Can Namecoin obsolete ICANN (and more)? - <AUTHOR> http://theumlaut.com/2014/02/05/namecoin-icann/ <comment><USER2> Article author here. Just wanted to add that if any of you work for companies that send engineers to the IETF, there is an Internet-Draft RFC that would normalize the use of several P2P pseudo-TLDs such as .gnu, .zkey, .onion, .exit, .i2p, and yes, .bit, which is what Namecoin is squatting on. Would be great to see everybody supporting it.

[http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-grothoff-iesg-special- use-p...](http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-grothoff-iesg-special- use-p2p-names-02)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll plug BitShares DNS--a Namecoin competitor I am working on--here: [http://nmushegian.github.io/dns/](http://nmushegian.github.io/dns/)

Whitepaper and FAQ are not quite up to date but you get the idea. From: [https://github.com/nmushegian/dns/blob/master/whitepaper.md#...](https://github.com/nmushegian/dns/blob/master/whitepaper.md#comparison- to-namecoin)

\- Namecoin issues new coins to miners as a reward for performing merged mining with the Bitcoin network. The namecoin supply is being inflated at nearly 30% per year for several more months, then over 10% for the next several years. Domainshares only ever shrink in supply, when fees are destroyed as implicit dividends.

\- Namecoin attempts to service multiple namespaces at once. .p2p is highly specialized for servicing the .p2p TLD namespace. The use case is the same as Namecoin's "d/" namespace, which is used for the .bit TLD.

\- Namecoin's name registration price is fixed at any given time and is independent of the name itself. Domainshares utilizes an auction-like mechanic to incentivize price discovery for names, making sure the final owner pays what it is actually worth. The majority of the final cost will have gone to the network as dividends by the time the auction is over, with a small fraction having gone to bidders as a reward for price discovery.

\- As a result of the fact that domains are expensive and there are dividends on shares but not domains, there is a high opportunity cost to squatting: holding a domain without making good use of it.

<comment><USER4>
      Domainshares utilizes an auction-like mechanic to
      incentivize price discovery for names, making sure
      the final owner pays what it is actually worth.

How would this work for, say, google.com ?

<comment><USER3> We are still working on the exact mechanics (open to suggestions!), but the simple first model is:

\- The price starts at 0 and people bid it up to the market value

\- If someone makes a bid B1, then someone makes a next bid B2 = B1 + D, then person 1 receives (B1 + D/2) and the remaining D/2 gets paid as fees to network (and thus become shareholder dividends)

\- This incentivizes people to bid up the price to what they consider the market value, because of the extra portion they receive when they are outbid

\- This also disincentivizes squatting because you will pay more for buying and selling the domain than you would have received as network dividends had someone else just bought the domain

<comment><USER4> So if I buy a cheap unused nonsense word domain (say wikipedia.org) and turn it into a valuable domain by making a popular website many people visit and link to, 'the network' gets to shake me down because wikipedia.org is worth $20,000,000 now instead of the $20 I paid for it?

And as an end user, I don't know if visiting or e-mailing wikipedia.org will take me to an encyclopedia or a cybersquatter or a porn site?

Who exactly benefits from this system, except for 'the network'?

<comment><USER5> Not sure what you mean exactly but it works like that : Once you buy your domain at 20$ is is yours and you do whatever you want with it. The bidding auction applies only the first time you buy it nobody can touch your domain name one you purchased it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I expect it will obsolete ICANN as effectively as AlterNIC, New.net, OpenNIC, etc.

The technical fact that it is blockchain-based really doesn't make much difference as it's incredibly unlikely to be adopted worldwide, due to the network effect of the already-established domain name system.

<comment><USER7> The telegraph, MySpace, and AOL had network effects.

It's a hurdle, but it's not insurmountable. The question is whether namecoin provides anything sufficiently more appealing to all players to overcome that headwind...

<comment><USER6> As it stands now, a domain name owner in the current system probably has more risk from domain hijacking than authoritarian censorship.

So the main feature of Namecoin - to provide a censorship-resistant, cryptographically untamperable set of domain name records - is also its biggest disadvantage, as recovery of any stolen domain names is entirely up to the goodwill of the thief.

This reason alone would make it very unappealing for most domain name owners, because as well as going against the established domain name system, it must also break societal expectations of redressing thefts through legal means.

<comment><USER8> "So the main feature of Namecoin - to provide a censorship-resistant, cryptographically untamperable set of domain name records"

And the above means zilch to the majority (let's pick an arbitrary 95%) of domain name owners (source: I am intimately involved in this business since the start and deal with these owners)

Do people seriously think that the millions of existing domain name owners are going to undo years of marketing effort for something that they don't even need? Local restaurant for example has no issues with censorship at least with respect to their website.

<comment><USER6> I agree. It may have a solid use case in providing name services alongside existing anti-censorship, anonymised networks like Tor and I2P, but for mainstream use Namecoin provides no benefit.

It's an interesting experiment though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am using namecoin to resolve bittorrent sync secrets in my distributed browser Syncnet:

[https://github.com/jminardi/syncnet](https://github.com/jminardi/syncnet)

It was fairly easy to integrate

<comment><USER10> Why not use the open source Clearskies instead of BTSync?

[https://github.com/jewel/clearskies](https://github.com/jewel/clearskies)

<comment><USER11> Did you intend to link to a repository of markdown files?

<comment><USER12> I don't know anything about the project but it looks like there is a working implementation of the protocol in ruby in that linked repository (just not in the master branch).

There is also an in-progress c++ implementation of the protocol in a different repo [1].

Even so, it's pretty clear that the thing isn't ready yet and even states that it shouldn't be used for anything other than test data.

[1][https://github.com/larroy/clearskies_core](https://github.com/larroy/clearskies_core)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have been looking at *coins for a while and the implications of the blockchain-based concensus system are interesting.

The system really maps the real world onto computers very well, in that it reduces what used to be technical issues to "political" issues. These systems work on concensus, and as such, require a significant amount of interested parties to work in the expected way. They are very much subject to network effects that only occur after critical mass is reached.

Namecoin, in particular, was subject to a major security issue last year: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ohyom/fatal_flaw_i...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ohyom/fatal_flaw_in_namecoin_found_doesnt_enforce_some/)

Blockchains are being used to implement solutions to different problems, and they could really solve some significant problems such as decentralized identity and reputation management (!). The difficulty lies in creating a significant enough "currency" so that miners will become involved and make the blockchain stable and reliable.

Bitcoin is a currency in a much stronger sense than namecoin or any other of "not-really-money-coins" around. I wonder if piggybacking on bitcoin might actually be the solution for this situation (i.e introduce other information in the bitcoin blockchain instead of using a brand new one).

Sadly, adding external information to the blockchain could be construed as "spamming the blockchain" and therefore not deemed worthy for inclusion in the bitcoin blockchain by miners. So there is a big challenge there.

If you are interested in this topic and want to work on related projects feel free to reach out (google my username).

<comment><USER2> > Blockchains are being used to implement solutions to different problems, and > they could really solve some significant problems such as decentralized > identity and reputation management (!). The difficulty lies in creating a > significant enough "currency" so that miners will become involved and make > the blockchain stable and reliable.

Author of the original article here. Namecoin is actually merge-mined with Bitcoin, so miner participation is not a serious problem. There's no way you could have known that without happening to know that, though, and I agree that this is an issue for a lot of new blockchain-based technologies.

<comment><USER13> Maybe I've misunderstood it, but how does merge mining create an incentive to mine namecoins? I figured all it did was make it "cheaper" to mine namecoins by "reusing" work done for the bitcoin blockchain. In order for the namecoin network to function, you still need to actively get involved with it.

Here's some information on merge-mining for anyone else involved: [http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/273/how-does- merg...](http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/273/how-does-merged- mining-work) [http://dot-bit.org/Merged_Mining](http://dot- bit.org/Merged_Mining)

<comment><USER2> Most of the major Bitcoin mining pools also mine Namecoin. The current Namecoin hashrate is around 60% of the Bitcoin hashrate. [http://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/hashrate-btc- nmc.html](http://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/hashrate-btc-nmc.html)

<comment><USER13> Well, that's a lot! I didn't expect it to be significant compared to the bitcoin pool.

Do you know how that came to be? i.e how did they convince everyone to start mining namecoin? Or was it just good timing WRT bitcoin?

<comment><USER14> Merged mining has good incentives since it basically gives free money; for the same work of mining Bitcoin you can mine Bitcoin and Namecoin simultaneously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Note that you can use namecoin blockchain with your DNS and HTTP tools with dnschain [0]. Check this out:

$ dig @dns.dnschain.net okturtles.bit

$ curl [http://dns.dnschain.net/d/okturtles](http://dns.dnschain.net/d/okturtles)

Both of them will resolve to whatever info is stored in d/okturtles domain.

With the (soon-to-be) DANE support (for those who forgot: DANE is about distributing TLS keys through a channel you trust (it comes from the domain you're visiting) but that is not the same as the final application (it's DNS, not HTTP/SMTP/IMAP/XMPP/etc), so you can prevent MiTM), I don't see what's missing technically to have our own internet.

[0] [https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain](https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain)

<comment><USER16> > DANE is about distributing TLS keys through a channel you trust

Only to the extent that you and your visitors already have to trust your DNS provider, your domain registrar, the TLD registry, and the DNS root. Neither DANE nor DNSSEC intrinsically solve anything that hasn't already been solved for end users... particularly when you consider forwarders will have to accept unsigned zones for years to come.

Namecoin etc does go some way to "squaring Zooko's triangle" (as many good minds have discussed already) but proof-of-work chains have their own burdens, and are not any more immune to the lure of trading robustness and security for convenience than traditional DNS forwarders, online DNSSEC signing, or webmasters offering up their SSL certificates up to CDNs.

<comment><USER15> > Only to the extent that you and your visitors already have to trust your DNS > provider, your domain registrar, the TLD registry, and the DNS root.

Which is not something I want to do, hence my push for namecoin :)

> proof-of-work chains have their own burdens

Do you have more information about how it can be detrimental to namecoin, specifically distributing DNS information ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Do namecoins have to be renewed or are we going to have old good domain names infinitely unavailable because someone forgot their key ?

<comment><USER2> They have to be updated around every 36,000 blocks (about 250 days), or else you relinquish the name. It can be just a "touch" update, no need to change the information.

<comment><USER18> Do you have to pay the 0.01 fee to update?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can I register google.bit, facebook.bit, apple.bit, oracle.bit, and microsoft.bit for a total of $0.25? Can they do anything to get it back?

<comment><USER20> No, you could not register those names. Because they are already registered.

They could ask very nicely for ownership of them, or perhaps send you a court order depending on what country the both of you were located in. But unless you provide them with the private key or fail to renew your registration... nobody should ever gain control of any .bit domain.

A Kraken.com dev looking into the namecoin code found a flaw and declared on the Namecoin blockchain that "Namecoin died October the 15th 2013, coinslayer" by re-writing the DNS values for the very first .bit domain ever registered (which is bitcoin.bit).

The flaw allowed for some people to "steal" domain ownership, but a patch was put through and everything is back to normal now. As far as I know, all domains are back in the hands of the original registrars.

This link shows the entire debacle taking place: [http://explorer.namecoin.info/n/1](http://explorer.namecoin.info/n/1)

<comment><USER21> > No, you could not register those names. Because they are already registered.

Who are they registered by?

<comment><USER22> You can explore the blockchain here: [http://explorer.namecoin.info/](http://explorer.namecoin.info/)

<comment><USER23> So we don't actually know who the owner is, if the best information we've got is a blockchain lookup?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Given the news around bitcoin one could imagine that stealing 'google.bit' out of the google wallet[1] would be a pretty lucrative target.

[1] No I don't really think Google would let that happen but Bob's Bakery Buns might and it could cost him his business.

<comment><USER25> Bob's Bakery Buns isn't likely to pick a web address that - at this stage - requires potential visitors to his site to download a plugin to find it. I'd be interested to see what percentage of major brands' .bit addresses become owned by the brands rather than squatters. If the latter percentage is sufficiently high you can pretty much guarantee that fear of phishing will make browser vendors very wary of seamlessly integrating .bit resolution into the standard browser build.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> How long does it take to resolve a namecoin key=>value pair? Considering the variable speed in these sorts of decentralized networks, is there a noticeable lag when you initially request a .bit website?

<comment><USER15> All the blockchain is local. The time taken to resolve a key->value pair is the time your software takes to decode information from your disk; it's nothing compared to DNS.

Change propagation, on the other hand, is as long as blocks can travel from peer to peer.

<comment><USER27> Hmm - if your ISP has a good DNS, and has a cache hit on your DNS request, versus if you have to seek your HD, the DNS might be much, much faster.

[http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_laten...](http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_latency.html)

Round trip in same datacenter: 500,00ns.

Disk seek: 4,000,000ns.

You have to lean on the numbers pretty hard to make the DNS faster, but it's possible it could be faster than your local disk.

<comment><USER28> Pretty sure the intersection of the set of people who worry about DNS performance and the set of people who are still running servers exclusively off spinning rust is nigh-vanishing...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> To me the real problem with namecoin for the purpose stated in the title of this post is that it doesn't emphasize delegation to near the degree necessary to achieve it. The current implementation is much more like the older name system in that it requires the list of canonical names to be distributed as widely as possible.

There is a reason the root nameservers only delegate the act of name lookup at the top level. It's just not practical for them to have a complete list, and it's not even particularly desirable for users of it to have their list of names completely public (think internal servers).

It is possible to name a delegate nameserver through namecoin, I believe, but last I looked it was a bit iffy and it doesn't require any kind of authentication of results from the delegated nameserver a-la dnscurve.

<comment><USER30> The realistic use case is to use a tree-structure similar to the one we have, then use namecoin as verification.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why do we asume that domains have to be 'unique' like trade/brand names? I have a name, shared with my grandfather, father and son; in the right context, you would never confuse one for another. Furthermore, my name is shared by probably thousands in my country; again, I have never been confused with any of them. So, if the whole point is to translate human readable (and memorable) words to IPs, and in the event that the DNS returns more than one result, can't the browser display a search-results-like page letting one know there are options? Wikipedia does it and that is THE descentralized knowledge store of the planet. Maybe if I type homes.com I mean local homes first, like Google rankings, but is ok if someone else is using homes.com elsewhere.

Think about it...

<comment><USER11> Does Jon Postel's ghost decide if I want local or non-local homes when I send email to email@example.com?

Side note: Wikipedia is _NOT_ the decentralized knowledge store of the planet. There is nothing decentralized about wikipedia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Has anyone created an easy to use name coin registration system so non- technical people can register names?

It seems like that would be a good opportunity?

<comment><USER2> There is [https://dotbit.me/](https://dotbit.me/) , but who knows how reputable that site is? Just as Bitcoin needed something like Coinbase, the Namecoin ecosystem needs a web wallet with reputable backing.

<comment><USER32> I guess not necessarily even a wallet.

A non technical user shouldn't even have to own or even know about name coins.

They simply want a way to register a cheap, non-censorable domain, right?

I'm imagining someone would make a service that offers that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> So, what happens if your domain gets hijacked?

<comment><USER20> Domain hijacking is impossible without access to the private key that controls the information written in the blockchain concerning that domain.

If somebody gets your private key, they can "steal" your website away from you, sure. Just don't let anybody access your private key.

<comment><USER34> So, your answer is - if your domain does get hijacked, then you're out of luck unless you pay the hijacker? That's a serious flaw.

Most people _don 't_ want their technical infrastucture to be immune to law enforcement, just the contrary.

<comment><USER20> That's not my answer.

That's how Namecoin works.

Namecoin is just a name/value store system. That's it. It might not be perfect for DNS but it's being used for other things like [https://onename.io](https://onename.io) right now.

The public can choose to use it in it's current implementation or build a better way of dealing with domain hijacking should they so choose.

<comment><USER34> Sure, it has a wide variety of niches which it fits greatly, and where it can be successfully used - but if anybody considers it as a solution to obsolete ICANN, as the original article proposes, then it's an entirely different ballpark than being just a name/value store; and rather different criteria for success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "(...) the cryptographic-decentralization Zeitgeist makes it an exciting time to have and use names"

Yes. Very true. For anyone interested in the above statment i'd highly recommend checking out [http://twister.net.co/](http://twister.net.co/) \- a decentralized micro-blogging spin-off of bitcoin. Unbelievable innovation is happening!

</comment><comment><USER36> Why is it called Namecoin and not something like Bitname or Bitdomain?

<comment><USER20> That's just the name that the original founding coder (vinced from the bitcointalk forums) chose and nobody has wanted or bothered to change it: [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6017.msg88356#msg883...](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6017.msg88356#msg88356)

Some chose to refer to it as the dot-bit project as well.

I have never seen any arguments over the name.

namecoin == nmc == dot-bit

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> MeowBit is system service for Windows which allows for resolution of dot-bit domains across all applications. [http://meowbit.com](http://meowbit.com)

</comment><comment><USER38> Could we just get rid of naming _authorities_ all together? Why not just let trusted _listing agencies_ handle it and users can simply pick the one(s) they wish to use. For instance, let's say I want to publish a website under the name "sony". Okay, that's fine, but it's going to get a lower priority then the offical Sony, Inc. site b/c any listing agency is obviously going to serve up that site when a user puts "sony" in their browser's address bar. However, a user could opt for an alternate listing agency --maybe one the offers no commercial listings, and then maybe my site would come up through them. Browsers could make it easy to switch between listing agencies and prioritize them.

<comment><USER39> This is already possible with the current DNS system. The listing agencies are commonly called "DNS servers" and they may chose to disregard the _authoritive_ DNS servers. End users can typically list which DNS servers they want to use by order of priority within their OS/browser DNS settings.</comment></comment>


StartupBus community is about to explode - <AUTHOR> http://www.karolis.info/post/3287876055/startupbus-community-is-about-to-get-much-larger

<comment><USER2> I took this literally (maybe a Speed kind of scenario?) and got super excited.

<comment><USER3> Real explosions are cooler than marketing blog posts :)

<comment><USER4> Not for the people on the bus :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Call me old school, but this is called college. I already lived through this once. Although good times, I don't like smelling like week old laundry.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can't read a sentence ending in "...is about to explode" without being put in mind of a low-rent press release from an idea-free MBA's idea of a startup.

Not that I think that's what this is, it's just an unfortunate turn of phrase.

</comment><comment><USER7> Getting motion sick just imagining it

<comment><USER8> We could get a motion sickness pills company to sponsor this. (I'm not even kidding)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've got a few invites for Chicago post if interested.

</comment><comment><USER10> If anyone wants an invite I've still got two.

<comment><USER10> all gone now.

<comment><USER4> I've got a few left, post here if you're interested</comment></comment></comment>


What is the future of Computer Architecture - <AUTHOR>

With the diminishing returns of Moore's Law, the traditional approach to Computer Architecture seems to have stop giving any meaningful returns. Do the new branches like hardware accelerators, approximate computing and neuromorphic computing have any scope? Or do we live with the diminishing gains associated with the traditional approach to Computer Architecture. <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to see what could be done with large scale combinational logic (ie. boolean circuits).

If you didn't have to worry about clock signals, had a simple circuit topology (for example laminar) and thermal issues were minimal because of having a small number of gates transitioning at any one time could you design a programmable logic chip that was more competitive with ASICS than current FPGAs are ?

</comment><comment><USER3> Software is going to have to pick up its game. Accelerators will help.

However, even these will be one time gains. As Bob Colwell says, it's very difficult to replace an exponential.

This will have profound effects not just on Silicon Valley, but the global economy. We've been riding this miracle for 40 years and it will end - soon.

</comment><comment><USER4> different</comment>


Ask HN: Do you feel you are mostly writing glue code? - <AUTHOR> Lately, we are writing glue code to connect a bunch of services which finance department pays for. Writing any service which can be acquired from the market is forbidden. Anyone else feels like this? <comment><USER2> Yes I have done that most of the time. I have thought a bit about this and feel that it should be true for most of us for software industry to scale. If you are in a solid tech company this will always be the case. Anything which can be used generally will be made into a framework and then most engineers will be expected to use that. This helps the company immensely as it can now hire top 1-2% who are extremely good at making these frameworks or guard-rails and the rest can be lesser quality devs who will do the plumbing. An example: writing multi-threaded programs and reasoning about them is hard so why not make a framework which takes care that developers only write business logic and integrate with various APIs.

This is now true in most companies now as Open source projects are doing the same thing. Look at Apache Spark for example which makes writing distributed programs for Machine Learning, ETL and Analytics much easier for developers.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's an argument to be made that that's a sign of an engineering organization that has its priorities straight and is serving the business well.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sometimes, though I suspect in a lot of cases that's probably for the best. I mean, if a product or service exists and does what you need it to, isn't it better to take advantage of that rather than reinvent the wheel every time? Sure, you could create your own inhouse CMS for those client websites or what not, but it's likely not worth it given the effort of making your updates, fixing security holes, etc. Same with anything really. You could in theory try and go all the way back to the start on your own, but where does it end? Eventually you'll be doing ten times more work for little extra benefit.

Are there examples where doing the extra work could be better? Of course, I know that one from experience. All that time trying to integrate a CMS and a forum script and a bunch of other standalone things was a nightmare, and in that case I definitely wish I'd just rolled the whole thing myself instead.

But in many cases, it's probably better to use pre-existing solutions rather than spend all your time reinventing the wheel or falling victim to not invented here syndrome. That way, you're relying on well tested solutions with a decent amount of support available online and a guarantee it'll still work when most of your team has moved on to pastures new.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes, many jobs are like this. Nothing wrong with it, it just depends on individual devs if they are okay with it or not. We are just 5 devs in our team and our manager spends a good amount of time optimizing dev hours so he can get the most useful features out. If this means using external services then that choice always wins (assuming we can afford it).

</comment><comment><USER6> Every team I've been on has had it's majority of engineers doing exactly that. Honestly, many are happy in that role.

Usually theres a handful of people that tend wiggle their way into more backend, architectural things (libraries, in-house tools, etc.). If you're bored, try to be that person.

</comment><comment><USER7> I understand the business interest in separating concerns. Focusing your talent on solving only the most unique problems is kind of charming, IMO, but the part where we write the glue code for third-party services can definitely feel soul-sucking.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think that most code that is well defined and I understand well I can reason about as basically transforms of dictionaries. It's often but of course not always a red flag if I can't reason about it in that way.

</comment><comment><USER9> That's the nature of some jobs, and it can be a sound strategy. I've mostly managed to avoid these jobs, personally.

<comment><USER10> Can't agree more. Why self roll your own code when you can use a tested, somewhat proven, piece of existing code.

<comment><USER11> I used to match patchwork quilts out of plugins, different HTML widgets, and try to make use of pre-made frameworks for CSS in the past. I always felt like I was 80% of the way finished before I started.....but the hard part was building the other 80%.

A few years ago I flipped the way I built stuff, preferring small, self-built pieces of code only I had authored, and not only was our code smaller and easier to maintain, it also significantly dropped the amount of bugs and conflicts we were having.

The problem that often happens with pre-built, well-tested solutions, is that they often only partly solve what you need to do. Edge cases might be the only cases you have, it's often better to get the one tailor made for solving your exact problem.

<comment><USER10> I've found the exact opposite at every job I've had. Typically pre-build solutions do WAY more than you need from them, and you can make wrappers for any very rare edge cases they don't solve which Ive found to be few and far between. Dependency managers go a long way toward making the patchwork nature of diverse libraries..manageable.

Also, I've found solutions custom rolled under pressure have more bugs and issues and theres never enough time to correctly debug, test, and QA before you're on to the next project.

However, CSS and HTML widgets may not lend themselves to libraries as easily as imperative programming languages.

You also, may just be solving more complex problems that require much more specialized libraries!

Just glad you found a solution that works!

<comment><USER11> Ah see what I end up doing is solving the problem and thinking deeply about what I need our solution to do, and more importantly, figuring out exactly what we don't need our solution to do.

Once I've solved the same problem about 4 or 5 times, I end up 'standardizing' the solution into a prototype plugin, which usually goes through 1 or 2 total rewrites, and by the time I've got the plugin resulting from that process, usually it's precisely what we need, and had all the kinks worked out.

I realize the irony here, but I release these solutions into open source and re-use them. And I know they're available for others to use and benefit from, and I fully understand why somebody like me might not actually use them directly haha. I hope people at least read my solutions in a literary sense and consider them while rolling their own solution that directly meets their own needs.

<comment><USER10> Glad you have the free time to do that! I work for an extremely fast moving biz and don't! And thanks for your contributions to OSS!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's no big wonder if one extrapolates from how many trivial questions you ask here.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like to keep difficult one for myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Longer than lately. It's "assembly" (not the other one).

</comment><comment><USER14> yup, That is pretty common thing, In the days of api-for-everything gluing is written more than api itself!!!</comment>


Ask HN: Glamorous vs emotion vs styled components? - <AUTHOR> There are all these new fancy ways to write CSS, can somebody explain to me what is the difference between them and which one should I choose?<p>Is there a good reason to switch to them if I'm pretty happy with Sass+Bootstrap? <comment><USER2> Not an expert on them myself, but I have links to articles discussing those libraries and the various ways to style React apps (plain CSS, CSS Modules, CSS-in-JS, and inline styles) in the "React Styling" section of my React/Redux links list: [https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux- links/blob/master...](https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux- links/blob/master/react-styling.md)

</comment><comment><USER3> Well you are lucky. I have asked the same question on Reddit /r/reactjs [0]

[0]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/84m529/styled_comp...](https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/84m529/styled_components_or_glamarous_or_emotion)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm a big fan of Styled Components. Also, check out Rebass: [http://jxnblk.com/rebass/](http://jxnblk.com/rebass/)</comment>


A 2.5 Year-Old Has A First Encounter with An iPad - <AUTHOR> http://laughingsquid.com/a-2-5-year-old-uses-an-ipad-for-the-first-time/

<comment><USER2> Stray observations:

1\. kids are awesome

2\. she only got frustrated once, and that was when she couldn't get back to the home screen. With the hint "press the button; the big button" she felt in control (and happy).

3\. By this point I'm thinking how I would simulate her investigative behavior in software. It's not systematic, but it's oh so efficient.

4\. the confidence with which she dragged the letters to the "learn a word" app. First hesitantly, a moment later she fully expected the scrabble block under her finger to move along. You can spot the difference because she stopped checking whether the letter would follow her finger, she _knew_ it would.

5\. Confusion when she put her left hand on the edge of the iPad. This is where the immersion breaks and she needed a hint to get back on track. In fairness, most adults who try an iPhone for the first time make the same mistake, if you can even call it that.

6\. The confidence with which the dad goes "Yup", knowing that she can't possibly do any damage to the device.

7\. How she immediately goes into "piano mode" when a keyboard app appears on screen.

8 . It surprises me that she makes the same mistakes most adults do when trying a iPhone/iPad for the first time.

So much for my stray observations. Fascinating stuff.

<comment><USER3> I was about to comment on point 2, when I saw you covered it in point 5. I imagine that the resting touch problem could be solved with software, the iPhone keyboard for exams supports resting a finger on one key while you touch the next. I was surprised that it didn't work on the home screen, eg, ignore the touches from a resting hand.

<comment><USER2> The glib answer is this: You have a problem. You solve it with heuristics. Now you have two problems.

If I had to guess why Apple designed it this way? Here goes: Apple can't determine what a resting hand is as an abstraction, because sometimes a resting hand should do something (e.g. the pinch gesture; one static touch + one moving finger). So app developers would each have to implement their own heuristics to decide what's "probably" an accidental touch and what's "probably" a deliberate (but sloppy) tap. Result: you won't be able to predict anymore how the iPad will behave. That's far worse than having a predictable but imperfect system.

<comment><USER4> A good number of laptops I've tried have palm detection on their touch pads, if the contact patch too big to be a finger, then it it is not a finger and it is not a touch.

Probably wouldn't help in the case of a toddler's hands, but, as mentioned, the hand-on-edge is something many have trouble with.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. There is an "ignore accidental trackpad input" option in my MacBook's system preferences that I turned off for the first time a couple months ago, thinking "I'm a pro with this thing, I'm sure I don't accidentally touch it."

Boy was I wrong, and I was really surprised at how sensitive the thing was. After a couple minutes of the pointer jumping all over the place, I turned it back on, impressed with the algorithm that had been ignoring those accidental touches all along.

<comment><USER6> It's surprising how sensitive the capacitive sensor in Macbook trackpads can be. I found an app once that gave a visual indication of where touch events were occurring on the trackpad, and it can detect your finger before you're actually touching the pad.

Of course, the software and hardware is calibrated to have a specific threshold, but the fact that technology is commonplace that can detect when something is near it is just amazing. A former roommate's Dell laptop did the same thing - the controls on the side lit up when your finger got near it, so you didn't have to fumble for the buttons OR deal with annoying LEDs all the time.

This is part of the reason the iPhone always felt so fluid to me. I can flick a list, barely even grazing the screen, and the list will spin like a slot machine. It gives you such an immediate sense of powerful, accurate control that it's very gratifying to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My daughter learned to do all of the basic iPhone interaction --scroll between home screens, launching, and quitting apps-- at around 19 months. Launching apps was the most difficult part, as it took her awhile to learn to touch only one part of the screen. It seems to me a brilliant testament to great UX design.

While on the subject of judging things by the reactions of small children, the first brand she recognized consistently is Google's - that includes the Google logo, GMail, and a GTUG t-shirt [1] (although she calls them all "Googool"). It's probably because the sound is easy to pronounce, and because of the distinct coloring, but it's still a little freaky, for a year and a half old toddler.

1\. <http://roman.nurik.net/images/designs/gtug.png>

<comment><USER8> Quick, get her reading Gogol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The physical home button for bailing out when problems or boredom strike certainly works well for her.

<comment><USER10> And it's fast. Everyone complains it doesn't have multitasking, but is there really a better way to switch apps that would be any faster than that even with multitasking?

<comment><USER11> People want multi-tasking for non-interactive tasks. They want to compose email while streaming music, or browse the web while chatting on IRC. So switching doesn't matter much; that's easy with or without multitasking.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I think a lot of the quality of the debate is lost to the word "multitasking".

"Backgrounding" seems much more descriptive of what is really desired by most iPhone OS users (and non-users) who say they want "multitasking".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm getting one for my 3 year old daughter. She's never used a touch UI. She has played some with my old laptop. I'll record the first interactions.

</comment><comment><USER14> Clearly her previous iPhone experience was paramount.

<comment><USER15> This really can't be overemphasized. I have a child about the same age (two- and-a-half) and he's been playing with my iPod Touch since I got it December 2008. He's proficient with it, just like her - able to easily navigate between the different pages of apps, launch new apps, use the navigation within apps, etc.

But obviously, it wasn't like that when he first used it. It took time. For example, it took forever to teach him that if the hand that is holding it is touching the screen a little bit, then it won't properly register new touch events from the other hand. Eventually he just learned this, but it took a long time.

The other thing to note is that children actually learn how to use computers far more rapidly than you might think. It's not just devices like this, where people will assume that it is the multi-touch and intuitive interface that makes it easy for them to learn it. This helps, sure, but I was shocked when, after a mere two hours or so of usage, my two-year-old had learned how to navigate Flash games in a browser using the mouse. I was about to restart the game he was playing by clicking through the menus but no, he grabbed the mouse and did it himself, to my amazement.

Bottom-line: although I sense that many people will assume it is Apple's superior design that is responsible for this child's proficiency, I think that the combination of prior experience, plus the very quick learning abilities of young children, is a more important factor.

<comment><USER16> It's weird, my twins are almost 3 and they have yet to play with a computer except the couple of times I had some Elmo episodes up on Youtube. Most of their play comes with the old fashioned puzzles and dolls and other assorted toys. I figured they wouldn't know what to do with a computer, but clearly I need to revisit that. What kind of things can a 3 year old do with a computer? I admit I haven't the foggiest idea of how to introduce a child to a computer.

<comment><USER17> My two year olds cant get enough of this game:

Open up notepad. Maximize the window. Change the font to 72. Turn on caps lock. Let them have free reign on the keyboard and tell them what letter they are holding down. After about two months of this they are pretty proficient at the keyboard and at their letters.

For mouse skills fullscreen Microsoft Paint. Same results.

<comment><USER18> You need BabySmash... but it's mostly for younger kids. They hit keys and the letters spin on the screen accompanied by fun sounds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The best bit of this video is where she hands it to her father and asks him to try. I'm guessing, but that gesture wouldn't have come quite so naturally on a traditional computer.

</comment><comment><USER20> Now try giving that 2.5 year old a Netbook with Windows on it and see how well that works.

<comment><USER21> Now try giving that 2.5 year old a violin and see how well that works.

Now try giving that 2.5 year old a graphing calculator and see how well that works.

Now try giving that 2.5 year old a drum kit and see how well that works.

Now try giving that 2.5 year old canvas with a palette of oil paints and see how well that works.

<comment><USER22> Those are great examples. Regular PCs are like giving people drum kits because it satisfies all the "requirements".

The iPad is like giving you maracas, a tambourine, or bongo drums. Same functionality? No. Vastly more fun for beginners? Yes.

<comment><USER21> I realize we're stretching the analogy thin, but maracas, bongos, and tambourines can all be had for $3-$20 each.

<comment><USER22> Very true, but are we considering cost or usability?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's amazing how fast she grasps the concept of the UI. Either she has some experience with an iPhone, or we have gotten to a point where interface design has become so intuitive that 3-year olds grasp software immediately. I think the first is the case, but impressive nonetheless ;-)

<comment><USER24> A friend told me his kids now try to use iphone hand motions on other screens they encounter and are surprised when they don't work. Same age group.

<comment><USER25> Almost everyone that picks up my kindle for the first time touches the screen before anything else. When I say it isn't touch screen they just kind of shrug and mumble.

<comment><USER26> A keyboard. How quaint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Comments on video by its author: [http://laughingsquid.com/a-2-5-year-old- uses-an-ipad-for-the...](http://laughingsquid.com/a-2-5-year-old-uses-an-ipad- for-the-first-time/)

</comment><comment><USER28> As a father of a 1.5 year-old who loves the iPhone, this looks very familiar. But toddlers pick up on all kinds of new things incredibly fast, so I'm not sure this tells us much about the learnability of the iPad for computing novices of any other age group.

It _seems_ easier than the typical desktop/laptop, but there are many subtle interactions that have to be learned and practiced to use the iPad. I would like to see how well a 60+ year-old without prior computing experience interacts with it.

<comment><USER29> My 1.5 year-old knows how to use the mouse (he grasps the interaction between what's in his hand and what happens on screen), spinning the wheel while the mouse is over a window makes that window move up and down, and that the "media" button on my keyboard launches Foobar 2000.

Kids are wicked smart, and learn shockingly fast. Needless to say, it's impossible to work with him in my lap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Shades of Neal Stephenson's _A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer_.

But also, from a friend who's had problems reclaiming his iPad from his 3-year-old son: shades of Ray Bradbury's _The Veldt_.

<comment><USER31> This is precisely why I was waiting for this device, or one like it, and why my daughter is getting her own ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anyone else think this could have very well been a father teaching his child how to use current caveman technology? Like a bow and arrow.

"It doesn't work when you hold your thumb there. Good. Now pull the arrow back and release."

</comment><comment><USER33> Note at 2:54 how she naturally crosses her legs...

What's was that link on HN the other day about ipad and seating posture?

</comment><comment><USER23> For people interested in interface design paired with kids new to UI's. The following link points to research performed in India, where computers were dropped in slums for children to use. They monitored their progress in understanding the interface, and in discovering the web. <http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/kids.html#04>

</comment><comment><USER34> Asked for a camera, "I want the one the takes a picture." Too bad, kid.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> So easy a child can do it? I really think testing a user interface on a child is key to good design.

<comment><USER35> really? why?

<comment><USER36> The more "higher level" thought processes required just to operate the basics of your device (e.g., basic navigation, app launching, scrolling, etc) the more mental effort (and thus, frustration and cognitive load) it takes from the user.

As an extension to this, the less brain power you have to devote to basic, fundamental interactions with the machine, the more bandwidth you have to dedicate towards other things (e.g., if the calculator is hard to use, you're spending more effort wrangling the calculator instead of solving math problems).

<comment><AUTHOR> I really like the calculator example. Imagine a buttonless calculator that just took dictation in plain english and gave the result for really complex equations.

<comment><USER37> Not sure I would want one. ".... over two plus three. No move the plus three out of the fraction. The other one. Don't put the fraction plus three in parentheses. Ah... just let me use the keyboard!" Non-trivial math expressions are very hard to dictate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> She has the attention span of a 2.5 ye -- oh.

</comment><comment><USER38> For the longest time the mantra in good user interface design has been 'make it so a three year old can use it'. This video so proves that to be a true thing. I always try to find people that have as little exposure to computers as possible when trying out new stuff, I never actually thought of taking that literally and employing toddlers as testers, but after this video I'm 100% convinced that's the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER39> Could this become a usability test? Take your app or device and observe the interaction; positive and negative to improve overall UX. Similar to the drunken user test.W ould the results be valid for business functions where the child does not have or understand the need or problem being solved?

</comment><comment><USER40> i can only imagine what kind of technology we'll be dealing with when she's reading HN

</comment><comment><USER41> Very cool vid. We haven't gotten these in Australia yet so I'm wondering what (if they exist) the parental controls are like for the iPad?

I'd be curious about purchasing another one for a nephew.

</comment><comment><USER42> Here's the link to the father's blog post with some brief commentary: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1245661>

</comment><comment><USER43> "The Apple iPad. So simple, your 2-year-old can do it."

I can't decide whether most people would be affronted or happy. I know I would turn away from an ad like that, but on the other hand based on the explosion of IT'S SO EASY ads in every sector, I'm probably a minority.

</comment><comment><USER44> Just fantastic

</comment><comment><USER45> What I find striking is how intuitive it all seems. She just "knows" how to use the device. It is very interesting from a user interface and HID perspective.

</comment><comment><USER46> it's a giant ipod. of course the girl knows how to use it. her father probably let her play with an iphone when she was still in her mother's belly.

</comment><comment><USER47> I propose a macrnews (MN) for posts like these, and all similar as new mac products are released and rumors dispersed.

</comment><comment><USER48> Isn't the radiation dangerous for small children?

EDIT: whoa! I have been downvotted after asking if it is safe for children.

So, here are some references.

"Children have much thinner skull bones and their brains have a lot more fluid, so their brain tissues would likely absorb twice more radiation compared to an adult's brain. But cellphone radiation standards set by the government remains the same for both groups." <http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/tag/radiation/>

"If the notebook is sitting on a child's lap, that child is exposed to radio emissions comparable to that of a mobile phone. If the notebook is 20 cm away, the child is subjected to exposure of just 1% to that of a mobile phone" [http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/04/29/warning- keep...](http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/04/29/warning-keep-wi-fi- notebooks-away-from-childrens-laps/)

How about that?

<comment><USER49> Actually, Apple ended up going with the standard lithium ion batteries instead of the thermonuclear reactor for the iPad.

Pretty weak if you ask me. Any money that the HP Slate will have a 50MW unit.</comment></comment>


Apple is suing iOS virtualization vendor Corellium for violating DMCA - <AUTHOR> https://www.ifixit.com/News/apple-is-bullying-a-security-company-with-a-dangerous-dmca-lawsuit <comment><USER2> Well, no, shit - Corellium, from what I can tell from other articles I've had to read, (their website is a virtual drought of information about the product) seems to have literally built its own virtualization platform to emulate specific iOS devices - and is likely literally just throwing IPSW files (the actual iOS releases from Apple themselves) onto this emulator and selling it as a service.

As much as I believe in the open and free exchange of ideas I can't actually agree with iFixit here.

The excuse of it being sold as a 'security product' contradicts the only statement on their website - that its a tool for development.

John Deere locking farmers out of repairing their own hardware? Awful, shitty behaviour.

But this is literally stealing Apple's OS, shoving it in an emulator and charging people for it.

This article also makes the fallacious argument that Apple 'gives away' iOS with the purchase of an iPhone or iPad. That's silly - the cost of the OS is built into the purchase price.

The R&D and development time and money that goes into iOS or MacOS is part of what we are paying for when we purchase a device from Apple.

When we purchase a computer from Dell with Windows 10, the cost of the OS is bundled with the purchase - but Microsoft still gets paid from that - unless, of course we might order the specific subset of Dell computers with Linux on them.

I expect better from iFixit. This article reads like a sob story from the CEO of the company. You stole their software. What did you expect?

How is this any different from a company that would sell you a preconfigured hackintosh? Or selling a DVD player with an unlicensed movie on it? :/

We can bitch about iOS and MacOS being closed platforms all we want - but for myself and many others the hardware/software package-as-a-unit is actually a huge part of the point.

<comment><USER3> It's amazing how people on HN can support companies like AirBNB, Uber, Lyft who flagrantly break laws to bring a new product to market that is arguable better than the old way of doing things, and then at the same time not support a company like Corellium for doing the same thing because it's Apple.

This is clearly a sorely needed product, Apple even agrees because they tried to BUY the company and when they said no they want to take their ball and go home.

<comment><USER4> >because it's Apple.

I think you're being assuming here.

<comment><USER5> The pattern is evident, and it becomes more clear if you look at individuals' comment histories.

<comment><USER6> If you're going to do this please make specific allegations instead of posting this pathetic nonsense.

Or email firstname.lastname@example.com like the guidelines tell you to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It sounds like Apple are going to release their own iOS device cloud virtualization product at WWDC in exactly six months, so their lawyers are turning up the heat now on their lawsuit from last August that they assumed would be settled—in their favor—by now.

<comment><USER8> Apple started a "research device" program shortly before filing this lawsuit.

<comment><USER9> Apparently, Apple also tried to buy Correlium shortly before this lawsuit. [https://twitter.com/mdowd/status/1193299900408090624](https://twitter.com/mdowd/status/1193299900408090624)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Articles that spend more time telling you how to feel about things instead of reporting on them should not be categorized as news.

</comment><comment><USER11> Honestly if I was a security vendor who found a major vulnerability in IOS this type of behavior by Apple would make me far more likely to simply release it rather than work with them to get it resolved.

<comment><USER12> I don't think anyone at Apple would be all that upset over that. A publicly released exploit is better than one privately sold to intelligence agencies. It's specifically the latter market that Corellium seeks to serve.

<comment><USER8> > It's specifically the latter market that Corellium seeks to serve.

Hence why Corellium often provides members of the security and jailbreak community with access to their services.

<comment><USER13> Lots of companies give lots of things to "the community" for goodwill, but that doesn't mean they don't also sell to governments. Amazon gives AWS away to anyone, but ALSO tried to get the JEDI contract. One doesn't negate the other.

<comment><USER8> This is starting to veer off track, but I am not overly sympathetic to "but your tool is used by bad people" arguments in cases where there are reasonable, general uses for the tool. Nobody goes after McDonalds because murderers eat there, too.

<comment><USER6> Ah yeah, McDonalds is _totally_ a reasonable comparison!

Corellium doesn't charge a few "nice" researchers, but builds their business around the evil researchers willing to pay $1M/yr for a license. Clearly they're exactly like McDonalds!

<comment><USER14> That's not the real licensing cost at all. The cloud and on-premise options are both available for substantially less.

<comment><USER6> The licensing costs seem to depend on who's asking. I have no doubt that they might have offered you substantially better rates than that.

People keep making very confident but incorrect statements regarding prices offered by Corellium because they assume everyone gets quoted the same, see this twitter thread for another example [https://twitter.com/therealdaneel/status/1193122030687797248](https://twitter.com/therealdaneel/status/1193122030687797248)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >So useful, in fact, that Apple tried to buy the company

It's not like Apple can't virtualize iOS.

Beyond that, I feel like this article could've done a much better job representing Apples claims. The author attempts to paint Corellium as the good guys while completely ignoring that they primarily sell to the likes of Azimuth.

Maybe DMCA is bad and Apple is evil, but that doesn't make Corellium the good guys.

<comment><USER2> >> Maybe DMCA is bad and Apple is evil, but that doesn't make Corellium the good guys.

Not only is this my favourite point in all the comments I've read - but I feel like this one sentence says, in one sentence - what it took me like a page and a half to convey. :P

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I don't see how providing a platform to speed up security research is a bad thing.

That said, I don't have a huge problem with Apple's 'they copied our bits' complaint. That's true.

The problem is that Apple is weaponizing 1201 in a way that would be very damaging if applied in other contexts.

<comment><USER8> But Corellium _isn't_ copying their bits; users provide their own iOS files.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


HTTPS Client Identification Using SSL/TLS Fingerprinting - <AUTHOR> https://www.muni.cz/research/publications/1299983?lang=en <comment><AUTHOR> [paper] [http://is.muni.cz/repo/1299983/https_client_identification-p...](http://is.muni.cz/repo/1299983/https_client_identification- paper.pdf)

[slides] [http://is.muni.cz/repo/1299983/https_client_identification-s...](http://is.muni.cz/repo/1299983/https_client_identification- slides.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> This is a _huge_ issue. We really need leaders to start being aggressive with bringing down the variation. It's damaging the benefit of using TLS at all, and I'd argue browser vendors would be making their users safer by having browsers force HTTP (or outright reject) on websites that aren't maintained enough to do TLS1.2 than allowing HTTPS and ultimately hurting the whole ecosystem.

I don't see a mention of timing in this paper, either. I suspect that it is another viable identifier. After accounting for latency, the speed of the response can give you an idea of what hardware they're using.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't really get the point of getting the user agent with this technique. How useful is it? It's not really fingerprinting. You can't identify a computer uniquely. Pretty much all iphones have the same user agent.

<comment><USER4> Another input for a Bayesian bot detection algorithm. If it looks like Forefox but doesn't use cipher suites for, any released version of Firefox then it might not be Firefox.

It's actually a less intrusive test than say searching the network for SIP end points via WebRTC like used today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> OpenSSL has a hack similar to this to workaround a bug in Apple's ECDSA implementation where it was unusable in older versions of OS X and iOS.

</comment><comment><USER6> Dropping "Network-based" from the name makes it a bit misleading/confusing...</comment>


Google searches and tweets about Bitcoin decline sharply - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-14/bitcoin-pop-culture-moment-fades-as-fad-gives-way-to-regulators <comment><USER2> Using Google Trends alone for calling a trend a success/failure isn't fair, as a spike can be correlated to _confusion_ about the term, and it's a safe assumption swarms of non-techies were Googling "how do I buy Bitcoin and get rich?" in November.

<comment><USER3> Good observation. Normalization of a new thing doesn't necessarily mean it's falling out of favor. My non-techie wife even knows what Bitcoin is now and isn't trying to understand it anymore.

<comment><USER4> If non techies aren't trying to understand it anymore what does that mean the next step for them would be? Adoption?

<comment><USER3> Perhaps. If my wife, for example, was asked by Western Union if "is Bitcoin okay?" for a money transfer to her brother, she would probably now say "sure". Where 5 years ago, she would have resisted. Brand awareness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Misleading article. The sharp spike in the graph was due to the drastic increase in the bitcoin price. This was the time when Bitcoin hit all time high and so the # of searches for the term.

Now that phase has passed and so the search trend is coming back to as it was before the spike. Also, it will go down because now more and more people already know about crypto. Not sure how that is a bad sign. Totally misleading article.

<comment><USER6> A person with a certain perspective would see it that way. Suppose you think Bitcoin is a fad or bubble. Ponzi scheme doesn't quite fit since there's no mastermind orchestrating it. You think that people are only buying or outlaying the capital to mine bitcoin in the hopes that someone downline gives you more money for it than you invested. Eventually the world will run out of greater fools and the price would plummet. Decreasing interest from new people would definitely signal something to this person.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Ponzi scheme doesn't quite fit since there's no mastermind orchestrating it.

What about the 'Whales' ? Apparently < 1,650 Wallets (and individuals owning those wallets) possess over 90% of all bitcoin in circulation, and each has a minimum of 1000 BTCs.

These whales have routinely manipulated the market. Most recently on Feb 6th, when the Mt Gox Custodian dumped like 300 million worth of BTC and briefly the BTC price plummeted from 7Ks to 5.6K.

<comment><USER6> What about them? What you describe just sounds like normal supply and demand to me. These 'whales' need to convert bitcoin to traditional currency to buy houses, cars, etc. The question is whether there's an unending supply of people who will buy into cryptocurrencies to support the demand side of the equation. And bitcoin isn't really on my radar anyways since nobody uses GPUs to mine it anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fading or becoming more ubiquitous?

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh look. Another Bloomberg article shitting on bitcoin. Seriously, I don't even have to guess the source of these doom and gloom articles on HN anymore. They are wrong way more than they are right and have made it a sport to generate clickbait like this article, titled: The Bitcoin Fad Is Fading—for Now (note the word 'fad', clearly meant to be inflammatory).

So, does anyone want to ask why the vast majority of searches for "Bloomberg" originate in Turkey, Singapore, and Hong Kong? Seems odd that interest in the term would be low enough in the US to place it outside the top 10. [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=bloomberg,bitcoin](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=bloomberg,bitcoin)

What's stranger is that the trends for 'Bloomberg' Turkey don't match any surrounding countries (that I checked), and outside Singapore and China, relative volume has dropped over the past few years, especially in Asia. [https://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=bloomberg&t...](https://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=bloomberg&t=weekly&p=tr#)

Maybe it's the conspiracy nut in me, but if I was a conservative financial news source and I saw a lot of interest in a totally new financial system that I don't understand (or have influence over), I'd be afraid, too. I mean, if the search interest in bitcoin was showing strength in those new markets I just spent cultivating, I'd probably downplay it too. But that's probably not what's happening... [https://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=bitcoin&t=w...](https://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=bitcoin&t=weekly&p=tr#) Or it totally is.

So, is the fad of Bloomberg fading? Nah, they've been consistently low for years, and everyone loves a 0 growth business. Is Bloomberg about to collapse? Hopefully.

Fucking dinosaurs, man. The worst part about them is having to hear their death moans from miles away.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is good........ for Bitcoin

</comment><comment><USER4> I, for one, welcome this "cooling down" of the hype.

</comment><comment><USER10> Lagging indicator.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Trough of disillusionment."

<comment><USER12> The ratchet up since 2016 certainly does not have me disillusioned.

<comment><USER11> It's a standard phase in the adoption of any technology. It usually goes: initial interest (run up), hype phase (often accompanied by bubble), hype peak (bubble gets absurd), disillusionment (often accompanied by crash), then gradual renewal of interest and "plateau of enlightenment."

Cryptocurrency is still in its hype phase but there are signs that it's ending. When it does expect a loss of interest and possibly a crash in value, though the latter may not occur as much as people expect due to the weird behavior of illiquid or thinly traded assets and the deflationary nature of most existing cryptocurrencies.

The plateau of enlightenment will come as people figure out new ways to scale cryptocurrencies and adapt them to different use cases in the real world.

Their current use cases of financial fraud, gambling, and crime are actually not uncommon. The military and criminals are generally early adopters of new technology, and things like gambling and porn are often early use cases. Sober mainstream "enterprise" users generally stay away from new technologies until they reach their plateau of enlightenment and are thus well understood and reliable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Who's implying that causal relationship when the contrary is just as likely?

</comment><comment><USER6> I hope cryptocurrencies are done. I need to buy a video card.

<comment><USER14> Have you tried contacting the manufacturer of the video card you want? Sometimes they have wait lists you can opt into.

<comment><USER6> Yea, I'm on the waitlist for all the good it does me.

It looks like the higher end graphics cards are available new for no less than ~3x their MSRP. Everything else is sold out. In all seriousness, the cheapest option is to buy a pre-built computer and throw out everything but the GPU. It's insanity, and I can't wait for this fad to be over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Duh. Nobody is using cryptocurreny in any significant quantities except criminals on the dark web. The only thing sustaining value in cryptocurrencies is investment speculation.

If investors cannot sell shares then there is nothing left for it. Investors must be able to advertise interest, any way they can, to entice other people to buys their shares otherwise it is just a retail souvenir.

EDIT:

I can see this post is irritating people. Please respond with an example of people using cyptocurrecy to make legitimate purchases in any valid quantities.

<comment><USER4> I will bite, despite suspecting that this is a useless argument to wade into :). What do you consider "valid quantities?"

<comment><USER15> Do you know of a population segment that makes more than 10% of their monthly purchases in cryptocurrency alone or a major business that receives a greater than 10% revenue from cryptocurrency?

I have heard of people on here living in silicon valley who claim to purchase occasional drinks with cryptocurrency, but I have not heard of practical or regular expenditures with cryptocurrency or anybody that I know offline who uses it for any kind of expense.

<comment><AUTHOR> CryptoKitties ? 12 MILLION in 2017, all in Ethereum / ETH.

> CryptoKitties, the Ethereum-based digital kitten collectibles game, has > processed more than $12 million in sales on its decentralized marketplace.

Source: [https://cointelegraph.com/news/cryptokitties-sales- hit-12-mi...](https://cointelegraph.com/news/cryptokitties-sales- hit-12-million-could-be-ethereums-killer-app-after-all)

Also, a story on their revenue model => [https://medium.com/@codetractio/a-look-into-cryptokitties- re...](https://medium.com/@codetractio/a-look-into-cryptokitties-revenue- model-6466b705a998)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Is a Logo-Like Language? - <AUTHOR> https://maxhallinan.com/posts/2019/08/25/what-is-a-logo-like-language/ <comment><USER2> >Does this mean that the use of the language is more important than the language itself?

The answer is a resounding yes. C became popular because it is the native language of Unix. It was Rails that made Ruby popular. JavaScript is popular because it is implemented by all the browsers. Objective-C became popular because of iOS, and similarly with Swift. Visual Basic was one of the most popular languages for a time because it made Windows GUI programming easier. The ecosystem and use of a language is far more important than the language itself.

<comment><USER3> Objective-C became popular because it was the Mac language.

<comment><USER4> In the pedantic sense, Objective-C became popular because it was the NeXT language. But by the numbers, its massive popularity was due to the iOS app store gold rush, not NeXT STEP or MacOS or OS/X.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anybody still have a copy of the file from the MIT-AI Lab PDP-10 called "AI: HUMOR; LOGO TURTLE" or something like that? I haven't been able to find a copy myself, but I remember reading it and have confirmed that it existed, and that it was published in SIGART around 1982.

It was Leigh Klotz's sarcastic response to a Defense Department questionnaire to Terrapin about how their technology could be used to kill people.

He proposed deploying a swarm of thousands of LOGO turtles to crawl around the battlefield in mesmerizing geometric patterns, and stab the enemy with a quick succession of PENUP and PENDOWN commands (proving once again that the pen is mightier than the sword).

Cybernetic Zoo: A history of cybernetic animals and early robots: 1969 – The Logo Turtle – Seymour Papert et al (Sth African/American):

[http://cyberneticzoo.com/cyberneticanimals/1969-the-logo- tur...](http://cyberneticzoo.com/cyberneticanimals/1969-the-logo-turtle- seymour-papert-marvin-minsky-et-al-american/)

Logo's Yellow Turtle: First programmed in 1970. Built at MIT AI Lab:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeFhFPNO8hc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeFhFPNO8hc)

Logo Update, Volume 4, Number 3 - Spring 1996:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20120904211432/http://el.media.mi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120904211432/http://el.media.mit.edu:80/logo- foundation/pubs/logoupdate/v4n3.html)

<comment><USER5> The person I would ask is Brian Harvey, but that's just a guess. It sounds pretty funny regardless.

<comment><USER4> Good guess: I was just discussing it with Brian Harvey, Ken Kahn, Andrea diSessa, and Leigh Klotz, who said he has a copy, which I've asked him to please share! Then I saw this LOGO discussion. Plate of shrimp!

I love the great work Brian Harvey and Jens Mönig have done with Snap! It's like a non-watered-down version of Scratch, with the full power of Scheme (first class functions, lexical closures, special forms, continuations, build your own blocks, user definable control structures, extensible in JavaScript).

[https://snap.berkeley.edu](https://snap.berkeley.edu)

Snap! 5 is here!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20309162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20309162)

Here's the elegant Snap! visual Y Combinator:

[https://imgur.com/cOq8tvR](https://imgur.com/cOq8tvR)

Visual Lambda: Note how the gray block after the "report", shrink-wrapped around the "call (fn) with inputs (fn) []", is a visual "lambda". It looks like a "gasket" or "baggie" that insulates the code inside from being immediately evaluated, returning a closure instead.

Here's an excellent mind-blowing example by Ken Kahn of what's possible: teaching kids AI programming by integrating Snap! with existing JavaScript libraries and cloud services like AI, machine learning, speech synthesis and recognition, Arduino programming, etc:

AI extensions of Snap! for the eCraft2Learn project

[https://ecraft2learn.github.io/ai/](https://ecraft2learn.github.io/ai/)

>The eCraft2Learn project is developing a set of extensions to the Snap! programming language to enable children (and non-expert programmers) to build AI programs. You can use all the AI blocks after importing this file into Snap! or Snap4Arduino. Or you can see examples of using these blocks inside this Snap! project.

[https://github.com/ecraft2learn/ai](https://github.com/ecraft2learn/ai)

[http://lntrg.education.ox.ac.uk/presentation-of-ai-cloud- ser...](http://lntrg.education.ox.ac.uk/presentation-of-ai-cloud-services- integrated-with-snap-at-the-connective-ubiquitous-technology-for-embodiments- center-of-the-national-university-of-singapore-and-keio-university- on-16-march-2017-by-k/)

What's the difference between Snap! and Scratch?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20311457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20311457)

LLOGO MACLISP sources with robotic turtle drivers:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12207532](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12207532)

>Here is the source code to LLogo in MACLISP, which I stashed from the MIT-AI ITS system. It's a fascinating historical document, 12,480 lines of beautiful practical lisp code, defining where the rubber meets the road, with drivers for hardware like pots, plotters, robotic turtles, TV turtles, graphical displays, XGP laser printers, music devices, and lots of other interesting code and comments.

[https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp](https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp)

<comment><USER6> I have to confess, that function, even though I always call it Y when I write it so people will get what it's about, isn't a combinator at all. Writing a real Y combinator in an applicative-order language is possible but complicated, so I never do it. :-) (The difference is that this function takes a _two input_ function as input and supplies itself as its first input. Really it should take a one-input function and magick that into a two-input one first.)

<comment><USER4> So technically, that's a "Y Not-Combinator"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Python offers a nice Logo-like environment using "import turtle".

[https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html](https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html)

<comment><USER8> That module is great fun to mess around with. I've made a program that uses it to plot the Python logo[1]. I had intended to also have it plot the correct gradient but I had trouble getting the trapezoid filling algorithm working correctly at the time.

[1] [https://gist.github.com/SuperDoxin/d7bb473dcec7e1c55f48](https://gist.github.com/SuperDoxin/d7bb473dcec7e1c55f48)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Logo is actually more than just a toy language for turtle graphics. It's a serious language with a lot of inspiration from Lisp (although not using sexps).

<comment><USER10> I seem to recall at least one Logo I used as a kid had an "advanced mode" that in hindsight boiled down to S-Expressions and several more Lisp functions added to its standard library. Wish I could recall which Logo that was. Maybe one of the later LCSI builds (Apple Logo or IBM Logo), but possibly some version of Lego's TC Logo?

<comment><USER6> Have a look at Berkeley Logo, [https://cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html](https://cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html)

About S-expressions, you can fully parenthesize everything if you want. But Logo uses square brackets, not parens, as list delimiters, so you still have to do a little bit of tokenization.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for making your Logo books available!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The book Turtle Geometry [1] by Harold Abelson of SICP fame is a pretty cool exploration of mathematics all the way up to non-euclidean geometry using turtle graphics.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Geometry-Mathematics- Artificia...](https://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Geometry-Mathematics-Artificial- Intelligence/dp/0262510375)

</comment><comment><USER12> I rewrote a Logo implementation in JavaScript in order to make a map of the train network in Taiwan.

[http://peterburk.github.io/tra/](http://peterburk.github.io/tra/)

Existing maps were not bilingual, which caused me to take the wrong train and miss a concert. When I decided to redraw it, I wanted the map to not only have subway-style graphics, but also make the distance between the points be proportional to the time it takes a local train to travel between those stations.

If anyone else would like to use Logo to teach kids programming, and make time-proportional subway maps for other cities, please get in touch! I think it'd be a fun learning exercise.

</comment><comment><USER13> Rebol and Red [1] are the only languages that I know which acknowledge having Logo heritage in their design and philosophy. Speaking from my experience, I can tell that working in them is indeed a deeply embodied microworld-like experience, they way author describes.

Manipulating homoiconic structures feels highly spatial, as if you're molding a clay with your own hands, or rather palpating the Urschleim. High polymorphism and rich standard library remove the mental burden and quite literally let you _think_ in the language (hi mr. Iversion! [2]) and feel embodied in its runtime. Symbolic programming directly parallels the magic of natural language, its eerie occult power of controlling the world by non- physical means - remember how Sussman spoke about linguistic abstraction and magic incantations in SICP introduction?

In fact, in Red and Rebol everything is a little language (an embedded DSL), from metal to meta, and programs in them are this beautiful symbiogenetic ooze of micro-formats, slangs and linguistic DNA strands, from which your program slowly emerges [3]. Ultimately, you and your code become of one mind and body, stitched together by problem-solving intent. "I'm not _moving_ the turtle, I _am_ the turtle that moves!".

Even thinking about it gives me heebie-jeebies and brings to mind Tsutomu Nihei's Blame! [4] ever-growing City structure and Frictional Games' SOMA craziness [5]. Never experienced anything like that with any other programming language (except maybe for Forth and Lisp, but they are Red and Rebol ancestors too!).

\--

On a slightly different note: there's a "Computer science Logo style" book series [6].

[1]: [https://www.red-lang.org/](https://www.red-lang.org/)

[2]: [https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm](https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm)

[3]: [https://meltingasphalt.com/a-codebase-is-an- organism/](https://meltingasphalt.com/a-codebase-is-an-organism/)

[4]: [https://myanimelist.net/manga/149/Blame](https://myanimelist.net/manga/149/Blame)

[5]: [https://somagame.com/](https://somagame.com/)

[6]: [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/exploring- logo](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/exploring-logo)

<comment><USER14> Link 4 is broken. Thanks for insight!

<comment><USER13> HN ignored last exclamation mark for some reason, changed the link to MAL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> While Processing isn't logo-like in syntax it is logo-like in intention as in it tries to make it very easy for users to get graphics on to screen.

Processing is java-based, but it has spawned both a js verison 'p5.js' and a python version 'processing.py'.

[https://processing.org/](https://processing.org/) [https://p5js.org/](https://p5js.org/) [https://py.processing.org/](https://py.processing.org/)

<comment><USER16> Logo's intention was not to make it easy to get graphics on the screen. Turtle Geometry is a mathematics made for learning. And it is only one part of the bigger picture of problem solving, using a computer both to solve problems, and to learn about how to solve them.

<comment><USER3> 99% of logo users only drew imperative pictures, and that it why logo is famous.

<comment><USER4> Terrapin published my LOGO Adventure on the C64 LOGO Utilities disk as an example of a simple non-graphical game that showed off Logo's list processing and functional programming capabilities.

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/logo-adventure- for-c64-terrap...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/logo-adventure- for-c64-terrapin-logo-4c684a240b53)

Paleotronic has ported it to their Apple Logo, which runs in their amazing 3D Apple ][ emulator!

[https://paleotronic.com/2018/11/10/logo-adventure-for- apple-...](https://paleotronic.com/2018/11/10/logo-adventure-for-apple-logo/)

[https://paleotronic.com/software/microm8/](https://paleotronic.com/software/microm8/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Regarding

...the elements of a language are features of a world I inhabit:

Environments are values floating above my head. I have an urge to glance up when I'm thinking about what's in scope. A closure is a one-way tunnel or pipe or wormhole back into the function environment. But the program itself can't flow through the pipe. Asynchronous control flow is a stream that I imagine myself floating down. I think about where the stream will take me. Functors are giant structures, like a sculpture by Richard Serra. Functor operations act like cranes, helping me to move around those structures.

27 years ago I began working on a programming language in which computational abstractions had concrete animated analogs [1]. ToonTalk was my attempt to make a Logo for the 90s. You programmed in a virtual world where you trained robots to put things in boxes, give birds messages to deliver, etc. The mappings are: computation: city, actor or process or object: house, methods: robots, method preconditions: contents of thought bubble, method actions: actions taught to robot, tuples or messages or vectors: boxes, comparison tests: scales, actor spawning: loaded trucks, actor termination: bombs, constants: numbers, text, and pictures, channel transmit capabilities: birds, channel receive capabilities: nests, program storage: notebooks.

ToonTalk became free and open source 12 years ago. 5 years ago I had time to re-implement much of it as a web app [2]. But as Don Hopkins wrote - I'm focussed now on adding AI to Snap!

[1] [http://www.toontalk.com](http://www.toontalk.com) [2] [https://toontalk.github.io/ToonTalk/](https://toontalk.github.io/ToonTalk/)

</comment><comment><USER18> We wrote a 3D version of Apple Logo [1] and we're going to be rolling out a tutorial for it for kids + running classes...

[1] [https://paleotronic.com/software/microm8/help/micrologo/](https://paleotronic.com/software/microm8/help/micrologo/)

<comment><USER4> I love your 3D Apple ][ emulator too!

[https://paleotronic.com/software/microm8/](https://paleotronic.com/software/microm8/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Logo appeared in a puzzle in this year's MIT Mystery Hunt: [https://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2019/puzzle/turtle_power.html](https://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2019/puzzle/turtle_power.html)

Fun puzzle. Took me back...

</comment><comment><USER20>
      I do not think of myself as a closure or a functor, unlike the Logo programmer and the turtle, but the elements of a language are features of a world I inhabit:

Here is the main difference between Logo and other languages. It's called "Embodied Cognition" in academia.

<comment><USER21> It's a difference in _programmers_ , at least. I do absolutely think of myself as a functor or closure, when I'm working at that level. (Dijkstra must be rolling in his grave.) Or a structure, moving through a queue, guarded by a serial dispatch queue ... I've realized a lot about data flow by being stuck in traffic.

My programs are apparently anthropomorphic, too: I start every new feature by adding "// TODO: i need ..." comments everywhere, and then go back and do what they say. Someone watching me once remarked that my program wrote itself.

Full disclosure: I learned Logo when I was young, and then Lisp as a teenager -- two of my first languages -- so perhaps I was infected from the start.

Now I'm kind of curious how else people think of programs. Do functions and objects not have a shape and position and rhythm? How do you model them? They're not literally just symbols, are they?

<comment><USER4> I remember code as places I've been (like a memory palace), that are connected to each other by the control and data flow. So my memories of old code are quite concrete, tangible, and first-person, and I can reconstruct the details and context by remembering the other places it was connected to, and my (the program counter's) journey from place to place that I took when I first encountered those locations (loci).

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ahhh... I remember LOGO on Apple ][e's Apple donated to the elementary school I attended.

Random Q: Why was that light on Apple's keyboard invariably uncomfortably hot?</comment>


Ask HN: Is any of the big COBOL codebases open source? - <AUTHOR> I read Increment.com article on COBOL and I'm wondering if there are any COBOL codebases that are (a) used (b) open source. I wanted to see how ugly it can get inside. <comment><USER2> COBOL is a pretty good fit for the domain that it serves, so serious COBOL cases are not that bad.

If you use COBOL you will get decimal numbers suitable for financial work. If you use Java or Python and take the defaults you will someday cut a check to somebody for the wrong amount. There are decimal math objects for Java and Python but they add to the "bloat" of the code and the complaint that it is "ugly".

On a mainframe the ordinary numbers on COBOL are good for business and they are supported in hardware.</comment>


Ask HN: Why isn't there a Saas-for-Saas? - <AUTHOR> I know this question has come up at least once in the past (can't find it now), but afaik without a clear answer.
So let me ask again: why isn't there a Saas-for-saas that takes away most of the common technical chores for getting a Saas in the air, and instead allows you to focus on getting your Saas-specific code out?
Setting up a Saas and getting it out there as a MVP, not to even mention a production ready version, requires a lot of similar effort between Saas'. I.e.:
- user/tenant management. Oauth + email/password, 2-factor, mail/sms flows for reset, etc.
- plan/package management + RBAC / access control + rate limiting and/or overcharges on pay-per-use basis - connection to payment provider(s). Say Stripe + Paypal for pretty good coverage. Needs to cover correct VAT handling - exposed self-service userprofile / saas-preferences / payment options / billing statements / 'currently accrued this month' statement, etc.
  - might be API only. Community will take it from there with canned Gui templates using bootstrap, etc.
- ...
Auth0 for instance tackles the user-management space pretty nicely, and it might make sense for this Saas-for-Saas to optionally outsource that part to them for all the extra stuff they provide (LDAP, etc). However, just as an example using multiple users under 1 tenant-account is not straightforward.
So why is it that such a Saas-for-Saas doesn't exist? Do startups hesitate to outsource this core-functionality? Do they just wing it, and later pull their hair out when realising that doing it properly takes far more time than anticipated? Or is selling to the startup-crowd just really tough?
Lastly to note: It doesn't have to be a Saas per-se. Could just as well be open-source code with a commercial license or something. It would have to run entirely separate from my own saas-code, but that's perfectly doable. I'd pay could money for this.
Anyone? <comment><USER2> I remember seeing MVPaaS[0] posted here awhile back which is kind of what you're saying (right?), but then again, I'm really not sure why it's needed. The things you listed are the _easy_ part of creating a product. Integrating Stripe is relatively painless, especially if you've done it before, and so is integrating something like Auth0.

And besides, there are a few more products like this such as RailsKit[1] and Spark[2] that help you get your SaaS idea off the ground quickly.

But again, those things are usually the quick and easy part, thanks to companies like Stripe. Building the valuable software and then selling it is the hard part.

[0]: [https://mvpaas.com/](https://mvpaas.com/) [1]: [https://railskits.com/saas/](https://railskits.com/saas/) [2]: [https://spark.laravel.com/](https://spark.laravel.com/)

<comment><USER3> Spark is one that I was going to suggest - I can't say I've personally used it, but it was something I certainly evaluated before going down a different route. From the outside, it looks like an excellent basis for a SaaS built upon PHP and the Laravel framework.

I personally made the age-old mistake of telling myself that it would be cool to build something in a new language as some form of personal development. Of course, the idea grew legs and now I'm learning as I go. Not strictly a problem, as I'm loving Django and Python, just an extra hurdle to scale before launching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The scope of such a project is way too large.

You'd have to become everything to everyone.</comment>


Tile38 – Geospatial database and real-time geofencing server, v1.15.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tidwall/tile38/releases/tag/1.15.0 <comment><AUTHOR> Released v1.15.0 Added official support for ARM/ARM64. There's also new commands, fixes, and optimizations.</comment>


23M Chess Players vs. 100 Remote Developers: An Interview with CEO of Chess.com - <AUTHOR> https://youteam.io/blog/23-million-chess-players-vs-100-remote-developers-an-interview-with-ceo-of-chess-com/ <comment><USER2> Hello HN! Erik from Chess.com here. Happy to answer any questions. If you are interested, when you are done reading the interview above, you can learn more about how we run our company here: [https://www.chess.com/blog/erik/how-chess- com-s-100-person-v...](https://www.chess.com/blog/erik/how-chess- com-s-100-person-virtual-team-works-together)

<comment><USER3> How come with all your resources lichess has a better user experience?

I don't mean that in a mean way but as a chess playing programmer they just do.

Their iOS and Android apps are similarly better.</comment></comment>


LLJVM - <AUTHOR> http://da.vidr.cc/projects/lljvm/

<comment><USER2> This is a massive improvement over the old way of doing this -- use a $LANG compiler targeting 32-bit MIPS and then emulate that processor in Java (not _too_ hard as the memory models match up).

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the big challenges facing the JRuby community today is the prevalence of gems with C extensions. For gems where the C source is available, this might be a viable route to compatibility.

For anyone trying to crack that problem, this is definitely worth deeper investigation.

<comment><USER4> This would require a compatibility layer for the MRI C API, which would be difficult but probably doable.

It would only solve part of the problem, though: many of the C extensions exist as bindings to existing C libraries. This wouldn't solve that unless the entire library were compiled this way.

<comment><USER5> There's libffi for the latter problem, though. It's still work, obviously, but probably less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's also NestedVM, <http://nestedvm.ibex.org/>, which works my using gcc to cross compile to MIPS and then convert the MIPS machine code into a Java class file.

</comment><comment><USER7> Someone actually just posted the llvm development mailing list with a backend they wrote for LLVM so that it can generate JVM bytecode (in the same way in generates x86, PPC, etc.) and it uses this lib, cool stuff.

<comment><USER8> That's the same guy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this an alternative to JNI?

<comment><USER10> Not really. I guess you could, in cases where you had the C source code, and were happy to compile everything into bytecode (including all that C codes dependencies with it). You wouldn't be running native code any more unlike JNI. JNA would be considered an alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> C on the JVM? Dear me!</comment>


"Wuhan has stopped testing, that is why new case = 0 there." - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/lokinhei/status/1241220936906338304 <comment><USER2> Apparently this started today? From the twitter thread:

 _Hangzhou government sent out a note today to cancel all temperature checks plus no need for green code in Hangzhou anymore. This is for entering public places and hotels are included._

But China has stopped reporting new cases for a few days now at least, no? It does seem they're cutting the testing short awfully soon, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> How credible is this source?

The Twitter post references an article from an Hong Kong site, which references the Japanese media (no specifics on which one), who then quotes a physician from Wuhan, yet doesn't bring up the physician's name or the hospital in which they work in.

</comment><comment><USER4> And the US has barely started testing. That is why the number of cases in the US is not 200,000 yet.

</comment><comment><USER5> This will be downvoted by HN overlords. Anyway, thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER6> The cat is out the bag. Most of the people in the world will be exposed to this virus and survive. China knows this. China also knows it's not possible to remain isolated from the virus and its effects. Even if that was possible, China's citizens would have to remain in virtual isolation until a vaccine was developed. Who knows when that will be or the knock on effects.

<comment><USER7> China went to extreme measure to lockdown and contain this. To believe the rubbish that they stopped testing is thrash. They contained it, aggressive testing, contact tracing and quarantine is what I have read from other sources they are using to keep it at bay with all new infections being from international travelers.</comment></comment>