Ask HN: Which roleplaying games do you play apart from Dungeons and Dragons? - <AUTHOR> As the title says. I'm particularly interested in any games not using a D&D-derived system, and even more in any less mainstream titles. <comment><USER2> It's not exactly a traditional role-playing game, but I've been very taken by Microscope. You can play it with a trello board it's pretty simple. It's more like world-building story-telling I guess.

[http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/](http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/)

</comment><comment><USER3> GURPS - though not often, no one else will run it and I don't have time these days.

Dungeon Crawl Classics - D&D-esque, but not really. Worth checking out, it's _fantastic_. Some of my favorite games come from this one. Start with a zero- level funnel (each player has 3-5 PCs all 0-level). The magic system is awesome. The recently published Mutant Crawl Classics but I haven't got it yet. Tons of pre-made modules.

Castles & Crusades - This is a D&D-derived system, something like a streamlined 1E/2E in mechanics, but retains the themes and character. Also a lot of good pre-made modules (not as many as DCC, but enough to run you for a while if you can't play often).

Fiasco - No GM. All storytelling. It's fantastic, you build up the world and story collaboratively. This is my go-to these days if I can get people interested in RPing.

Dread - Low mechanics, focus on storytelling. Mechanic is a Jenga tower, if it falls the PC whose player pulled is dead (or otherwise out of the game). Story set up is a set of questionnaires the GM gives to players beforehand with guiding questions intended to connect the various PCs (the players don't know what the others wrote, this leads to neat developments). Good for one-shots, not campaigns.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm pretty fond of White Wolf's games like "Scion". Where you get to play the offspring of a god and mortal.

Also, you can't go wrong with a good game of Cyberpunk

<comment><USER5> Oh, yeah. A good game of CyberPunk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Every single game in the Final Fantasy series, even some of the silly spinoffs like World of Final Fantasy.

[https://kotaku.com/world-of-final-fantasy-the-kotaku- review-...](https://kotaku.com/world-of-final-fantasy-the-kotaku- review-1788174070)

</comment><comment> a-saleh I played:

* Dungeon World (and World of Dungeons)

* Apocalypse World

* Blades in the Dark

* Scum and Villainy

I blame mostly Steven Lumpkin and Adam Koebels streams with J.P. Mc Daniels on twitch.

One day I would love to play the standard 5E dnd, or maybe Stars Without Numbers, but the games in my list were fast-paced enough to have meaningful 2 hour sessions, which was often a must :-)

<comment><USER7> My first experience with pen and paper RPG's is from JP's streams, I used to be obsessed with them, watched all R&D, Swansong and MirrorShades, hard to commit enough time to watch 4 hour long episodes tho.

Recently I played my first game where I DMed Dungeon World for a few mates, was great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Paranoia is a great game that's a lot more freeform. And you get to kill off your players as well!

<comment><USER5> Paranoia and Teenagers From Outer Space were both seriously crazy games, and were so mentally taxing that I could only play them about once per month.

Most of the rest of the time, I played the West End Games version of Star Wars RPG, or Marvel Super Heroes RPG, or sometimes the Amber RPG.

More recently, it's been primarily the FFG version of SWRPG, online via Roll20.net.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Occasionally I play "Hero Kids" with my children. Three are six and really like it, but we have to do very short sessions. My daughter is 21 and has fun playing it with her brothers, but it's definitely geared toward younger kids.

</comment><comment><USER10> Divinity original Sin 2: Ok it's a video game but if you guys like table top games it is based off it it. It is based off tabletop games and it definitely shows

It's great to play with friends but you can also play solo if that's more your thing.

<comment><USER11> Baldurs Gate uses the AD&D rule set, as did all the Icewind games.

Personally I find the video games mentioned a bit contrived as it's clearly not the same, video games are always on rails compared to traditional RPGs.

Saying that, DOS2 is fantastic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I stopped playing games 20 years ago. Mostly for lack of time.

I am curious though. If you are a gamer, how old are you? Do you have a spouse and kid(s)? How long is your commute? When do you typically play?

<comment><USER13> I'm 32. I have a wife and 3 kids (two of which don't live with me). My commute is 1h30m (depending on traffic).

I play every Wednesday and Saturday.

Wednesday is a short game, usually 8p-10p. My wife doesn't get home until close to 10 because my daughter has dance class (game is cancelled if I take her).

Saturday is a game I run. It's typically 7p-11p (although it can run past 12 sometimes). I've been running this one for quite awhile since before I met my wife.

I'm extremely grateful that she lets me have this hobby. Besides woodworking it's my only other hobby. I needed something that wasn't more coding. I used to sit at my desk at work and then come home and sit at my desk working on a side project but I burnt out super quick.

The thing that makes it possible for me is Roll20[1]. I've never met my group in person. I've never even seen a picture of a few of them. We met on reddit and a dnd discord and the rest was history. We're actually planning on an IRL game in the coming month or two, so there's that.

[1] [https://roll20.net](https://roll20.net)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I always enjoy Path Finder, it's just so easy to get a game started. I've tried Mutants & Masterminds, but the powers can quickly get bloated and OP.

</comment><comment><USER15> same thing here, stopped around 10 years ago, but the last game sessions were GURPS Swashbucklers and WoD werewolf.</comment>


What Carriers Aren't Eager to Tell You About Texting - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/business/28digi.html

<comment><USER2> SMS is a cash cow. It's the only thing that really makes money for some carriers. After voice, it's generally the biggest contributor to ARPU (average revenue per user) -- more than selling ring tones or 3G service.

This isn't really a big secret; read any quarterly report from a carrier or, heck, read the press release about the report.

</comment><comment><USER3> A terabyte costs only $100? Someone had better tell NetApp.

I dispute that so-called professor's assertion about the size of a text message making it cheap; for transmitting data over long distances the limiting factor is packet latency; for tiny messages proportionally greater of the system's time is going to be spent waiting for packets to move on the wire. It's quicker and easier to move a gigabyte file 3000 miles than 10,000,000 100-byte files. Per byte of data, SMS traffic is probably the most expensive traffic to route and switch.

<comment><USER4> SMS messages are _much_ smaller than a single TCP packet is capable of carrying (or, if you want to roll your own re-transmit logic, a UDP datagram). They also have effectively no QoS guarantees attached, so you can queue them for transmission whenever bandwidth is unavailable (or would degrade service for more critical streams, like active voice calls).

Since the "last mile" bandwidth is effectively free, by virtue of being embedded in the control channel, there's no reason other than "consumers will pay it" that justifies the cost of SMS traffic.

The Internet is full of services that blast millions of tiny packets between networks (routing, DNS, etc.) without incurring significant per-transaction costs. There's nothing special about SMS that should drive costs up as much as they have been.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Who cares? Prices aren't based solely on cost, they're based on competition and demand. The author seems to miss the point of capitalism.

From their point of view, why _shouldn't_ AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and TMobile charge whatever the market will bear? What's the incentive to charge less?

Of course, there's an opportunity there. Should one of them, or some new company, start charging $5/month for unlimited texting, it could be pretty popular.</comment>


Why perl has separate arrays and hashes: It's as if they thought it through - <AUTHOR> http://altreus.blogspot.com/2011/06/its-as-if-they-thought-it-through.html <comment><USER2> Arguing that this cannot reasonably be done is unconvincing when well-designed languages like Lua pull it off.

The only thing about Lua's tables that consistently confuses people is the behavior of the length operator in the presence of "holes." The previous, somewhat confusing definition in Lua 5.1 (<http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#2.5.5>) has been replaced with:

        The length of a table t is only defined if the table is a
        sequence, that is, all its numeric keys comprise the set
        {1..n} for some integer n. In that case, n is its length.
        Note that a table like

         {10, 20, nil, 40}

        is not a sequence, because it has the key 4 but does
        not have the key 3. (So, there is no n such that the
        set {1..n} is equal to the set of numeric keys of
        that table.) Note, however, that non-numeric keys do
        not interfere with whether a table is a sequence.

        A program can modify the behavior of the length
        operator for any value but strings through the __len
        metamethod.

(<http://www.lua.org/work/doc/manual.html#3.4.6>)

<comment><USER3> Not only does Lua have the length problem, but array offsets are a matter of convention. Lua chooses 1 as the first element of an array instead of 0. But that is just convention. Your code could use 0 or -100. A confusing implementation of length and offsets by convention instead of using nearly universal array semantics from other languages is not "well-designed". It's a cheap hack to conflate everything into one table data structure.

<comment><USER4> Perl 5 has $[ which lets you set the base for every array. eg. $[ = 1; would cause all arrays to be 1-based. Thankfully they've now deprecated this misfeature ...

[http://perldoc.perl.org/perlvar.html#Deprecated-and- removed-...](http://perldoc.perl.org/perlvar.html#Deprecated-and-removed- variables)

<comment><USER5> I thought that was deprecated a long time ago. When I learned Perl in 2000 I remember I read not to use that "feature". Apparently it was just not recommended, for a very long time.

<comment><USER4> Certainly the advice has been don't use it for a very long time. At least since the 90s when I learned Perl. However it wasn't actually deprecated until last year (Perl 5.12). There were a sequence of steps leading up to full deprecation which you can read about in the link I provided above. Maybe some people were actually using it?!?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> First, it is pretty funny for this poster to use this as a reason why perl is a well thought out language. It like all languages has pros and cons, and picking one thing about perl that isn't even unique to perl isn't a good example of how perl is so well thought out.

Second, I agree with the premise that having two separate structures is better, but a lot of the issues brought up in this post just don't come up in the real world. For example with PHP once you understand that the array() construct is just a hash map with a linked list that stores the ordering, a lot of the these complications are much less complicated. Just don't think of the keys as indexes in an array, think of them as keys in a hash map that have nothing to do with ordering. If you want to change the order, you need to change the linked list, which initially is set by insert order but can be changed to something else by using various sort functions. Again, I'm not saying this is the greatest design in the world, but I am saying that living with this design in practical application isn't a big deal.

In fact, the biggest annoyance has nothing to do with any coding stuff, it is just that you pay a huge memory penalty if you just want a simple array of items. Luckily PHP added a few newer data structures (<http://www.php.net/manual/en/spl.datastructures.php>) like SplFixedArray which are much more memory efficient. Obviously in standard usage the memory doesn't really matter, but in some cases where you want very large data structures these new objects come in handy.

<comment><USER7> _It like all languages has pros and cons, and picking one thing about perl that isn't even unique to perl isn't a good example of how perl is so well thought out._

I believe you've misread the intent of the title. I read it as an answer to the question: "Why does Perl have arrays and hashes, even though the language I'm used to does not?" And, this article takes a decent stab at explaining why Perl has arrays and hashes. It does not, as far as I can tell, make any attempt to explain why this proves that Perl is superior to all other languages or is more thought-out than other languages (except perhaps those languages that don't have separate array and hash datatypes).

The way I read it, it's saying in a lot more words, "You'll like it once you get used to it."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do so many languages conflate arrays and hashes?

I know of PHP and JavaScript. PHP was not designed at all so no point discussing it. JavaScript was initially written in a week so we forgive Brendan Eich.

<comment><USER9> Javascript doesn't really conflate arrays and hashes in the way PHP does. It uses the same bracket syntax for both, but you either instantiate an array or a hash.

I don't think that allowing you to iterate over a hash as if it were an array is all that unforgivable, though it's often not the right thing to do and you can't expect the values in any particular order.

<comment><USER10> > I don't think that allowing you to iterate over a hash as if it were an > array is all that unforgivable

it's not even doable in JavaScript: bare objects (~hashes) are iterated with for...in, using that with arrays gives inconsistent results: the array's keys will be iterated as if they were (string) properties, there are _no guarantees_ they'll be iterated in numerical order, and any enumerable property added to the array itself or any of its ancestors will be iterated over as well.

Friends don't let friends iterate over arrays with for...in.

<comment><USER11> > Friends don't let friends iterate over arrays with for...in.

Which is too bad because it looks so much better.

<comment><USER10> I just use Array.prototype.[forEach|map|filter] instead, or the equivalent Underscore.js function (which aliases to native when it can) if IE- compatibility is needed.

If you need performances, nothing will beat C-style access anyway. And FWIW, using for...in on an array is slower than using Array.prototype.forEach.

edit: FWIW, even hand-rolling an each() function (in the style of underscore's) will be faster than for...in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That this post has so many upvotes is evidence that a lot of nonprogrammers read HN.

<comment><USER13> I don't understand this comment. I'm a programmer, designing a language in my spare time, and I found it interesting, since I considered going the Lua/PHP route with my collections. I thought it was nice to find an article about actual programming an HN again, and I don't know why non-programmers would upvote it.

Please explain. I'm really curious.

<comment><USER12> My comment was reflecting my intuition that most programmers would not find the blog post useful or insightful.

The first two sentences of the blog post are, "I wonder why we have separate arrays and hashes in Perl. Other languages don't do it." However, as evidenced by only 4 contrary languages listed in the comments here, the _vast majority_ of programming languages have separate array and hash structures.

Much of the post is absolutely _trivial._ The post is a combination of circular reasoning (arrays and hashes must be different because they... are different) and some sort of straw man gedanken (well it would be easy to do if we did this but then that doesn't work, so obviously this way's "thought out").

It's a whole post to point out that arrays and hashes are different and are used differently. Hurray? Let's upvote it?

<comment><USER13> I see what you mean, in that it could definitely have been a lot shorter and to the point. But it was satire, especially those first two sentences, to point out how silly he thinks it is to combine them. I think you may be taking it a tad too seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's almost as if the majority of programming languaguages are "thought through". I mean, really, who designs a programming language and doesn't think it through? It's a nontrivial undertaking typically undertaken by people that are smarter than the average bear.

</comment><comment><USER15> This was a fun post, but I found the other post on this blog more interesting:

<http://altreus.blogspot.com/2011/06/anatomy-of-types.html>

Not terribly useful to anyone who's been around the block in Perl at least once, but it's a great explanation of the three Perl variable types. Saving it for the next time I need to teach someone Perl.

</comment><comment><USER16> How is this different from Python's lists/dictionaries?

Also IIRC PHP does internally differenciate between array(1,2,3) and array('blah'=>1, 'bloop' =>); Just the syntax is not as clear.

<comment><USER17> The syntax is unclear, but also the behaviour is unclear.

$var[] = "entry1"; $var['something'] = "entry2"; $var[] = "entry3";

$var[0] is now "entry1", and $var["something"] is "entry2", but what's the index for entry3? And if you iterate over the array, will you get entry2 before entry3?

What if you create $var[$somestring], but $somestring is "29"? Now it will be at $var[29], and automatic indexing will reset to 30, which you may not expect.

There's a lot of argument to "just don't write code like that", but with the inconsistencies in PHP library functions (and PHP's careless type conversion) it's easy to come across cases where this sort of "do something unexpected instead of throwing an error" behaviour can bite people in the ass down the road, through no fault of their own.

<comment><USER16> Oh yes, I don't deny that it's horribly done. I use my own classes "Dict" and "Li" instead of arrays whenever I need them to be specific, generally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Array and hash types in perl likely evolved bottom-up from the lower-level data structures of the same name.

Other languages use terms like "List" and "Associative Array" for their abstract data types to differentiate from the implementation techniques. And yes, lists and associative arrays have slightly different properties, as do sets, stacks, and queues.

</comment><comment><USER19> tl;dr: arrays, dictionaries, ordered dictionaries (lists, sets and so on) are all different classes of data structures with different properties. To be efficient one should chose best one, not rely on some "all included" generic datatype.

</comment><comment><USER20> The PHP array is a wonderful data structure with an awesome set of properties. This blog post contains a lot of "problems" that are somewhat trivial and have been reasonably solved in PHP. This comment will be downvoted to oblivion without discussion.

<comment><USER21> > This comment will be downvoted to oblivion without discussion.

If you can see the future, I recommend playing the lottery. If you're a snarky ass, I recommend not commenting.

I've been working with PHP for five+ years now, and only started working with Python in the last year or so. You're right - working with PHP's arrayhash isn't too terribly complicated, but having actual arrays and hashes as different types is _super_ convenient. At least once a day, I think fondly of Python and wish I could use it - list comprehensions and negative indices could eliminate the need for half of PHP's array functions and make for cleaner and more readable code.

<comment><USER20> > If you can see the future, I recommend playing the lottery.

I can't see the future, but I can edit the past. It's just a little disappointing to be downvoted without anyone actually commenting on the subject.

> but having actual arrays and hashes as different types is super convenient.

I agree especially if, in the language, arrays and hashes are objects with methods.

I didn't claim PHP's arrays were the greatest data structure on earth but ordered hashes that special-cases integer indexes is a pretty nice procedural- style data structure. PHP doesn't really have arrays; it's just the hash type is flexible enough to do double-duty.

Apparently, on Hacker News, having such opinions is both downvote worthy and punch-in-the-face worthy.

<comment><USER21> > It's just a little disappointing to be downvoted without anyone actually > commenting on the subject.

When I saw your comment, it didn't look downvoted to me. You clearly realize that people can vote on comments - has it occurred to you that comments can bounce back from a negative score? That is, unless you append some passive aggressive horse-shit to the end.

Honestly, I don't know if we gain anything by PHP having arrays pull double duty in this way. The only advantage is, what, having one less keyword to remember?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Using the same object for arrays and hashes seems like a terrible idea long before thinking about it this much. JavaScript does it, but JS goes for this super-simple, everything-is-a-function-hash-thing simplicity

<comment><USER23> As stated above Javascript does not do this it has separate array and Object types. Javascript developers might.

<comment><USER24> No it doesn't. Arrays are a type of Object, they're not distinct.</comment></comment></comment>


University Investigates Claim That White Professor Pretended to Be Black - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/us/jessica-krug-gwu-race.html <comment><USER2> She should not have lied or deceived, but it would not matter much if (1) the quality of scholarly work were judged independently of the race of the author and (2) there were no racial preferences in academia.</comment>


Wheeler: Insecure open source software libraries? - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/490973/

<comment><AUTHOR> Good discussion, with some pushback on the "correct answer" (use system libs), e.g. <http://lwn.net/Articles/491030/> ("we have almost every single library pulled into the source tree.")</comment>


Is pinboard.in still being supported? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> What makes you think it isn't?

<comment><USER3> I had read some reddit thread where they said developer was not responding to emails. Also its twitter feed is filled with US Politics.

<comment><USER2> The founder is also on [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords) and quite a character with twisted sense of humor (nice words while others might call that off-putting). Just send him or support@ a test email and raise the concern.

(I run a small SaaS and could swear some of the support emails we get are a test to see if we answer at all or maybe measuring how long we take).</comment></comment></comment>


The Amazon Echo as a map of human labor, data and planetary resources - <AUTHOR> https://anatomyof.ai <comment><USER2> There's a lot of truth in this essay but there are also a lot of unsubstantiated claims made by two people who clearly don't actually know how the Echo and Alexa are developed. The tone and language implies they know what they're talking about and express everything as fact even though they're completely wrong about some of it. The sensationalism and vilifying really detract from an otherwise important topic that should be discussed more: the environmental impact of modern technology and how sustainable it is.

<comment><USER3> Just curious, what parts made you think that? Kate Crawford is a very well- respected researcher on the sociological and cultural aspects of "big data". Her perspective might not be purely technical, but her descriptions of these productive processes seem very in line with a lot of the other conceptualizations (mostly in the humanities) of data as labor, which I think is _the_ most important part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _In recent years, shipping boats produce 3.1% of global yearly CO2 emissions, more than the entire country of Germany. In order to minimize their internal costs, most of the container shipping companies use very low grade fuel in enormous quantities, which leads to increased amounts of sulphur in the air, among other toxic substances. It has been estimated that one container ship can emit as much pollution as 50 million cars, and 60,000 deaths worldwide are attributed indirectly to cargo ship industry pollution related issues annually. Even industry-friendly sources like the World Shipping Council admit that thousands of containers are lost each year, on the ocean floor or drifting loose._ holy crap...

</comment><comment><USER5> I dont really understand the map is there further material that comes with it - a talk or slides?

<comment><USER6> Scroll down

<comment><USER5> huh youre right, some kind of UI fail there but otherwise all good thanks

<comment><USER7> You're not the only one. The header image is so big, and links to a PDF, such that I thought the PDF _was_ the content.

This is caused by:

      height: 93vh;

[https://anatomyof.ai/css/main.css?line=178#line:178](https://anatomyof.ai/css/main.css?line=178#line:178)

...causes the header image to occupy 93% of the viewable area of the open window.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Firms 'blacklisting' Australia over encryption laws, government contractor says - <AUTHOR> https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/firms-blacklisting-australia-over-encryption-laws-government-contractor-says-20190722-p529ec.html <comment><USER2> Makes me wonder what the intelligence agencies themselves think about these developments. It sounds like it may be counter productive for them, if it means that no local business with which to pressure are even operating, because they've been forced out of business by cost of compliance. That's a separate issue even from having privacy conscious consumers completely overlooking them.

I wish our voting populous was more politically astute... Time and time again, we prove that we're unable to do anything to stand out in any way that makes us a first choice in anything. Our education system isn't well regarded at all. The way things are going, being designed in China will be a sign of greater reliability and trust than Australia. It isn't like individuals aren't capable, just somehow, it isn't valued, so it doesn't happen. Any time we get something that works half decent, we're somehow thankful and relieved to have something above average for once.

Maybe our intelligence agencies should be rethinking their internal missions. You know, so they actually have something worth protecting. They should be uniquely positioned to have a good view of the sociological factors which make up our society. That's part of their job. Sure as hell not going to get a politician pull their weight.

</comment><comment><USER3> > companies ... "should have confidence that the legislation does not, or > indeed cannot, undermine the security of products and devices," the > department said.

How they can say that with a straight face is astonishing to me. Of _course_ it undermines the security: that is the exact purpose of the law.

</comment><comment><USER4> Good. This has to hurt them in quite a major way before anything will be done about it. From my (possibly ignorant) perspective, the Australian government is a bunch of corrupt coal-industry loving dinosaurs who do not understand the first thing about tech and won't care about anything until it hurts their bottom line.

<comment><USER5> From an Australian perspective, I think you summed them up nicely. I'm still ropeable that Labor helped the government ram this through.

</comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 The only sane response possible to this insanity.</comment>


Ask Hn:  How can I buy a parked domain if they have private registration? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to buy a domain name from someone that's just kind of squatting on it.  They bought it back in 1997 and using http://www.archive.org I was able to determine that they were trying to start a web hosting company.  Since 2001 the domain has been parked and it's registered until September 2012.
The way I see it I can do 2 things:
1. Try to contact the person using the contact info in the whois records
2. Wait until it expires and do what Mike Davidson did to buy newsvine.com (see below for link)
The domain is registered with private registration (of course), so I shot an e-mail off a couple of weeks ago to the contact person at the registrar to see if they could put me into contact with the owner.  No answer as of yet.
What would you do?
Article Link From Above: http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/03/how-to-snatch-an-expiring-domain
[Edit: Fixed formatting.  I'll get the hang of it yet!] <comment><USER5> Well you could try getting a DomainTools domain history report as well. If they've not dropped it since 2001 they're probably not going to drop it in 2012.

Go to domaintools and do a whois on the site there. They can tell you things like how many other domains this registrant holds. How many times the whois information has changed (if it's ever _NOT_ been private this is where you can look)

Maybe try and get in touch with a domain broker. I know the people who work for domainadvisors.com are very well connected in the "domaining" industry and she might be able to help you out. (look up T.R.A.F.F.I.C for a window into the world of domaining)

Services are not cheap though - you'd better _really_ want the domain if you're planning on going that route.

I might have some more tips if you want to get in touch with me privately - alex dot chesser at gmail. (I don't know exactly how much help I can be - <USER2> I can help you hash out the ideas a bit more).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your insight! I'm going to start by looking into DomainTools (never heard of that before, but sounds super helpful). If I had to guess, the person that bought it back in the day bought it for a long period of time because he/she thought the idea would work - at least that's what I'm hoping.

I might end up sending you an e-mail too. I really appreciate that you'd be willing to give up some of your time to help me out with this. I think the majority of us here on HN really value our time very highly (myself included), and it speaks worlds about your generosity to be willing to give some of it up. Thanks again!

<comment><USER5> No worries. It'd honestly be a pleasure to help out. Domains are a bit of a murky world - but - as the other comment says, the parking provider might be happy to broker a sale as well.

Take a look at sedo.com, afternic.com & namejet.com to get an idea of what premium domains 'go for' in the aftermarket.

<http://domainnews.com/> <http://www.domainnamenews.com/> <http://www.dnjournal.com/>

Are some industry references that I've got in my RSS feeds. Unless you're prepared for the sorts of costs that domains go for, you might find yourself a little shocked by how much this person might want for the name alone.

Quite often it's worth it - but depending on the scope of your project - <USER3> might also want to consider looking for alternative names for your project. Someone recently posted <http://impossibility.org/> to HN and I thought it was absoloutely brilliant. A domain name generator. It's bloody fantastic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A guy that purchased a domain in 2001, tried to make it work, has it registered through 2012 is likely to turn down offers if he will even respond in the first place. There is a bit of pride he's got to swallow because the sale would mean that he failed at his idea. He'll want to keep the domain because one day he's going to revisit that idea and make it work.

I've had a domain backordered since 1999 - it has had a parking page since it was purchased, and every year, about 7-10 days before it expires, it gets renewed. The domain isn't special, just one that meant something to me - <USER4> obviously him. Every year, about 60 days before renewal, I send an offer letter, he's responded a few times but has never asked for more money, just that he isn't interested in selling.

That said, a domain broker might be able to get a response. I wish you luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like you're right. He did get my e-mail and said they didn't think they were interested in selling it, but he did ask me why I want to buy it. I'm guessing that if I say it's for my business he'll try to gouge me on the price (if he decides to sell it), but then again I think he might do that anyways.

How would you respond to him?

<comment><USER6> First question is, how valuable is the domain to you?

Any offer will have to be enough to allow him to make some profit from the domain registration, possibly hosting, and perhaps a small incentive during the holidays for profiting on an unused domain. If the name is an actual word, he's going to assign some inherent value which might make the domain more valuable to him. The fact that you have some back and forth dialog means he's at least considered it enough to respond.

In cases like this, I generally let them suggest a price and use the 73% rule. Generally, they won't accept less than 73% of their initial offer. Once you have a number to work from, you can start to negotiate the purchase. If the answer exceeds what it is worth to you, you could try a hail mary and say, well, we really only had $x budgeted, thanks for your time. If you ever reconsider, please let us know.

Money today sometimes exceeds the possibility that he could sell the domain in the next year and make more than that, especially if you're the first offer he's had in a while. Until you get some starting point, it'll be difficult.

As for what you want the domain for, I would just say that you were considering a project and thought the domain would be a good fit. There are other domains you're looking at including another you have registered, but, you thought this domain had a slightly better fit.

Good luck with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> most private registrations will auto forward emails to the actual owner. try emailing the address the comes up in the whois.

example: email@example.com will forward to the actual owner.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep! Spot on! I just got a response from him today. Looks bleak though...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You might try contacting the parking company.</comment>


Dear Google, Commit Your Broad Patents to a Defensive License - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/dear-google-commit-your-broad-patents-defensive-license <comment><USER2> One of the issues is how you define "defensive" purposes. If you are locked in an ecosystem battle with opponents who are fighting on multiple fronts over years (Microsoft shaking down Android vendors, Apple suing to ban and restrict competition), then you yourself may never be sued directly, but your interests are nevertheless, still being attacked indirectly. It's like a Cold War where your client states are fighting it out against other superpowers.

Thus, is it "offensive" if Apple sues one of your customers over a stupid patent on phone number extraction via regular expressions, or Microsoft sues over FAT32, and you retaliate by suing them because they built a bill- splitting app into their product? Or must they launch a nuclear missile directly at your capital before you're considered justified in a counter- offensive?

The hope I think of asserting these kinds of patents is that mutually assured destruction results in detente. You build up a nuclear arsenal so that it becomes unthinkable by your opponent to attack, and this is undermined if you hold yourself to some kind of pledge never to use them, or never to use them unless your capital is bombed directly.

What the EFF is asking for is a nuclear non-proliferation treaty and test ban, but they are asking the weaker player (who has fewer weapons) to give up their weapons and give up making, and not the superpowers.

<comment><USER3> _> Microsoft shaking down Android vendors_

Please can we stop saying this? I can write a whole essay on how licensing patents is the norm in tech industries, and how Microsoft (and Apple) are using patents exactly as they were meant to be, and so on.

But since you're a Google employee (IIRC), I'll just point out that it was _Google_ that was actually _convicted and made to pay 14 million_ for doing what you are accusing Microsoft of doing.

<comment><USER4> This Ars Technica article[1] lists the five patents they were demanding ridiculously high license fees for. Please, by all means, explain how demanding the same fee they would for licensing Windows Phone itself[2] for such ridiculously terrible patents is exactly how the patent system is supposed to work.

Patent cross licensing is incredibly common in the tech world, but this was not an example of that. This was Microsoft taking the playbook from the RIAA and the porn industry and betting they can get a large chunk of money out of companies by setting the license fee at the perfect level so that it was safer to settle than to countersue.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/long-battle- likel...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/long-battle-likely-in- microsofts-newest-patent-infringement-suit/)

[2] [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/long-battle- likel...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/long-battle-likely-in- microsofts-newest-patent-infringement-suit/)

edit: below, afsina provided an even more detailed look at the three patents that became key to the barnes and noble ITC complaint:

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/02/the-three- patents...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/02/the-three-patents- microsoft-is-hammering-the-nook-withand-why-they-may-be-invalid/)

<comment><USER3> _> Please, by all means, explain how demanding the same fee they would for licensing Windows Phone itself[2] for such ridiculously terrible patents is exactly how the patent system is supposed to work._

1\. Those are just 5 patents they asserted in that one lawsuit. The portfolio they actually license probably has hundreds and maybe even thousands in it. They only asserted these 5 because a) it's practically impossible to sue over more than a few patents, and b) they thought these were the likeliest to get B&N on.

2\. I am not sure what the "ridiculously high license fees" were... Were they ever even revealed? To my knowledge, the actual terms of any of their Android deals is not known to this day, and the $10/phone figure is complete speculation. This is true of almost any IP licensing deal by any company in the world ever. These deals are typically closely guarded trade secrets. My hunch is, MS is actually licensing for a lot less than $10/phone, and is instead negotiating for a stronger commitment from manufacturer's on the Windows Phone front.

3\. Patents give holders a right to sue others if they infringe. Infringers can try to avoid lawsuits by negotiating a license. Or they can argue that they don't infringe or the patent is invalid, which often (but not always) ends up in court. That is how the patent system was designed to work. Microsoft chose to use it by negotiating licenses for the most part. Apple chose to not license and used their right to sue instead. Now one may complain about the quality of the patents involved, but...

4\. ...On what basis did you judge those patents to be "terrible"? Really, I am curious as to what you think the patent covers and why it's terrible. I ask because the default for tech media or HN is that all patents are "terrible" but when I drill down into it, most people are woefully uninformed about how they work. It's actually quite difficult to truly evaluate the quality of a patent. From a legal perspective, it requires reading not only the patent, but the entire file wrapper including all the cited prior art, the office actions and the applicant's responses. From a layman's perspective, judging the novelty of something, especially if it's old, is difficult because it's very difficult to envision the state of the art at the time of filing and appreciate what is being claimed; things too easily appear obvious in hindsight, and some of the patents on there are from _1994_!

<comment><USER4> You didn't address the actual point of contention here. How is asserting these patents in court, or using them to get an import ban via the ITC, an example of how the patent system is supposed to work? They cow a company with patents over things barely invented (B&N actually argued that they weren't invented at all, at least not by Microsoft) that should have never had a patent issued for them in the first place, and you argue that once they do agree to a patent license they are getting to license totally awesome things?

"Hate the player not the game" is not an excuse when the charge was "Microsoft shaking down Android vendors". The RIAA (and now the porn industry) was also granted the right to sue and recover up to $150,000 per infringement of their copyrighted works. Now, one might complain that the Copyright Act wasn't written in a world where individual songs could constitute an infringement act, nor did Congress intend the higher damages amount to apply to individuals not engaged in a profit-making venture, but...

In any case, you sound reticent to start reading the patents. Here's a good starting place: Barnes and Noble's response to Microsoft's ITC complaint: [http://www.groklaw.net/pdf2/MSvB&Nanswer.pdf](http://www.groklaw.net/pdf2/MSvB&Nanswer.pdf)

Yes, the patents really are terrible.

<comment><USER3> _> How is asserting these patents in court, or using them to get an import ban via the ITC, an example of how the patent system is supposed to work _

I thought I did so in point 3.

(Edit: removed bit about copyright because it could quickly derail this thread into a copyright/piracy thread.)

 _>... (B&N actually argued that they weren't invented at all, at least not by Microsoft) that should have never had a patent issued for them in the first place,...

> Here's a good starting place: Barnes and Noble's response to Microsoft's ITC > complaint: > [http://www.groklaw.net/pdf2/MSvB&Nanswer.pdf](http://www.groklaw.net/pdf2/MSvB&Nanswer.pdf)

> Yes, the patents really are terrible._

Really? You're going to take the defendant's word to show that the "patents really are terrible"? I'd like you to find a single defendant in a patent lawsuit who didn't think the asserted patents were terrible.

 _> ... you argue that once they do agree to a patent license they are getting to license totally awesome things?_

No, they'll just get a license to do things covered by the patents that they were allegedly doing anyway. Said things may or may not be totally awesome. And if they're not very useful, why do them in the first place?

 _> In any case, you sound reticent to start reading the patents._

No, I actually did go and read the pertinent parts of the patents linked above. They're actually better than the really terrible ones I've seen from that era. But I cannot make an off-hand judgement on their overall quality because that would require reading the patents, and the file-wrapper, and the prior art, and...

But, wait. Did _you_ read the patents? And the file-wrapper? And the prior art? Or are you just accepting an opinion given by hilariously biased sources?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google use patents offensively when it suits them. They are not on our side.

[http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-13-406_en.htm](http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-13-406_en.htm)

 _The European Commission has informed Motorola Mobility of its preliminary view that the company 's seeking and enforcing of an injunction against Apple in Germany on the basis of its mobile phone standard-essential patents ("SEPs") amounts to an abuse of a dominant position prohibited by EU antitrust rules_

<comment><USER6> > The Commission opened the investigation in April 2012.

While the process of buying out had begun at this point, it wasn't finalized until May 2012. I am not sure how much "Google" had to do with this decision.

<comment><USER7> Nice one, others did it, not Google.

Too bad this notice was published on 6 May 2013. Surely Google had time to stop whatever Motorola was doing until May 2013 but decided not to, even if Google had no hand in pushing Motorola to do this.

<comment><USER2> Motorola, and HTC to some extent, are companies that were on their last legs, almost bankrupt, and the world's most profitable tech company, with half the market, and $150 billion in cash, is engaged in offensive lawsuits against them trying to enact import bans. Who is the bully here? It's like a billionaire punching a street bum in the face, and then whining when the bum fights back ungentlemanly. The two biggest bullies, Apple and Microsoft, have cross-licensing agreements and a behavior of ganging up on Android.

I find it absurd that FRAND patents are practically valueless, but "obvious" patents, which are effectively standards essential because wide applicability, are worth billions and import bans. Apple sued HTC over a patent which is a college algorithms homework question, the first strike on the Android was launched by Apple in 2010. I would view all suits against Apple since then, not as trolling, but as an attempt to negotiate a cross-license by forcing them to the table.

<comment><USER7> _It 's like a billionaire punching a street bum in the face, and then whining when the bum fights back ungentlemanly._

Very touching, minus the fact that APPL was once almost bankrupt too and that the iPhone, that everyone started copying, really made them that $150 Billion. Care to tell us what Android looked before the iPhone? Oh, it looked like the market leader of that time, Blackberry. [http://gizmodo.com/334909/google- android-prototype-in-the-wi...](http://gizmodo.com/334909/google-android- prototype-in-the-wild?tag=gadgetsandroidhardwareinthewild)

 _I find it absurd that FRAND patents are practically valueless_

No one forced them to make them FRAND patents. At least they get a cent here or there from every phone on earth.

<comment><USER6> They made good business decisions to make that money. That does not give them the right to become ass holes and claim everything they did was original and exclusive to them.

Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. Some better than others, some different, some identical. It is insane that this shit needs to be patented.

<comment><USER8> You know, I can't even tell who you're talking about there, Motorola's FRAND patents or Apple?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How about Microsoft and Apple? Do they get a free pass from this, because they're less likely to do it, so why even bother asking them?

I'm not defending Google, and I support EFF's request. I'm just saying this seems to happen quite often. For example, even though Apple was trying to make things better for Foxconn employees, they were actually the ones being targeted and criticized "for not doing enough", a lot more than the other Foxconn customers were.

<comment><USER10> There are two factors at play.

Imagine you want a date. Do you call up your favorite celebrity and ask him or her out? No. You find someone that you like that has a greater than 51% chance of actually saying yes. (OK, it doesn't need to be 51% since you stand to lose less than you could gain. But some mental calculation like that is going on.)

The other factor is Internet hype. Try this: write a story involving Google or Apple as the protagonist, submit it to HN or Reddit, and watch as the Internet goes crazy for it. The companies are "hot" now, and merely mentioning them sells newspapers (or pageviews, or Reddit karma, or whatever). If what you're writing is technically true and contains controversy, all the better.

The first factor rules out Apple. The second factor rules out Microsoft. And who's left?

<comment><USER7> Or maybe the two faced Google is the one trying to win brownie points with the tech crowd, while applying for patents on bill splitting?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is the nature of the EFF's power? Can they harm Google calling them a hypocrite[1][2] if only via reputation or public shaming? Will programmers on certain forums, for example, be less likely to accept a Google position because of Google's patent policies, especially ones that are highlighted by the EFF?

Then I think: apart from fearing the mighty EFF's vast and influential power (ha), what other concerns might motivate the patent decision maker at google (whoever that is) to take action in this case? Perhaps they are motivated by the respect of their colleagues. Perhaps they have something I read about in college, called a "conscience", which I was led to believe was a powerful influencer of individual behaviors. Wouldn't that be amazing, if the decision- maker at Google actually told the world that their _conscience_ wouldn't let them take a certain action they believed to be wrong? That would be a massive win, in so many ways, and for so many people.

And I, for one, might call back that Google recruiter.

[1] [http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2013/02/lets- defend-i...](http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2013/02/lets-defend- innovators-against-patent.html)

[2][http://www.geekwire.com/2013/joke-google-seeks-patent- splitt...](http://www.geekwire.com/2013/joke-google-seeks-patent-splitting- restaurant-bills/)

</comment><comment><USER3> To be fair, something that gets the extreme cases of bill-splitting right probably deserves a patent, if not a Nobel. After all, Bistromathics _is_ the most powerful computational force known to parascience...

</comment><comment><USER7> _Now, we understand you may never assert this patent. Given your history, you may only be acquiring it "defensively."_

This is the same argument as Obama used for the bill allowing indefinite detentions [https://www.aclu.org/national-security/president-obama- signs...](https://www.aclu.org/national-security/president-obama-signs- indefinite-detention-bill-law) without a trial: "I will never use it" or something like that. The point is that it should never exist, what happens next year or five years from now?

By the way Google is a convicted patent troll, [http://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-says-wins-patent- tri...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-says-wins-patent- trial-004332318.html)

<comment><USER6> > Though the award was just half of the $29 million in damages Microsoft had > sought, the company hailed today's ruling as a landmark victory "telling > Google to stop abusing patents." But the patent battle predates Google's > 2011 acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Microsoft first sued the phone maker > in 2010 for overcharging on patent licensing.

Source: [http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/04/motorola-versus- microsoft/](http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/04/motorola-versus-microsoft/)

Please try to stop inventing facts. EFF does this thing for a living, I would think they would not miss something as obvious.

<comment><USER12> I see examples, time and time again, of companies (especially Microsoft) twisting facts to make sound-byte-style comments that make Google look bad.

However, I cannot think of a single example where Google has done that about any company.

Can someone prove me wrong?

<comment><USER3> See the whole "Bing rips off Google's results" thing. No less than Stephen Colbert fell for it and the truth never got as much publicity. People still believe Bing scrapes Google.

Interestingly, the whole thing was instigated by Vic Gundotra, who's ex- Microsoft...

<comment><USER13>
      > See the whole "Bing rips off Google's results" thing.
      > No less than Stephen Colbert fell for it and the truth
      > never got as much publicity. People still believe Bing
      > scrapes Google.

[http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating- copying-...](http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our- search-results-62914) is a comprehensive and detailed writeup of the accusations. Do you have an alternative explanation for how the results for those particular obscure random text strings propagated from Google to Bing?

      > Interestingly, the whole thing was instigated by Vic
      > Gundotra, who's ex-Microsoft...

In that same article the author says he was contacted by Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts, not Vic Gundotra (they don't even work in the same division):

      > My last meeting of the day was with Singhal and Cutts —
      > where they shared everything I've described above,
      > explaining this is one reason why Google and Bing might
      > be looking so similar, as our columnist found.

<comment><USER3> _> Do you have an alternative explanation for how the results for those particular obscure random text strings propagated from Google to Bing?_

How about this link from the very article you quoted?

[http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its- ac...](http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its- accusations-63279)

I know you work for Google, so you must have the technical competency to see the nuance; can you say with a straight face that this was "copying"? Is it any different from the tracking Google of Facebook do across the web via their various products?

Like I said, the truth is more nuanced, but people only remember the scandalous version.

> Amit Singhal

You're right, my bad. I completely misremembered.

<comment><USER13>
      > I know you work for Google, so you must have the
      > technical competency to see the nuance; can you say with
      > a straight face that this was "copying"?

My personal belief is that it was copying, yes. There is no other legitimate reason to phone home which results a user clicked on in a competing search engine.

      > Is it any different from the tracking Google of Facebook
      > do across the web via their various products?

When I go to a site with Analytics on it, the site operator chose to put that code on their page and they're the ones using the resulting data. In my opinion, tracking scripts are morally no different from analyzing server logs.

In contrast, the toolbar in question appears to record the user's behavior across the entire web, then send it back to the toolbar's developer. The purpose appears to be distributed scraping of search results across various search engines (it's not just Google being copied from, here).

If Chrome reported which links people clicked on to Google, there would be an uproar (and rightly so). In terms of malicious behavior, tracking a user's clicks on web sites and sending them to a third party is only one step above a keylogger.

<comment><USER3> _> My personal belief is that it was copying, yes. There is no other legitimate reason to phone home which results a user clicked on in a competing search engine._

It phones home with _all_ the links a user clicks, not just on a competing search engine. The legitimate reason is that users have chosen to do so in order to "enhance their surfing experience". The reason may be BS but users are given an option. Suggested Sites is explicitly opt-in and IIRC (can't verify, on a Mac), the toolbar installer defaults the checkboxes to opt-in but presents a screen to opt-out during installation. So at least users are given a choice. Websites that use Google Analytics and similar products don't even do that. (Except if you're in the UK and have to obey the "cookie" law.)

I would argue that a website operator has less of a right to say what happens to the data about users' behavior than the users themselves. So, in my opinion it's fair game for Bing to use that data.

You could argue users are technically clueless and don't know what they're opting in to, but again, even giving them an option is more than what website operators and Google (and Facebook and Bing itself) does all over the Internet.

 _> If Chrome reported which links people clicked on to Google, there would be an uproar (and rightly so). In terms of malicious behavior, tracking a user's clicks on web sites and sending them to a third party is only one step above a keylogger._

Google itself tracks which of the links on its search results users click, so that they can use it in their search rankings. And, of course, Google also tracks users across the entire web so that targeted ads can follow users across sites. Just because it's the web page itself that does the tracking rather than the browser does not mean you are not tracking them. Why is one "just a step above malicious" and the other perfectly alright even when the end result is exactly the same?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I agree with the sentiment but as a publicly owned company it may be considered in breach of duty to stockholders to commit to such a thing. These companies are about only one thing: how much money can we get? If they make good stuff along the way, that's OK, but that is not their purpose. It's a reversal of proper means and ends. In our system, money is the end, creating things is the means. In a proper system, it's the reverse.

<comment><USER15> And google is the king of unusual business models. It can be in a company's wallet's best interest to be moral if it drives up sales and trust. I can think of countless companies that exist in the "we're green so buy us" space.</comment></comment>


The TechCrunch Bubble Index: Parsing Headlines to Quantify Startup Hype - <AUTHOR> http://toddwschneider.com/posts/techcrunch-bubble-index/ <comment><USER2>
        article.published_at = Time.zone.parse(elm.css(".byline time").first.to_h["datetime"])
       # timezone seems inconsistent, no big deal because we only care about date anyway

I've written a TechCrunch scraper myself, and it turns out the reason the time-zone is inconsistent is TechCrunch outputs the time in 12-hour AM/PM...but forgets to include the AM/PM. So the hours just loop around from 0 to 12.

<comment><USER3> I too wrote a little TC scraper a few months back, as a friend's startup was expecting an article there and I wanted to see it first. In the process I found a Wordpress bug that meant unpublished article headlines were leaked. Reported it to TC, no response at all. Reported it to Wordpress via Hackerone, they've fixed it for Wordpress VIP sites, but not in the main codebase yet. That was four months ago, and they've stopped responding to emails now.

<comment><USER4> Who did you email? I don't see anything. email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I stopped visiting TechCrunch almost 5 years ago when it changed from highlighting new and upcoming startups to simply covering news of the already established and huge tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook etc.

I haven't been back, but do catch an article or two when it's linked from HN. Does anyone here still frequent TC enough to comment on the current editorial direction?

<comment><USER6> They have a separate startup section now, but even that's getting repetitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is pretty good - until you published it. Now all you need to ask is how much incentive TC's owners have to show a certain graph. (That is just one example of gamification this can create.) I mean because they can publish whatever headlines they want and track and hack this graph absolutely directly.

I think it would have been better to keep this pretty powerful heuristic for yourself :)

</comment><comment><USER6> I remember doing a very basic analysis (via Google search) of TC headlines back in 2012, but I was curious about their preference for funded companies vs bootstrapped, in terms of coverage. Predictably, they were mostly covering funding rounds:

[http://blog.itrendcorporation.com/2012/07/23/no-coverage- for...](http://blog.itrendcorporation.com/2012/07/23/no-coverage-for-self- funded-companies/)

Your data is very interesting. Any change you could also "group by" company and list companies which are more frequently (repeatedly) covered by TC? I have a theory about that, would be interesting to test.

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe the equation is that TechCrunch articles about startup funding get more "help" from those startups on sites like HN/Reddit, thus they get much more exposure, thus more views.

This is an amazing analysis. Thank you. I really enjoyed the aggregated "x for y" headlines.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is really awesome. It really says something about the quality of the product being churned out at TC.

I imagine that most of the funding articles are short. It would be interesting to see how much of the total words were about fundraising (i.e. not just headlines, but the entire article).

</comment><comment><USER10> Funraising is very envy-inducing. Envy tends to be good for advertisers (look at womens print magazines, if you have any doubt). I'd be interested to see how this impacts their advertising business metrics.

<comment><USER2> For my TechCrunch scraper, I obtained the number of Facebook shares for each TechCrunch article to use as a proxy for popularity/page views. There appears to be a correlation, as Facebook social media shares of TechCrunch articles have doubled in the same months as the peak of fundraising announcements.

[http://i.imgur.com/Xqhahjs.png](http://i.imgur.com/Xqhahjs.png)

EDIT: reduced unintentional financial verbiage.

<comment><USER11> In the same months? Can't you just at # of shares post by post and see it it correlates with whether it's a fundraising post?

<comment><USER2> I had the chart+data on hand: doing that analysis would take a little more work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd love to see this done with the new hackernews api.

</comment><comment><USER13> it's interesting to see a spring surge in headlines & a fall surge in headlines - perhaps a result of the summer slowdown at VC firms.

</comment><comment><USER14> Very interesting. I wonder if any changes in TC editorial line could have biased this graph.

</comment><comment><USER15> This article indicates startup funding is way down since this spring.</comment>


Show HN: Convert any piece of writing into a tweet using AI - <AUTHOR> https://remarkapp.io <comment><USER2> That's really a fantastic tool. More than just tweets, I am trying to learn to summarize my writing and be more to the point. I was really surprised at how great the result was. Sure, room for some improvement, but, I've added the plugin.

Might be nice also to have a gmail plugin, as it's often in email where I want to be more concise.

Great work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for feedback! Good point, i will write a plugin for gmail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting! I played around with it, and it seems to perform abstractive summarization of fairly good quality with coherent output. I can see myself using this. Can I ask what kind of model are you using, and what dataset was out trained on?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not quite sure, I'm more of classic programmer, there is an ml guy in our team, that operates this layer

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Super cool! Thanks for sharing this! Question though, when adding to Chrome it asks for permission to read and change data on all medium.com sites. Any reason for this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for feedback. Ya, there is a feature, we are testing right now, when user visits medium article, it can process it and give the result without even copy-pasting.</comment></comment>


Applications open for Startup School - <AUTHOR> http://startupschool.org <comment><AUTHOR> Notice that this year we've expanded the intended audience from hackers to include designers and engineers as well.

<comment><USER3> Why are you asking for age? As the leader in the space of incubator you're setting the stage for age discrimination and you're making it acceptable. I'm very disappointed!

<comment><AUTHOR> Because we have higher standards for achievement for a 30 year old than a 20 year old.

<comment><USER4> The form only asks for education and where you've worked. That's a limited definition of higher standard (especially for hackers and designers).

You also wrote this [1] back in 2007. Have your views changed since then?

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> It asks what's the coolest thing you've built.

<comment><USER4> Indeed it does. When I posted my comment, the additional questions about tools and coolest thing you've built, were not appearing.

Edit: As mentioned in a sibling comment, This appears to be an issue with Safari where items 'below the fold' don't render. Strange.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I went to the first (?) one of these back in 2005 at Harvard. I really, really wish there was one on the east coast to complement the SV one. It was a great experience and I think there are a ton of up-and-coming entrepreneurs fresh out of school (or still in it) in Boston and New York who would benefit from the experience.

<comment><USER6> I wish there was one in NY too. I'm sure there are some enterprising enough among us that can make it happen.

<comment><USER7> I'll help.

<comment><USER8> Me too. Let's get one started.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Application Form is broken on Safari 6.0.5 on OS X 10.8.4. It doesn't display anything after "What tools do you like?"

Error Console shows "Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found) [https://news.ycombinator.com/sus.css"](https://news.ycombinator.com/sus.css")

</comment><comment><USER10> Pics from last year's

[http://bambax.smugmug.com/Other/2012-10StartupSchool/2708004...](http://bambax.smugmug.com/Other/2012-10StartupSchool/27080040_bVJ942)

</comment><comment><USER11> pg, are you guys taking volunteers for Startup School by any chance?

</comment><comment><USER12> PG should think about 'franchising' his operation. By that, I mean creating a systemic process for accrediting founders, choosing franchisees in big cities around the world, and a webapp to manage this all. He could scale the YC startup process to thousands of startups per batch. In fact, it might become a sign of failure to not be accredited by YC when seeking first round VC.

<comment><USER13> Speaking as a member of the the "batch that broke YC (s12)", I think YC's resources are best utilized by continuing to improve the quality of the program at its current size. Read: [http://ycombinator.com/w13smaller.html](http://ycombinator.com/w13smaller.html)

Obviously the quality is already very high, but still quite a ways to go for each batch consist of "50 AirBnBs", which to me is a far more impressive goal than having 1000s of lower quality startups. It's also better that YC is a signal of success than "not-YC" being a signal of failure. Franchising would dilute the brand and more importantly be a distraction from (as YC would always say) making and improving something people want.

YC is relatively "open-sourced" and there's nothing to stop others from creating accelerators with similar models around the world (and in the valley). There are already hundreds of imitators and these catch many of those that YC misses.

<comment><USER12> I'm saying this politely - so don't bite my head off - <USER2>

a.) you would say that, wouldn't you, you'd like as much of PG's attention as possible

b.) it's quite presumptious to state that the 1000s of others would be lower quality. Are the less than 1000, mid 20s, mostly male, mostly american, applicants to YC the best candidates on earth?

There are probably 1000x, if not more, capable founders of all age groups, nationalities, and genders that PG could get a slice of. He's built a brand and should seek to capitalize on it before someone establishes a superior brand.

Off course, this all about what PG does for fun, he's already rich enought to never work again. It might be that he enjoys mentoring a few founders a couple of times a year and doesn't have global ambitions.

<comment><USER13> b.) The startups being of "lower quality" has only to do with a watered down selection process. If you were to go to a YC dinner or demo day it would be immediately obvious that while there are plenty of mid-20s, male, american founders there are also plenty that don't fall into those categories.

Harvard "built a brand", but I don't see Harvard establishing franchises around the world to capitalize and satisfy it's "global ambitions". It's satisfied with trying to be a better Harvard, which is why it's brand persists.

In the same sense, YC could scale by getting more of those 1000x capable founders to apply the regular way and continue to improve on picking the best of them.

<comment><USER14> Re: Harvard - what about the Harvard Extension School, specific overseas programs such as the Harvard Beijing Academy which are open to anyone([http://www.summer.harvard.edu/programs/study- abroad](http://www.summer.harvard.edu/programs/study-abroad)), and now online courses ([http://www.extension.harvard.edu/distance- education](http://www.extension.harvard.edu/distance-education)) and finally EdX? That's like a textbook case of extending their brand to get more of the market.

<comment><USER13> My argument was against "franchising" in the sense that the franchises would be top-level equivalents of YC, a demand on the time of YC partners and a dilution of the network.

I think YC does extend its' brand in a different way: by funding companies that create new avenues for startup funding/networking such as FundersClub.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have a couple of questions for those who have gone before.

I'm currently building a smaller business. Decent recurring revenue, very unlikely to scale to big proportions. Basically aiming for financial freedoms. Not technical, but learning to make websites for what I'm working on.

Is this worth my while to apply for? My time is flexible, so I'd just be looking at cost of flight + booking to attend.

</comment><comment><USER16> What about opportunities to network, brainstorm ideas, and start conversations with interesting people before the event beside Hacker News?

I always met great people at the day of the event but I had the feeling that I may have missed some important connections with people that may have similar interests and/or complementary skill set to mine.

</comment><comment><USER17> The google maps link to Flint Center seems broken. I just get a zoomed out view of the Bay Area.

<comment><USER18> [https://maps.google.com/maps?q=37.321766,-122.046626&ll=37.3...](https://maps.google.com/maps?q=37.321766,-122.046626&ll=37.321455,-122.04493&spn=0.00622,0.011759&num=1&t=h&z=17)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> New location from previous years at Stanford.

Flint Center 21250 Stevens Creek Blvd, Cupertino, CA

<comment><USER20> Hopefully that venue will be even larger, so that more successful applicants can attend for the truly awesome experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I always look forward to the Startup School talks and interviews that get streamed and posted on the web. Would love to see DHH and especially Andrew Mason again.

</comment><comment><USER22> What happened to BASES?

<comment><USER23> Looks like FLINT center has a higher seating capacity. Startup School was pretty packed last year, so I am glad they are increasing the seating capacity.

<comment><USER22> Hm, I guess I meant more in terms of their involvement with the event at large. As far back as 2007 ([http://web.archive.org/web/20070105191044/http://startupscho...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070105191044/http://startupschool.org/)), Startup School was run by YC along with BASES.

My only guess would be since they don't need a venue on Stanford's campus, they don't need help from BASES anymore, but I was just looking for someone to confirm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is not "first come, first serve", right?

<comment><USER25> Correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Soon every child will be born with its own "startup".

I've come up with a formula...

<large font><made up word - typically something like boopnik, slurpio, cloppertrin, etc>Do <something that has been done 5,000 times>, <faster, better, more, gooder, bestester, more better, simply, less hard, more easier></large font> blah blah blah blah blah, here's a picture of us sailing and helping the homeless, because we're unique. Give us money. Thx.

...because in order to really protect your customers' data, you should share it with more clueless children who think javascript should be used for everything.

</comment><comment><USER27> Having the Startup School in the cradle of startups is preaching to the choir, no?

</comment><comment><USER28> Wow that is the most beautiful application form I've ever seen /sarcasm</comment>


Google Hires Chris Lattner for Its AI Team - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-14/google-hires-former-star-apple-engineer-for-its-ai-team <comment><USER2> Just 6 months with Telsa? Kind of a red flag.</comment>


Refining Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://blog.headius.com/2012/11/refining-ruby.html

<comment><USER2> The most convincing argument as to why not to include refinements in the Ruby spec comes from alternative implementations like JRuby and Rubinius. Method dispatch will need to be vastly more complex (and have scope-limited caching) to support this feature. Much, much slower. Folks using these implementations are still on the fringe, but it seems wrong to add a feature to Ruby that makes both more complicated code and slower running code.

Wasn't Object#source_location added in 1.9 to help folks understand and find method definitions in code? Shouldn't we simply test our code to ensure it functions correctly and not force additional semantics all the time to fix a rare issue?

<comment><USER3> > Shouldn't we simply test our code to ensure it functions correctly and not > force additional semantics all the time to fix a rare issue?

The problem is you can't. If library A and B define String#to_param differently for internal use you can't use them together, while both of them are perfectly correct on their own.

<comment><USER2> I've been writing Ruby professionally for six years and this has never been an issue for me or folks I work with. Can you give a single example where you found a conflict in libraries that broke your application?

<comment><USER4> Rake::RemoteTask (a dependency of Vlad) defines a bunch of stuff on Kernel, including #role. For whatever reason, if an ActiveRecord model includes role as a property, things break in weird ways.

Reasonably easy to work around by aliasing/undefing Kernel#role to #server_role or something, but amusingly that would be something that could be fixed by refinements (though I'd rather see something more like Thor, that's not run toplevel).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/4085>

Headius technical comments on ruby tracker are a must-read.

As my personal take, I am appalled at refinements. I think this is a bad idea solving the wrong problem.

<comment><USER6> I wish 2.0 had focused on speed, not a bunch of features that working rubyists really don't care about. Esp. not ones this poorly thought out (you'd think given 2 years discussion they would have abandoned the idea).

<comment><USER7> The decision making in the Ruby world seems to be fairly centralized and not very inclusive. To see that one of core devs of one of the biggest Ruby implementations thinks it's a bad idea is really confusing to me. I really wish there had been more discussion about it before it happened.

Cause now not only do we have that confusing feature which very few people seem to like, it also underlines a worrying trend where the different parts of the Ruby world don't reach a consensus before going in radical directions.

No one summed it up better than Brian Ford at his RubyConf talk really: [http://www.confreaks.com/videos/1278-rubyconf2012-toward- a-d...](http://www.confreaks.com/videos/1278-rubyconf2012-toward-a-design-for- ruby)

It's a must-see.

<comment><USER8> While I enjoyed most of Brian's talk, I wasn't particularly convinced by his dislike of refinements. Essentially, it boiled down to "this feature is hard to implement, it hides complexity, and it isn't well specified". The first and third arguments shouldn't matter to us nearly as much as the middle one. And I fail to see how namespacing monkey patches can do anything but decrease and contain accidental complexity (in the same way that method dispatch and polymorphism are better at limiting complexity than explicit conditionals).

<comment><USER4> The benefit to refinements is in preventing code conflicts from a shared namespace (like monkeypatching a core class).

The downside is it becomes even _harder_ to figure out what code is being run just by reading it. Right now, you just have superclasses and included modules, potentially gummed up by method_missing. Now, you need to also pay attention to refinements included by code that _calls_ the code you're looking at, which may change the way it behaves.

Unless used with great care, it's going to create a nightmare debugging situation. And with some of the code I've seen, it'll happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When it comes to monkeypatching, this is one thing that JS and Ruby got wrong. C# got it right. It'd be great if you could monkeypatch in JS/Ruby in a module level scope vs a global scope. Good to see that Ruby is taking steps to remedy this. Too bad my favorite language, JS, hasn't yet.

<comment><USER10> C# had an easier time here, though, because it's statically typed. Extension methods rely entirely on static types and static binding.

Getting normal method call syntax while still being lexically scoped like extension methods without opening the monkey-patching can of worms is still an open research area as far as I know. I know of classboxes, a proposal for something similar to ES Harmony (that they ended up passing on) and Ruby refinements, and that's pretty much it.

<comment><USER11> I had a good ten year run with Ruby and I still enjoy using it for quick utility scripts but I will never again voluntarily build any large systems in a dynamically typed language. The benefits of static typing for performance, correctness, and tooling are just too valuable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What problem does monkey patching solve? It seems to only add complexity onto the already complex nature of inheritance. What do I gain by adding camelize to String vs. using MyModule.camelize?

<comment><USER13> Among other things, MyModule.camelize doesn't provide an extension point for polymorphism. Consider a serialization library in which different classes should be able to have separate freeze/thaw behavior. It's possible to do this in current-day Ruby without easy collisions, but it tends to involve cumbersome manual prefixing or emulating method dispatch yourself.

Methods being namespaced in packages separately from the class hierarchy is something CLOS has that I miss in almost all the more Smalltalk-y languages.

<comment><AUTHOR> MyModule.camelize doesn't support polymorphism (you could even call it procedural programming in a OOP shell), but something like Camelizable.new(my_string).camelize does. I'm still convinced that what Ruby needs is more object composition (and maybe a way to override default literal construction), and that refinements are a cannon to shoot a mosquito.

<comment><USER3> Camelizable.new(my_string).camelize does not support polymorphism, because it does not depend on the type of my_string.

Which means if I want to add camelizable to my AnnotatedString I have to monkey patch Camelizable#initialize.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it means that the implementation of Camelizable#camelize needs to be polymorphic w.r.t. my_string. Since Ruby is duck-typed, presumably the implementation of "camelize" would first check to see if the receiver responded to "gsub", then do the necessary substitutions. (Actually, a better implementation would be to first check if my_string responds to "camelize" and call that directly if it does.) In the end, this is a classic decorator pattern.

<comment><USER3> if you go the way of a decorator pattern, say, I write my `IntegerCamelDecorator` since your `Camelizable.new` does not support numbers, then what is the point of `Camelizable` to start with? You can just have a mirror hierarchy of `CamelAdapters`.

Of course, you can implement `Camelizable.new` so that it performs a dynamic dispatch itself, by looking up in a `CamelizableRegistry`. You can even have this built up magically with reflection.

You can, of course do everything, but a method call in ruby still only dispatches on self, and if that is fixed the method cannot be polymorphic, if you think otherwise we can agree to disagree.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're focusing on the #new call. The actual #camelize call is still dispatching based on the Camelizable object which is parameterized with my_string. Ok, so it's not true call-site polymorphism...fine. I'd argue that's an unimportant implementation detail, but if you prefer (and what I frequently do in my own code) you could have something more like:

        Camelizable(my_string).camelize

where now Camelizable does the dynamic class lookup to choose the correct decorator for my_string. This turns #camelize into a truly call-site polymorphic call and, at least in my opinion, is far more readable/reasonable than either monkeypatching _or_ refinements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> `module_eval` and `refinements` seem like good ideas unless you mix them. if `module_eval` wouldn't be so widely used op's arguments about what refinements do to code readability would mostly fall.

...why not simply just find way to discourage people from using these together, like having blocks of code only see refinements from their defining scope, not the one they are actually run in?(this would make it obvious for library authors that mixing these to features is "not sane to do", if the fact that they are used to solve similar when it comes to creating DSLs problems does not make it obvious)

</comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know how Objective-C categories handle some of the issues brought up with Ruby 2.0 refinements?

It seems method swizzling is a far less touched trick than monkey patching, and the latest LLVM compiler throws a warning if a category overrides an existing method. I am curious about low level differences in how the two languages approach this problem.

<comment><USER16> Method swizzling and refinements are basically the same thing. The real difference isn't in the features, it's in the fact that Ruby is a dynamic language, and Obj-C is only _dynamically typed_. You can swizzle all you want in a statically compiled program, and refinements work equally well in a "static" Ruby program. The problems with refinements start coming to light when you start refining things at runtime, i.e., with module_eval. Obj-C doesn't have this problem, since swizzling happens only once at compile time.

<comment><USER15> I don't believe that is true, you can use class_replaceMethod to dynamically swizzle methods at runtime. This gets rid of compiler error and warning messages that appear when just using categories to override existing methods. From my understanding, the compiler enforces compilation unit visibility for methods implemented in a category, but the methods actually are actually added to the global scope.

There is no "top level" object or class_eval in Objective-C, so the situation is quite different from Ruby.

Here is an interesting paper about classboxes[1] (same concept as refinements), and the source code for the Objective-C runtime[2]. I found them to be useful in my research.

[1] [http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/archives/papers/Berg05a-CompLangE...](http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/archives/papers/Berg05a-CompLangESUG04-classboxesJournal.pdf)

[2] [http://opensource.apple.com/source/objc4/objc4-532.2/runtime...](http://opensource.apple.com/source/objc4/objc4-532.2/runtime/objc- runtime-new.mm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> While I run into unexpected monkey-patching from time to time (i.e. just about anytime I include an "active_" library from Rails), I can't remember the last time it's screwed me over. But I can see the potential...what have been the most prevalent cases of conflicts for day-to-day Rubyists?

<comment><USER18> Merb & DataMapper's integration with Rails 2 was seriously hindered by ActiveSupport's core monkey patching, coupled with how ActiveRecord was inextricably linked with other Rails components.

As a consequence, it really took Rails3's clean up of ActiveSupport to allow for other ORMs and libs to integrate in a safe manner.

I'm not 100% certain about the way that refinements currently work (mainly because I haven't had time to dig into the proposal), but the case that wycats makes for refinements amount to defensive coding. When you chose to include a lib, you should be able to control whether and how it steps on the rest of your app (and w/ refinements that can be done by specifying for other parts of your app, that it should/n't listen when someone tries to monkey patch its stuff).

<comment><USER19> One of the things that terrify me about refinements is that it'll just end up as a band aid for bad designs in cases where the vastly better solution would be to redesign without the need for monkey patches. They we end up with code that's potentially a lot harder to reason about out of pure laziness.</comment></comment></comment>


Study: In-Game Video Advertising Trumps TV Advertising In Effectiveness - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/24/study-in-game-video-advertising-trumps-tv-advertising-in-effectiveness/ <comment><USER2> This bodes well for QuakeLive.

IIRC it's totally free and revenue is going to come from in-game advertising.

But then again, the environment lends itself to ads. In World of Warcraft, for example, you'd be breaking an illusion if ads for Jolt cola started popping up.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how profitable the product placement of the VW Beetle is for both the film makers and for VW?</comment>


The 315-Year-Old Science Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/22/slow/the-315_year_old-science-experiment

<comment><USER2> Forgive my ignorance, but what mechanism did they use to not damage their retinas by staring at the sun through a telescope?

<comment><USER3> I thought the way that sunspot counting works is that you point a magnifying telescope at the sun, and the image projects on the floor. You look at the image on the floor.

He did have a valid point. For the data to be consistent across a 300+ year data set, he had to use the same method as his predecessors.

However, you could use technology to augment the manual count. They could use the same k-factor adjustment they used to compare multiple human counters, and use the same k-factor adjustment when technology changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sadly, they don't mention Ham Radio, which (along with other shortwave users) is pretty close to obsessed with sunspots. They have a dramatic impact on HF propagation.

</comment><comment><USER5> > The observation of sunspots predates modern astronomy by at least three > millennia.

Any idea how they watched those back then? With the naked eye seems too painful.</comment>


This Week in DevOps: November 11th - <AUTHOR> https://thisweekindevops.com/2019/11/11/this-week-in-devops-november-11th/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey Everyone,

As a long time DevOps practitioner and advocate, I struggled to keep up with the constant barrage of new cloud and devops provider announcements each week. So I decided to aggregate all the major announcements in one place with a short summary so you don't have to read the whole article to see if it's something that interests you.

I will be blogging each Monday and then sending the article out as an email newsletter. I hope you find this useful, it's something I wanted for a long time, so I finally decided to create it myself.</comment>