movie are the real guards in the real prison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I remember when I first saw Peter Jackson's Braindead - from the first 5 minutes I wasn't sure if it was an amateur movie or a total parody. Glad I kept watching. Some of the scenes were templates for some LOTR scenes, polished to perfection there.

This strikingly resembles it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJmyhrnLYBU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJmyhrnLYBU)

</comment><comment><USER17> Another good example of good stuff from Wakaliwood, Cuchillo de Fuego's Nocturno clip:

[https://youtu.be/grOK2PdDAow](https://youtu.be/grOK2PdDAow)

<comment><USER18> Damn man!!! I loved it

<comment><USER17> Y'all should listen to Cuchillo de Fuego, btw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Link to trailer (I think) mentioned in article - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZXqkgFegLQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZXqkgFegLQ)

Lalalala....ACTION! Supa Kicker!

The passion is inspiring.

EDIT: Vice also did something on these guys (it seems all the BBC does these days is recycle content) - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy0OOVTmsJI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy0OOVTmsJI)

<comment><AUTHOR> Forget the trailer, you can watch _Who Killed Captain Alex?_ in its entirety on the official Wakaliwood YouTube channel, complete with hilarious running commentary by VJ Emmie:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEoGrbKAyKE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEoGrbKAyKE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why have I been wasting my life?

<comment><USER21> Same thoughts here. This just looks fun! It reminds me of when I started programming. I had a cheap laptop that took half an hour just to start. There were few co-working spaces, so I just camped out on the stairs of a goverment building for free internet.

But it was a productive, fun time. Now with all the high end resources and tools I have, it's not as fun and surprisingly, less productive.

<comment><USER22> Why is it less productive now? Doesn't make any sense. Even just the available tools and libraries today make every thinkable workflow orders of magnitude more productive.

<comment><USER23> One factor likely is the fact that to produce a working website to today's standards is a team effort when a few years ago you could hack out something that worked in a day or two by yourself. Team communications add overhead and that in turn slows you down.

A similar thing has happened to game development, it is rare to see a monetizable game made by a single individual.

<comment><USER22> This is not about productivity, this is just about quality of content. You can still make a game of the same standard as way back, by one person. It's just that games of today are objectively so much better and more complex and intricate.

<comment><USER21> Arguably, games like Fallout 4 have a huge world but it's not complex at all. It _looks_ more realistic, but the storyline is simpler and far less memorable than Fallout 2.

I'd also argue the most complex games are something like Dwarf Fortress or Ultima Ratio Regum. Both of which were made by 1-2 people.

The way of writing "use cases" for dwarf fortress is also a lot of fun and probably doesn't scale up with a large insustrial team: [http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_story.html](http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_story.html)

There are games like Rimworld which try to imitate DF's charm, but go further with a team, professionalism, and better funding. But while it's more polished and "balanced", it doesn't come to the same level of craftsmanship. You also don't get the same goofiness as a necromancer who slices off your finger, animates it, then pokes you in the eye with your undead finger.

<comment><USER24> "You also don't get the same goofiness as a necromancer who slices off your finger, animates it, then pokes you in the eye with your undead finger."

Where does that happen? Ultima ratio regum?

<comment><USER21> Dwarf Fortress.

It's full of crazy details, like falling down the stairs, cracking a rib, and dying when something pushes the rib through a heart. Or that time when someone found out mermaid bones were valuable and set up structures to trap, breed and "harvest" mermaids.

Even the 'bug' list is a fun read: [https://m.imgur.com/gallery/ROa2C](https://m.imgur.com/gallery/ROa2C)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is a link to the guy's first movie: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEoGrbKAyKE&t=145s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEoGrbKAyKE&t=145s) ... simply awesome! :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Relevant Reply All episode: [https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply- all/114-apocalypse-soon](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/114-apocalypse- soon)

</comment><comment><USER27> Not Tarantino, more like Peter Jackson Bad Taste [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgCnCri2cTU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgCnCri2cTU)

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

Netflix ought to give these guys a budget and let them run wild.

</comment><comment><USER28> Well known in the YouTube community [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUtiVL6z8wE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUtiVL6z8wE)

<comment><USER29> The package he got was very funny.

PR material for the movie "Cannibal mama - I hope to meat you" cracked me up. :-D I feel this is a subculture that could be interesting and funny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I hope at least $1 from Vim donations somehow made it's way to supporting this directly. And I hope that snake lady doesn't suffer the same fate as the original Tin Man.

<comment><AUTHOR> If anyone wants to support them directly, they have a Patreon here: [https://www.patreon.com/wakaliwood](https://www.patreon.com/wakaliwood)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The one thing that annoys me in these sorts of articles/titles is that they do not really reflect the true costs of production (be it games or film or anything else). Sure it is easy to make a movie with no budget if you don't pay anything for peoples time, equipment, locations, or any other resources. But that does not mean that those are free, or without value.

</comment><comment><USER32> Well worth checking out. "Bad Black" looks like a ton of fun. [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6044414/?ref_=nv_sr_2](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6044414/?ref_=nv_sr_2)

Trailer here: [https://vimeo.com/120747455](https://vimeo.com/120747455)

</comment><comment><USER24> "He then taught himself how to use editing packages such as Premiere Pro and After Effects, and borrowed a camera from a neighbour. "And with that I started""

But how was he able to afford the expensive adobe products?

Joking ... probably the same way most of his audience sees his work.

</comment><comment><USER33> Even this is better than Netflix shows. At least you don't expect much, so it exceeds expectations.

</comment><comment><USER34> Reminds of the movie 'Be Kind Rewind.' Low budget film making is great fun.

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

</comment><comment><USER35> Back in a day ZF Skurcz from Poland made a few great amateur kung-fu comedies [https://youtu.be/EyumZCv1vD8](https://youtu.be/EyumZCv1vD8) Unfortunately there are no subtitles

</comment><comment><USER36> reminds me of the jack black movie called 'Be Kind Rewind'!

</comment><comment><USER37> (2015)

<comment><USER38> Added. Thanks!</comment></comment>


China's nascent cafe scene attracting billions in investment - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-10/why-bill-ackman-and-coca-cola-are-betting-big-on-coffee-in-china <comment><USER2> And coffee from those cafe chains sucks just as those from the Starbucks</comment>


Ask HN: Any advice for our first meeting with an angel investor? - <AUTHOR>

Hello everyone!
We have our first meeting with an angel investor tomorrow, so I figured I would see what advice the HN community would offer on talking/negotiating/working with angels.
We are from the Midwest, so the tech startup environment is quite different. I'd be especially interested in hearing from any other Midwest tech startups that got angel funding.
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> Don't be intimidated, take control of the meeting. Confidence reflects success, as a matter of fact, just think of any initial meeting with an important investor as a first date with a girl, stay cool, be charming and impress.

<comment><USER3> You may have just made it worse :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have not received from Angel Investors currently but I made a a couple pitches to some In Chicago and also received great advice from a highly respected investment banker in NYC. That being said make sure you have a clear path to revenue, it should be easy to understand. Secondly make sure your pro- forma and all your numbers make clear and logical sense. Your predictions cant be too conservative or too far fetched, use your best judgment. You wont receive any offers tomorrow so dont worry about negotiating. If they for some odd reason do make an offer, just ask to sleep on it.

Be enthusiastic and convincing. At the end of the day, you are selling. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER5> Definitely work on telling your story. I think thats the most crucial part in creating an imagery of who your consumer audience is.

Also, have you been valued at a price yet? I would be slightly weary of negotiations over equity if you are in your micro stages. Just because it's easier to be valued higher over time. (I.e. you're easier to go from a value of 0 to 10 million then from 1 million to a 10 million valuation) If you're in your infant stages...I would stall it out for awhile, but that's just my 2 cents. =) hope that helps?

</comment><comment><USER6> When I have a meeting I'm nervous about I always repeat in my mind "It's just a conversation". If you don't have trouble talking to normal (smart) people about your project then you shouldn't have any trouble talking to a good angel investor either. It's just a conversation.

</comment><comment><USER7> Be clear on what you want. If you want funding, specifically ask for it.

<comment><USER3> In particular, ask them if they can/want to lead a funding round (that other angels participate in). If that's what you want.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to do networking when you are working remotely? - <AUTHOR> I basically live in a third world country with almost non-existing tech scene.<p>What are your approaches to networking and getting new clients when there are no meetups and no technology companies near you? <comment><USER2> Email, phone, social media?</comment>


Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-proud-github <comment><USER2> This is an interesting observation:

 _The first year or so of the company reminded me a lot of the awkward teenage phase of self-discovery. GitHub the company had sort of sprung up from this side project, so we never had any big vision or dream or aspirations. We just wanted to work on something cool. I'd love to say that's all you need, but we've learned there's more: you need to have a vision and a philosophy. Everyone (all the founders, at least) need to be on the same page. The hard part is finding that page._

 _Do we make web apps, or just do source control? What do we pay our employees? Should we speak at conferences? How do we approach customer support?_

I don't hear many people talking about the value of a company vision and philosophy. I occasionally hear people talk about company culture, but usually in an abstract way.

<comment><USER3> They never really said how they manage this, or whether they wrote it down. What ways of keeping people on the same page are most effective?

<comment><USER4> I have a feeling it was mostly accidental. Having a bunch of awesome people increases the likelihood of it happening, but I don't think that is a very repeatable lesson.

<comment><USER5>
      Having a bunch of awesome people increases the likelihood of it happening...

I'd hazard a guess and say the non-repeatability comes down to the _awesome_ bit.

It is easy to label someone as _awesome_ after coming out on the good side of a rough patch. It is much harder to be comfortable in that label when sizing up a potential co-founder.

<comment><USER6> If you assume the set-equivalence that "awesome people get on the same page quickly" implies that "people who get on the same page quickly are awesome", you then find, by <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem>, that "awesome" means _rational_.

The question is whether the assumption holds :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That was worth reading just for this bit:

"We generally ignore the advice/opinions of others as a rule. GitHub is the company of the compelling argument – every decision needs to stand on its own merit. That someone successful (or unsuccessful) tried something before might matter in a discussion, but what matters more is how the idea itself applies to the situation."

<comment><USER8> Every company would describe itself as a meritocracy though. In github's case they're probably still small enough for that to be true.

<comment><USER7> Agreed, but in this case I actually believe them. As soon as you've got two layers of management that probably is the first to go out the door.

<comment><USER6> I've never understood why a startup would choose to grow to the size where it needed two layers of management, unless the individual product they were working on was really of a complexity too high for a small team to manage (like, say, a nuclear reactor.) For products that stay the same size, but gain new sub-products, cross-products, side-businesses, etc., why not just "undergo mitosis" and become two startup-sized companies, each handling a single facet of the business but sharing a treasury and building?

<comment><USER7> There was a company (BSO) that did just that, they split every time they got to a certain number of employees (I believe the magic number was 50). They were hugely successful.

You can read all about it here: [http://www.extent.nl/articles/entry/the- evolution-of-bso-and...](http://www.extent.nl/articles/entry/the-evolution-of- bso-and-its-offspring/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The most salient point to me was the fact that github was not initially conceived of as a business, but as a tool the founders desired for the betterment of their own day to day. And not only that, but github was quickly adopted in the founders' workplaces at the time, giving them time to focus on it and refine it without giving up an income. Dogfooding is a common theme in startups and it's worth noting that 37signals' Basecamp product was, as I understand it, built with the a very similar purpose. Initially it was a tool for them to help manage their own projects first and something they could charge for second, built under similar conditions where they already had a business designing client websites, providing them an income.

A lot of times I dream up projects I think of as potential startups but often have to ask myself, "Would I actually use this product?" If the answer is ever even a hint of "no" I tend to suspect that I could not dedicate myself to the project wholeheartedly enough to back a business. I wonder if this is a meaningful metric and if dogfooding is really such a powerful motivator.

<comment><USER10> Is that not how most great technologies are born? Ok some are for war, but most of the "cool" technologies I've seen (even some made by co-workers) are all about someone having a major itch and developing the best damn back scratcher they could to scratch that itch. Its quite incredible what someone with a vision can do, even without technical prowess that some posess. Its all about just thinking that "I am only one man, I only have a few hrs a day... however I need to do the job of 10" and instead of giving up building something that lets you do just that.

I find the in corporations where you can throw more people/time at the problem is where it starts to fail. I can always "hack" something up fast, and add a few programmers to make it faster, but the trick is to not add anyone and still meet the deadline (or a bit over, but that gets covered by blowing all other deadlines away).

GitHub is no different. They had an itch, scratched it, turns out other people had the same itch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, the cottage industry that is Linus Torvalds keeps churning out the goods that make empires (Red Hat, Android) and up-and-comers (github).

"I'm not a businessman; I'm a business, man!" --Jay-Z

</comment><comment><USER12> Paradoxically, I think some of these businesses 37signals is listing are more interesting than they are themselves. Part of their 'unfair advantage' is simply being famous. Github is famous too, because they took a smart approach to the free/paid split that works out pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER13> I want that octocat plush doll.

<comment><USER14> I thought it went by the name octopussy, but i want one too

<comment><USER15> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopussy_(character)>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _One thing Tom had learned at his previous venture, Gravatar, was that offering a resource intensive service for free was a losing proposition._

Is anyone else wary about the continued existence of gravatar? Even though it was bought out by Automattic, I think it might shut down in the future because it is resource intensive and hard to monetize.

<comment><USER17> I would think it could be optimized to be quite efficient, and breakeven value might be possible via the data it throws off -- every Gravatar is a web bug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> All to often, people seem to associate "not taking venture capital" with being a "lifestyle business".

GitHub is an interesting business. Like EngineYard or any other tool oriented startup, its potential is not the same as a broad consumer internet business (like Facebook or Google).

But I don't think Github will be a "lifestyle" business. It already isn't.

I don't think Paul Graham has a problem with this. But it seems like a lot of his followers do / might.

I think there's an important distinction here that is missed and I'm not sure how to bring it up. (Last week I asked about doing a startup outside the US, because the US is not an option for US, and one person presumed we were doing a "lifestyle business" because we expressed costs as one of our concerns.)

</comment><comment><USER19> fogus, thanks for highlighting that article, which then showed up in the HN feed on Twitter. Great advice and perspective from Chris Wanstrath.

</comment><comment><USER20> Rock stars living the dream.</comment>