Fallacies of Distributed Computing - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Computing <comment><USER2> I'm not sure whether the OP is implying that Amazon is guilty of these fallacies or whether AWS's users are.

Having worked at Amazon, I can attest that Amazon _does_ take these issues into account, and many more. That said, the purpose of the services that failed isn't to guard against network partitioning at the data center cluster level. The services that were designed with cluster network partitions in mind are still up (S3, EBS, SQS, etc).

If you are renting instances in a specific data center, and you wish to have cross-cluster redundancy, it is your responsibility to build that into your distributed system. This is ultimately a question of whether you need to commit to an SLA higher than that of the service on which you depend. (It's more complicated than that, but that should suffice for simplicity's sake).

There are companies that built services on top of EC2 to mitigate these risks (e.g. Elastra), and there are competing solutions that provide application- level hosting that should guard against such partitions (e.g. Windows Azure).

<comment><AUTHOR> _I'm not sure whether the OP is implying that Amazon is guilty of these fallacies or whether AWS's users are._

I had AWS customers in mind, more than Amazon.com themselves.

 _If you are renting instances in a specific data center, and you wish to have cross-cluster redundancy, it is your responsibility to build that into your distributed system._

Exactly. It's easy, though, to build something on top of AWS (or Rackspace or whatever) and then stand back, marvel at it's magnificence; and forget that an outage - in a network segment or service that you don't control - can totally wreck your masterpiece.

<comment><USER2> Fair enough. As I mentioned in my earlier post, there are available solutions that mitigate the risks of these fallacies for AWS's customers. When you build on top of a networked service, you are taking a hard dependency on its SLA, and if you need something with greater reliability, it is _your_ responsibility to provide the necessary redundancy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> We use AWS for the following reasons:

* Flexible pricing, with fair costs

* Instant, flexible provisioning

* Awesome APIs and third party libraries (e.g. boto)

* Extensive documentation/support in the wild (i.e. you can get just about any question answered via Google or Server Fault)

* Solid uptime track record with SLA to back it up

Did I expect that all server outages would magically disappear because we were now in the "cloud"? Not in the least bit.

Did others sign up for AWS thinking that? Sounds incredibly foolish to me if they did. But this sounds suspiciously like a straw man to me...

<comment><AUTHOR> _Did others sign up for AWS thinking that? Sounds incredibly foolish to me if they did. But this sounds suspiciously like a straw man to me..._

There's no straw-man, because nothing is being debated. That said, I do have a hunch that some non-trivial number of Amazon AWS customers do sign-up, build significant parts of their business on AWS, and not fully consider the implications of this configuration in terms of reliability, uptime, etc.

Building in the kind of redundancy and failover mechanisms to handle outages like this isn't easy, but it is important; and awareness of the kinds of things pointed out by the "Eight Fallacies" is part of that.

<comment><USER3> We probably agree but are perhaps looking at it from two different angles.

I guess I took the implication of your sharing this list of fallacies to be, "A buncha suckers got duped by all the cloud services hype."

As an actual AWS customer, I'm just sharing my perspective -- namely, that I never expected to be immune to unpredictable service outages like these, and that this is not at all a reason why I signed up for AWS. Maybe other did, but I am not personally acquainted with any of them if so.

I do slightly disagree with your assertion that building in redundancy and failover mechanism is by definition "important." Important is a relative term and is probably more meaningfully looked at from a business or cost/benefit perspective. For a company like Netflix it's clearly massively important to have a fully functioning failover plan in place. For startups like Quora, it probably suffices to have a simple service outage message.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go back to hitting refresh over and over on the AWS Status page.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I guess I took the implication of your sharing this list of fallacies to be, "A buncha suckers got duped by all the cloud services hype."_

No, not at all. I'm a big advocate for cloud services, including AWS.

 _I do slightly disagree with your assertion that building in redundancy and failover mechanism is by definition "important." Important is a relative term and is probably more meaningfully looked at from a business or cost/benefit perspective._

True.. I was generalizing a bit, due to laziness. That and it didn't seem important - at the time - to get into all that. But yes, I agree... the importance of failover / redundancy / etc. is clearly a business decision which is related to a number of factors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are more general issues at AWS this morning, but the continuing issues all center around EBS.

I think this is just reinforcing to me to never use a networked filesystem. It is the wrong abstraction for storing data across multiple physical units. Too often you end up hanging the whole box waiting for an IO operation to finish.

NFS fell out of favor for most Linux things a long time ago for these reasons.

IBM's GPFS... I've seen it fail spectacularly. But their marketing materials said it is awesome!

And now Amazon's EBS, essentially a networked block store, is failing.

Don't trust a vendor about networked storage. Its a lie, just like the cake.

<comment><USER5> That's an odd thing to say.

Internal networks can easily be more reliable than applications given that higher end equipment has a lot more money poured into it at a development level, and anything above the bottom end of the market typically has multiple layers of redundancy options available. Wether it's VRRP, stacking, bonding, IPMP, iSCSI channels etc.

EBS is unreliable, granted, but blaming the network seems faulty.

For one, it's nothing like NFS. For two, NFS can be adapted to highly- available systems fairly easily. These days it's a pretty simple system. Even with just a single Array, put two FreeBSD "heads" on it, MPIO connectivity, and CARP between the boxes. Monitor the CARP interface to import/export the file-systems and there you go. If you can tolerate a minute or two of downtime when a host fails you have reliable, automatic redundancy.

EBS, FCoE, iSCSI, et all are entirely different beasts. But again, you can make the hosts redundant pretty easily. With iSCSI you can give the clients multiple paths to the devices increasing reliability and available bandwidth without LACP. Consolidate storage needs to save money. It's win/win/win.

Networked storage, wether it's block devices or shared file-systems, whatever the technology, aren't going away anytime soon. Matter of fact, they're becoming more critical to operations day by day. And these days, they're one of the easiest things to setup, and ensure availability on.

That EBS is the weak-link at Amazon is a bit counter-intuitive based on my own experience. I wonder what the root problems actually are...

<comment><USER6> Let me summarize the argument against using network filesystems. Elsewhere on the HN homepage as I write this [1] there is a link to the Wikipedia article on the Fallacies of Distributed Computing [2], which are:

        1. The network is reliable.
        2. Latency is zero.
        3. Bandwidth is infinite.
        4. The network is secure.
        5. Topology doesn't change.
        6. There is one administrator.
        7. Transport cost is zero.
        8. The network is homogeneous.

_Technically_ , every one of them is a myth of local disk storage as well, inasmuch as nothing is every 100% reliable in the mathematical sense. In reality, unlike network programming where the moment you step out into the big world you are slammed in the face by the mythical nature of these claims, they are _true enough_ for when you are working with local disk that you can write significant programs as if they are true, excepting perhaps latency (busy disk may mean you get scheduled much later). The basic argument is the practical differences are so significant that where the file interface is most effective when it just pretends most of the myths are true because adding the complexity of being able to deal with violations isn't worth it (and most programmers using local disk would get it wrong even if you offered it; how many programs gracefully handle running out of disk space, let alone more bizarre failure cases?), the network _must_ give you the tools to handle those issues, and correspondingly _must_ have a more complicated API.

In particular, every time you so much as touch the network, you need a code path to handle the possibility that the network communication utterly failed, just disappeared into oblivion. You just don't code that way when you deal with files; the file may be gone, the disk may run out of space, but you don't sit there in the middle of a fast read loop and handle _failure_ on every read, such as a topology change, i.e., "the disk drive is no longer present". That's not because it's not possible, because you can certainly yank out a USB key mid-read, but you tend not to handle it in most userland code. In fact the OS won't even let you handle many failures, as it will either abstract away the retries or simply lock your userspace hard.

So the fundamental idea is that filesystem abstractions built for relatively reliable communication simply isn't correct for network communication.

Incidentally, the same argument can pretty much be made against remote RPC by simply replacing "disk access" with "function call". You do not have to guard every function call you make with a check for absolute failure. (Not the function returning failure or the function throwing an exception, but the function that may have been there two minutes ago unexpectedly being _entirely gone_.) RPC may look cute in the source code but it's the wrong layer of abstraction.

[1]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2470865>

[2]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Computing)

<comment><USER5> That's actually this post (the fallacies link). :-)

And you make a good argument about handling read errors.

In practice that's not what high availability is about though, and it's certainly not what we're talking about with AWS, iSCSI or even an HA-NFS solution.

Availability in those terms is properly designed, redundant infrastructure. There are many cases I'm sure (say a Stock-Exchange) where HA-NFS would not be appropriate. In your average web-app however, request failures while transitioning to failover are (in my experience) just part of the bargain.

In that context, waiting 60 seconds for a stale NFS handle to pick a new connection up on the VRRPed failover node is acceptable, and like you said, you make assumptions and don't worry about the edge-case here.

There are clearly situations where NFS wouldn't work well, but those are definitely the exception to the rule. There are not a lot of reasons/scenarios where iSCSI couldn't or _shouldn't_ replace local storage for virtualization needs however. In my opinion.

iSCSI is simple and extremely reliable. Perhaps even _more_ reliable than local disks, especially if the primary concern is availability.

Frankly, I don't know that these rules are really something that applies at the level of a polished iSCSI or NFS stack. They certainly apply to the internals of those systems. While you or I aren't going to worry about wether a buffered-file-reader can fetch the next 8K block, that thought and engineering effort definitely has been put into these protocols and implementations at a lower level than you or I will typically work with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why do people think being in the "cloud" for hosting changes any of these rules? EC2 is a rentable compute utility, it doesn't provide for automatic failure or redundancy. Also people keep talking about an EC2 outage but it is really 1 region and from the status updates, maybe only a single Availability Zone that is affected.

That said, maybe I'm just less upset because my site is in a US-East Zone that doesn't appear to be affected.

<comment><USER8> Actually, EC2 and AWS in general does give a lot of options for automatic failure and redundancy.

I have a highly available application running in EC2 and I have multiple instances ready for failover and scripts triggered by monitors to move into another zone if the whole zone goes bonkers. This would be much more expensive and complicated if I needed to have dedicated redundant hardware in two geographically separated datacenters.

<comment><USER9> You set those scripts up yourself though so AWS is not automatically providing it. AWS does make it easy and cheap though.

<comment><USER8> A lot of it is actually just configuration of their auto-scaling mechanism. If a web front end stops working it starts new instances according to the pool minimums and CPU load. There are some custom scripts though, mostly for migrating data to another zone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As popular as "cloud" solutions are becoming, I think it's more important than ever to consider these fallacies, especially fallacy number 1:

 _The network is reliable._

<comment><USER10> Or the even older "Don't put all of your eggs in one basket"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This compounds with other fallacies in computing. Like picking designs that behave very well on average but show very nasty behavior once in a while. In particular, beware of people talking about big O notation without mentioning worst case behavior.

<comment><USER12> Wait, what? Big O notation is _all about_ asymptotic worst-case behavior. Anybody using it in another way is abusing the notation, although it may sometimes be useful to talk that way.

For example, a naive quicksort takes O(n^2) time. On random data, its expected runtime is O(n lg n). With ideal partitioning, it can be brought down to guaranteed O(n lg n) on arbitrary data, though this will usually make it slower in practice. But someone who says that quicksort is "usually O(n lg n)" is misusing the notation, and hopefully will quickly point this out by mentioning worst-case time.

Is this roughly what you had in mind?

<comment><USER13> Big O can be used to represent worst-case behavior, but it can be, and is used also for average-case. And no, it is not a misuse of the notation - it is legitimately used for both (also for best-case, but I have never heard of anybody actually bothering with that). Just be sure to understand which is being talked about.

<comment><USER12> Okay, this is a subtle point, but you're right. Big-O notation describes an asymptotic upper bound on any function. If that function is average run time, then that's perfectly kosher. Actually establishing what this means, though, is a bit trickier, and something people often mess up.

<comment><USER14> I don't think it's a subtle point at all - Big-O is _not_ inherently anything to do with worst case time complexity of algorithms, it is a general relationship between functions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Open question: does Google App Engine have automatic redundancy across multiple datacenters?

<comment><USER16> Probably, but it's not like they're immune to failure.

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/02/google-app- engine-...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/02/google-app-engine-is- down---ba.php) [http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/02/google-app-engine-broken- fo...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/02/google-app-engine-broken-for-4-hours- and-counting/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think the way the "cloud" was explained for years before it became mainstream was misleading. People would explain that if there were any failures within the cloud, data would magically shift to another part of the cloud with zero downtime. Obviously this isn't true, even Google has suffered outages in their cloud.

That's not to say the solution is to use managed data centers, but we will get better and better at improving the reliability of the cloud.

The cloud is not fail-proof.

</comment><comment><USER18> Can you make the "network is homogeneous" assumption given that all servers are at the same datacenter? It seems to me that more or less is true if you make the latency resolution at millisecond level.

<comment><USER6> If A, B, C, and D are all on gigabit on the same switch, if A and B are using their full gigabit to talk to each other, C could get significantly different bandwidths if it tries to talk to A vs. D. Is that homogeneous? Depends on how you define it but "no" is probably the more useful answer.

(There's a couple of other possible outcomes, like the switch prioritizes C, but then the A<->B link sees variable bandwidth over time, another type of inhomogeneity. One way or another something is going to give.)</comment></comment>


NSA search trends - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=nsa <comment><USER2> For anyone wondering why Paraguay is the top country here, it has nothing to do with the National Security Agency but rather Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, a transportation/bus company in Paraguay.

</comment><comment><USER3> And now if you want to depress yourself, tick the "Forecast" checkbox on the right.

</comment><comment><USER4> Comparing with CIA search trends is equally interesting:

[http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=nsa#q=nsa%2C%20CIA&cm...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=nsa#q=nsa%2C%20CIA&cmpt=q)

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=national%20security%...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=national%20security%20agency)

This does better at discriminating against bus companies and such.

The steady decline until recently is interesting.

<comment><USER6> Maybe people got lazy over time and tended to use the abbreviation?

Or maybe one can see a general decline of less popular terms due to the growth and change of the internet usage in the past 10 years? Imagine all those people who search for 'weather', 'email', 'facebook' etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> FYI, the Poles are searching for the Supreme Administrative Court of Poland - "Naczelny Sąd Administracyjny."

<comment><USER8> Is bulgaria also a similar case?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "nsa dating" is not what I thought it was.

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting to see "NSA Jobs" is 4th.

</comment><comment><USER11> Startup hockey-stick success explosion? Or:

[http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=nsa#q=Snowden&cmpt=q](http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=nsa#q=Snowden&cmpt=q)</comment>


Ask HN: Any suggestions for a managed local shared storage solution? - <AUTHOR>

We currently have about 22 employees, most of whom need access to all of our client project directories. We've been using SVN installed on a local Linux box for the last 3-4 years. We used to have an employee that managed our servers as a side job, but he has since left and we don't really have a full time need for someone with these capabilities. We are also having a hell of time finding someone locally (company or individual) that offer Linux support. We are nearing the point of the server filling up and basically don't have someone to handle archiving projects, increasing raided storage etc etc.
We are an all Mac shop (besides our servers) and like SVN because of its user friendliness with our creative team. We use Cornerstone App as our interface with it and rarely have any problems with any of our non-technical staff.
Are there any services/solutions out there that would configure a box that we would place on our local network and then manage it for updates and future expansion etc? Ideally this solution would be SVN based because it is what our team is used to, but we are open to other options. We just need to maintain versioning and have an offsite backup solution in place.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> My (slightly biased) suggestion would be to hire a part time sysadmin. The vast majority of what's required can be done remotely (this is how I operate for 99.9% of my clients)

If you're interested my details are in my profile

<comment><USER3> I concur :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone run a job site? - <AUTHOR>

Way back in 2007 my first ever venture on the web was http://hire-engineers.com, an engineering job board.
While I was putting my time and effort into it, it was making a few hundred bucks a month. However, it's been sitting dormant for a long while.
All that to say, I'm interested in selling it so if anyone who runs a job board and wants to pick it up, please to get in touch... will also thrown in the domain hiredash.com
Thanks! <comment><USER2> In response to the subject, I do.

But the site and domains don't really fit in with what I'm doing. Thanks for offering this up though.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for taking a look!</comment></comment>


Study challenges conventional wisdom of how cell membranes work - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-11-conventional-wisdom-cell-membranes.html <comment><USER2> This has been Gilbert Ling's bag since at least 1962!

</comment><comment><USER3> > Provided by: Harvard University

This seems similar to the non-peer reviewed articles you get in university magazines promoting the research of some lab.

<comment><USER4> One of the side effects of the corporatization of modern universities is that pretty much every scientific finding is accompanied by a PR fluff piece and scientific journalists usually just recycle aforementioned fluff piece. :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hopefully this leads to people actually questioning conventional wisdom. Up next: aquatic ape!</comment>


A.I. accurately predicted the full baseball post-season back in July - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/ai-makes-yet-another-remarkable-prediction-2172570.htm <comment><USER2> This reminds me of one of the chapters from "How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking" by Jordan Ellenberg (highly recommended). He describes how "stock brokers" would send out a "free stock prediction" to thousands of email addresses. The prediction would be a simple up/down prediction for a specific stock. The prediction was randomly chosen. But these "brokers" would send an equal number of up and down predictions, ensuring that they got a correct prediction for half of their recipients. They would then throw away half of the emails (the wrong half), and repeat with the remaining half. After ten predictions, there would still be a small number of people remaining for whom they'd sent only correct predictions to (10 in a row, which seems really impressive if you can't see the full picture). They would then contact these few people and offer to keep selling them predictions for a fee.

Stories like this (And Paul the Octopus, who I see was mentioned already) are exactly the same thing. Thousands of people are trying to using deep learning (i.e. stats), or other crazy methods as in this article, to make predictions. Of course every now and then one of them is going to work better than expected. This would be the case even if people were simply using random numbers. But we ignore all the ones that fail and give heaps of attention to the Pauls.

<comment><USER3> If anyone is interested, this is known as p-hacking in statistics ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging)), and works in a similar way.

For instance, you have a statistical population of one hundred men and one hundred women: you collect as much data as possible about them - as many features as possible, actually - until you find something which happens to be statistically significant for your group (eg. salt consumption). Then, you publish your results, pretending that the feature you found was the original hypothesis for the study ("Our study confirms that salt consumption is higher in males.")

<comment><USER4> It would be far more specific - you'd collect all their medical details, their ethnicity, age, etc., and then you end up with:

'Salt consumption can increase the risk of liver consumption for middle-aged males of African descent'

<comment><USER5> ... liver consumption ...

<comment><USER4> I meant liver disease. But I'll leave it this way because it's funnier. And pretty tasty.

<comment><USER6> "Consumption" is an old-fashioned word for classes of tuberculosis, which can affect the liver. So you could still be right :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nothing about this seems to add up.

They claim they made the prediction in early July, but link to a newspaper article dated 4 August that indicates the predictions were made just one day earlier.

They picked the team with the best record all season long to win the championship. They got one of the division winners wrong.

Just publishing the current favorites from MLB.com's probability page [0] as of 3 August would have also gotten 9 of 10 postseason teams correct, including going 6/6 on division winners. So the 'knowledge' of fans voting actually did worse than a monte carlo simulation.

I'm not impressed.

There's no way this should be considered predicting the "full baseball post- season," and I am not seeing any evidence that it happened in July. Wish they'd have shared it.

[0] [http://mlb.com/mlb/standings/probability.jsp?ymd=20161002](http://mlb.com/mlb/standings/probability.jsp?ymd=20161002)

<comment><USER8> There's also the issue of the full suite of predictions, if these were the only predictions made then it's impressive, but if they made lots of predictions then some of their predictions coming true may be no better than chance.

<comment><AUTHOR> They also predicted which managers would win the MVP awards, and which players would win the CY YOUNG awards but those don't get announced for 2 weeks.

<comment><USER9> Managers don't win MVP awards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> UNU seems to get their press releases on here a lot. As far as I can see there's not much "AI" involved, just a UI over the "wisdom of crowds" method of making predictions. In this case, the Cubs were heavily favored all season to win the World Series, had arguably one of the best GMs and managers in baseball, and a raft of all-star players. Goat aside, it was fairly smart money to lean towards them from mid-season on.

Same thing with their Kentucky Derby prediction this year. The swarm literally decided the horses in the exact odds they were going off at (which makes sense since gambling odds by their very nature are "the wisdom of the crowd") and that's how they finished.

<comment><USER11> Agreed - predicting that the Cubs would win the world series isn't impressive - the majority of SI writers [4/7] did that at the beginning of the season: [http://www.si.com/mlb/2016/03/31/playoff-picks-awards- picks-...](http://www.si.com/mlb/2016/03/31/playoff-picks-awards-picks-mvp-cy- young-rookie-of-the-year)

Correctly predicting who would advance in the post season is mostly luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not to be overly critical but:

It does not match my definition of A.I:

"UNU enables groups of online users to think together as a unified emergent intelligence -- a "brain of brains" that can express itself as a singular entity. Touted to as the world's first "hive mind," the UNU platform has had over 60,000 human participants in swarming sessions this year, together answering over 250,000 questions."

Also I would reasonably expect some of those 250.000 questions to beat the odds and get answered right.

<comment><AUTHOR> Except this was a prediction that was done formally for the Boston Globe, at their request. You can see their article about it here:

[https://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/redsox/2016/10/04/group-g...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/redsox/2016/10/04/group- globe-readers-predicted-nine-mlbs-playoff- teams/Fssfk351Wgy3xhRBXkg2CJ/story.html)

<comment><USER13> Still, this is not "AI" in the traditional sense of the phrase. Asking a bunch of humans and then deciding an outcome is not AI.

<comment><USER14> Well, I think it's pretty clearly an "emergent intelligence" that is distinct from any of the individuals' unique intelligence.

In other words, whose intelligence is being represented by the swarm?

<comment><USER15> Corporations have been collectively intelligent for centuries, but we don't call that AI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 1) The AI was just sythesizing answers given by human readers. It didn't do any of its own analysis of the data set.

2) The experiment was published in August, when the regular season was _already two thirds completed_. The cubs were well ahead of everybody at that point and were favourites to win (although in baseball that doesn't necessarily mean you are going to win in the postseason). Here are the standings at that Date: [http://www.baseball- reference.com/games/standings.cgi?year=2...](http://www.baseball- reference.com/games/standings.cgi?year=2016&month=8&day=4&submit=Submit+Date)

You can see that the 10 playoff teams were ranked 1-5 in each league at that point. So predicting the playoff teams was just "Which 10 teams are leading right now", which they asked humans about.

The AI didn't predict the full post-season, just which two teams would be in the World Series, which happened to be the team everybody thought it would be from one league and the second placed team from the other.

</comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me very much of delta polling, where you survey experts in a field with a complex and unsolvable question, tally the results, send that information back to the experts, and then ask them again. After a few rounds this tends to arrive at what is usually a pretty solid answer.

It is used sometimes in scientific and medical research. An automated tool is pretty neat, but like others said, it doesn't really classify as AI. I'm not sure how much money I would really put down on the bets the site makes, but it is similar in some ways to the scandal that rocked Draft Kings/Fan Duel, where admins were using high-level data to make bets on opposing systems. They did in fact make money.

</comment><comment><USER18> It irritates me that this is called "A.I".

</comment><comment><USER19> Anyone remember Tamara Rand. [0]

Well, one of the greatest Tamara Rand jokes was from CNN sports tonight: "The Cubs are predicted to win the World Series. Only thing is it was predicted by Tamara Rand."

Quite cool at a time when tv commentary was never light hearted.

[0] [http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/tamara_rand](http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/tamara_rand)

</comment><comment><USER20> What UNU does is more like "An live online poll of a group of people picked the post-season in July".

</comment><comment><USER21> How many AIs screwed it up? Remember the hits, forget the misses.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'd be curious to know what else they predicted that turned out to be wrong. This could be an impressive run, or it could be that the company's press release highlights several victories and omits several (or more) failures.

I have no evidence one way or the other but would be interested to see more context.

</comment><comment><USER23> Has Unu made any incorrect predictions? Their blog only seems to cover the big, successful ones.

<comment><AUTHOR> In response to such skepticism, reporters come up with their own questions and ask UNU to make predictions. And the reporters monitor the process. That's what this set of picks is - it was done for the BOSTON GLOBE, at their request, with their own participants:

[https://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/redsox/2016/10/04/group-g...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/redsox/2016/10/04/group- globe-readers-predicted-nine-mlbs-playoff- teams/Fssfk351Wgy3xhRBXkg2CJ/story.html)

<comment><USER24> That doesn't actually answer the question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Survivorship bias.

Also why the stated historical performance for your 401k funds are probably tricking you.

</comment><comment><USER26> Oh cool. How many AIs did they have doing the predictions? Survivorship bias.

</comment><comment><USER27> The article mentions "swarm intelligence" that essentially forms a hive-mind. Where is the AI/ML when it seems like it just picks the most popular responses from its many respondents?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is the latest UNU election pick: [http://unu.ai/election- fatigue/](http://unu.ai/election-fatigue/)

</comment><comment><USER28> What are the chances? Probably not that slim considering how many people are trying to make predictions using methods like this.

</comment><comment><USER29> What a game. What a series.

<comment><USER30> Hi and welcome to Hacker News! Please only post comments that add something meaningful to the topic of discussion (a proclaimed artificial intelligence that claims to have predicted this result much earlier).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Found this forward-looking post on which states will pass marijuana legalization ballot issues. [http://unu.ai/legalization/](http://unu.ai/legalization/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Who does the A.I. say will win the election next week?

<comment><USER32> [http://unu.ai/election-infographic/](http://unu.ai/election-infographic/)

<comment><USER33> I'd love to see an update; 538 has cut a third off of Trump's chance.

<comment><USER34> [https://i.imgur.com/09Sf7jj.png](https://i.imgur.com/09Sf7jj.png)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: PleaseMeet, send opt-in intros from Slack - <AUTHOR> http://www.smooz.io/pleasemeet <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, i'm the maker of PleaseMeet. I love networking, but sometimes intros can be a bit tedious (both sending and receiving)

Built over the weekend, inspired by this Medium post: [https://medium.com/kima-ventures/cracking-the-code-of- introd...](https://medium.com/kima-ventures/cracking-the-code-of- introductions-154d634d460a#.awp3lycrr)

I also documented the process there: [https://medium.com/@MVaragnat/how-to- build-a-slack-app-5b83d...](https://medium.com/@MVaragnat/how-to-build-a- slack-app-5b83d71e083a#.ojtu0nbg7)</comment>


Court: Feds Can't Just Grab Someone's Laptop at the Border - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150818/16495632000/doj-dismisses-case-after-court-explains-that-feds-cant-just-grab-someones-laptop-border.shtml <comment><USER2> Will this stop the next Border Patrol person from grabbing a laptop? Most definitely not. They can grab it, and then let the defendant wind his way through the courts. This isn't new, by the way; I remember going back all the way to Steve Jackson Games[1] that the government will seize the stuff willy- nilly, and then let you fight it out in the courts.

Violations of our basic rights will continue until there is tangible punishment for an LEO for doing so.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._U...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._United_States_Secret_Service)

<comment><USER3> Exactly.

I don't travel much international, like twice a year, but know dates in advance. I clone my drive and ship image encrypted ahead of my trip. I travel with laptop without hard drive in it.

This is of course, inconvenience, but not illegal. Many times they will ask me to "turn it on" to make sure this is not a bomb disguised as a laptop, but you don't need a hard drive to have BIOS flash on your screen.

<comment><USER4> Tonight someone invited me to give a talk at his business conference in NYC in front of 80 potential customers. I refused. I don't travel to US:

\- I have porn on my computer, obviously not underage but what am I supposed to say if the border agent asks me "Is this subject underage?"

\- I use a false name on Facebook. This is impersonation against an american interest.

\- I've downloaded torrents. Even if I delete the files, I'm pretty sure there are footprints everywhere. Pretty sure there's jail time for piracy, and being my third offense in this list, I'm pretty sure it could be considered as a repeat offense.

There's a reason why we have a right to privacy. It's because everyone has very fluid limits on things that are forbidden, and everyone, including elected officials, breaks them. But not everyone is punished. So I'd rather not cross the US border.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The headline is misleading, and I shouldn't be surprised that techdirt didn't explore the language being used:

        > After considering all of the facts and authorities set
        > forth above, then, the Court finds, under the totality of
        > the unique circumstances of this case, that the imaging
        > and search of the entire contents of Kim's laptop, aided
        > by specialized forensic software, for a period of
        > unlimited duration and an examination of unlimited scope,
        > for the purpose of gathering evidence in a pre-existing
        > investigation, was supported by so little suspicion of
        > ongoing or imminent criminal activity, and was so
        > invasive of Kim's privacy and so disconnected from not
        > only the considerations underlying the breadth of the
        > government's authority to search at the border, but also
        > the border itself, that it was unreasonable.

Unless I'm reading it wrong, this is a very narrow ruling that can't really be used as precedent for other situations.

In this one unique case, DHS was told they were not justified in their actions. There's nothing in this language that says other seizures, in other circumstances, are not acceptable.

<comment><USER6> That run-on sentence would have made my high school English teacher weep.

<comment><USER7> It's actually not a run-on. It's certainly a poor sentence though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The court's order suppressing the search has more detail on the situation and the government's arguments: [https://www.unitedstatescourts.org/federal/dcd/159072/42-0.h...](https://www.unitedstatescourts.org/federal/dcd/159072/42-0.html)

"The search of the laptop began well after Kim had already departed, and it was conducted approximately 150 miles away from the airport. The government engaged in an extensive examination of the entire contents of Kim's hard drive after it had already been secured, and it accorded itself unlimited time to do so. There was little or no reason to suspect that criminal activity was afoot at the time Kim was about to cross the border, and there was little about this search – neither its location nor its scope and duration – that resembled a routine search at the border. The fundamental inquiry required under the Fourth Amendment is whether the invasion of the defendant's right to privacy in his papers and effects was reasonable under the totality of the circumstances, and the Court finds that it was not."

</comment><comment><USER9> Unfortunately, this case carries no implications for arbitrary search and seizure (in many cases with no return of hardware and no recourse) of computers on arrival to the US. That has been the major point of controversy, vide Jacob Appelbaum.

</comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of how the DOJ keeps dropping cases anytime someone questions their sting ray tech. Seems like moving forward, the DOJ, is going to try their hardest to keep any of these cases from ever getting appealed anywhere near the supreme court. Even if it costs them a few cases here or there.

<comment><USER11> Straight out of Sun Tzu. Why fight battles when you can score easy wins elsewhere?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I'm reading this correctly, this is only about grabbing someone's laptop when they are _leaving_ the country. Does this in any way affect people who are entering the country?

<comment><USER12> Given the words "unique circumstances of this case," it is unlikely that this decision was intended to set precedent for anything.

It would appear that the court reiterates that searches and seizures at the border needed to be supported by reasonable suspicion, and the examination needed to be limited in scope and duration.

It seems like nothing in the statement would stop them from seizing your laptop for two months just because it has a BSD Beastie or a Linux Tux sticker on it. Remember, the suspicion only has to be reasonable _to them_.</comment></comment>


Who wants to kill the electric car this time? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2019-4-july-august/feature/who-wants-kill-electric-car-time-koch-brothers <comment><USER2> >In Nashville, Tennessee, the AFP chapter rallied hard against a mass transit plan in 2018. The transit project had been viewed positively by two-thirds of voters until an AFP campaign kicked off, featuring local front groups, exhaustive door-to-door canvassing, and the use of the Kochs' private voter- profile-data network. Voters ultimately killed the transit plan.

PR, or democracy. Pick one.</comment>


Expect Longer Battery Life with Ubuntu Linux 12.04 - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/246432/expect_longer_battery_life_with_ubuntu_linux_1204_precise_pangolin.html

<comment><USER3> Anecdotally, I appear to get better battery life with Windows (and some vendor-specific additions) than with Ubuntu on my laptop.

It's great to hear this is an active area of development, as it's probably the biggest remaining factor in me choosing host OS.

<comment><USER4> It is quite true. A lot of hardware today require drivers (ah.. I remember days I hated software modems 'cos without drivers these were useless, and now this is normal). And most drivers are proprietary. And on top of it - <USER2> hardware is being customized by OEMs requiring even more spcialized drivers.. And of course, nobody bother with doing drivers for Linux...

This is a case with my new Dell Precision M6600. It have on-chip GPU and discrete GPU. I still trying to find a way to switch to integrated GPU. And this one of the areas Ubuntu 12.04 should fix (well. To be exact, not Ubuntu, but kernel included into this distribution).

Just from witching from external GPU to internal GPU I expect to bump battery- time to ~6 hours from current 3 hours.

</comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Excellent. I'm still on 11.04 on the laptop atm. I installed 11.10 on the HTPC and it didn't seem to provide anything new that was especially useful. I think I'll give 12.04 a try in July after it's had a few months to bed in.

<comment><USER5> I blindly upgraded to 11.10 Xubuntu on both the latptop and work machine and have regretted it ever since. Not only did it not offer any new value, it have had stability issues that I never saw with 11.04.

<comment><USER6> The problem is that you upgraded. I did the same and got the same result but a clean Xubuntu install works like a charm.

<comment><USER5> Possibly. I upgraded from 10.10 to 11.04 without a hitch and was hopeful that they hat sorted the standard upgrade issues. I personalize my installs so much that I really hate fresh loads, but I'll be doing only that in the future. Maybe I'll stick to long-term releases only.

<comment><USER6> I reply to that comment after two days, I don't know if you or anyone else will read this.

My rules of upgrade:

1\. Keep your home folder in a separate partition.

2\. Backup at least your system partition before upgrading using Remastersys [1]. It creates a live CD/DVD from your custom Debian/Ubuntu system.

3\. If the upgrade fails, restore the old system or install the new version and copy/adapt your config files from the backup.

[1] <http://remastersys.sourceforge.net/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good to hear that canonical is addressing this.

I had complaining customers on my SatchBook. Battery life got worse with every release recently.

<comment><USER8> Why is this a canonical thing?

It seem to me to be a kernel thing.

<comment><USER7> That's right, but it's not only the kernel that uses power.

<comment><USER9> All of the solutions/fixes talked about in the article seem to be at the kernel level. Do you have evidence that Canonical is working on power savings with user-land processes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm using an old Thinkpad x41 running Lubuntu 11.10. It has a new third party battery, 6 cell...the batt is now more than 1 year old now. I get well over 3 hours on a full charge. I'm pleased with this. Would be happy to put a future ubuntu on a future MacBook Air and get 6 hours of battery. That's about the only thing that might pry this x41 out of my hands.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been playing with the 3.2 kernels from the Ubuntu kernel PPA and there's a dramatic increase in battery life for me. I go from ~3.5 hours to ~6-6.5 on the same hardware. (It's a bit unstable though... I've had a couple of crash issues. But it's still a development kernel so that's to be expected.)

</comment><comment><USER12> Hopefully this is true, I bought a Macbook because my older laptop with a new battery and Ubuntu lasted for less then an hour fully charged. There didn't seem to be any native power-management tools and all the solutions seemed overly complicated and hacky.</comment>


Windows 10 Urgent Update - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/14/tech/windows-10-microsoft-security-update-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> CVE-2019-1182: [https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security- guidance/ad...](https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security- guidance/advisory/CVE-2019-1182)

Slightly more technical information from Wired: [https://www.wired.com/story/dejablue-windows-bugs-worm- rdp/](https://www.wired.com/story/dejablue-windows-bugs-worm-rdp/)

TL;DR: Remote Code Execution via RDP on all windows versions, including 7 and 10.

Wired Quote:

> "Microsoft today warned Windows users of seven new vulnerabilities in > Windows that, like BlueKeep, can be exploited via RDP, a tool that lets > administrators connect to other computers in a network. Of those seven bugs, > Microsoft's advisory emphasized that two are particularly serious; like > BlueKeep, they could be used to code an automated worm that jumps from > machine to machine, potentially infecting millions of computers."

> "Unlike BlueKeep, however, the new bugs—half-jokingly named DejaBlue by > security researchers tracking it—don't merely affect Windows 7 and earlier, > as the earlier RDP vulnerability did. Instead, it affects Windows 7 and > beyond, including all recent versions of the operating system."

<comment><USER3> Thinking of this in context to Win7 EOL approaching:

I imagine the type of people who have RDP publicly exposed are the same type of people who will not be upgrading from Win7 anytime soon.

I suspect we will see many exploits of this to come.

<comment><USER4> Microsoft really ought to develop their own worm, and use it to patch the flaw.

They can release it on the same day as the regular updates, and scan the whole IPv4 address space every hour.

That way, the pool of unpatched machines will be so tiny it isn't worth evil people trying to exploit it.

<comment><USER3> Its the same threat vector as BlueKeep, so I would imagine the prime exploitation window for Win7 (which was/is vulnerable to both) has already passed.

A quick Shodan query already does what you're thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Only if you have Remote Desktop Connection (RDS) enabled and exposed to the open internet. Which you shouldn't.

To quote the CVE:

> Disable Remote Desktop Services if they are not required.

#

> Block TCP port 3389 at the enterprise perimeter firewall

If you're using a VPN or RD Gateway which have been best practice for tens of years, you're already insulated. I'd still patch but outside of business hours.

<comment><USER6> I know people do that, what with cloud based VMs and all, but still... I don't get it.

<comment><USER7> It's usually to run some old, proprietary software that only has a Windows version.

<comment><USER8> "Old, proprietary software" describes something like 80% of all the software keeping the modern world going.

<comment><USER9> Some of it is new software. South Korean love of ActiveX for example, a technology dead for at least 10 years. Still getting new stuff written.

On the contrary, most critical software is plenty new - things like MS Office. Still bound to Windows.

The remaining systems rely on truly custom software and should be either airgapped (so no RDP) or rewritten. I'm thinking industrial - they should've planned for this many years beforehand. There were instances back when Windows XP was the main driver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had a feeling something like that was lurking which is why the roll-up was visible but not distributed yet by Windows Update.

They were testing it for corporate users...

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone know if the latest insider ring builds are affected, or what the minimum build number is to have the fix? I'm currently on build 18956 at home...</comment>


Ask HN: The best system to store these metrics? - <AUTHOR> There was an interesting discussion in the Prometheus thread today, but I'm still trying to figure out what to make of it.
I have an app which records usage statistics on a per-instance and global aggregate in 5 minute intervals. I want to store request counts, source IPs, average latency, and keep this data indefinitely. I also want to be able to query and summarize the data on-the-fly and display to the end-user. Potentially at scale, but starting with a half dozen POPs each serving thousands of users.
Today, literally, this is all stored in graphite/carbon and works quite well actually considering it was easy and free. What is a better solution for this? I don't expect a turn-key solution.
I was assuming that Prometheus would be the way to go with this. I thought it had the redundancy and multi-site aggregation that I am looking for, but apparently not? <comment><USER2> If you're not having problems with Graphite, I'd leave it in there. I haven't worked through the Prometheus stuff yet, but I think it's probably a solution if you're growing out of what you can do with Graphite in terms of scale.</comment>


Making the HTML5 <time> element safe for historians - <AUTHOR> http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/04/making_time_saf.html

<comment><USER2> Indeed a very enlightening discussion. Everybody knows this stuff is complicated but the author does a stellar job in pointing out just how ridiculously convoluted it really is.

Having a powerful <time> element as the author suggests would definitely be amazingly useful. Not only for historians but also for us mere mortals. For example, many web-developers could benefit greatly from being able to perform simple date arithmetics in markup. All those little time-related tidbits such as "posted 3 hours ago" or "due in 2 days" have to be computed somewhere and being able to do that in straight markup instead of the current server-side or javascript approaches would be an advantage. At the very least it could do away with many of the timezone and "browser time vs server time" related headaches that we deal with today.

Anyways due to the massive complexity this would very well deserve to be spun off into a separate project maintained by specialists, akin to MathML.

But given the track-record of the W3C I fear neither will happen. Instead we'll get the usual half-baked solution after the usual 5-10 year snail-race. And then, ofcourse, MSIE will come along and establish a broken parallel universe...

</comment><comment><USER3> This guy has some interesting and worthwhile things to say. However, his whole discussion seems to be predicated on the idea that, if the specs for the <time> element were changed appropriately, then _everyone would follow the official standard_.

A 10-second look at the web tells us this is not going to happen.

So, suppose some document is written indicating how the <time> element works. What reliable guarantees does that give us concerning the use of the <time> element on real web pages? Answer: None.

So, nice try, and an interesting article, but I really do not think it's going to work.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very thorough and interesting discussion. When is HTML5 expected to hit mainstream?

<comment><USER5> HTML 5 is two things: a codification of how browsers parse documents and handle errors, and a slew of new features for HTML and JavaScript.

The first part is more of a set of guarantees that browser vendors can agree upon, and I believe it's largely based on IE's behavior.

The new features are already slowly trickling into browsers. For example, Firefox, Opera, and Safari all implement <canvas>. There are a number of other features that are already implemented in browsers, which you can read about here: <http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Implementations_in_Web_browsers>.

So, right now some new features are closer to the mainstream than others, especially where there are 3rd party implementations for IE (like ExplorerCanvas, and Google Gears which will probably have HTML5 APIs at some point). I wouldn't hesitate to play around with these new technologies, especially at the rate they're being implemented.</comment></comment>


Which Tech Giant Would You Drop? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/10/technology/Ranking-Apple-Amazon-Facebook-Microsoft-Google.html <comment><USER3> As someone who doesn't particularly like social networking sites, and especially dislikes Facebook compared to other social networks... I'd drop Facebook first. Heck, I only joined because I had to in order to add a page for a business I was working with.

Apple I could drop pretty easily too. An iPhone is nice, but it's not exactly the be all and end all. Any old Android phone could work well too.

Amazon... personally I'd be able to drop it easily, though most people would have more trouble there. That's because nowadays the products I mostly buy from there are computer accessories and games, and the latter is under serious competition from the likes of Steam, various digital download stores on consoles and even the companies themselves selling boxed versions.

Still can't imagine how people buy food on these sites. I mean, do you often like to wait for your food to be delivered? The supermarkets here are both pretty cheap and within walking distance.

Microsoft would be tough, simply because Microsoft Office is really important to me, and I'm really used to Windows at this point.

Google is arguably the toughest one to drop. Why? Mix of services needed (it's damn hard to promote a website about certain subjects without YouTube nowadays, and Gmail is very convenient) and the fact their alternatives are just nowhere near as good for a search engine. Which is depressing given how far downhill Google's own search results have gone recently...

But yeah, interesting to see the stats there.

<comment><USER4> > I mean, do you often like to wait for your food to be delivered?

As a foreigner, Amazon ( and others ) offers food that is simply not accessible in the local supermarket.

All the food that requires a trip to a larger supermarket or a specific shop ?

For example, my last buy was some sort of pasta that is difficult to find in London. I'm 100% certain I could find it in some Italian shop. I'm 80% certain at least 1 of the major supermarket stock at their largest store. To find out, I would need to explore the city. I don't want that pasta enough to dedicate a whole week-end to search for it. Alternatively, I can use internet and the first results are generally a shop that offers delivery. Again I don't want to dedicate a significant part of my we to go to that shop to buy 4 GBP worth of pasta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised that only 10% of people would drop Apple first. I would have guessed that way more than 10% of people don't own a single Apple product. I wonder if maybe the NYT's readership is biased toward Apple owners?

(My ranking: I'd drop Apple and MSFT easily since I don't use anything by either company. FB would be easy to drop but I do use it and would miss it a little. Amazon and Google would be significantly more work to let go of.)

<comment><USER6> Between iTunes and iPhones they have a massive market share.

<comment><USER5> Agree, but do you think it's 90% market share? I'd guess it's 20%-40% (in the US). That's just my gut feeling though, and not based on data.

Edit: Found some data. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/232790/forecast- of-apple...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/232790/forecast-of-apple- users-in-the-us/) Suggests 30% of Americans have an iPhone. Not sure what iTunes usage is like.

<comment><USER7> Again. You're continuing to draw conclusions from poor source data.

A New York Times poll that possibly has only been posted here is always going to skew more towards Apple users who are typically more affluent and higher educated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was interesting. It made me think about which services each provider has that I personally would really miss if they were to suddenly dissappear tomorrow, and the only one that would have a big negative effect would be google maps.

I don't use facebook at all. I can count the things I've ordered on amazon (in all 30+ years of my life) on one hand. I don't use microsoft or apple products unless I'm forced to because of some work related project. And this isn't even out of any crazy principles or anything. I simply like linux distros better than apple/msft. I use an android phone but mainly just the phone functionality personally (i.e. like a good ol nokia + gmaps).

Funny, I would of thought it would have effected me personally a lot more, especially me being a software developer and all. But honestly it would make my life a lot easier, then cross-platform would be just linux :)

</comment><comment><USER9> 1: Facebook, no question there. I never had an account, nor do I ever plan on getting one. This is one company I'd like to be rid of, please.

2: Amazon, there's plenty of other options and - at least in Europe - I don't see any specific advantage to Amazon anyway.

3: Apple, overpriced lifestyle is not my style and I don't particularly like their attitude in many ways, nor do I like the idea of them having enough cash to buy a small country. It is not so much that I begrudge them their success but that I wonder what that power will eventually be used for.

4: Microsoft, using Linux since 1992, OS/2 before that, another company I won't miss having around. Having said that, as long as Apple is around I'd like to keep Microsoft alive as well, just like I wanted Apple to be there to make sure Microsoft did not gain a 100% stranglehold on mainstream personal computing.

5: Alphabet - or should I just say Google. I use some of their products in 'customised' form, Android without Google-proprietary stuff, the search engine without persistent cookies. I don't have a Google account though so I'm not tied to them by more than a search setting in a browser (Seamonkey, Firefox, Chromium, ...). There are other search engines, there are other mobile operating systems.

<comment><USER10> Don't forget that Microsoft was a top Linux code contributor for awhile, and that OS/2 was a partnership between IBM and Microsoft.

Microsoft is everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Definitely Amazon. As a customer from New Zealand, their online shopping site is almost impossible to purchase from (any item I look at does not ship here), and some of their practices are so misleading as to be illegal in my country ('one click' buy X at price $Y, which when billed then includes another $Z for freight).

Never again.

<comment><USER12> Why blame a shop which is not really operating in or near your country? It's also not NZ law they need to follow. But I would also stay away from one buy IMHO... you can cancel always (if no digital goods) and you are fast enough.

<comment><USER11> Because all of my other favourite shopping sites (specifically AliExpress) that don't operate in or near my country are able to communicate what I can and can't buy, and clearly show me the shipping price on the product page (i.e. no other click through, or worse, not telling me I can't buy it _till the bloody checkout screen_ ) just fine.

Actually whilst I'm having a bitch about the abysmal user experience on Amazon, here's another: Don't let me fill my cart with things I can't buy (after I already selected my shipping address before even started to add items), and then tell me hey this item can't be shipped to your location, which I then remove, only to be told hey this item also can't be shipped to your location. Repeat for all the items. Just tell me _all_ the god damn items that can't be shipped at once, or shit how about this for a trip... maybe don't let me add them in the first place. /rant

<comment><USER12> Well I agree that the Amazon shipping information for international orders is not very clear. At least you can ship some things internationally... many other shops refuse to ship internationally altogether

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I ranked in order of how easy it would be to get equivalent services elsewhere.

Amazon is a particularly good ecommerce site, but by no means alone in its class, and there are plenty of IaaS providers. (Getting locked in to AWS specific products is a bad idea anyway).

Microsoft products already have superior competitors on the marketplace. Retooling and retraining the entire business IT world will cost something, but it needs to happen anyway.

People have been trying to replace Facebook since it started; some new entrant will supplant it overnight.

No one is really competing with Apple on quality. I think it would take a long time for someone to replace its offerings with equivalently polished products, if it ever even happens (the demand for cheap stuff might be so strong that Apple is only viable because of brand inertia). I'd miss it.

Alphabet is unmatched in search, drive, email, and Bell Labs-style R&D moonshots. I doubt it's repeatable outside of the specific time and place from which it emerged.

<comment><USER14> > No one is really competing with Apple on quality.

I would dare say that Microsoft is encroaching on this slowly but surely. Between the Surface, Surface book, the upcoming niche desktop PC, and air- esque laptop, they are steadily coming up with compelling offerings that are eating into Apple's space.

Google's Pixel devices are also squeezing Apple, though mostly in the mobile market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't want to 'drop' Google, but I distrust them enough to want a escape plan, should things get bad. Thing is, they provide so much stuff, I don't know how I could possible ever migrate away.

I don't use any Apple stuff, except vary rarely iTunes for music purchases, because I've still got credit there from ~5yrs ago.

Amazon have little to no presence in Australia currently, but that could change.

I'd love to get away from Facebook, but as previously discussed[1], my nooby friends are the main thing holding me back.

Microsoft seem to have mostly picked up their game in recent years, so I have no problem with sticking with them. That said, I refused to fully integrate like I have with Google (mail, calendar, etc.), because their products just don't seem to work as well.

[1]([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14217083](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14217083))

<comment><USER16> > Thing is, they provide so much stuff, I don't know how I could possible ever > migrate away.

It's actually very easy, and once you do you'll realise Google's significance in your life is seriously overestimated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> 5\. Microsoft. Could arguably live without Windows and Office (via either OSX or Linux), but at present it underpins all that I do on a computer.

4\. Alphabet. Alphabet/Google products are the next layer I use on top of MS products, therefore are the next hardest to remove.

3\. Facebook. The next layer again; MS and Alphabet provide general case tools, FB is a particular implementation on top of those, so it would go before either of the above two.

2\. Amazon. No Amazon in Australia anyway, no big loss.

1\. Apple. Only Apple product/service I use is a keyboard. Happy to see it go.

</comment><comment><USER18> Weird, I don't really use any of those companies. I switched away from Google (although I guess I still use Android and Maps, so not entirely), I don't own anything Apple makes, I don't buy things or rent services from Amazon, and I haven't used anything Microsoft in years.

I sometimes use Facebook to talk to non-close friends, although I do use Whatsapp daily, so I guess that counts too.

All in all, I don't think it's impossible to escape at least one of them.

<comment><USER19> _Weird, I don 't really use any of those companies_

Except apparently, Google, Facebook and Microsoft [1]. If you have any apps installed then probably AWS also indirectly or maybe even fulfillment that you don't know is coming from one of their FCs

That's not even mentioning that you're tracked across the world by them even if you don't go there directly.

I think the only person that doesn't use any of those and is still on the internet directly is RMS [2]

The idea that you can actually live in modern society and not touch one of the big 5 is misguided.

[1][https://duck.co/forum/thread/4350/did-you-know-that- duckduck...](https://duck.co/forum/thread/4350/did-you-know-that-duckduckgo- bing)

[2][https://stallman.org/stallman- computing.html](https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)

<comment><USER20> Yeah, article is interesting if you only look at end user products and services, but there's practically no internet without the server infrastructures provided by Amazon, Google and MS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> \- Facebook I think does more harm to the world on the whole (basically a chain-letter conveyor belt for a majority of the public), but slight good to me personally (able to keep in touch with people that would otherwise have disappeared from my life), so it was a toss-up of interpretation whether to dump it first or second.

\- Killing MSFT would do a lot of short-term economic damage, but the new innovation that happens to fill its place would probably be an easy net boon. Linux would be a fast replacement, and it would probably force that ecosystem to blossom. As someone who doesn't use any MSFT products (I have no need for them), I wouldn't personally suffer at all.

\- Amazon is the center of online commerce, but I think it's already a fat, complacent company. Their infrastructure is famously good, but the purchasing experience is crap. Finding what you want is much harder than it should be for an online experience, and the recommendations are laughably bad. What takes its place would necessarily be much better.

\- Apple's products are still a force of pressure on the market to innovate, though I suspect that will not be true for much longer. Their latest products are less clearly better than the competition, and they've made some bizarre design blunders. My next phone/laptop will likely _not_ be Apple, so once their innovation dries up, seeing them disappear probably wouldn't make much of a difference in my life.

\- Google and Gmail are still unparalleled. One could imagine something better than Gmail, but Google search is so core and effortless it's hard to picture what an improvement would look like. Deleting google would break the internet.

<comment><USER22> > Finding what you want is much harder than it should be for an online > experience

I can't believe that after all these years and all the engineers they must have, sorting a category by top rated still puts an item with one review and 5 stars above a product with 10,000 reviews and an average of 4.9 stars.

<comment><USER23> OMG! so true! I have been going with popularity as sorting parameter and screening low rated products myself

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Could you ditch them?

Yes, of course. All of them. I was alive before those companies existed, and life was more pleasant then in many ways. I already use Linux.

Google Search is a difficult one to replace in this line of work.

Google Maps is especially useful for people who tend to get lost, but I think it's also bad for people's brains, because it takes cognitive load off of the brain's navigation system, which is required for many cognitive tasks, including memory.* In any case, there would be other mapping companies to fill the space.

* It still needs more research, but this is interesting: [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm)

</comment><comment><USER25> Dropped microsoft fifteen years ago and never looked back. Dropped facebook seven years ago. Google is still useful but got bitten in my pockets by adsense so they are in my watch list. Mozilla, Amazon, Apple in high esteem but could be more user friendly and more innovative in their fields. Big media and big telcos, I don't care. Twitter, snapchat, instagram, never used them, don't care about social fads.

What else?

</comment><comment><USER26> For me, the hard choice was whether to drop Facebook or Apple first, and then whether to drop Microsoft or Google last. I don't really use either Facebook or Apple (or Amazon either, I guess, but Amazon ended up in the "no opinion" category more than anything else)--I've not looked at Facebook in months, and I've not posted anything in years, and the newest Apple product I own is well over a decade old.

Ultimately, I'd drop Facebook first largely because I see Apple as still providing some value-add, whereas it's hard to see any value-add from Facebook. I ultimately dropped Microsoft last because they're the only ones who have made decent office productivity software (I say this having used both Corel's stuff long ago and LibreOffice for several years).

For all of the visualization stuff that the NYT does, I'm surprised that the visualization here is pretty sucky. Only bar graphs of the top and bottom choices? Really? That's the most you could come up with?

</comment><comment><USER27> First drop for me is easily Microsoft. I have a gaming PC, and I keep it booted in Ubuntu unless a game requires Windows. I'm pretty sure I could boot into Windows less often if I used WINE, but I don't currently wanna deal with that hassle. The only other tools from Microsoft that I follow are TypeScript and Visual Studio Code, but I'm happily using Flow and WebStorm.

Second drop would definitely be Facebook. I feel like my Facebook feed is largely full of shitty memes. It'd be annoying to lose Messenger, but most of the contacts I regularly speak with are available through other means of communication. If I were closing my account I'd probably message a bunch of people to make sure I have their alternative contact info. I don't think I'd be able to easily drop React and Flow. Migrating away from their ecosystem would be incredibly challenging for me.

I can't drop Amazon, Apple, or Google.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think this is an unconstructive question. We better ask ourselfs what can we replace them with that is fundamentally better?

<comment><USER29> I think, people doesn't necessarily hate the product, they hate the business model.

However, I don't have any realistic replacement business model to offer.

<comment><USER28> I think some of the fundamental shortcomings could and will be replaced/fixed by decentralization/distribution which is actively being worked on with projects like ipfs and ethereum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Fascinating to see that people choose to drop fb first in most cases. I'm wondering how many are considering WhatsApp as part of fb. In my case I could drop fb and Instagram tomorrow. WhatsApp? That'd be really really really hard to just drop out of touch with family or force them to install something else.

<comment><USER31> Pretty easy to just switch to Telegram. There are tons of messaging apps that use phone number as identity. Signal, WeChat (I think?), Allo, Hike to name a few.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have never really used Apple or Facebook much, dropped Microsoft years ago, loss of support for my Kindle would be at most a minor inconvenience but Google? Crippling.

I use G Suite both privately and at work, basically run my life via Calendar/Maps/Keep, and get a nervous twitch in my left eye just at the thought of what a massive hassle it would be to first switch, and very likely second -- maintain the alternative.

That's even before I consider that there would be no Google to turn to when configuring that alternative, that my phone would essentially become a Nokia E52 with a larger screen (no Google Apps, no Uber without Google Maps, not even the local bus/directions app would work, not sure about Signal), and I that would need to dig up a ton of data from a cold, cold storage.

On a lighter note, NYT is now writing HN-tailored clickbait. We captured the zeitgeist.

</comment><comment><USER33> From the perspective of what the impact would be if these companies disappear:

Apple would be the easiest to lose. They mostly just design high end consumer products that we don't particularly need and the gap could be filled by others. Foxconn would have to find another design studio to outsource to.

Hardest would be MS. The impact wouldn't be immediate but there would be a made scramble to replace all sorts of business software (internal and external) to other platforms. There would also be some massive hardware compatibility issues to deal with while doing so. I'd quit my job and make bank "porting" c# projects to mono, maybe even do some win32 to wine work.

Of course that depends on how much you use the online services of any of the companies too. The only impact on me would be the loss of gmail, but I'd get over it pretty quick.

</comment><comment><USER34> My order was :

1\. FB (because it doesn't serve any really important meaningful purpose... I much prefer reddit),

2\. Apple: Because I hate apple products and their closed walled gardens when it comes to building apps and things (I'm android/linux desktop user).

3\. MS: DOn't much use any of their products anymore, but did for a long time, and if I were to leave linux I'd probably go back to windows, since I like custom built computers.

4\. Amazon: Love amazon, great deals - only place I shop, but if they didn't exist I'd probably find somewhere else using google.

5\. Alphabet: Self-driving cars, android, youtube, gmail, search (I've tried bing, etc... but no other search provider gives the quality of results -- esp for coding questions), and they're even my isp: Google FIBER... so yeah this one would be a hard one to sever for me.

<comment><USER35> I'm interested how reddit of all things acts as a replacement for Facebook.

What do you use for IMing, group chats, organising events and sharing jokes (memes?) between friends? I'd imagine those are the main use cases of FB for most people. Nobody I know cares in the slightest about the news feed, it's just private groups and messenger.

<comment><USER34> Iming --I use hangouts, mostly I only chat w/ wife.. Group chats--Slack, and only my dev team. Events: EventBright, or Meetup.com.. I only read the newsfeed on FB, don't use it for much else...I did just recently start using FB Messenger as my sms, and switch to that for some IM'ing but there's a million different IM apps so not like they couldn't be replaced easily enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Facebook

<comment><USER37> agreed.

<comment><USER38> Facebook, to me, is the worst to use. It's a mental hazard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > _Which Tech Giant Would You Drop?_

I guess Google, since they're indirectly the most responsible for clickbait headlines.

</comment><comment><USER16> I chose Facebook as my number 1 and Alphabet as my number 2.

He then goes on to rant about how amazing and utterly irreplaceable and amazing Google is and how difficult my life must be not using Google services.

The contrary is true. It's very easy not to use Google services and they are very replaceable.

<comment><USER14> > how amazing and utterly irreplaceable and amazing Google is

> It's very easy not to use Google services

Both can be true. Which is more true for you depends on how much of the ecosystem you (and your peers) use. For example, the previous startup I worked for used Google services quite extensively. Chat, hangouts, documents, spreadsheets, drive, email, calendar, even YouTube... the cost of moving off would have been quite significant, for very little benefit.

The company before that didn't use Google at all, and instead used IRC, NFS/SMB servers, and private MX servers. They functioned fine, though many of the non-tech users were beginning to grumbling about the benefits of moving to Google (because that was what they were familiar with).

There's a bit of a sunk cost fallacy which always comes up when talking about moving off Google, but that doesn't mean the cost of replacing everything Google provides is anywhere near zero - especially when it comes to convenience.

In a way, Google's offerings have become the new Microsoft Office suite - <USER2> not because they're the best at any one thing, but because of all the value provided by everything together, and the familiarity of incoming users with that suite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I dropped all except Amazon, because books are cheaper there. The cockroach is Amazon.

Google was surprisingly easy to drop. I use DuckDuckGo and quit GMail.

Microsoft I dropped more than a decade ago.

I never used Facebook.

I half-dropped Apple by switching away from Mac OS X, but I still own in iPhone that I'll drop when it breaks.

</comment><comment><USER41> In order of what I could easily/already drop:

Facebook: Never had Facebook

Apple: Don't use any Apple products

Alphabet (Google): 90%+ searches are now through DuckDuckGo for me

Amazon: Needed as online shopping often through Amazon, and I still buy a lot of books through them

Microsoft: Must have, my life is intimately tied to Excel

</comment><comment><USER42> The easiest to drop for me would be Facebook and Amazon.

I enjoy Apple and Google. products and don't see a need to drop.

Microsoft doesn't have a big impact on my personal life anymore. It wouldn't be feasible to remove them fro, my personal life, however.

</comment><comment><USER43> I stopped using Facebook and Twitter for a few months. Once the initial pains of withdrawal subsided, I couldn't even remember that was something I wanted to check. Don't need either one of them.

</comment><comment><USER44> I haven't used anything Microsoft in 5 years.

<comment><USER12> I tried to achieve the same. But still need to use Skype for some work contacts. And for first time in many years I felt in love with a MS product: VSCode (well it is coded by a very talented sub branch from MS in Switzerland).

So nowadays I'm coding Linux production software on a Mac with a Microsoft editor ;)

<comment><USER38> I bought a win7 laptop after owning nothing MS related for a decade just to "freshen up".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Microsoft and Facebook are the obvious easy ones for me. The next three are far more interesting as I use each on a daily basis.

</comment><comment><USER46> Easy, Amazon. They don't make anything.

<comment><USER47> They make Alexa voice tubes and kindles and tv boxes and tv shows. (I'm probably missing a few things)

<comment><USER48> They also do distribution. Granted that isn't something they "make", but it is still a legitimate service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Facebook. I don't use them. Never did.

</comment><comment><USER50> Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER51> warning: paywall</comment>


Subtle Patterns : A large collection of website background images - <AUTHOR> http://subtlepatterns.com/?hello

<comment><USER2> Kudos for the effort and so on, but the thing I can't understand is, who would use these backgrounds, unless they specifically want their site to look like their grandmother's house.

It's 2014. By now we've realized it's counter-productive to stamp your background with pictures and patterns, because they distract from your site's content, and make it harder to read.

Don't have content? The solution isn't funky backgrounds. It's: have content, or don't have a site.</comment>


Some Investors May Request Protection From Aqui-Hires - <AUTHOR> http://uncrunched.com/2012/04/24/some-investors-may-request-protection-from-aqui-hires/ <comment><USER2> Why does Google/Facebook pay the investor anything at all? If they have no interest in the assets, then they also have the option of just sending over a big envelope of job offers to the founders and having the founders distribute it to the team. The investor's position is pretty weak. Everyone knows it, and the Google's and Facebook's are just reminding the founders what is true.

<comment><USER3> Probably because it's cheaper than defending yourself against a never ending stream of lawsuits (baseless or not) that would inevitably arise from founders and teams all leaving to one company en masse.

<comment><USER4> Dont think a suit to stop people "playing their trade" is going to work esp with the current "No Poach" lawsuit going around.

Sounds like the VC's are finding that laissez faire industrial relations a bitch when in some rare ocasions it favours the employee :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm wondering why the founders and any other employees can't just be hired away from "their" startup, with a large signing bonus, and no change to the equity structure of their prior company (but, effectively no employees)? Non- competes might prevent this, but I was under the impression that they're not terribly enforceable in California.

Any lawyers out there to clarify?

<comment><USER6> Not giving legal advice but here are my two-cents: 1) Possible tax savings: Signing bonuses are taxed as income. If you held your stock long enough, you may qualify for long-term capital gains tax treatment. 2) Silicon Valley is a repeat player business. You don't want to screw over your investors if you want to raise more funds or do anything else here where folks might ask around about you. 3) Non-competes are generally unenforceable in CA except in certain situations, including the acquisition of a company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Guess this very much depends on which position the financial investors have put the (technical) founders into.

If they have taken a huge part of the equity for themselves and left the founders with far less than 50% such behavior might become understandable (many founders then might feel that it's not their company anymore).

But if the founders still hold around 60% after financing rounds of >$50million and then leave a large part of their investors "standing in the rain" i.e. they just get parts of their money back this becomes dubious. Nevertheless such cases are very rare and most of the time some investors will still complain even if they are making a very serious profit but less they have been dreaming of.

Best seen recently with Instagram when one early investor was labeled as not very clever even though they were making a few hundred time their investment (a few 10'000 pct profit).

Generally if investors are unhappy, that those who have generated such massive profits for them benefit as well after they themselves have already been rewarded, something else is substantially wrong.

<comment><USER8> If you're talking about the investor I think you are, remember that he came out and said how he thought everyone saying he wasn't clever was ridiculous because he made a lot of profit and his decisions at the time were the right decisions for the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > I've been fascinated with acqui-hires for years now. The first one in recent > history I know about was Parakey, acquired by Google in 2007

I thought Facebook?

<comment><USER10> Yes, it was Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What are the ethics around Facebook walking in the front door of your company saying "anyone who drops what they're doing to come work for us can have this big fat check!"?

<comment><USER12> They effectively do this all the time; by head-hunting individual and small groups of developers from smaller startups, especially ones where not everyone are A-players. It just is rarely reported on. Twitter and Square have been getting in on this lately too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The best definition of a startup I've heard is "a temporary organization working together in search of a business model"

With that in mind, investors are investing in a temporary organization in search of a business model. Late state investors may invest after that temporary organization either has a business model or is about to establish one and really early investors may put there money in before any business model has been discovered. Whatever the case may be, it's an exploratory effort that investors are part of.

If the entrepreneurs are fully capable of building a sustainable business, but never discovered a sustainable business model, then the investors, as agents that both advise and help with issues like recruiting talent, are as culpable for any failure to achieve that goal. Founders are putting in their time at below market rates (an opportunity cost whereby they aren't participating in other potentially lucrative ventures) and investors are putting in their money (an opportunity cost where the money invested can't be applied to other lucrative ventures.

Both have a claim to the business model generated. Entrepreneurs pay for their claim with time. Investors do it with the money that enable the entrepreneur to put in that time.

Now, IMHO, where acquit-hires come into play and how they can be split up fairly is to divvy up the grants and benefits by who brought who into the organization.

If investors put dumb money into the organization to find a business model that was never found, they have very little they can claim. If however, you have smart investors with solid connections that contributed highly to the creation of the organization established, they could make a case that they contributed significantly in the value being purchased by the acquirer.

The fair thing to do would be to ascribe a significant portion of the bonuses and grants according to the golden handcuffs applied and to divvy up the rest of the pot among those people most responsible for creating the organization.

If I was responsible for 90% of the recruiting in my organization, I don't think it's fair for any investor to think they have some claim to that value that was largely generated via networking extra-temporary organization. If, however, one or more of my investors contributed a large portion of their social capital to bring talent to my business, they've invested a non-tangible in the business that they deserve to be compensated for.

Money is invested in a business model. If the business model succeeds, you deserve a part of that.

Social capital is invested to build an organization of talent. If you, whether entrepreneur or investor, contributed social capital to the business to attract that talent, you deserve a part of that. The only exception that is just that I can see would be where the startup paid well over the market rate to attract the talent. In this case the recruiting incentive used to grow the company was not the people, opportunity and problem being solved but simply cash exchanged for a mercenary activity. In this case money, and not social capital, contributed to the growth of a valuable organization, and investors could make claim to the returns.

My question is the following: Of all the acqui-hires we've seen in the past few years, how common is it for those teams to stay together as a smaller organization within the larger acquiring organization.

If teams generally don't stay together 6 months to a year after an acqui-hire, then the value created it not in the professional relationships (edges) of the acquired organization, but in the people (nodes). If the value is in the nodes, all the value belongs to the individual employees and not to the organization.</comment>


Ask HN: Are the new gTLDs the future of Internet domains? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm speaking of the new upcoming gTLDs like for example: .business, .fashion, .mortage, .baseball, .movie, .coffee, .pizza, .fitness, .porn, .shopping, .dating, .academy, .club, .forum to name a few.

* ICANN Blog [http://blog.icann.org/](http://blog.icann.org/)

* ICANN FAQ [http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-service/faq...](http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-service/faqs/faqs-en)

</comment><comment><USER2> I think it will be the future of the internet domains, now we'll know much more about a site just from the domain (.App or .Music) it's time for a change... It may take some (A lot) of getting used to, but things must change.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think so. The marketing dollars behind .com are huge and arguably a greater threat to domain names are apps and app stores.

</comment><comment><USER4> For me it is just a huge cash grab for icann and others. Gosh, look at the pricing.</comment>


What's the permanent solution against mosquitos? - <AUTHOR> It's 2018 and we still have mosquitoes. Why aren't there mosquito following lasers or shots which make you poisonous to mosquitos. Or some way to cause mosquitoes to breed like crazy but ends up sterilising. Ofcourse it has to be cheap, so the solution should cost £50 or less. <comment><USER2> Mosquito traps are pretty effective. Since mosquitoes don't tend to migrate very quickly, you won't get many new ones moving in as the nearby ones are trapped.

If it's feasible, you should reduce the amount of standing water around you. Also there are effective poisons (specifically [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis_israele...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis_israelensis)) that you can add to puddles or ponds. Mosquitoes only live about a month so if you can keep them from spawning for that time the population will just die off.

Even an oscillating fan will mess with their navigation enough to discourage them in a small area.

<comment><USER3> It's worth pointing out that trap choice is critical in terms of efficacy. Ideally you want a trap baited with Octenol and CO2, as traps without the bait are generally ineffective at population control. If you have a large body of standing water, you can also consider introducing Gambusia fish, which eat the larvae.

<comment><USER2> I know a guy with a pricey propane-based one (he runs a propane company) that works really well too, but that seemed out of OP's budget. The propane breaks down into CO2 and water plus heat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Trials are starting on Oxitec's "friendly" mosquitos that genetically prevent adults from reaching maturity:

[https://www.oxitec.com/friendly-mosquitoes/](https://www.oxitec.com/friendly- mosquitoes/)

[http://wlrn.org/post/want-say-gmo-mosquito-trial-you-just- go...](http://wlrn.org/post/want-say-gmo-mosquito-trial-you-just-got- another-30-days)

The debate now concerns the release of genetically modified creatures into the general ecosystem.

Perhaps you can campaign for a trial in the UK.

</comment><comment><USER5> Final solution, you mean.</comment>


Google acquires PittPatt, to add facial recognition - <AUTHOR> http://www.pittpatt.com/

<comment><USER2> Earlier this year one of their other engineers, Louis Brandy, went to Facebook.

<http://lbrandy.com/blog/2011/01/im-buying-facebook-at-50b/></comment>


The Problem with Wokeness (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-problem-with-wokeness-ayishat-akanbi <comment><AUTHOR> Also available on [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-WimRb2jXs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-WimRb2jXs), ironically censored.</comment>


A boot-strappers guide to turning $2000 into $2,000,000 in sales in 4 months - <AUTHOR> http://www.upshiftpartners.com/sales-hacking-a-boot-strappers-guide-to-turning-2000-into-2000000-in-sales-in-4-months/?utm_content=buffereda05&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> This is a typical sales process. Not much new.

A lot enthusiasm and "hustle".

7 touches before a sale.

Yet, he does not go into detail about how he turned $2,000 into $2 million in 4 months.

He just talks about his sales process.

I wish I had my 10 minutes back.

<comment><USER3> While I agree I think it's a good article for any starting entrepreneur to read. The key take away is the first point.

Go out and literally knock on doors. You have to get the first customers the old fashion way.

I've seen too many people say they have an MVP and then start talking about what feature is next since nobody has magically shown up to their site.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Does it hurt to apply more than once? - <AUTHOR>

This may have been covered before, so apologies if it's a dupe.<p> Does it hurt to apply more than once? That is, once you get dinged, is there some sort of "uh-oh, it's that guy again" that happens the next time around? Or do each time you get treated like it's your first time up?<p> I'd like experience applying, if nothing else. But I don't have a co-founder and don't want to hurt my future chances by using up any of my "free karma" on a long-shot application. <comment><USER2> I would also say that you are not the exact same person the second time you apply. You've had 6 months to grow as a person, learn more, and think more. Also, to apply twice there must be some level of commitment to the startup ethos. You aren't just applying on a whim -- a startup is something you genuinely want to do.

At least, this is what I hope Paul Graham thinks, as I'm applying for the second time myself. ::grin::

</comment><comment><USER3> This question was asked 3 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=64112>

plusbryan replied to say that he was rejected in Winter'06 but accepted in Summer'07: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=64132>

My personal opinion is that it's very unlikely that pg et al. remember all of the 500+ applications they reject, so I wouldn't worry about this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

BTW -- I looked around for a search button on news.yc, but heck if I can find one. If I could have, I wouldn't have duped.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you organize your tasks outside of software engineering? - <AUTHOR> I'm a software engineer and we use jira/Trello alot.
I've talked to a few friends in finance who don't seem to be using these things much.
Currently working on an intelligent compliance trello board that helps compliance officers manage/track their work better. <comment><USER2> I use emacs org-mode for organizing various things. Its pretty neat.</comment>