Show HN: Linkurious, the first data visualization platform for graph databases - <AUTHOR> http://linkurio.us/ <comment><USER2> The quote "They trust us" gives me a very negative response as I am reminded of Mark Zuckerberg's "They trust me. Dumb fucks" quote. [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg)

Maybe rephrase that to something like "trusted by" or "our trusting clients"?

edit (after downvotes into grey): Sorry for trying to share a negative first impression with the idea of helping the landing page to become better. If you did not get the same association just ignore the comment...

<comment><USER3> Ah thanks, I get it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congrats on the release!

For the HN crowd, worth mentioning two other startups here:

1\. KeyLines (Cambridge Intelligence) has great visualizations and core integrations (Neo4j, Titan)

2\. For exploring bigger graphs (ex: entire live netflow topologies from Splunk) and graph analytics+ML (ex: Spark/GraphX), we're alpha testing our GPU-accelerated client/cloud approach. Email firstname.lastname@example.com :)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Worth also mentioning Sigma.js, the open source core on which we are building our toolkit.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, building a great graph engine is hard!

I like a lot about:

\-- Cola (flexible constraint-based): [http://marvl.infotech.monash.edu/webcola/](http://marvl.infotech.monash.edu/webcola/)

\-- Vivagraph (big graphs in webgl) doesn't get enough love: [http://www.yasiv.com/graphs#Bai/rw496](http://www.yasiv.com/graphs#Bai/rw496)

Getting the best of both is hard, hence our real-time GPU clusters. It'll be longer before we can usefully open that up that layer =/

<comment><USER3> Cola has great algorithms! Hopefully they will be implemented as a Sigma plugin ([https://github.com/qinfchen/sigmajs- webcola](https://github.com/qinfchen/sigmajs-webcola)).

Still, GPU clusters beat all for performance. I'd love to see a demo :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks incredible, and I'd love to take a look - but we use Allegro. We've also been experimenting with Orient and Titan. Do you have any plans to support different graph DBs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

We are in talks with Allegro and OrientDB and have clearly planned to develop connectors for these databases.

As for TitanDB, since we will probably develop our OrientDB connector on top of it's Gremlin API [1], it'll be little work to write the TitanDB connector after that (they have a Gremlin API too).

[1] [http://orientdb.com/docs/last/Gremlin.html](http://orientdb.com/docs/last/Gremlin.html)

<comment><USER6> To clear out a possible minor confusion for readers here - Titan's only API is Gremlin (though there also is a lower level Java API). You guys should also have a look at ArangoDB, which also supports Gremlin. Linkurious with upcoming TinkerPop3/Gremlin will definitely be quite interesting to use. Keep up the good work.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, our backend is based on node.js so we're considering to support the Rexster server ([https://github.com/thinkaurelius/titan/wiki/Rexster-Graph- Se...](https://github.com/thinkaurelius/titan/wiki/Rexster-Graph-Server)), which provides a REST API to Gremlin. What do you think about it?

We're also eager to see any binary protocole to communicate with graph databases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Neat! Really wish I could try it on my dump of the PGP public keyserver network. A visual map of the web of trust would be cool. Alas, it's just a volunteer project, so no funds :(

[https://keyserver- elasticsearch.daylightpirates.org/keyserve...](https://keyserver- elasticsearch.daylightpirates.org/keyserver/key/_search?pretty)

<comment><AUTHOR> If your project is Open Source, you should take a look at our toolkit: Linkurious.js, which is available under GPL3 (free for Open Source projects).

[http://linkurio.us/toolkit/#pricing](http://linkurio.us/toolkit/#pricing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a long time Gephi user (~4 years) this is awesome. Congrats. I don't currently have a project that could benefit from this platform, and the price point is a bit out of a reach for a college student, but I am really looking forward to see how this pans out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! You may be interested in our toolkit: Linkurious.js, which is free for non-commercial uses.

[http://linkurio.us/toolkit/#pricing](http://linkurio.us/toolkit/#pricing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is actually similar to the work of a company here in the Netherlands, Eindhoven ([http://www.synerscope.com](http://www.synerscope.com)). Infovis on big data. From what I know is that they spent a lot of time on performance in the financial scenarios. The amount of data is huge, they process in (under a) second(s) using gpu but they ran into trouble some year ago when a customer used a different type of DB (different order of joins, unions and selects I believe). What is the performance on linkurio? When talking multi-million or billions of transactions, will it scale? How long for a query to complete?

<comment><USER3> The biggest dataset used by one of our users is a genetic graph of 240 millions of nodes and edges using a single server. Linkurious will take a few hours to index the complete dataset. From then, the search engine delivers instant results with autocomplete, fuzziness and advanced query options; graph exploration queries take less than a second to complete (sometimes a bit more depending on the web client). We are still working on improving our data indexing strategy to gain performance.

Synerscope has a strong approach to data analysis, and Danny Holten is well- known in the infovis community. I don't think that they provide a search engine thought, you have probably more information on their product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stunning work, the best graph viz engine seen so far

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for the kind words!

Out or curiosity, what were the graph viz engines you know/use today?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hello folks,

We've just launched and we need your feedback. Thanks! :)

Seb

<comment><USER11> Looks cool! do you support GraphX out of the box?

Feedback items:

1\. launching the demo triggered chrome's popup blocker (small conversion funnel disrupter... easy fix)

2\. when typing a company name in the chrunchbase demo, the first few milliseconds while it's searching show "no results found" instead of a spinning wheel or something... again, minor thing but adds to "psychological trust effect" in the software

Looks awesome otherwise.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback!

We currently only support Neo4j and have planned the development or a OrientDB connector (see my other comment about that).

Regarding the missing spinning wheel while searching, we are currently fixing that :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> On the homepage, your pricing link is buried in the footer. (I see it's in the subnav on internal pages). Maybe consider promoting that link to the main navigation?

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the suggestion! We have 2 different products, the second one being the developer toolkit ([http://linkurio.us/toolkit/](http://linkurio.us/toolkit/)) so we ended up displaying the pricing on each different page... but we're still unsure about the clearest approach :/

<comment><USER13> What is unclear here is why you are selling what is and should remain free and open source software without even crediting the authors of what appears to be 90% of your toolkit product.

<comment><USER3> TL;DR the README ([https://github.com/Linkurious/linkurious.js](https://github.com/Linkurious/linkurious.js)), huh? The authors of the core/Sigma are cited in the documentation and license. Plus it is released under GNU GPLv3, so I don't understand why you complain. If you don't need the extra features, you are free to go with the core only.

After creating Gephi 8 years ago I'm still a big fan of open source as a production model, but definitely not as an economic model. Companies need support and high-end features to speed up their projects and to limit risks; this is what our tookit is about, adding more than 30 plugins.

Notice that we are happy to give back to the core when the original authors agree. Say thanks to us every time you click on an edge! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Do you have a partial trial to try using it first, or require a one year commitment? I do lots of instagram & linking data for bloggers. This looks interesting.

<comment><USER3> Licenses come with a 1-month money back guarantee. Drop me an email to email@example.com to discuss your project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I didn't see any specification for the size of graphs you can display/layout - what's the max number of vertexes and edges you support?

<comment><USER3> Technical side: we recommend to display up to 2000 nodes and edges. Laptops < 2 year old can display and layout graphs up to 4000 nodes and edges but with stability issues.

Cognitive side: we recommend to hide nodes and edges as soon as you don't need them. One cannot ask the same class of questions to graph visualizations of very different sizes, see slide 19 on [http://www.slideshare.net/Cloud/sp1-exploratory-network- anal...](http://www.slideshare.net/Cloud/sp1-exploratory-network-analysis- with-gephi)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> are there any examples? i couldn't find any on the site. what about some kind of support for dot/graphviz?

<comment><USER17> The demo is available at the end of this page [http://linkurio.us/product/](http://linkurio.us/product/)

For Linkurious.js there are some examples over here [https://github.com/Linkurious/linkurious.js](https://github.com/Linkurious/linkurious.js)

All infos on the toolkit are available on [http://linkurio.us/toolkit/](http://linkurio.us/toolkit/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great App! Can't wait to use it!</comment>


Was Reddit hacked this morning? - <AUTHOR> http://www.levigross.com/post/8216012837/was-reddit-hacked-this-morning

<comment><USER2> Not a hack, just pointed at the wrong thing. It's an 'under construction' page in Japanese. (The second line says 'this server is under construction.' Don't know why they didn't bother translating it, too.)</comment>


AT&T Restores Access to 4chan - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/27/shitstorm-averted-att-restores-access-to-4chan-which-is-now-under-ddos-attack/

<comment><USER2> Let us remember that DDoS attacks are the closest thing to normalcy that 4chan can have.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I was going to say, the DDoS'ing has been going on for a while now...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Before everyone goes crazy, I would like to know the standard procedure at AT&T to deal with a DDoS attack. Can they point to previous examples of shutting down sites because of it? Surely 4chan isn't the only site that has been attacked through their network. If they have a history of doing this and have granted access back to the site this is a non-story. If they don't ever do this and they can't point to previous examples, then my friends, they may well deserve the barrels of fun coming their way.

<comment><USER5> If TC isn't completely wrong (and they are notorious for being careless with the facts) AT&T was demanding some changes to the content on 4chan in order to restore access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The pertinent question at hand is, did AT&T block access to parts of the site to counteract DDoS attacks or to censor content?

The opinions of rational people can't be adequately formed until it becomes clearer as to the reasons behind the action.

<comment><USER7> The word on the street is 4chan was being hit by a SYN attack. The ACKs were directed to various ISPs, one of whom was AT&T, who all blocked 4chan in response.</comment></comment>


Ask HN:(Review my startup) MacSupport.com is there for you. I'm there for you. - <AUTHOR>

People call me all the time. I haven't worked as a consultant in years, yet I still hear from old clients regularly. I started my business by going to people's homes and businesses. I would introduce myself, learn about them, and learn about their problem. Then I'd fix it. I'd show them exactly how I solved their problem so they could, if inclined, fix it themselves if it ever came up in the future. At the very least, they'd have the knowledge to explain it to another tech. I was there for them, so they always called me back when they needed more help.
Building my network of clients took effort. I had to get work by pitching. Telling stories. I'd tell stories about other clients, I'd tell stories about myself. I'd tell stories about the future, about how technology I was excited about could be useful to them, and where they could be with help. Any help, not just me. I may have named my business "Wizard," but I don't know any magic. I'm just good at what I do, and so they called me.
I got involved with a startup, MacSupport.com. MacSupport is there for you in ways I could never be as a consultant. We have techs waiting for you to call. We answer when you email us and we're there for you on the phone. While we can't travel and come to your house, we're instantly beside you, in your computer, showing you how we're doing what we do.
Our techs are smart and friendly and our customers love us. I'd like to consider that a success. Our problem is, I don't know how to pitch on the internet. I don't know how to find enough customers. And since we're not meeting out clients I don't know how to go the extra mile that gets them referring us to their friends. A handshake and a smile made a lot of a difference.
I'm trying a few ideas:
1) We haven't been talking to our current customers enough. We sent them one email on purchase and one in the beginning. When we have them on the phone we play our part well, keep them clam, and teach them enough so they're not more worried about their situation than we are. They almost always hang up happy. We're supposed to follow-up in the end, but we haven't been (miscommunication with the techs). I would like to be better at that.
2) We're too expensive for the small quick questions. I want to have a free email support option. One or two questions a month free, you can subscribe to a package for more, or you can refer friends for more. (think dropbox)
3) Improve the site's UX. I can talk about this one more later, we should have screenshots in the next few days.
4) Better email capabilities. I want to be able to say "Just email us at firstname.lastname@example.com" and have our backend system work the way it should, creating account, adding messages to tickets, etc. (Just call, or IM us should work the same way too.)
5) Marketing. We need to figure out how to get more referrers and conversions. We've tried traditional press releases, and we constantly tweak our Google adwords. We got nowhere with the press, and the business we do have is from months of continually refining our adwords campaign. I feel like we're missing something, but I don't know what.
This is a "review my startup". I think these are our core problems, but our solutions fall short. I'd like to know what you think.
Thank you for your time.
--- Francis Gulotta Director of Technology MacSupport.com <comment><AUTHOR> Myself and our team are here if anyone has any feedback. Thanks.</comment>


Have aliens hijacked Voyager 2? - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7722455/Aliens-hijack-Nasas-Voyager-2-spacecraft-claims-expert.html

<comment><USER2> "Nasa claimed that a software problem with the flight data system was the cause but Mr Hausdorf believes it could be the work of aliens.

This is because all other parts of the spacecraft appear to be functioning fine."

The display on my car radio no longer works, but the rest of the car appears to be functioning fine.

Film at 11.

</comment><comment><USER3> Once decoded, the alien message will read: "Please update the playlist. We've seen all of these already".

</comment><comment><USER4> Submitted previously and rightly killed. Complete bollocks.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1347492></comment>


Play with Kubernetes Quickly Using Docker - <AUTHOR> https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2015/04/06/play-with-kubernetes-quickly-using-docker/

<comment><USER2> Cool, looks like it's not _that_ hard to try out Kubernetes :)

Some of the Kubernetes terminology is explained more thoroughly here:

[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an- introduc...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction- to-kubernetes)

[https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes/blob/maste...](https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes/blob/master/examples/walkthrough/README.md)

<comment><AUTHOR> The first time I tried was in November. The Vagrant one is not hard, but the salt provisioning was taking forever, and it was using a lot of memory, which meant I had to shuffle around services on my server. Hence the 'soviet' comment, as the OpenShift one was a lot easier: [https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/play-with- an-o...](https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/play-with-an-openshift- paas-using-docker/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Also, for fun:

Which is faster? Setting up a @kubernetesio cluster vs. making a latte?

Brendan Burns answers that question: [https://youtu.be/7vZ9dRKRMyc](https://youtu.be/7vZ9dRKRMyc)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Google's response went way beyond my expectations here.

<comment><USER4> I didn't see anything in your blog post that refers to a response from Google. Could you elaborate on that? Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> "I tried to follow Kubernetes' Vagrant stand-up, but got frustrated with its slow pace and clunkiness, which I characterized uncharitably as 'soviet'. Amazingly, a Twitter-whinge about this later and I got a message from the Kubernetes Lead Engineer saying they were 'working on it'. "

I'll try and make this clearer - thanks for the feedback!

<comment><USER5> Had similar pain points 6 months ago. Went through vagrant, docker, ec2, gce, gke and found issues almost everywhere. That's just the way it goes in the early days. 6-12 months down the line this will all be really easy and seamless with hopefully a lot more people contributing to the kubernetes ecosystem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad it wasn't just me... I did waste a lot of time 'researching' Kubernetes this way.

<comment><USER6> I updated it over the weekend, it's down to 3 steps now:

[https://github.com/brendandburns/kubernetes/blob/hyperkube/d...](https://github.com/brendandburns/kubernetes/blob/hyperkube/docs/getting- started-guides/docker.md)

And I think I can get it down to a one-liner.

(also, can you update your blog to point to the hyperkube:v0.14.1 image instead of :dev, :dev is a random binary from my client, where as v0.14.1 is an official release... Thanks!)

<comment><USER7> I have also tried kubernetes a few times, and got stuck everywhere. I was unable to find a "this is how you build a kubernetes system from scratch" document somewhere. All I managed to find where very specific howto's for specific system combinations, none of which fits my needs. I tried a few times with building systems on the documentation list, but ran into issues at each step.

My biggest worry and issue with running kubernetes in production is the overall workflow of standing up an environment, which seems to be:

1\. download some images/dockerfiles 2\. [magic] 3\. profit

I cannot find a document anywhere that tells me what components are used, how they interact, what settings are required, etc. I'd love to be able to give kubernetes a try and see how it would work for our service, but am having a very hard time getting the right level of detail. It appears to be either "go the [magic] route", or "read all the code" with little in between.

If I had some kind of pointer, I'd be happy to write something up about how to get it running for a prod setup...

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's too early for you to think about Kub in production by the sounds of it.

This whole area is still in the early stages; any documentation you see on specifics are likely to be soon out of date.

If you try the hyperkube command you'll see very many command line options, and I can only see that growing.

To an extent though, there is a certain amount of magic when downloading images that do stuff for you. For example, the scheduler is a pod that just starts up on the master. What exactly it does, I've no idea yet.

To quote the kub github page:

"Kubernetes is in pre-production beta!

While the concepts and architecture in Kubernetes represent years of experience designing and building large scale cluster manager at Google, the Kubernetes project is still under heavy development. Expect bugs, design and API changes as we bring it to a stable, production product over the coming year."

<comment><USER7> > I think it's too early for you to think about Kub in production by the > sounds of it.

Maybe this is getting lost in translation, but I find this line to be somewhat condescending. I am asking for some hint as to where I can find documentation that goes beyond "here, run the docker/vagrant/VM image, and have fun" \- I want to know what is what, which pieces talk to which pieces, and how. I specifically not asking "Is this ready for production" which is a decision I am happy to make for myself, on the basis of the research I hope to do.

Just to be clear: I am an (admittedly increasingly unfashionable) infrastructure guy. I am pretty sure that if I follow your examples, I can get something up and running that allows me to feed some DSL into some tool, and have a running set of containers. Not interesting to me. I am happy to believe that this works, and am happy to take people's word for it.

I want to know and learn about required infrastructure, about failure domains, about networking requirements, about load and overhead, and ultimately, about "If I build something like this, what are going to be the issues in making sure it will never go down". I see a lot of high-level architecture, which appears to segue quite suddenly into "now do magic, and here is how you then start a pod". I am asking about this in between stage, as I have been unable to find this.

> This whole area is still in the early stages; any documentation you see on > specifics are likely to be soon out of date.

I would expect any documentation to be at least somewhat relevant to the version it is released with. It isn't important for us to be on the latest greatest - it is important for us to know and understand how the stuff we use behaves and is to be operated, especially in failure modes. If my only recourse during a failure is "well, lets try to restart a container running something critical and lets see if the problem goes away" then indeed it isn't ready for anything other than being a toy.

I do see the likes of Kismatic and now tectonic making moves to run this as a production system, so somewhere, somehow, it would be possible to stand up a system that has not had all the key decisions made for you, and would allow you to build something that is ready for a particular environment.

Kismatic have actually released some packages that appear helpful in pulling the pieces apart and I will be looking at those to get a better understanding of what does what.

> To quote the kub github page: "Kubernetes is in pre-production beta!

Yeah, I saw that, thanks... From the perspective of the Kubernetes team "pre- production" likely means that they have not yet evaluated many probable edge- cases for many different use-types. This is important to them, not so much for me. What is important for me is that _my_ workload works. It is a lot easier and faster for me to test this (and feed back the results, thus helping the project towards production status) on the basis of an infrastructure I know and understand than it is for me to try and put together something something [magic] and trying to figure out stuff isn't working. Case in point: I followed one of the VMware install guides. at the "now run this image, and xyz will happen" nothing happened. No reasonable possibility of troubleshooting, as the image in question was/is a black box, and no documentation I could find, outside of the "invoke these magic incantations".

To be very honest, I am not too bothered - there are plenty of viable alternatives that do the same / similar things. We are evaluating a large list of possible environments, and kube got crossed off the list pretty quickly, which is a pity as it looks interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't mean to be condescending, sorry if it came over that way :(

Anyway, FWIW I've had similar troubles with documentation with this and OpenShift Origin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's great to see more options out there for folks to start playing with Kubernetes. It can be a bit daunting initially, especially for newcomers.

As an alternative, I started a project called "Corekube" ([https://github.com/metral/corekube](https://github.com/metral/corekube)) that allows you to kick the tires on Kubernetes on top of CoreOS.

Corekube is an OpenStack based Heat template that just requires an OpenStack provider to stand up a Kubernetes cluster in minutes - the cluster comes complete with a private Etcd discovery service, 1 K8s master, 3 K8s minions, and a logic coordinator/deployment operator aka "the Overlord" which interacts with Etcd, Fleet and K8s via their API's to set things up.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's good - the 'problem' with my one is that afaict there's no way to get more minions going.

You should blog the steps getting that up.

<comment><USER8> Corekube's Heat template is structured to allow up to 12 minions to be used, you just have to change the parameter.

I have a blog post on the Rackspace Dev Blog from when I initially released it, but it is a bit outdated - [https://developer.rackspace.com/blog/running- coreos-and-kube...](https://developer.rackspace.com/blog/running-coreos-and- kubernetes/)

Most of the same information on the blog can be pulled from the README as far as I'm aware, but I'm happy to answer any further questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hadn't realized Kubernetes was written in Go. Cool.</comment>


The new Axios website (brief summary of tech stack) - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/new-axios-website-google-amp-563e62ba-8708-4965-8f5e-3216bd268383.html <comment><USER2> All this bullshit about providing user experience is hilarious. You use the ad stack: Google AMP. This is an engineering cop-out.

<comment><USER3> Ok, but please don't post angry low-information rants to HN. I'm not saying you owe major media sites or Google better, but you owe this community better if you're commenting here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment>


Evolving the Firefox Brand - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/evolving-the-firefox-brand/ <comment><USER2> Only foxes chasing their tails look like Firefox.

Everything which is not recognizably a circular fox-thing is something else.

Hypothesis: marketing people are afraid to continue a brand identity that can go on for decades, because that kind of success means that they don't have a redesign project every three years.

AT&T has been a variation on the Death Star since 1984.

IBM has been horizontally striped initials since 1972.

NBC is a peacock.

McDonald's is golden arches.

Firefox should be a flaming fox chasing its tail.

<comment><USER3> I very much agree. Marketing people will always want to design fresh things because that's what they love to do. Once their product dies, they move on to something else.

Marketing people also believe that you can sell anything with a fresh coat of paint. They are trained to sell.

I think the new icons are awful. You don't even see it's Firefox anymore. God I dislike marketing people so much. :(

<comment><USER4> > You don't even see it's Firefox anymore

Are Mozilla's designers simply following the 'debranding' or 'decorporatizing' trend? [1] [2]

[1] [https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the- age...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-age-of-the- wordless-logo/499166/?single_page=true)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649985)

<comment><USER5> Opened that Atlantic article and it prompted my phone for camera a d microphone permissions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At this point, Mozilla's biggest asset is the Firefox brand. Seems unwise to go with a bland, generic redesign... especially one that's a blatant rip off of GitLab.

It also seems like they're going to have two "main logos"? And incredibly different logos for each flavor of Firefox? I used to work at Mozilla, and it was already confusing enough to explain Mozilla vs Firefox to the average person.

Their current userbase is mostly less-tech-savvy people, and I can't imagine changing the icon is going to go well for Firefox. Much like how it took Firefox a decade to convince people "The Internet" wasn't just IE's "e" logo that came preinstalled, changing their icon is going to hurt way more than it helps.

<comment><USER7> It looks like they're trying to leverage the Firefox for the main logo for Mozilla, which is the rather disconnected `moz://la`.

The logos aren't very impressive, but most people will just see the Firefox Quantum logo, and that looks largely the same, if bland and uninspired.

<comment><USER8> The "masterbrand" icon is not replacing Mozilla's logo. Mozilla's logo is not changing.

<comment><USER9> What a pity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ainar-g The System 1 Masterbrand Icon is GitLab[1].

The System 2 Masterbrand Icon is the flag of Phoenix, AZ[2].

Both seem very bland and generic to me. I wanted to like them, I really did, but those are just... extremely unoriginal.

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

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

<comment><USER10> I think the system 1 icon is too similar to gitlab which is a shame since I like that one the best. I would like it as the default browser icon instead of a round icon.

<comment><USER11> Note that under both proposed systems, the icon of Firefox-the-browser would remain the same. The "Gitlab-like" vulpine logo would be that of Mozilla, whose logo is the "://" thing right now.

<comment><USER12> That "://" logo would be one year old. [1] And yeah, it does look stale already.

I appreciate thoughtful design, but IMO the frequency of redesigns of Mozilla branding/subbranding/websites/subdomains only communicates a sense of vanity at this point. The visual schizophrenia between trustworthy software developer and NGO doesn't help.

[1] [https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_log...](https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_logo_for_mozilla_by_johnson_banks.php)

<comment><USER13> I think I might be the only person in the world that actually likes the moz://a logo.. But like most people say here, I am not a fan of the new system logos, but the system 2 browser logos are cool.

<comment><USER14> Another fan of the moz://a logo here!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Honestly, what makes a brand identity work is at least 50% longevity. One good logo is better than 3 great ones over the course of a decade. If there's no continuity, not only do consumers have to become reacquainted with the brand (losing some established good will), you don't have any brand recognizablity until it becomes well known again.

The Firefox globe is a good logo. Not only is it instantly recognizable, there's a clear connection between the symbolism in the image and "Firefox". I think the globe logo is also suggestive of international connectedness and cooperation - Firefox is something that brings people together.

IMO all the suggested icons represent a change for the worse. Even the one from System 1 most similar to the existing logo reduces the amount of detail and makes it harder to quickly recognize the logo at a glance.

<comment><USER16> Completely agree.

And it's worth adding that both of these proposed design options are _great work_ in isolation; separate from any existing market concerns, these would make for great logo systems.

But the biggest problem for any redesign is that the current Firefox globe is just so damn good. It has been refined numerous times over the past decade but iconographically—when viewed at a small size for short bursts of time—it has barely changed since the original in 2003. Each refinement has simplified the design to a point where further simplification is simply not justifiable for reasons of aesthetics or utility.

Look at the progressive simplification of the QANTAS flying kangaroo logo over the years. [0] The third-most recent logo is utterly iconic and timeless. The second-most recent iteration teetered on the edge of a cliff of oversimplification and gave the kangaroo clown feet. The current logo? The only reason that it isn't an obvious trainwreck, the only reason isn't immediately obvious that they've fallen off the cliff is because it evokes memories of the older logos when the kangaroo actually looked like a kangaroo. They've doubled down on the clown feet and given it a gradient that makes zero sense. The overall shape is so abstract that it might as well be a boomerang- like throwing or slicing implement. But it does look super modern.

[0] [http://mascola.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/line- up-1200x8...](http://mascola.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/line- up-1200x841-1024x718.png)

<comment><USER17> Is this for real? I haven't noticed the newest 2 on planes yet. The third newest is definitely where they should have stayed.

<comment><USER16> It's for real, and there aren't many planes left with the older livery painted on them. Most are either the newest or second-newest.

(I'm an infrequent observer though, I'm sure a planespotter can chime in with more precise info.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The older I get, the more I hate the industry around "brand". Obviously it has an effect, I get that, but my god the branding guys are so wanky about it. They can go on for hours about stuff that literally no-one but branding guys care about, and unlike techies they don't seem to have learnt how to summarise and then shut up (because non-branding people, like non-techies, really don't care). I don't remember it being this bad a decade ago, but I was only starting out in the tech industry then so perhaps I just didn't see it.

Maybe it's a bit harsh to lump this blog post in with the stuff I'm complaining about, but it doesn't help having daft phrases like "Do these systems reinforce the speed, safety, reliability, wit, and innovation that Firefox stands for?" (answer: no, they're small images).

I've reached a point where I just abhor marketing in general, and branding is swiftly joining it on the pile at this rate. It was in hindsight a good idea to go back to programming after getting my design degree!

<comment><USER19> > unlike techies they don't seem to have learnt how to summarise and then shut > up

Have you seen a post on here about text editors, tabs v spaces or rust vs C++? Or how about the weekly posts of "we rewrote our CRUD app from FOTM X to FOTM Y and this is why it's awesome" ?

<comment><USER18> Well to be fair this is really the target market for those sorts of posts and discussions. Equally the same could be said of the Firefox blog post I guess, that it was intended only for other branding people, and that by posting it here it is outside of the interests of many people here (though as it was addressed to the community I don't believe that to be the case). However when branding guys write these sorts of posts, they very often write it as if they're preaching to the unwashed masses.

Clearly everything that was before is now terrible, our new icons resemble the very essence of our business/existence/the human condition, and we will deign to allow you to experience it. Bonus points if they fit "growing the brand" in there somewhere!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Say "Firefox" and most people think of a web browser on their laptop or phone, period.... from easy screen-shotting and file sharing to innovative ways to access the internet using voice and virtual reality, these tools will help people be more efficient, safer, and in control of their time online."

Translation: They want to overload the Firefox name to the point where it's totally meaningless. The success of the Firefox name is no doubt the reason but this fails to recognize that's not how names work. This direction is exactly the reason why Nintendo called their console "WiiU" and that turned out about as well as this ultimately will.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Firefox being the name of a single product. The entire underlying premise of this redesign is flawed.

"Firefox is where purpose meets performance."

The marketing direction here could not be less inspiring.

<comment><USER21> Exactly. This looks like yet another attempt to detach Firefox the Brand from Firefox the Web Browser.

Mozilla has tried this a number of times already, and they fail spectacularly every time. I wish they'd just own the fact that they're making a web browser, and focus on making it the best web browser in the world. Not some generic platform.

Purpose meets performance? WTF? It's so generic, it could be the tagline for any automobile, sportswear, or study aid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'd say neither are very good, and they lack the sophistication of brand design history and why things are designed the way they are. I can tell these were sketched and created by someone who has not studied iconography or identity branding.

But why is this the case? What indicators signify this? Here's a basic test: damage them.

Strip away the colors. Make them entirely flat. Can you still identify them? Do they stand out after you've "damaged" the icon in any regard? It's just not colorblindness: what about to a viewer who sees them as slightly blurred, can you still recognize the brand? If you warp the logo, as if from a wrinkled shirt, can you point out whose brand it is?

What about on the worn surface of a sticker on someone's MacBook? Someone getting acetone on some branding materials?

Think about the branding of companies from the S&P500, when the light hits cutouts of their icons, can you identify them from the shadows?

<comment><USER23> If you want to see some truly amazing tongue-in-cheek corporate logo rebranding, the Pepsi Gravitational Field:

[https://www.slideshare.net/tblogosphere/pepsi- gravitational-...](https://www.slideshare.net/tblogosphere/pepsi- gravitational-field)

<comment><USER24> That (amazing) doc is apparently not a parody, but a million dollars' worth of deadly serious.

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo- redesig...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesign- document-1-million-for-this/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like the forward-looking fox face idea, but I would de-abstract it a little bit. It's not cute anymore. It's the equivalent of the 1986 Prudential logo: [https://www.ortnergraphics.com/designofthetimes/?p=285](https://www.ortnergraphics.com/designofthetimes/?p=285)

<comment><USER26> That's a logo with a really strong idea behind it. Firefox doesn't seem to have that much meaning behind its name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I can't figure why companies and foundations waste money and designers time to make new ugly logos when their current one are totally ok and well recognized. This is even more ridiculous since Mozilla recently changed its logo for black and white that is at the total opposite of what is shown in the blog post.

</comment><comment><USER28> In addition to the fact that they'll all look old in three years: none of these icons really leverage each other. If you saw the rocket ship and the picture and the browser next to each other, nothing about them but the color scheme would connect them.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why? Whyyyyyyyyyyy?

Firefox the brand is fine. Someone needs to fire all these "business" people at Mozilla.

</comment><comment><USER30> Firefox survives in spite of mismanagement and misapplication of resources from the top down. For example, do they really need a lush waterfront office in San Francisco?

<comment><USER31> If they want to hire some of the most capable browser developers, yes, it probably helps enough to be worth it. They do have other offices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Please don't change the logo. I love the Firefox logo the way it is. Don't chase trends!

</comment><comment><USER33> At this point the only valuable things Mozilla still has, are the desktop Firefox browser and their software developer team.

The rest of the organization consists of deadweight: making deals with MrRobot, playing with adware, screwing up logos and testing silly IoT ideas.

</comment><comment><USER34> Firefox 'System 1 masterbrand' icon: [https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/files/2018/07/Screen- Sho...](https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/files/2018/07/Screen- Shot-2018-07-26-at-11.27.44-PM.png)

Wileyfox logo: [https://www.androidcentral.com/sites/androidcentral.com/file...](https://www.androidcentral.com/sites/androidcentral.com/files/styles/larger_wm_brw/public/article_images/2016/06/wf- spark-9_0.jpg?itok=VzZB3HDS)

Bit similar?

</comment><comment><USER35> The fox chasing its tail is an iconic brand, and also an iconic color scheme.

I like the other icons that carry forward the Firefox color scheme to other shapes (system 1, row 2), that still feels firefox-y without being Firefox, and would be a good look for firefox affiliated products. When you get down to the third row of system one, or the "master brand" icon, it loses both the recognizable shape and the recognizable color scheme of the Firefox brand.

System #2 is just a mess. I don't even know what they're going for there.

</comment><comment><USER36> These logos looks really fresh right now, but I doubt they'll age gracefully. The viridis/magma tones with gradients are a dead giveaway that a logo was designed between 2015-present, and I suspect they'll look old-timey in a few years. The current moz://a branding will likely age better.

</comment><comment><USER37> Guys your opinions are great, I just hope that if you really care about FF leave you comment in the blog post too.

</comment><comment><USER38> I just knew this was going to be bad based on the title of the article alone... No need to change the current logo and even worse to consider something so close to the Gitlab logo. Mozilla should be embarrassed.

</comment><comment><USER39> Now, organizations do change over time, as the people behind them change. But I honestly cannot believe such a retarded move can be justified by the ignorance of management and design. How can such a decision not be turned down immediately? Erasing the iconic Firefox logo? The only brand asset they have?

Is the Mozilla organization infiltrated by saboteurs? I imagine a lot of governments and corporations will be much happier when the last trully free browser dies. Please fire those people.

</comment><comment><USER40> With the post about golang branding this is the second time in the space of a few months that I read a branding post that sounds like a parody.

Look at the images at the bottom. Look at that hip guy wearing D&G sunglasses and a hip, obviously photoshopped, firefox t-shirt. What is that? Is moz://a making a web browser or a new fashion line? Did Mugatu make this post?

I liked it better when corporations kept their masterbranding habits private.

</comment><comment><USER41> How many version of Firefox do they intend to ship? I don't get it... If they are declination of Firefox, surely they should keep the fox in the picture no?

</comment><comment><USER42> No thanks on both of those...

</comment><comment><USER43> System 2 without question.

</comment><comment><USER44> Everyone is hating on these (like any and every logo redesign ever) but I just want to know how I can get that blue tshirt.

</comment><comment><USER45> Beautiful logos, but I found no reason to "reset" the iconic fox. Is there a problem with it I am not aware?

<comment><USER9> It wasn't made by the current designers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Please don't use the fox head icon. It is too similar to Gitlabs icon and makes the overall aesthetic more silly.

</comment><comment><USER47> While evolving the brand, could you also add a dark/night mode to your browser? Dictionary lookup would be good, too. There are no extensions satisfying my requirements. Besides, I try to minimize the use of potentially insecure and privacy-violating code.

</comment><comment><USER48> How about just making a couple decent products and stop trying to be a million other things nobody cares about?

</comment><comment><USER49> Although I like both icon sets, I really miss the colors of the current Firefox logos. It seems that the new Firefox logos in these two new sets use slightly different colors. I believe the current colors are much nicer with great contrast, even though it's a small difference.

</comment><comment><USER50> It looks like gitlab's logo...

</comment><comment><USER51> You guys are all missing the point... the new icon would be the one in the top left of each of the grid of photos.

<comment><USER28> Which is an unnecessary change and an icon which looks nothing like the other icons so still does nothing to offer "enough design tools to represent this entire product family."

<comment><USER51> Comparison: [https://imgur.com/a/x7yrzZx](https://imgur.com/a/x7yrzZx)

Is it the lack of an arm you don't like, or the fact it's more flat?

<comment><USER28> I don't exactly dislike the new browser logo (although I think going _less_ circular is dumb) so much as I think it's unnecessary.

My bigger issue is that the other 9 logos don't use the same design motif beyond the colors.

The browser logo is a "fox" encircling the globe leaving a trail of fire, or speed. This is perfectly fine for a global communications tool named firefox that thinks "purpose meets performance" is it's brand identity.

but if you want to use the same design tools for the same brand identity: you need to focus on things that imply performance which none of them do except maybe a rocket. and you need them to evoke each other which, imagine for a second those were all random colored and on your phone's home screen; what about them is thematically unifying?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This change was entirely unnecessary.

Good design is timeless, this is anything but.

Admittedly it doesn't look terrible tho.

</comment><comment><USER53> I'd keep the "quantum browser icon" Firefox . And bin the rest.

</comment><comment><USER54> Is it just me, or do the System 2 forms borrow from Opera's current O?

</comment><comment><USER55> How can an open source company so blatantly rip off Gitlab? Total madness.

</comment><comment><USER56> I don't care as long as Waterfox doesn't change its logo.

</comment><comment><USER57> Both of these options are godawful, but that's the amateurishness I expected from whatever design team came up with the horrendously terrible MDN redesign last year.

</comment><comment><USER51> I for one really like the new logo.

</comment><comment><USER58> Foxshedding

</comment><comment><USER59> Maybe it's those sunglasses and that pose, but their new mascot in the douchey dot com white dude costume sure nailed the "Chad" stereotype! Right out of central casting, as Trump would say. Which episodes of Silicon Valley did he play a Hoolie Brogrammer? ;)

</comment><comment><USER23> I would pay money for intentionally silly t-shirts with a badly drawn Firefox logo and "mozzarella foxfire" on them.</comment>


Europe's Attacks on Google Are Backfiring - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-10-17/europe-s-google-antitrust-ruling-backfires <comment><USER2> I see even Google requiring OEMs to pay for the apps to be included as a good thing.

However, what the EU should have done - and can still do - is force Google not do bundle Play Services with its other apps or Android in general. If Google's other apps don't work without the Play Services framework, well, that's Google's problem, isn't it? And maybe then it should make its apps more interoperable with other frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER3> This was written by someone who either failed to fully read Google's statement or who is being paid to make the EU look bad, as it's very misrepresentative of what just took place.

I've emailed the senior editor to ask who wrote it, as it appears Bloomberg is hiding their identity behind the "Editorial Board" account.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm usually on Europe's side against tech giants (Facebook fine, google antitrust fine, WhatsApp, mostly for unfair Ireland loophole with apple taxes) but this looks incredibly dumb to me. I'm fairly anti google but now that they have a 90% market share I want them to charge a ton for each phone and force someone to create a brand new OS that competes with android or iOS, fix all the security, convince developers to build for that, market it to millions, force a satisfied consumer base to learn a new OS and deal with a brand new UI.

This is a complete Google win. Now they can charge without looking bad.

<comment><USER3> Google's not going to be making any more money under this plan, and that's my point: This Bloomberg article has suggested a completely fictional interpretation of events.

Google previously offered a single bundle of apps, one that contained apps that it made money on, and one that contained apps that cost them money. Since OEMs are required to include all of them, Google charges $0 for them.

Now, they'll have two bundles: One that phone makers will pay for, and one that phone makers will be paid to include. If they're still getting both bundles, it's a wash. Again, $0 changes hands.

But what could happen now that it's unbundled, is Bing could pay to have Bing preloaded instead by outbidding Google, and then they can still pay for the Play Store and such. In that scenario, the OEM actually saves money under this change, because there's competition to Google now, where that wasn't possible before. Bing would pay the OEM per phone more than the OEM has to pay Google for the Play Store.</comment></comment></comment>


Node.js v0.9.0 (Unstable) is out - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nodejs.org/2012/07/20/version-0-9-0-unstable/

<comment><USER2> Considering the current numbering scheme, 0.9 will be the unstable version of 1.0. Which means 0.9 should give us a very good idea of the final backwards compatible API (hopefully)

<comment><USER3> Or it might be the unstable version of 0.10.

The dots are there for a reason.

<comment><USER4> IMHO, it should be followed by 0.12, because 0.10 is too confusable with 0.1, but 0.12 is clearly a new version...

<comment><USER5> They use a variation on semantic versioning, which is pretty standard:

        major.minor.revision

_revision_ is incremented when backwards compatible bug fixes are added

 _minor_ is incremented when backwards compatible features are added

 _major_ is incremented when backwards incompatible change is introduced.

All of them are integers, and the smaller ones are reset to 0 when a bigger one is incremented.

For versions 0.x.x (pre v1), backwards incompatible changes are allowed at any time.

There are more rules, see <http://semver.org/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Streams are everywhere, as an abstraction of async I/O model. Hope the Stream API will have a cleanup by 1.0.

</comment><comment><USER6> Might be smart to mention in the title that its just an unstable release.

<comment><USER7> every odd version is unstable

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nothing jumps out at me as significant to bump the version to 0.9. Can someone explain what makes certain changes worthy of the version change?

<comment><USER9> Node follows a even/odd version scheme where even releases are stable and odd releases are unstable. v0.9.0 is just the first release of the unstable v0.9 series.

The versioning scheme is unfortunate because it confuses people. After Node 1.0 we'll switch a less confusing version system.

<comment><USER10> Is it not standard semver? What will node switch to?

<comment><USER9> isaac likes semver - so probably that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I haven't even finalized migrating from 0.4 to 0.8...</comment>


Ask HN: What is the most Neo-Luddite thing you have done this year? - <AUTHOR> Seems like there is a big undercurrent of technoskepticism in society today. Even technologists are scaling back their use of social media etc, ... what is the most Neo-Luddite / anti-tech thing you have done this year? <comment><AUTHOR> For me it's pretty small: deleted all social apps from my phone. But I've been thinking about making bigger changes to live a more minimalist lifestyle. Looking for inspiration/ ideas / discussion.

</comment><comment><USER2> Ditched all social media a few years ago - still not looking back.

It has its downsides but I like the fact that my life is ad/spam-free.

</comment><comment><USER3> Stopped using a percolator. It takes much longer to make coffee, but I look forward to the ritual and the idle-brain time.

</comment><comment><USER4> Put my phone in a drawer on Sunday mornings and take it back out Monday morning.</comment>


How to Run Background Jobs on Heroku for Free - <AUTHOR> http://viatropos.com/blog/how-to-run-background-jobs-on-heroku-for-free/ <comment><USER2> Background workers only cost you money (5¢/hour) when they're running. It's prorated to the second. You can avoid running one constantly by using pedro's "autoscaling" branch, meaning you can run a few hours of background processing --which should equate to hundreds or thousands of jobs--every month for a few nickels.

<http://github.com/pedro/delayed_job/tree/autoscaling>

Pedro is a Heroku employee, so this use is totally fine by them, although the branch is not officially supported software.

[I'm friends with a few guys there, but I don't work there.]

<comment><USER3> I was just coming to the thread to post the exact same thing.

I'm using the auto-scaling version of delayed_job in production on two applications and it has worked absolutely flawlessly.

As the jobs are only for sending emails in the background I don't think I've racked up more that $1 over the last month...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Clever use of app engine to poll Heroku. :)

<shameless plug> You might also want to check out PiCloud (<http://www.picloud.com/product/#features>), which offers low-cost pay by millisecond python-based crons</shameless plug>

</comment><comment><USER5> Background job processing is so essential to any app that I've ever built, that the lack of suitable free background processing (whether via cron or DJ) effectively makes Heroku not have a free option for me. Even if I'm writing a little toy app, it will probably involve DJ and cron, so it will need to be hosted somewhere else than Heroku.

(as for bigger apps, let's not get started... Heroku is pretty expensive at scale, not sure what they have that justifies it)

<comment><USER6> Ease of use, Heroku is really REALLY easy to use compared to GAE. I was going to go for GAE for a project a few months ago, and decided on Heroku because I can just get straight to work instead of fapping about configuring things.

On another, slightly related note you could use Mirah on GAE, a ruby like language. It's pretty neat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me a bit of the django "Poor Man's Cron" project:

<http://code.google.com/p/django-poormanscron/>

I couldn't think of a reason to go with it with projects like Celery around, but I guess if my host was trying to charge a lot for background processing, this would do it.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a nice little hack that I'll stick into my toolbox. The comment on the post about turning the workers on and off when needed is interesting as well. The commenter uses less than an hour on average per month using the method. I wonder if it's time consuming to do this though?

<comment><USER3> Time consuming from a development stand-point, or billable-time standpoint?

Switching to the auto-scaling version of delayed_job on heroku took me about 20 minutes and it has worked flawlessly ever since.

The repo is here: <http://github.com/pedro/delayed_job/tree/autoscaling>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's a very simple library for Heroku that makes delayed jobs switch on background workers only when necessary.

<http://github.com/mtravers/cheepnis>

</comment><comment><USER7> Background processing and regular processing are ultimately the same thing. It doesn't make sense to me why Heroku would try to price discriminate around that feature.

<comment><USER2> They don't. They both cost 5¢/hr per process. The only difference is, you get 1 'foreground' worker for free (per application), but not any 'background' workers.

<comment><USER10> _The only difference is, you get 1 'foreground' worker for free_

That's the differentiation.

<comment><USER10> BTW, don't get me wrong: Heroku is a standout service, and I use it as an example of how dramatically easier it is to start a technology business compared to even 10 years ago. I just have this little nitpicky complaint, that they ought to include one background process for free. The lack of it is actually blocking me from using Heroku for a startup idea at the moment. (I could always pay, sure, but when you're at the proof-of-concept stage, you're reluctant to put out even that much money.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What about having another (free) Heroku app to do the background processing?

Anyone tried that or would the Heroku guys kill such a thing?</comment>


Administrate – Rails framework for creating flexible admin dashboards - <AUTHOR> https://robots.thoughtbot.com/announcing-administrate <comment><USER2> Reminds me of [https://github.com/activeadmin/activeadmin](https://github.com/activeadmin/activeadmin) which is still being maintained apparently, and is incredibly flexible and useful. Won't replace a custom admin interface, but is pretty close.

I made a simple invoicing application a while back using activeadmin and it turned out pretty great: [https://github.com/ianmurrays/active_invoices](https://github.com/ianmurrays/active_invoices)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep! We were heavily inspired by ActiveAdmin. We're hoping that dashboards built with Administrate are easier to maintain in the long run.</comment></comment>


World of Warcraft to go IPv6 - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/world-of-warcraft-to-go-ipv6/1027

<comment><USER2> This is utterly thinking out my ass, but here is a question I had about IPv6 that I thought I would ask:

Could it make sense to use a network wrapper around some types of objects, such that each object has an IPv6 address - and all communications between then occur over IP?

Say you build a distributed app where each component of the app has an IP wrapper - you can deploy the various components in such a way where the calls between them occur on IP - this may allow you to deploy an app across multiple cloud vendors that would otherwise not have the ability to mix and match services.

Say, you have one vendor that has super cheap storage, and another has a particular hardware-based feature you want to tak advantage of. Deploy part of your application across both - linking the components through IPv6 tunnels...

Obviously there are performance issues with this - but it may make it more secure/resilient if those factors are more important.

E.g. you could have duplicate service components spread across multiple vendors which would make the overall app much harder to take down in an outage....

so aside from performance.... what other thoughts would there be against making core components wrapped which are globally addressable?</comment>


The Difference Between jQuery's .bind(), .live(), and .delegate() - <AUTHOR> http://www.alfajango.com/blog/the-difference-between-jquerys-bind-live-and-delegate/ <comment><USER2> Isn't live really used in instances where an element is being added to the DOM after the page has loaded? with delegate, it is attempting to check an event click on an element which does not exist in the DOM.

I'm far from a Javascript expert, but it seems to me that .live is just so much easier to understand conceptually. jQuery is always looking at the DOM.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, live and delegate are mostly interchangeable (for reasons explained in the article). They are both used generally to attach a handler to a DOM element indirectly, by actually attaching it to one of the ancestor elements, and then listening for events that propagate up to that ancestor element, and then checking to see if the target of the event matches the target supplied in the live or delegate method as an argument.

The two reasons for using either one are either:

a) to attach handlers to DOM elements that may not yet exist in the DOM.

b) to attach a handler to a single element or small group of elements, listening for events on descendent elements, instead of looping through and attaching the same function to 100 individual elements in the DOM.

For the most part, live is now generally discouraged in favor of delegate (also for reasons explained in the article). In fact, here is the description for .delegate() from the jQuery docs:

        Delegate is an alternative to using the .live() method, allowing
        for each binding of event delegation to specific DOM elements.

<comment><USER3> this is especially useful with AJAX since the DOM elements may get replaced.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Choosing the right 4k display and GPU - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking at options for upgrading to 4k on my desktop but it seems like a minefield out there. I definitely want a panel that can drive 60Hz via a single stream (not MTS, or dual-dual DVI).
Key features I'm after:
- Single stream @ 60Hz (I think that means Display Port 1.2 or HDMI 2.0)
- 28-32" panel
- Good colour reproduction / fast response
- VESA mountable
- Ideally something I can also hook up to a current generation Macbook Pro Retina and get 4K @ 60Hz too
- A suitable desktop GPU to go with it (my preference is NVidia)
- I mix between Windows 7/Ubuntu/Mac OSX
- I'm also quite interested in NVidia G-Sync - but it's not a deal breaker
My budget is ~£1000GBP for one panel and GPU, I'd probably like to add a second panel in the near future.
For reference my current setup is a 460GTX with two Dell Ultrasharp U2713H monitors, and I'd like something of similar quality.
It seems like right now the manufacturers and vendors are making it harder than it needs to be to get the full information you need - often the inputs are listed without versions, and use of MST isn't mentioned at all.
I guess I'm looking for advice really - what other people are using and enjoying. One that is potentially standing out is the Acer Predator 4k2k XB280HK 28". <comment><USER2> I'm currently using the Seiki 39inch 4k. 30Hz, but great for coding/browsing; probably no good for graphics work (bad color reproduction) or games (30Hz).

It is very inexpensive, so I think of it as a one or two year "rental", until the 4K market matures. I enjoy the huge screen real estate, although I find it best with a tiling window manager.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've seen 30Hz in action on a couple of panels and there is no way I can stomach it!

<comment><USER2> Honestly I don't notice it ... where does it bother you?

I'm not sure whether I really want to know the answer here - this might be one of those things that you can't unsee once it is pointed out!

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely nothing you can't un-see - it's just terribly jarring for me.

I pretty much find anything (that doesn't have inherent motion blur baked in - like film/tv) below 45 frames per second painful to watch - however 60 frames or more is smooth as silk.

Edit: I should point out I do a lot of CAD work, constantly panning/zooming. I'm sure in a text editor it wouldn't matter so much!

<comment><USER2> I can definitely see how it might not be the right monitor for CAD work. Hope you find something that works for you (and that doesn't break the bank), although it feels like waiting a few months could be a good strategy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


End-To-end Audiovisual Speech Recognition - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06424v2 <comment><USER2> Y'all didn't cite some extremely relevant work: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.00572](https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.00572) (disclaimer - they're from my lab)

<comment><USER3> What is HNs impression of the etiquette of "demanding" citations? I agree with nmca that it's the author's onus to research prior work as widely as possible, but if something is missed, presumably both by the authors and the reviewers, and therefore clearly was not actually a reference for the work in question, is the author really at fault? Is it "ok" to demand a citation like this?

<comment><USER4> Closed-form peer review is basically a (very tight) spam filter in ML at the moment. Everyone wants the papers to appear quickly, so reviewers can't meaningfully require changes --- papers are in or out. Overall this is net better. Requiring changes leads to bike-shedding, and really long publication processes.

Most review is community review, of exactly this sort of form. So we really don't want to add a lot of politeness constraints around requesting citations.

The literature is moving so fast that authors can get away with assuming readers won't know about relevant work. If we let that thrive, we'll reward bad actors who "forget" prior work and claim novelty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow: "In presence of high levels of noise, the end-to-end audiovisual model significantly outperforms both audio-only models."

</comment><comment><USER6> I am curious what the success rate would be without any audio - by just reading lips and face.

<comment><USER7> I'm going to guess "very bad" given that even experts can't do this very well. I don't think there is enough information.

Edit: It does say in the paper actually. The "classification rate" (I assume % of words correctly identified - they only recognise single works from a dictionary of 500) is 82 for visual only and 98 for audio, and audio-visual (without noise).

Without noise the audio is good enough to be near perfect (I assume 100 is perfect) so the video doesn't really help. It helps when there is noise (which matches real life experience - people lip read in noisy bars).

<comment><USER8> > people lip read in noisy bars

Maybe that explains why I, as a visually impaired person who can't lip read, have trouble carrying on conversations in noisy bars. Good to know!</comment></comment></comment>


Permanently opt your browser out of online ad personalization via cookies - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hhnjdplhmcnkiecampfdgfjilccfpfoe

<comment><USER2> Google makes most of its revenue on advertising. Google's ability to target ads is a huge plus to its advertisers. Google still offers a way for users to opt out of this if they choose.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is 'Don't be Evil' in my books.

<comment><USER3> Modus tollens at its best.

'"For example", does not a proof make.' \- sorry, can't recall the author

<comment><USER4> Except that he's simply saying _this_ is part of "don't be evil", not that because of this, Google are 100% non-evil.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> wow I went to the url provided, <http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/> . To see what interests are associated with my cookie. Its amazingly accurate as to what my interests are. In all honesty its quite impressive.

<comment><USER6> Accurate in no false positives or accurate in it captured it's best fit to you?

I was in the same boat as you but then I investigated what all it could flag on my account and realized that I tricked myself. My categories were actually closer to fortune-telling type stuff. 'You like video games', 'You like online videos', 'You like computers & electronics'.

But when I drilled down I found it missed lots of things it could flag me for. Google did not recognize I was a programmer despite me googling for various C apis and programming questions commonly. Last summer I spent a good amount of time learning to garden with much help from google but nothing about that category. I often google books for reviews rather than goto amazon.com directly.

Given the amount of interests I have told google about I am actually surprised that they have flagged me for such a conservative set of categories.

That said: it is nice to peek under the covers in such a convenient way.

Edit: And now I am, oddly, pausing before opting out. If you had asked me if I would have opted out before I had the choice I would have said yes. But now, given the choice to opt out, I wonder if I am actually giving up value. If I opt out do I lose something of value to me: having a better chance of that spacing being filled with something valuable rather than just noise. Is it a fair trade: My interests for a better signal-to-noise ratio? Before I had the choice it felt, to my human brain, that I was getting the short end of the deal. But now that I have a choice my human brain is wondering if it is a fair deal after-all. funny.

<comment><USER7> _"Accurate in no false positives or accurate in it captured it's best fit to you?"_

One false positive for me - Beauty - though that's probably my beautiful wife searching.

Regarding capturing me - not close. A few periphery interests (comics - because I have Dilbert delivered to my Gmail each day?), but not one business category despite the fact that I work as a business coach, write a business blog, used to edit and run social media for a national business coaching company, and spend a heap of time on HN and elsewhere reading business articles.

I also welcomed the awareness because it made me go 'meh'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ghostery is similar, but blocks the information used to do this kind of tracking. I guess it makes sense to use both, although personally I trust the Ghostery approach more because it doesn't rely on the tracking companies keeping their word (for example, it would be difficult to detect if they still recorded you use, but just stopped personalizing ads).

<http://www.ghostery.com/> (not involved, just a happy user)

</comment><comment><USER9> So ad-personalization is bad because?

I would much rather see personalized and relevant advertising then random garbage.

<comment><USER3> I would rather not be stalked and have all my personal and private information available to people trying to sell me crap I don't want or need.

I'd rather see no advertisements.

<comment><USER10> No offense, but without advertisement, then how does Google pay the bills? It's one thing to not want to be stalked, it's another thing to use a free product and complain about the company making money from even showing adds on the side of the page....

<comment><USER8> I'm not shutting down Google. I am disabling ads for me. The two are not identical.

If everyone did as I do, then Google would have problems. But they would have them anyway, because I don't follow ads. On the other hand there would also be one hell of a lot more free software. And everyone would have a shaved head and a beard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The last part of the title, "via cookies" still concerns me, ever since seeing the evercookie project (<http://samy.pl/evercookie/>). There are so many other ways for sites to track users besides normal cookies.

This is a good start on Google's behalf. Hopefully this type of pluggin will evolve to include the long list of other methods sites use to track users.

</comment><comment><USER12> The ~146 sites it opts out could just be added to /etc/hosts. This site has a much more comprehensive and longer list of pre-formatted and commented/explained list of sites you can just drop into your /etc/hosts: <http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/>

</comment><comment><USER13> What's the benefit of opting out? Opting Out results into Google not providing better ads to you; Google may still track and categorize users and the collected information may still be used for other uses (e.g. personalized search/news, personalizing its own ad campaigns).

</comment><comment><USER14> If you are a Firefox user, check out Beef Taco - [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/beef-taco- tar...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/beef-taco-targeted- advertising/)

<comment><USER15> If you're interested in other extensions/plugins at all, have you seen <http://donttrack.us/> ? The site is one giant ad for DuckDuckGo, but it has some useful links at the bottom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am slowly beginning to cut Facebook some slack after seeing how Google manages to master the art of privacy setting obfuscation.

I'm a "superuser" and have used Google for who knows how many years, and I was apparently still in the opt-out program.

If Larry Page needs a cause that will set him and Google apart from Eric Schmidt, here's a good place to start.

"Don't be creepy." How about that?

<comment><USER17> I wouldn't cut them slack just because someone else's arguable worse.

<comment><USER16> I don't have a Facebook user, so there's a lot of slack to be cut, before I get to that step. :)

It just puts Facebook in another perspective on my relative axis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Install Disconnect (written by an ex-Google engineer).

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

It blocks 3rd parties and trackers from a variety of places, not just Google.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hot on the heels of Firefox' "Do not Track" announcement ... momentum is building. [http://www.futureofprivacy.org/2011/01/24/breaking-news- fire...](http://www.futureofprivacy.org/2011/01/24/breaking-news-firefox-do- not-track-advances/)

The first DNT proposal surfaced after a bunch of privacy advocates met a few years ago in California. It's great to see the idea get refined and adopted.

</comment><comment><USER19> While many seem to think this is a good move, I personally think it should be opt-IN, with the default action of no cookie being needed to turn it all off.

I block all cookies for Google by default anyway and virtually all ad networks and tracking are blocked too (check out Ghostery for Firefox).

</comment><comment><USER20> I am more concerned with some of its categorization of my interests!

Reference - Humanities - Philosophy What happened to philosophy being the queen of sciences?

Science - Mathematics Mathematics is a _subtopic_ of science? Science is impossible without math.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why not just block all 3rd party cookies in your browser config? That easily possible with Firefox and Chrome and almost all sites work fine without 3rd party cookies. Seems that 99% of the use-cases are tracking related anyway.

</comment><comment><USER22> Anyone else having hotmail and yahoo email issues after installing? Login info is no longer being saved. Each time I shut all chrome instances I have to re- enter the info to login. Before it was stored in a cookie.

</comment><comment><USER23> I found a better solution: set your browser to forget all its cookies when you shut it down. Use different providers for webmail, feed reading and search.

No opt-out cookie required!

</comment><comment><USER24> I have been wondering about two things:

1\. Is it possible to not use a cookie to opt out?

2\. Why must we _opt out_ , instead of opting in.

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't want to opt out as it'll turn adverts from rarely useful to never useful.</comment>


Uppy: let's teach an old dog some new tricks - <AUTHOR> http://uppy.io/blog/2016/07/uppy-begins/ <comment><USER2> On one of my sites, I'm using websockets to do uploads. This is because it gives me better control over congestion issues (I can for instance do bandwidth shaping for each of my virtual connections).

However, sadly, I've discovered that in Chrome when a tab does not have focus, upload speeds dramatically go down, probably because of some scheduling policy in the browser.

If you want to _programmatically_ address uploads (i.e., not with a simple PUT request), you have to somehow face this issue. I'm not sure if Uppy has this same problem or not (or if it even allows bandwidth shaping).

<comment><USER3> In general, Chrome fires setTimeout and setInterval slower when a tab isn't focused. Could it be that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was actually expecting a dog getting taught something. But rather I got excited like a dog when I read resumable uploads.

<comment><USER5> I was hoping Updog had got a new round of funding and had pivoted.

<comment><USER6> What's updog ?

<comment><USER7> Not much, how 'bout you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Last discussion about tus: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10591348](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10591348)

Great to see progress. Even though I would prefer if resumable uploads were part of the browser.

</comment><comment><USER9> We tested a few commercial options out there (Filepicker most recently), but the issue consistently ended up being that uploading is such an important part of our app, that if it's down even for 20-30 minutes a month (which they all were), it's a big headache, and results in cancelled accounts.

We ended up plugging in the AWS JavaScrpt S3 SDK. We trust their uptime much more, and browser support is pretty widespread. It came with it's own headaches (namely, client side clocks being out of sync, and AWS rejecting uploads due to some security checks), but once we got everything figured out, it became incredibly stable.

It works by uploading files directly to your S3 bucket. Setup wasn't seamless (notably, setting things up with AWS Incognito), but in the end, we're incredibly happy we went this way.

We still use 3rd parties for resize images that are uploaded (namely, Cloudinary, which has been fantastic), but decoupling the upload logic from the usage logic has helped tremendously, and affords us reliability in that we control where the file is stored, how it's name, and are not tethered to a 3rd party (other than AWS).

<comment><USER10> You can just use Fine Uploader, which is an MIT licensed-library that handles direct-to-s3 uploads from the browser, with support for v2/v4 signatures, chunking, pause/resume uploads, image scaling/previews, drag and drop, folder uploads, etc, etc. [http://fineuploader.com/](http://fineuploader.com/)</comment></comment>


Airbum – A simple and elegant online album - <AUTHOR> http://airbum.co/ <comment><USER2> The design is great and this is a really nice way to display a travel album, but the experience is not there. I'm sure when testing over a local network this is fast but even over my 30mbps connection I had to wait a long time for all of the images to load. That's not normally a problem but the page seemed totally 'frozen' until about half of the pictures had loaded, and scrolling was full of jank until it was totally loaded.

Is there some way you could put placeholders in for the images while they load so that I can scroll around? If I wasn't waiting to see the demo specifically I would have assumed the page was broken and clicked out.

<comment><AUTHOR> The site is hosted on S3 and cloudfront right now. The poor performance might be because the page transaction and animations. My initial vision is display the album similar to a photo book, now seems nature scrolling might be more acceptable.

<comment><USER2> I, unlike some others, don't mind the paginated scrolling. I just think it would be good to be able to quickly flip through pages without delay just because the images are loading.

A good example would be a Facebook photo album. If I click the left arrow as fast as I can, the page keeps flipping instantly. Instead of seeing each picture, I see a small loading icon and a box where the picture will be. When I finally stop mashing the arrow, the picture I'm settled on will load.

I hope you don't find my comments overly critical. It's a beautiful design, just trying to be constructive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a Brit, the name makes me giggle :-) (The equivalent US interpretation of how it reads to me being, perhaps, 'airfanny').

<comment><USER4> I was expecting airbnb but for bums (vagrants).

<comment><USER5> Thought I was the only one :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Please don't mess with my ability to scroll through content. Additionally, having content in between the nav breaks is infuriating, and my scroll bar is gone.

<comment><USER7> Your comment is overly harsh but I find the reaction interesting. It's getting more common here.

In other cases I'm also disturbed by the broken scrolling but in this case my only complaint is the space bar not working. This is a slideshow, but it feels like scrolling because it goes vertically and the scroll bar works. I'm pretty sure if the scroll bar were completely disabled and there was a [next] button with a different transition you wouldn't complain because you wouldn't think of it as broken scrolling, but just as another slideshow.

So, my suggestion to the author: make it slide horizontally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would like something like that not as a service but instead to create locally so I can just upload a static directory to my own server (or neocities, etc.) so I don't have to upload my pictures to yet another 3rd party.

<comment><USER9> Same here. My parents had big books full of pictures of my brother and me. I only have digital photos of my kids.

I'm looking for the equivalent, a local (everything not under my control is out, no saas) solution. Mediagoblin _might_ solve this in the future. Openphoto/trovebox seemed promising. So far I haven't found something that looks right though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the only uses of this type of page scrolling that I actually think works pretty well (YMMV, I'm on Windows/Chrome).

Having said that the name really is so bad that it kills it. I wouldn't send a link around to people in the form of [http://www.airbum.co/gmcbay](http://www.airbum.co/gmcbay) or whatever a user url will look like. I "get" the _album_ connection you're going for but the end result is in expert-sex-change territory as far as how it actually reads, I'd be too embarrassed by the "risky click" looking url.

<comment><USER11> I didn't even catch the "album" play-on-words. I just read it as "Air Bum," as I'm sure many others did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Alas, I'm just told that I need to visit the site on my desktop with "a lastest Chrome browser".

</comment><comment><USER13> The demo is slow as molasses on my 2012-era Macbook Air (Google Chrome). Seems to have something to do with the scroll hijacking, which IMO is usually a bad idea. I wonder if there is a way to do this kind of vertical presentation while still allowing me to use the browser's native scrolling.

</comment><comment><USER14> So, _not_ a flying tramp? Not an evaporating derrière?

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting concept, but I'm with SDGT on breaking scrolling. If it's a slideshow that's one thing, but when you're having me scroll with my touchpad (because nobody wants to click those tiny dots on the right that are overly popular) it's extremely frustrating to not have a direct correlation to the speed with which I'm scrolling. Worse yet is when it scrolls further than I wanted and I have to scroll back up again.

Also, I love Medium's design as much as the next person, but I honestly thought I had landed on a Medium blog for the first few seconds.

</comment><comment><USER16> Checked the demo, and... why the interference with the scrolling? I saw such design for first when Apple released their rubbish-bin Mac Pro, and later on a BBC article* , and the experience was bad in all.

* "The Reykjavik Confessions", an excellent read BTW [http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27290883](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27290883)

</comment><comment><USER17> This looks nice, although I agree that I would find the scrolling difficult to put up with.

An alternative, focused on travel mainly: [http://maptia.com/maptia/stories/the-overview- effect](http://maptia.com/maptia/stories/the-overview-effect)

<comment><USER18> My travel documentation is incredibly fragmented between direct emails to family, photos on my phone, dslr photos, blog posts, tweets, facebook posts/albums, etc...

I like the idea of Maptia for aggregating all that into one place, but because of uploading everything everywhere for so long, I really want a solution on my own server and attached to my own domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Don't have much of an opinion, as the frontpage, and the demo itself, are broken on Opera 12.

<comment><USER20> Also broken in IE9

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Reminds me a lot of Storehouse, but with page breaks. E.g. [https://www.storehouse.co/stories/f5oh-adventures-in- califor...](https://www.storehouse.co/stories/f5oh-adventures-in-california)

</comment><comment><USER22> Product seems simple and clean, very 'Medium' like. The name is horrible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, I just decided to change the name. Is there a good alternative?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Having 'bum' in the name's been mentioned as funny but it can quickly turn into a liability if work, school and profanity filters interfere with accessing and sharing your website.

<comment><USER24> I doubt that would be cause for concern, here's a very innocent subset of the 44 words that contain the letters bum.

album bumble bumblebee bumbled bumbler bumbles bumbling bump bumped bumper bumpersticker bumping bumpkin bumpy verbum

That said, they always find a way to build a better fool. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem)

<comment><USER23> That article is exactly why the name should be changed .... the most recent example is from _January this year at the ISP level_. It's such a pointless risk to take.

        In January 2014, files used in the online game League
        of Legends were reported as being blocked by some UK
        ISP filters due to the names 'VarusExpirationTimer.luaobj'
        and 'XerathMageChainsExtended.luaobj' containing the
        letters used in the word "sex".[30]"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Change the name. Layout reminds me of Medium. I'd be interested to see the user interface in actually creating the album-- that's what would determine whether I used it or not.

</comment><comment><USER26> The demo looks great! It would really be a good way to do a trip show case to my beloved.

What kind of product would you want to make it into? An online service or a paid software or even.... open source? :P

</comment><comment><USER27> Reminds me of [https://exposure.co/](https://exposure.co/) \- But scrolling and navigating through the site feels a lot smoother on exposure.

</comment><comment><USER28> Holding the "down" arrow blows up the animation pretty good. I think that your implementation of the scrolling for Mac mice is pretty solid so far.

</comment><comment><USER29> Anyone else experiencing huge amounts of lagg on that demo page? Am on a 100/100 connection with a decent graphics card and all..

</comment><comment><USER30> No mobile version: project is already doomed.

</comment><comment><USER31> Beautifully simple

</comment><comment><USER32> Airbum?

</comment><comment><USER33> 404

<comment><AUTHOR> really? I still can access the page</comment></comment>


This Single Tax Change Could Destroy the Startup Ecosystem as We Know It - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/dana-severson/this-1-single-tax-change-could-destroy-startup-ecosystem-as-we-know-it-and-it-could-happen-today.html <comment><USER2> The current administration is not pro small business, for all their shilling about being business friendly. If the current tax bill passes as is, it'll trigger a housing crisis (mortgage deductions capped at $500K), probably increase tax for residents of states with state income taxes, and kill startups with this options thing.

It'll only benefit Trump & his big business cronies.

<comment><USER3> It's not going to trigger a housing crisis what-so-ever.

~97.5% of all home owners will remain unaffected by that cap at $500,000.

"approximately 2.5 percent of Americans are paying mortgages on homes valued at $500,000 or more."

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/03/how-m...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/03/how- many-families-actually-own-half-million-dollar-homes/)

88% of the benefit of the state income tax subsidization goes to people making over six figures.

"The state and local tax deduction disproportionately benefits high-income taxpayers, with more than 88 percent of the benefit flowing to those with incomes in excess of $100,000."

[https://taxfoundation.org/press-release/benefits-state- local...](https://taxfoundation.org/press-release/benefits-state-local-tax- deduction/)

You're taking issue with taxes going up on people that are doing _quite_ well, in other words.

Further, the stock options taxation policy has been removed from the Senate legislation and has zero chance of becoming law.

The 20% corporate income tax rate will benefit the majority of small businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> According to AVC this language was changed in the final version of the bill, and the bill is now favorable to the interests of VC-backed startups.

Nevertheless, taxing options when they vest rather than when exercised (NSO) or on sale of underlying stock (ISO) might not be such a big deal. If this change had been adopted as law, the option-holder could presumably still make an 83(b) election when the option is granted. But if not, then yes, this would be the end of option comp as we know it.

But the existing tax code is problematic enough. Ideally we could give startup employees restricted stock grants through all stages (or at least, the early stages) of growth. Instead, b/c of the deemed fair market value of the stock, we have to use options to avoid a phantom tax hit. Option comp leads to a lot of the stories we hear from aggrieved employees and former employees of high- flying startups, whose interests often get lost in the shuffle.

What if we could change the code to permit taxing startup restricted stock grants _on exit_ instead of on grant. Define startup restricted stock grant as illiquid private company stock issued as equity compensation to service providers. Here's a compromise -- allow an elective deferral of tax until exit, with the trade-off that stock taxed on exit pursuant to the deferral is taxed as ordinary income. This would solve so many problems, and vastly simplify early-stage equity comp. Alas, our tax code is held hostage to the cat-and-mouse game played with large public companies and PE funds, and efforts to make those people pay more tax end up having tremendous unintended fallout on small private companies.</comment>


The Essence of Google Dart: Building Applications, Snapshots, Isolates - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/articles/google-dart

<comment><USER2> > Using static type information in Dart doesn't help with the runtime code for > several reasons. One is: the types the developer specifieѕ have no impact on > the semantics at all

I wonder if string concatenation, set union and integer addition are not totally distinct cases worth optimizing.

> and, as a matter of fact, they can be totally incorrect.

And this is where Dart starts to feel _really wrong_.

</comment><comment><USER3> Much more interesting than the early (over-) reactions we saw last week. This one puts Dart in a sensible context. Thanks</comment>