Failed out of uni. Any tips on making myself more employable? - <AUTHOR> I have some decent personal projects, nothing amazing. I won't post links as I want this to remain anonymous. I have no professional experience. My response rate when applying to local dev jobs is fairly low, and they generally lose interest upon discovering that I didn't finish my CS degree.<p>Any advice, general or specific, would be appreciated. <comment><USER2> First: Get your interview story straight. You didn't graduate because you didn't graduate. You had a change of plans, possibly wanted to work on a side project, hobby, programming. You quit because your were ambitious about something.

Two: If the interviewer is asking you to do the impossible i.e. move, relocate, have super long traveling distance you say: "I have a short term plan formulated, and working on the long term one. It's an overcomable problem". You're an engineer, you can solve problems.

Three: Impress people with your CV. Write it in LaTeX. Grab some cool template here: [https://www.sharelatex.com/templates/cv-or- resume](https://www.sharelatex.com/templates/cv-or-resume) If you list graduate courses in the left CV column, then format the course names as hyperlinks linking course descriptions.

Four: Giving your CV to a future employer, despite it's good-looking, full of links, and with impressive information, it won't do unless you have someone at your past uni which you can name as your reference. That person knows you, and knows the course descriptions, so that when a future employer calls, the information is concise and complements the CV.

Five: Throw yourself in deep waters (figuratively). Problem solvers work best when solving problems is literally part of their strife.

</comment><comment><USER3> If your personal projects are decent, then you should have no trouble demonstrating talent, initiative and self-reliance. Market that in your interviews.

Keep working on your projects. Pick the 3 CS subjects closest to the sort of job you're looking for and read the related materials to keep up a minimal theoretical background.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> The thing is that I went to a decent (~ top 50) university. Recruiters that end up contacting me usually start off with that; upon clarifying that I didn't actually graduate, things go downhill from there. I'm not sure how much good said projects do for me as it would require people to at least give them a look. If people contacted me with my projects foremost on their impression of me, perhaps it would be a different story.

I've considered removing the year range that I spent at uni, or at least making it clear that I don't, in fact, have a degree.

<comment><USER4> Have you considered removing the university reference entirely?

The base line assumption is that you list education you completed (graduated), so anything less is likely to 'dissapoint' the recruiter.

If you can repackage what you did in university as discrete 'experience' that might give you the chance to establish a positive narrative ('I was well qualified for university but found the CS program too theoretical so decided to pursue a different path.')

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll have to give it some thought. Given that I passed all of the lower-div requirements and a few upper divs, I'd have to account for a decent CS background some other way. As my projects alone aren't so advanced as to verify exposure to all foundational CS concepts, my best bet is to try to spin what university education I have in some positive way.

Thanks for the advice, by the way. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had a very similar experience. Specific advice: grow and nurture your network. It's very likely someone you know is going to be able to help you out with a job. It's likely going to be something you're overqualified for, but it'll get you "in the door" so to speak.</comment>


Nokia to Cut 10,000 Jobs as Elop Tries to Stanch Losses - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-14/nokia-to-cut-10-000-jobs-as-elop-tries-to-stanch-losses.html

<comment><USER2> Huh, never saw that spelling of "stanch" before; always thought it was "staunch".</comment>


55,000 Twitter passwords leaked - <AUTHOR> http://www.airdemon.net/hacker107.html <comment><USER3> I just did a random sampling of these accounts, and what's interesting is that every one of the twenty accounts I looked at had about 3-6 followers, and was following thousands of people (or it was suspended).

All their bios sound like bot-generated text, they all have suspiciously similar passwords that look auto-generated, and none of them seem to have much to say.

On a hunch, I logged in to a few of those accounts and saw that they all had messages asking them to confirm their email addresses, as they had not done so yet.

This is probably not a "leak," but some spammer's list of fake accounts.

<comment><USER4> _"This is probably not a 'leak,' but some spammer's list of fake accounts."_

Ok, since I like to randomly speculate about various facts, consider the following, what if this was a white hat operation? We have seen that folks who uncover botnets are in a weird place because if they take them out they can be accused of violating the CFA but if they leave them in place, the world stays sucky. So what to do? A creative missive to not take them out?

A white hat can 'leak' all of the spam accounts, which engages Twitter's customer relations team, which disables all the accounts because they might be 'compromised' and sends an email to the owner to change their password. Except they are spam accounts and don't have real emails so the emails go into the bit bucket and 55,000 spam accounts go dark. I realize that is a lot of construction.

<comment><USER5> Why wouldn't they just email twitter explaining how to identify the spammers and including a list?

<comment><USER6> Said email would become a confession and evidence if Twitter (or a third party that had this list) were to charge the leaker under CFA (or the relevant law in their country). Posting it anonymously has the same effect without exposing the leaker to legal issues.

<comment><USER7> Also: Joe Jobs.

<comment><USER8> Steve's extra-evil twin? Or did you mean "Joe jobs"?

<comment><USER7> The latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Every single account I checked has constantly retweeted the account_ @Swagstro[1]. They have 314k followers, but no "Verified Account" tag (which extremely popular users tend to have). I don't mean to point the finger, but it seems like these accounts were used to boost the popularity of said account.

EDIT: They gained 70k followers in the past two days alone[2].

EDIT 2: Their tweets have all disappeared since posting this comment.

CONCLUSION: Automatically generated accounts, profiles, and tweets. These accounts are used for services that provide paid followers and retweets. It's actually pretty interesting stuff if you look at the automatically generated "Twitter Ipsum" that is their profile descriptions and how they randomly pick quotes from famous people to tweet.

[1] <https://twitter.com/#!/Swagstro>

[2] <http://twittercounter.com/Swagstro>

<comment><USER10> If you look at who that account is following, there seems to be a whole network of people using accounts with names close to (or impersonating) celebrities who all re-tweet each other and promise "10 follow-backs for each follow" and "if you follow <random> I'll follow you" etc.

Looks like either some kind of weird social hack/club or I don't know what..

This account has close to 1M followers, and appears to be in that same network or loop of spammy follower-harvesting group..

<https://twitter.com/#!/CraveMyThoughts>

<comment><USER9> Actually, that account looks pretty legit (in the sense that it's not 100% bot generated).

Look at Swagstro's follower list [1], and Cmd/Ctrl-F for "holic", "fanatic", "introvert", "bacon", "wannabe". Almost all of the accounts are simply randomly generating the Lorem Ipsum of Twitter descriptions.

[1] <https://twitter.com/#!/Swagstro/followers>

<comment><USER11> This makes me wonder if Twitter is ever going to crack down on these spam accounts, or put in place some preventive measures. Right now it's really encouraging for spammers to create these accounts and sell their services. There's still lots of room for improvement in these bot accounts, currently they're still too easy to detect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I disagree that the all or even most of the passwords are randomly chosen, there's too little entropy for it to be a pseudo random system, and too much for it to be a simple algorithm based on the username. I'd bet the percentage of the accounts here that are spammers reflects the same percentage as the overall site, and is probably shockingly high.

\---

... email@example.com:123456789321_ < probably guessed numbers until the system said it wasn't "too obvious"

...

 firstname.lastname@example.com:159753100_ < physical numpad pattern, "X" + 100

...

 firstname.lastname@example.com:euamominhamae_ < "i love my mom" in portuguese... Twitter blocks "iloveyou" as it's a really common password, but this seems similar

email@example.com:africadosul

email@example.com:molestia

email@example.com:tei,xei,ra,

firstname.lastname@example.com:matheussofia

firstname.lastname@example.com:picaxura

There are many others that may be autogenerated, but I think we can rule out the idea that most or all of them are. The common patterns are probably just because humans are bad at this "make up a secret that no one else makes up" game.

<comment><USER13> no need to post the full details here, please redact the mail addresses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> For the curious:

        curl http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=Kc9ng18h > twitterpw.txt
        curl http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=vCMndK2L >> twitterpw.txt
        curl http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=JdQkuYwG >> twitterpw.txt
        curl http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=fw43srjY >> twitterpw.txt
        curl http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=jv4LBjPX >> twitterpw.txt

<comment><USER15> Or (bash/zsh):

         curl "http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i={Kc9ng18h,vCMndK2L,JdQkuYwG,fw43srjY,jv4LBjPX}" > twitterpw.txt

Then: $ wc -l twitterpw.txt 58978 twitterpw.txt $ sort -u twitterpw.txt | wc -l 37001

Lots of dupes in there.

<comment><USER16>
        curl "http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i={Kc9ng18h,vCMndK2L,JdQkuYwG,fw43srjY,jv4LBjPX}" | sort -u > twitterpw.txt

<comment><USER15> Sure, but that doesn't tell you how many dupes were in the original list (unless you were to separately keep a linecount). Hrm ... does pv let you do that?

Hrm ... No, but process substitution does:

        curl "http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i={Kc9ng18h,vCMndK2L,JdQkuYwG,fw43srjY,jv4LBjPX}" | tee >(sort -u >twitterpw.txt) | wc -l
        [1/5]: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=Kc9ng18h --> <stdout>
          % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                         Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
        100  261k    0  261k    0     0   788k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  953k

        [2/5]: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=vCMndK2L --> <stdout>
        100  434k    0  434k    0     0  1630k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 1630k

        [3/5]: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=JdQkuYwG --> <stdout>
        100  349k    0  349k    0     0  1526k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 7441k

        [4/5]: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=fw43srjY --> <stdout>
        100  367k    0  367k    0     0   897k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  897k

        [5/5]: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=jv4LBjPX --> <stdout>
        100  291k    0  291k    0     0  1638k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 1638k
        58978

And what did we actually output?

        $ wc -l twitterpw.txt
        37001 twitterpw.txt

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I took a sample of 34k. I may have had some files that didn't download fully[1]. I was only interested in picking out some trends.

66 - No password (ie null)

580 - had the password "315475"

492 - had password "123456"

187 - had password "123456789"

68 - had password "102030"

62 - had password "123"

52 - had password "12345"

44 - had password "1234"

29 - had password "101010"

35% were numeric/number only passwords. There were many that were a variation of 123...

The rest appear to be a mixture but first names are popular. I haven't tried, but would assume many of these would be the same passwords for the registered email (username).

The day someone comes up with an alternative to passwords it will be a great day!

Edit: [1] 34k unique accounts, I must have deleted duplicate usernames/accounts.

<comment><USER18> What's the significance of "315475" as a password?

<comment><USER19> I think it might relate to some "mass follower" script

See this forum thread: [http://psx-scene.com/forums/f195/twitter-1200-follwer- hack-v...](http://psx-scene.com/forums/f195/twitter-1200-follwer- hack-v2-recreated-scripts-103024/) which links to this pastebin page which contains a bunch of users all with that password <http://pastebin.com/0hcDigvU>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> (posted this on HN after seeing it on an RSS feed)

Definitely looks like it was a large-scale spam operation that was hacked and not twitter itself.

I just edited the title to try to reflect the lesser impact of the leak.

<comment><USER20> Something I haven't seemed mentioned, but this makes a BIG difference for the following reason (among others):

If this was twitter that got hacked, it implies that they're storing passwords in plain text.

That news is or should be a Big Deal.

<comment><USER21> Almost all the passwords are 8 character alphanumeric. It would mean they aren't salting, but it's within the range of md5 rainbow tables.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Doing a quick analysis.

58978 accounts listed, 34064 unique account/passwords

25069 accounts by email 8995 accounts by usernames

Most accounts by email:

hotmail.com @ 15598

yahoo.com.br @ 2375

gmail.com @ 2148

bol.com.br @ 1031

uol.com.br @ 695

A lot of misspellings for domain names.

</comment><comment><USER23> is it just me, or do the vast majority of the passwords appear to be the default randomly generated passwords? How many of these accounts are even active?

<comment><USER24> I also see a lot of randomly generated accounts, but a lot of legitimate ones as well. I think the big chunks of similar looking accounts were created by spambots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Any idea where these came from? Was Twitter actually hacked somehow (and if so, why only 55k)? Or was 3rd-party software that collected Twitter credentials hacked? Can 3rd-party software even collect credentials at all or is OAuth the only authentication flow that works today?

<comment><USER26> could be an old list from a 3rd party in the days before Oauth

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone know the significance of 315475 as a password? I can't immediately see what would make this so popular.

Unless of course as other people pointed out its just the same person who registered a large portion of these accounts.

<comment><USER28> Perhaps because it's fairly easy to type on a number pad?

<comment><USER15> Many numbers are.

Fair point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Not quite 55K - lots of these are duplicated as many as 4 times in the dataset.

        $ wc -l twitterpw.txt
        58924 twitterpw.txt
        $ sort twitterpw.txt | uniq | wc -l
        36997

</comment><comment><USER30> > "Unbelievable that Twitter isn't taking any necessary steps to keep its > users data safe. Even after encountering a huge number of hacks in the past > including celebrities account."

I don't think that's very fair.

> "All they need to do is to add a password strength checker during signup > while changing passwords. And guide the users to create a strong password. > That could save a lot of users frustration."

Right...

</comment><comment><USER31> Going through the comments posted here, I wonder why actually nobody speaks loud an obvious thing: "Why in the hell twitter uses non-obfuscated password?" I think on of the rule of thumb, when creating a webservice with credentials, is to store the password in the way in the database, that it cannot be retrieved. I mean, you usually obfuscate it with some salt and then hash it afterwards.

Assuming Twitter does this kind of obfuscation, then all the password couldn't be retrieved from Twitter directly and hence no blaim on Twitter side.

Assuming Twitter does not obfuscate the password, why then nobody mentioning this? In such a case Twitter made a beginner failure and this should be somehow pointed out, I think. I just remember the case about one dating-site, which did that and it was more or less lynched for this by the community.

</comment><comment><USER32> 34,068 without duplicates.

</comment><comment><USER33> Our comments seem to be geared towards figuring out the mechanism and not the motive. While this can lead to the greater picture, I wonder if we can make an assumption.

There were ~55k user:passwd leaked.

And while a large subset may come from specific regions, it's hard to say if they all do.

But we already have a connection between all accounts, (obviously) they were all hacked and released together. (Pretty strong connection).

So then the number might allude to an effort of some scale for some unknown reason.

Currently and besides the legitimate users of the accounts, only one entity has "taken damage" from this "leak". Twitter

So anyone care to continue this line of thought?

midstreamEdit: NYtimes is saying it's a retaliation hack.

</comment><comment><USER34> Why 55k? Gotta wonder where those specific accounts came from

</comment><comment><USER35> "Unbelievable that Twitter isn't taking any necessary steps to keep its users data safe. Even after encountering a huge number of hacks in the past including celebrities account. All they need to do is to add a password strength checker during signup while changing passwords. And guide the users to create a strong password. That could save a lot of users frustration."

If only it was that easy to prevent account stealing.

</comment><comment><USER36> Seems auto-generated. Looking through pastebin, this is what I found just now: <http://pastebin.com/Rd1GjX9T>

which leads to:

<http://www.twitteraccountcreator.net/services/index.html>

Edit: Why am I being down voted? The links above seem relevant to me.

<comment><USER37> You are being downvoted because, unlike the pastebin dumps in this article, the one you found was created by an account named "Planex". The ones in the article are all "Guest" / anonymous.

The "Planex" account is simply a pastebin spammer. If you visit <http://pastebin.com/u/Planex> you can see all the things this account has pastebin'd. Just because they had a spam pastebin related to a Twitter service does not make it related to the other 5 pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I don't think those are legit accounts because you can clearly see pattern between passwords usernames and e-mails.....

</comment><comment><USER39> Disregarding whether the accounts are spam accounts or not, I created a little search tool, to check for user names: <http://twitterleak.martinwittmann.at/>

Maybe this will be helpful for some people.

</comment><comment><USER40> The passwords in the linked pages look far too random for humans to have chosen. My guess: either they're a spammer's account list, or this is a hoax.

Edit: There are twitter accounts to match the usernames - the few I checked were bots. I won't test the passwords.

</comment><comment><USER41> How was this hacked? Passwords where stored in plain text? or were they brute forced?

</comment><comment><USER42> I actually don't think this is a good enough reason to force users to use strong passwords. You may at most warn them, but that is still annoying. If a user chooses a weak password, it's their choice. They are taking the risk.

</comment><comment><USER43> I found one from the List on this Site <http://www.dazzlepod.com/lulzsec/?page=135> it´s from June 16, 2011 - <USER2> there are more from the Pastebinlist.

</comment><comment><USER44> There seem to be a lot of randomly generated account names and passwords, especially in Page 1. For the rest, most of them seem to be from Brazil; just search for .com.br. Brazilian users also use hotmail.com accounts.

</comment><comment><USER45> Given that, as jaysonelliot already pointed out, most of these passwords seem auto-generated and are indicative of non-human accounts...then I guess the source of this leak isn't from a phishing operation.

</comment><comment><USER46> I haven't done a formal analysis of the password text but by eyeball and guy these don't really appear to be real people.

The passwords are far too complex based on previous password dumps I've seen.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'd put money on this being from a backdoored spam tool.

</comment><comment><USER48> I can generate random strings in Python too.

Did anyone actually try any of these? None of them work.(Correct me if I'm wrong -- I didn't try them _all_)

</comment><comment><USER49> What sort of hashes are those?

Edit: Nevermind... they seem to be passwords, not hashes. They look randomish though. Likely computer generated.

</comment><comment><USER50> As always, amazed at the stupidly simple passwords people use (if, indeed these ARE real people).

</comment><comment><USER51> Change your password if you have a Twitter account. Change that password where ever you use it. They may not have released the full list of passwords they actually have access to.

I recommend 1password for managing passwords so that issues like this are easier to manage and so that I do not use the same few passwords everywhere.

<comment><USER52> this isn't a list of passwords they gained by compromising Twitter. This is (most likely) a list of spam accounts and passwords. It doesn't look like anything was stolen from anywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> what's the maximum size of these passwords? These look like they were obtained by a relatively shallow brute force attack, given the weakness of the passwords.

</comment><comment><USER54> Any info on how exactly this was accomplished?

</comment><comment><USER55> these people all have pretty sophisticated passwords. :]

</comment><comment><USER56> I just looked at one of the pages and by looking at the data, it looks like it's from Brazil. Portuguese names,portuguese passwords. That was the page with L-O.Not Portugual either, Brazil. So a good sense of observation I have.

</comment><comment><USER57> You can't.

"'The micro blogging platform is aware of this hack and was taking necessary actions to save those people's account from malicious activity', said a Twitter insider."

At first my reaction to the story was "like I give a tweet!" What are they going to do, tweet something inane? Um... that's kind of the point of the whole service, isn't it?

But then I remembered the true vulnerability with leaked usernames/passwords: people use the same ones across sites.

These same people would never change their username/password combo on ANOTHER site due to prompting ont he Twitter site. They just can't read and follow directions like that. (If they could they probably wouldn't have the same username/pd combo).

So, I think that: "'The micro blogging platform is aware of this hack and was taking necessary actions to save those people's account from malicious activity', said a Twitter insider." is asking the impossible.

The only malicious activity is on the users' other, real, non-SMS-length- message-broadcasting-to-the-whole-world accounts... (email, facebook, etc)

</comment><comment><USER58> Seriously, they store passwords in an easily reversible format? Or are these booster accounts stolen from somewhere else than Twitter's premises?</comment>


"How to become an expert in my core skill (say Java) ?" - <AUTHOR> http://rrajkumar.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/how-to-become-an-expert-in-my-core-skill-say-java/

<comment><USER2> realize that experts in any language are usually experts in languages. I've read many of the greats make a habit of learning a new language every year.</comment>


Show HN: Static website hosting with auto optimization - <AUTHOR> https://www.clodui.com <comment><USER2> Your app seems geared toward users who are not very technical. I think your pricing structure is too sophisticated. I would include everything in the free plan and the tiers would only be bandwidth usage and form submissions. No one is going to upgrade for robots.txt file support. Even the 30 deploys a month is a lot but it's psychologically going to feel limiting and decrease signups. They're gonna upgrade because they need to capture more forms not because of deploy count, that's just going to upset people. That's why Netlify has unlimited everything but if you want to capture forms or any other server side processing, you pay. That's the biggest value add for these services imo.

<comment><USER3> I agree in general but FYI Netlify's free tier now limits build minutes. It may end up being the lever that gets me to upgrade.

<comment><USER2> That's interesting, thanks for the update. I think removing build restrictions still applies though. In netlify's case they are trying to convert their large free base whereas this product is new and needs those free signups for future growth/conversion and I bet the build minutes aren't going to be a huge cost. I would just throttle heavy users (deprioritize in the queue once you exceed 100 builds in a month or something). I wouldn't even bother doing this work until/unless it's a scaling or cost issue though, it may never be and saying the builds are "unlimited*" with some wording that excessive use may be throttled would be enough cya.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Like the idea! But for me I do not see the a benefit over a simple FTP enabled webserver + cloudflare apart from the form submissions. Would you elaborate on that, what makes it worth 5$/month?

* Pricing hint:

\- Go either more expensive with the monthly plan, or cheaper with the yearly. For only 5% off I would not go for the yearly commitment.

\- Display your yearly price also as 4.74$ & 14.24$ per month instead of the big yearly sum as the big number requires me as customer to pull out my calculator to see the actual saving

\- Add Call to actions to the pricing boxes e.g. "Signup now for Business plan", even it just redirects to the signup page, it has less friction for me as customer

* Other website feedback:

\- I don't find a imprint. If you control my website, I would like to know who you are.

\- I assume you are not a native english speaker (me neither), as some sentences sound a bit weird on the site. Maybe get a proofreader. (I do that for my projects and it increases the sites a lot :D)

\- Especially for the target group you mentioned I think the automatic rollback is a good selling argument. As if you only use e.g. FTP and overwrite files, everyone knows that feeling of accidentally overwritten a wrong file or with an old version.

\- For being GDPR compliant your privacy policy is not enough

\- Unlimited Bandwidth could be a bad idea as some high traffic sites could cost you a lot

\- A SLA would be nice to have, like "99.9% uptime" to know you are trustworthy and my site will not be down for month

* Feature ideas:

\- Automatically add lazy loading for images

<comment><AUTHOR> Founder here: the advantages over FTP based approach are - no need to install extract tools and deployments are atomic, so you can rollback instantaneously.

Settings up Cloudflare or AWS CloudFront + S3 is easy for users who all familiar with technologies. What I have seen is, there are many web designers out there who design awesome websites but lacks technical knowledge. My brother was like that, he designs websites but I was the one who was helping him to host and write PHP scripts for handling form submissions etc... that's one reason I built a service like this.

Thank you for the suggestion on pricing, I'll consider it and update it accordingly.

 _Update:_

Image lazy loading enabled when website optimization settings is set to "Full"

<comment><USER5> > Thank you for the suggestion on pricing, I'll consider it and update it > accordingly.

You should calculate everything and move your prices up as you have unlimited bandwidth. I have few static websites, but smallest one generates on avg. 400gb monthly transfer(plain website with main content), adding to this image optimisation(sizes, etc) and few other options totalling nearly 1TB+ a month.

So for me $15 looks nice, but you would loose a huge amount of money on clients like me. You can't expect that static website will weight 1MB and eat 1GB of bandwidth a month. :)

This is why Cloudflare has image optimisation in Business plan, or Imgix which is pricey. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, that's a good point. I'll change unlimited bandwidth in the business plan to limited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like what you're doing but I have to admit that I am finding a lot of the front page copy to be somewhat awkward:

"Clodui automatically minifies all your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, then served in compressed gzip format to further reduce the file size. All the requests served over HTTP/2, which further boosts your website speed."

would be much easier to read if it were reworded like so:

"Clodui automatically minifies all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. These minified files are then compressed and served over HTTP/2, which further boosts your websites speed."

If you want help cleaning up more of it, contact me at my username @ gmail.

<comment><USER5> IMO all copy should be thrown away as it's aimed for non-technical users. So cut this technical buzzwords and write like for kids. ;)

<comment><USER2> Agreed. Something like: "using our Accelerator technology, we take care of optimizing your website with industry-best practices. Your users get fast page speeds, and you can stop worrying and get back to building sites." Then have a graph of page load times without acceleration and with acceleration and a link for more info for the curious.

<comment><USER7> A buzzword bingo like that would instantly turn me off, but perhaps that doesn't matter. I admit I'm not in the target market.

<comment><USER8> To be fair, it wasn't that buzzwordy, it's just the "Accelerator technology" thing that biased me. The rest of the sentence was fine, maybe that's what happened for you too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Worth noting that firebase (Google) provides a similar service. It's entirely free to host static websites. Definitely ends up on a cdn and definitely uses static compression. Ssl certs even get auto handled.

<comment><USER10> True, but I really like the simple click to deploy feature. I can see it will add value to designers who find simple deployments hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hi Cvrajeesh, congrats on launching! It's a big achievement to get your project out the door and in customer's hands.

We launched a very similar service (fast.io) a few months ago and have found some good interest in the product. Unfortunately, however, there are many other good solutions for simple deployments and performant static hosting. My question for you would be, what are you doing that solves your customer's problem so much better than competitors that they'd be willing to put their mission-critical website on your (unproven) service over anyone else's?

For these simple use-cases (the ones you appear to be targeting) most users just aren't willing to pay. The more sophisticated users who are running businesses (and would pay) often need more features and greater control over their hosting solution - features that will take you a long time to build out and prove in the market.

As such, we're working on a product pivot that's educated by the insights we've gained through our initial launch. We don't want to go head-on with other products that are, quite frankly, doing a great job in this market already. I'll be really curious to see/hear if you encounter similar challenges and how you navigate them.

<comment><USER12> > We launched a very similar service

I haven't seen them post to a Show HN to shamelessly promote and link to their own rival version, so that's one difference.

<comment><USER11> I can see how you might think that, but to be more clear we are moving out of this market - I'm trying to be helpful to the OP (and anyone else who's looking at this market) by sharing our experience.

A Google search is going to yield a lot of great other companies for static hosting like [https://netlify.com](https://netlify.com) (which even supports this exact functionality of drag and drop uploads) and [https://zeit.co](https://zeit.co) just to name a couple, not to mention a graveyard of other services who've tried to do similar things over the last 5 years. You might even notice that we've changed our messaging to focus on file-sharing and direct links - not website hosting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A few nitpicks:

\- In the ToS there's no mention of the company I'm making the agreement with

\- I'd appreciate an about page about who's behind this, but my first point kinda explains it :)

\- What CDN are you using? Have you built your own?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, we're using AWS Cloudfront as the CDN.

ToS needs to be re-written; currently, I used an online service to generate it :(

<comment><USER14> Just a small thing: Cloudfront gets very expensive rather quickly. We went to a $4,000 pm to a $20 pm bill by moving our CDN for static assets from Cloudfront to Cloudflare. The only reason we let it come that far is that we had AWS credits. But as soon as we neared the end of the credits, we made the switch to Cloudflare.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the heads-up

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just curious: how is "clodui" pronounced?

At first I read Cloud UI, but after pausing a little I realized it was not Cloud UI.

I mention this because I think names matter for word-of-mouth recommendation. In many interviews, Morgan Freeman would recount that The Shawshank Redemption bombed at the box-office because back in the day word-of-mouth was still dominant way of getting movie recommendations, and people couldn't say or remember the word "Shawshank".

<comment><AUTHOR> Founder here: I'm pronouncing it as "clod ui". The name came from the word "Cloud" \+ "UI" and removed "u" from Cloud so the domain is available.

<comment><USER8> "Clod" as in "stupid person"? Was that intentional?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Woof, expensive. This might be worth it if there's live support included and a really easy control panel, but otherwise a similar setup is $60/year.

The image resizing and optimization is a good sell, but it's dramatically more expensive to have it when under the hood it's a relatively cheap feature aside from initial build out, and it's available in basic form for free on places like Netlify.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wanted to read about forms in your docs. Page does not exist : [https://www.clodui.com/form/add-form](https://www.clodui.com/form/add-form)

<comment><AUTHOR> this is the correct URL [https://www.clodui.com/docs/form/add- form](https://www.clodui.com/docs/form/add-form)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks interesting, the minification looks like a pretty good selling point.

One thing I noticed is the slow connection from Australia, it seems your CDN is limited to Europe and America.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I'll check that

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Would be nice to know more about the CDN, because after all just two POPs makes a very simple CDN, but a CDN isn't just two POPs!

<comment><AUTHOR> Founder here: my entire stack is on AWS. I'm using CloudFront as the CDN

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> aren't a lot of these things already handled by web servers and browsers? (caching. gzip compression, etc...)

<comment><AUTHOR> Founder here,

yes caching and gzip is done by web servers. Clodui does much more than that

* minification of CSS, JS and HTML

* automatic webp image generation, dynamic image resize

* and the website is served via CDN, which connects to the nearest CDN server

* automatic form handling etc...

We're really targeting users with less technical knowledge in server-side but creates awesome websites.

<comment><USER21> Does it really make sense to "minify" everything when you have gzip enabled?

<comment><AUTHOR> minify saves a few bytes per file but image optimization feature reduces your website size considerably. Usually, people rely on image CDNs to do this, we provide it with hosting service itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow !! This is a great piece of work. Hassle-free hosting and automatic optimization

</comment><comment><USER23> that's just cloudflare. they are doing all of those.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess they don't handle form submissions automatically, need to write code to handle it.

<comment><USER23> they have cloudflare workers for that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not targeting users with that level of technical experience or those who want to spend the time and effort to do all those.

<comment><USER23> make sense. but i feel the difference are not big enough. cloudflare dns change do most of this, with the exception of form submission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Really cool idea ! :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Looks like Netlify

<comment><AUTHOR> Founder here: I do like Netlify, IMHO it's targeting developer community, I'm targeting users who all are still developing websites in the traditional way.</comment></comment>


Humanity's Extinction Event - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-mission/humanitys-extinction-event-is-coming-c0f84f1803f#.uc2k0gk1z <comment><AUTHOR> Many of us understand that ginormous asteroids are whizzing uncomfortably close to Earth (often undetected until 2 days before they pass!). But what many people don't understand is that we need fully autonomous vehicles and robots (that can operate in space!) if we're going to have any chance of stopping or rerouting these asteroids. This is the story of two mad scientists working on a solution, with a little help from the humble C Elegans roundworm...</comment>


Ask HN: Far UVI breather instead of filter face mask? - <AUTHOR> Would a portable far-UVI breathing apparatus be a better approach to virus proofing than particulate filter face masks or respirators? Background info links
https://www.hepacart.com/blog/effective-uv-disinfection-lights-4-benefits-of-far-uv-sterilray https://fastlifehacks.com/n95-vs-ffp/ <comment><USER2> no idea why this isn't getting more views - "far-uv" (different wavelength vs uv c) - seems to be a decent tool to kill virus fast...</comment>


CasperJS - a navigation scripting & testing utility for PhantomJS - <AUTHOR> http://n1k0.github.com/casperjs/ <comment><USER2> This is a neat project (with good documentation!). I really like PhantomJS, and it's great for pulling data off of a single page but sometimes it can be a pain to use it to run a series of steps in sequence. I was thinking about trying to hook into the PhantomJS, but this looks like a very clean way to do this. A similar project that is also very useful is pjscrape: <http://nrabinowitz.github.com/pjscrape/> .</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone know how to publish code samples to Posterous? - <AUTHOR>

I'd love to use Posterous as my main geek blog, but I can't figure out how to post code to it. A geek blog without code is like Santa without a beard. Anyone know how to achieve this feat?<p>If it's not supported, is that a feature you'd like to see on Posterous? Since Posterous is YC-funded, I imagine they'll pick this thread up, so let them know here if this is a feature you'd want (assuming it is indeed missing). <comment><USER2> swombat, thanks for the suggestion!

Hm, I'll whip something up and post back here when it's ready (hopefully in the next hour).

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==

UPDATE: It's taking a little longer since I'd like to get some really slick syntax highlighting going. It's 3:25 am and I'm still recovering from a cold so I'm going to call it a night, but expect an update on the Posterous blog tomorrow: <http://blog.posterous.com>

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==

UPDATE 2: I couldn't sleep, so I kept working on it. I've just popped an early version of it live for you to try out. All you have to do is surround your code block with the following tags:

      [code]
      your code here
      [/code]

Additionally, if you want to get fancy, you can specify a language with the following syntax:

      [code lang='java']
      public static boolean isAwesome = true;
      [/code]

This should work for both through the web interface and through the email interface.

The available list of languages is: 'cpp', 'c', 'c++', 'c#', 'c-sharp', 'csharp', 'css', 'delphi', 'pascal', 'java', 'js', 'jscript', 'javascript', 'php', 'py', 'python', 'ruby', 'rails', 'ror', 'sql', 'vb', 'vb.net', 'xml', 'xhtml', 'xslt', 'html', 'xhtml'

Current known issues: HTML formatting might be a little spotty at the moment. Will be fixing asap. I also see some intermittent errors where the code isn't getting properly recognized.

Please report any bugs to me at firstname.lastname@example.com. Thanks for all the support and ideas. Please do keep the feature ideas coming -- the best way to reach us is to email firstname.lastname@example.com, but voting up to the top of Hacker News works too. ;-)

<comment><USER3> Unbelievably fast. This sort of user response definitely sets you apart.

<comment><USER2> Sunday night is like ideal coding time!</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft changing its privacy policy: here is one important change. - <AUTHOR>

Privacy As part of our ongoing commitment to respecting your privacy, we won't use your documents, photos or other personal files or what you say in email, chat, video calls or voice mail to target advertising to you.<p>After reading the first point alone, I'm tempted to change my default mail provider to Microsoft. Comments? <comment><USER2> You should have added the official URL of the source for your quote in your submission, but you may have read it in the mass mailing they did recently. I found your quoted text here:

[http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft- service...](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft-services- agreement-faq)

Though Microsoft has a prevalent platform, and adding support for their platform to your own products can be profitable, trusting Microsoft with anything has always turned out to be a really bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ok so they are not using it for advertising, are they using it for something else?</comment>


Show HN: JSONlite – A simple, serverless, zero-configuration JSON document store - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nodesocket/jsonlite <comment><USER2> If you are going to invoke the sacred name of 'sqlite', then I expect to see rock-solid code and quality testing.

Instead, there are two tiny tests, and I found a couple of issues in 30 seconds of looking at the code.

EDIT: I should prove my point.

1) Race condition on calculating uuid (obviously won't be too serious for a good uuid implementation)

2) No check that file is written successfully.

3) No check when json is invalid, just silently swallowed, or filesystem full.

4) Makes one file a json file, will scale terribly past a few thousand json files.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point on 2 and 3. Should just involve checking the previous commands return code before echoing the uuid. I'll get that patched up and ship a new version in a bit.

Not sure what you mean exactly by 1 and 4 though.

<comment><USER2> With 1, you are trusting the directory returned by uuid will be unique --it should be, but it might not be, in particular if it is based on time and I run in two threads.

With 4, I find once a directory has about 100,000 files in it, things get bad, from the simple (ls * won't work) to the nastier (git starts using huge amounts of space, you'll hit github's size limit even though all your files are quite small).

<comment><USER3> I would not let anyone close to the code I'm working on if he wanted to verify whether a properly generated UUID clashes with some previously generated UUID.

You could just as do stuff like "int x=1; assert(x == 1);" and so on. And it would be just as futile.

<comment><USER2> In this case, you are relying on what installed program or function is called when you invoke uuid in the shell. It seems reasonable to me to check if it is having sensibly, if the reliability of your program counts on it. I have no idea what dodgy uuid programs you might find installed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think your title might not be the best;

* Serverless typically implies something accessible from more than the host you're on

* It's not zero configuration, there's at least 1 configurable parameter (albeit with a sensible default)

* I'm actually not even clear why this is a document store limited to JSON, other than you're piping it though a JSON python module.

Having done some things like this in the past, as you continue, you'll probably want to create subdirectories based on the first N characters of the UUID, but I'm not sure you wouldn't get considerably more value of just putting your json blobs into an AWS Dynamo table.

<comment><USER5> I agree that "serverless" now mainly means "Function as a Service." The goal here is convey that there is no server component of the database, similar to SQLite and unlike PostgreSQL.

What is the correct terminology to highlight this architectural distinction?

<comment><USER6> What's wrong with 'local'? Serverless is a terrible word to describe this.

<comment><USER7> I always thought they were "embedded" databases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hint: If you really want to use your filesystem as a database (and don't mind the haters, there's a long and storied history of doing just this), make sure you break it up into many subdirs usually based on the first few characters of the uuid.

Example: ./jasondir/aa/bb/cc/aabbccdd

You won't like what happens when you put 100k files in one directory.

<comment><USER9> There was an old document management system called Keyfile that did just that.

<comment><USER10> Git does it too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is 200 lines of bash using the file system as a database. The term document store implies a database which this is not. How is this different than just writing files to a directory?

What are the use cases of this project?

<comment><USER12> "A database is an organized collection of data". I think writing files in a directory with a convention falls in that category.

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

<comment><USER13> The point is the project seems a bit low-effort. The most complicated thing in that bash script is argument processing.

What is the added value of that project? does it come up with something new or interesting? a query language for data? an efficient data storage? no, it just store json files in directories. Sure the file system is already a database, but that project doesn't add anything to the file system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think there is a lot of feedback, mostly constructive criticisms. I would encourage you to embrace a lot of what everyone is saying and not to take it personally. You've done far better than most developers: you authored something and shared it with the world. To this day I'm still too afraid to show HN or Reddit my work.

</comment><comment><USER13> Serverless means anything really, a cli app is now serverless. I didn't know I was writing serverless applications for 20 years then. Serverless was already a bad buzz word, it gets more and more meaningless by the hour.

By the way sqlite just got support for JSON :

[https://www.sqlite.org/json1.html](https://www.sqlite.org/json1.html)

off-topic : I'd like to see more books on database implementation for beginners. Of all the crap load of CS books that come out year after year this is a matter with very little literature, as most papers on the subject are research papers. Seems like an excellent topic to teach distributed programming.

<comment><USER15> No, serverless database is not a recent buzz word, but a term frequently used to describe DB that doesn't need a separate server running to which clients connect: compare MySQL, PostgreSQL against BDB, LMDB, SQLite.

<comment><USER13> "serverless" means so many things it really means nothing, that's like "cloud computing" and that's the definition of a buzzword. Sqlite is an embedded database and has nothing to do with your favorite buzzword.

<comment><USER15> Richard Hipp called SQLite "serverless" long before you started trying to be cool by hating buzzwords [https://sqlite.org/serverless.html](https://sqlite.org/serverless.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I currently don't see the similarity to SQLite, that is implied in the readme.

SQLite stores all its data (every table and all entries in tables) in one single file. JSONlite does store every JSON entry in one particular file, as much I saw. So, JSONlite uses the file system (one directory) as data storage -- in contrast to SQLite!

</comment><comment><USER17> > JSONlite sandboxes the current working directory similar to SQLite.

Huh, what does that mean?

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't like that it is just a composition of bash and the filesystem. I'd just do this:

id=$(uuidgen)

echo '{"hi":"mom"}' | jq . > id

cat id

</comment><comment><USER19> The "serverless" starts being used and abused the same way "microservices" and "rest" are.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why not just use SQLite? Its JSON1 extension is pretty good, and then you get all the rest of SQLite's goodness as part of the package. [https://sqlite.org/json1.html](https://sqlite.org/json1.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> There's already an R package called jsonlite: [https://cran.r-project.org/package=jsonlite](https://cran.r-project.org/package=jsonlite)

</comment><comment><USER22> Wouldn't you be much better off storing JSON in a SQLite table?

<comment><USER23> How would that be an improvement? you still wouldn't be able to readily query and build indexes? Or does SQLite handle that now?

<comment><USER13> [https://www.sqlite.org/json1.html](https://www.sqlite.org/json1.html)

I really don't get why this made it to HN first page, especially when plenty of other show HN demonstrate way more efforts than writing a short bashscript yet never make it. I suspect it has to do with the number of buzzwords that were inserted into the title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me of NodeJS configstore[1].

I would be really happy to learn what are the use-cases for this tool, since using it via bash is actually an overkill.

1: [https://github.com/yeoman/configstore](https://github.com/yeoman/configstore)

</comment><comment><USER25> First I want to say this is really cool. Thanks for taking the time to make it and I'll definitely give a test drive. That said, it's not zero configuration and your title is kinda misleading.

</comment><comment><USER26> Also the name of a very popular R package. Maybe call it JSONdb? Or JSONstore?

</comment><comment><USER27> Cool! Can you add an append function?

</comment><comment><USER28> lol why is this so high in the front page? BTW this is __NOT SERVERLESS __therefore click bait in my book</comment>


UX Bloat Nonsense - <AUTHOR> http://yongfook.com/ux-bloat-nonsense <comment><USER3> Quote of the day: "This is where you stop looking at your startup as a self- masturbatory piece of UX genius and start looking at it as a business"

There was an article on HN the other day about expedia increasing revenue by removing a confusing form field on their booking process. I think the lesson is that users find different things confusing / annoying than UX experts (or web designers). UX experts ramble on about 'clutter' and simplification, however, in my experience, everyday people have a high tolerance to clutter as long as its the right clutter and that clutter is easy to understand (or is a really great deal). At the end of the day, put your faith in data driven split testing, not UX zealots.

<comment><USER4> And anecdote about my first experience with the intricacies of design. A company I worked for about 10 years ago was building an application that had lots of graphic elements to it. One of the colours they were using was red. It was being used throughout the application in bold ways. It looked really nice and slick. However, when we went to show it off to the partners, they were taken aback. See, they were from Taiwan (or some other nation in that region, I forget which), and they were almost insulted by the colour red. Using red was frowned upon for reasons I can't remember, but I believe it had to do with poor luck. Basically, it was bad to use the red.

It was at that moment that I realised that UX is not as easy as making it simple to use. UX isn't build around rules, but reason built on testing.

<comment><USER5> Do you perhaps have this backwards? In the West, the common association green- good, red-bad is pretty common. In Asia it is usually reversed: green-bad, red-good.

<comment><USER4> Maybe. There was a lot of green in the application as well, so that could very well have been it. It was 10 years ago, and I wasn't involved in the design. Whatever the color, it looked good design wise, but we had to change the color because of the culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To counter his disclaimer, Japanese and American web sites are very different:

[http://www.zeldman.com/2010/07/25/the-puzzle-of-japanese- web...](http://www.zeldman.com/2010/07/25/the-puzzle-of-japanese-web-design/)

This doesn't address his core point. I've always believed that users will tolerate a surprising amount of crap to get what they want. Godaddy isn't exactly suffering.

<comment><AUTHOR> To give some context, we certainly don't prescribe to the cluttered aesthetic of some other Japanese ecommerce sites. We are much more about letting the product do the talking:

Screenshot: [http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1205/5145308747_25d89aa4e5_o....](http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1205/5145308747_25d89aa4e5_o.png)

<comment><USER7> I was going to say the exact same thing as JoelSutherland, so I'm glad you posted a screenshot of your site.

And now I want to say thank you so much for bringing some taste to the Japanese internet, especially the Japanese fashion/shopping internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Every piece of "bloat" has two consequences: it annoys some users -- possibly to the point of scaring them away from the service -- and it convinces some other users to do something profitable.

The fact is, savvy users are much more likely to stick with a bloated system than we like to imagine. I still buy tickets from Orbitz, despite the pages of upsells I have to click through, because I have an account there and I know their quality of customer service.

</comment><comment><USER9> There's good stuff here, but one worry... The stuff about fading customer acquisition and needing to upsell existing customers more... This sounds an awful lot like the trap that many "mature" companies get into where growth levels off and they switch their focus to squeezing the maximum amount of revenue out of existing customers.

There's a tradeoff, and all of the business practices involved in squeezing more out of the "captive audience"--pricing, UX, everything--drive some customers away and alienate other prospective customers.

This drives the need to squeeze even more out of captive customers, and the business and their most entrenched customers begin to circle each other in a deadly embrace.

The author isn't advocating any of this, of course, it's a post about UX. But I did get that feeling like the argument was part and parcel of this dilemma facing businesses as they mature.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not really sure where this is coming from, but really any sensible UX person will say "good UX is requiring the least out of users to allow them to achieve their goals while having enough to deliver your business objectives" and not "less is better".

Obviously there is no perfect balance for any market and bloat is a completely subjective value to tag on to anything. Bloated in relation to what? In what context?

For a site that sold £1000 shoes Amazon's UX principles would be a crazy strategy to implement, but if you apply the same idea visa-versa I imagine that Amazon would be able to measure lost revenue in the tens of millions. But there will be an underlying essential UX requirement because both sites are based on the principle that people have actively chosen to look for an item, and by making that decision they are, more than likely, willing to put up with more than, say, someone looking around a support site for help with their printer drivers.

</comment><comment><USER11> > This is where you stop looking at your startup as a self-masturbatory piece > of UX genius and start looking at it as a business.

What crap. User experience and business aren't mutually exclusive. You have a choice: make money as a result of making your users happy or make money at the expense of their happiness. It's as simple as that. As your decisions compound on one side of that balance or the other, the shape of your brand begins to emerge.

My preference, continually, is to work with companies who optimize their business on the side of making me happy. They are playing a long term game that I respect, and which respects me. On the other side, that's the kind of user experience I want to create myself.

It's a bit like arguing that you can be a successful organism by being an asshole. Its definitely true that you can. But I posit you can be a successful organism by being good to people, and that the upshot is that it's a lot more fun.

Edit: And, of course, this is an _exhausting_ trope, but do I need to mention that one of the largest companies in America makes great user experience the acid test for their business decisions?

<comment><USER12> "User experience and business aren't mutually exclusive."

They are not necessarily always aligned either and you may have to choose at one point. UX is very subjective and taking a dogmatic approach to it and how it affects your business isn't a very good idea.

<comment><USER13> Since when is having a poor user experience good for business.

I would also say that having a poor User Interface and poor User Experience is doubly bad for business.

I'm reminded of the recent article posted here to HN about Expedia removing a single field from their checkout form that resulted in $12MM to the bottom line.

Better UI + Better UX = Better Business

<comment><USER14> _Since when is having a poor user experience good for business._

Would you like fries with that?

Article continues on page C8.

The DX is a fine automobile, sir, but the LX offers a lot of extra safety features, which I'm sure mean a lot to you with such a charming wife. (Are you newlyweds, ma'am?) Traction control, ankle air bags, anti-impact rustproofing, everything a _lucky_ man like you needs to safeguard his precious cargo. And the premium for these features is really not much compared to what you have to lose.

Leave this box checked to receive product information and spam.

The product is configured using a bespoke business process description language that describes your configuration in intuitive problem-domain terms. It's so simple and intuitive, a non-technical person can understand this fake example! The support contract specifies that our consultants will be available at reasonable rates to attempt to train your business analysts to be programmers, and then to attempt to train your IT staff to write code in what turns out to be an arcane '80s-era language with dozens of undocumented bugs and sharp edges, and then to do all the work themselves at great cost since nobody can actually be trained to configure the product in any reasonable amount of time.

<comment><USER13> touché (even though all your examples are in un-related industries) :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You can certainly have a successful business without a proper UI/UX. Don't think for a second, though, that a good UX won't significantly improve your company. Facebook itself started as being the clean, user-friendly alternative to competitors like Friendster and Myspace.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't think upselling has to be a negative thing ... if you put a bit of thought into it and are actually trying to help the user, it definitely could be a big plus.

I love when I put a book or some Music in my cart at Amazon and it shows me related items I could be interested in ... I think almost 25-50% of the stuff I've bought from there has been as a result of this.

What I do find rather retch-inducing is this idea that you as a business are 'leaving money on the table' by not trying to upsell me, it shows that you see me as a wallet and could care less whether I find some awesome book or new music that makes my week.

I would never want any business I run/start to end up like that.

ever.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's possible to both up sell and have a good UX. Provided the upsell UI is sensibly restricted, unobtrusive and actually related.

Sometimes up selling can actually helpful. I brought a camera recently because I dropped my last one and smashed the screen. After adding it the basket the site listed a few related accessories which included a leather case. Following my recent breakage it's exactly what I needed, but for some reason I had totally forgotten. As it happens I searched a bit a got a different case, but it was their upsell prompt that reminded me I needed one.

</comment><comment><USER18> _I'm a director of one of Japan's largest online fashion flash-sales sites. I have a vague idea of what I'm talking about when it comes to e-commerce._

Ahh that familiar smell of insecurity fills the air once again.

</comment><comment><USER19> Thank god someone finally says something about this. If I see another one of those "73 Beautiful Web Designs" with all the same layout and content type (simple blog) I'm going to go nuts.

</comment><comment><USER20> What's with the disagreements? His argument is against the claim that "'simple' is unilaterally better for your business." He's entirely correct. At some point, you'll have to go out and get new customers if you want continued growth. Public companies - the commerce variety he mentions specially - <USER2> implicitly required by shareholders to show such growth if they are to remain relevant. And so, you'll have to find ways to make that happen. Upselling seems to be one such source.

</comment><comment><USER21> The trick to being nice is that you have to do it even when it seems like a bad idea. This isn't because suffering losses is virtuous, it's because you lack the ability to tell when it's safe to be mean. If you have an extraordinary ability to predict user backlash, which you may well have, by all means go ahead and piss some people off. But don't scold people for having the humility to know that they personally can't get away with it.

</comment><comment><USER22> The major problem with UX is that many people from the UX industry are academics not designers.

This creates an unhealthy focus on users and too little focus on customers.

For anyone interested I wrote a lengthy essay speaking of some of the same things.

[http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything- you...](http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you-think- about-user-centred-design-is-wrong/)

</comment><comment><USER23> There is no right answer to this. As hinted in the article, you can have a good business with a cluttered UX (hello Ebay) and you can have a good UX with a bad business model (hello thousands of web2.0 companies). Or, you can have the best of both worlds: good UX + good business (hello Apple).

I don't see UX and Business as mutually exclusive.

</comment><comment><USER24> Great post, simple explanation: UX people don't measure profit. That's a huge disconnect that leads to these weird professional silos between UX and marketing/ecommerce. The sooner UX people start measuring profit -- like they should -- the better.

</comment><comment><USER25> [http://www.quora.com/What-should-you-do-if-your-business- goa...](http://www.quora.com/What-should-you-do-if-your-business-goals-and- product-goals-are-in-conflict)

</comment><comment><USER26> Sometimes opposite of good UX brings (at least short-term) revenue:

<http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/wiki/Home>

</comment><comment><USER27> I hate to be terse and snarky, but I think the entire counter-argument boils down to "GoDaddy.com"

Go try to buy a domain from GoDaddy. See where all of this up-selling gets you.

This is a simple issue, he is correct. The marketplace will decide.

Strange that this would show up today, I blogged about this trade-off between user annoyance and profit just yesterday: [http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/11/good-and- evil...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/11/good-and-evil-i.php)</comment>


New Analysis Confirms Why the Skagit River Bridge Collapsed - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/new-analysis-confirms-why-the-skagit-river-bridge-colla-1785842162 <comment><USER2> There is no mention of installing a sturdy beam across the road slightly lower than the least clearance, just a suggestion that the least clearance should be reported, and an extended discussion of the multiple (and rather unsurprising, IMHO) ways in which the pilot car system failed.

I am reminded of the half-assed measures that were taken to mitigate the risk of DC10 cargo doors blowing open, prior to the Turkish Airlines crash in Paris. Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER3> Sadly, there's not much that can be done to fix humans.

The elevenfooteight bridge now has a traffic light which goes red and stays red on detecting an overheight vehicle, with a lit-up sign saying "OVERHEIGHT MUST TURN". It's still getting hit by overheight vehicles.

And then there's the lengths that had to be gone to in Syndey to stop overheight vehicles entering tunnels:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoTMC- uxJoo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoTMC-uxJoo)

<comment><USER4> It depends on what you want to fix.

The 11'8 bridge does indeed seem a lost cause as far as preventing people from ruining their overheight vehicles. But the problem for the _bridge_ has been solved: they installed a beam in front of the bridge which takes the impact.

The same sort of thing could be done with this bridge. Install a sturdy beam ahead of the structural bits. You won't stop people from driving overheight vehicles onto the bridge, but you will stop them from destroying the bridge in the process.

<comment><USER5> It depends on if you want to allow max height vehicles to use the center lanes or not.

I guess you could have a mechanism to raise the warning beam and only activate it after direct communication with the driver.

<comment><USER4> You could have sacrificial beams in front of all the important ones throughout the bridge, if you're worried about lane changes. That may not be worthwhile though.

<comment><USER5> My (not well studied) understanding is that all of the beams are important on this style of bridge.

That's sort of the other way of looking at the problem. The bridge isn't overbuilt enough.

<comment><USER4> Right, so you'd need a lot of sacrificial beams if you wanted to defend against lane changes in the middle of the bridge. Probably easier to add structural redundancy instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The driver was following the pilot car too closely: more than half the recommended distance for adequate response (400 feet, or a five-second response time, instead of the recommended 865 feet, allowing for a 10-second response time)."

Er, that's _less_ than half the recommended distance. How did the copy editor let that through?

<comment><USER7> The braking distance increases with velocity. The measurement is in seconds, not feet.

<comment><USER4> Following time and following distance are linearly related. Either way, it's less than half.

<comment><USER7> Braking distance is not linearly related to following distance. Braking distance is what is being referred to here.

<comment><USER4> They're pretty clearly talking about following distance there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "that doesn't account for the economic losses that the area felt because they and visitors no longer had access to the interstate"

I've got a pretty awesome picture of me and my son standing in front of that empty section of bridge from the detour route. They essentially routed I-5 traffic into the town and across another bridge. If I had to guess, the stores in that area probably made more money during the detour...

</comment><comment><USER9> The sheer number of things that had to go wrong for this disaster to happen is impressive.

<comment><USER10> Indeed. The system works, most of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I haven't seen this image posted recently. It's wonderful: [https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/4ehaka/on_the_road_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/4ehaka/on_the_road_to_success_there_are_no_shortcuts/)

       ON THE ROAD TO SUCCESS,
       THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is the first I've heard that the I-35W Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis was "fracture critical", and even if it was, the design flaw of too small gusset plates would possibly make that moot when one of them gave way, since others that were too small would then fail more easily.

</comment><comment><USER13> > The authors recommend changing policy to report the lowest vertical > clearance for bridges, rather than the highest

Common fucking sense.

<comment><USER14> > Common fucking sense.

No, it isn't, and this is one of the problems when the "general public" comments on engineering things. It's not that people aren't _capable_ of understanding; they lack the _experience_ to understand why something is the way it is.

Someone on /r/seattle[0], where this was recently posted, put it more politely than I:

===

It's because that extra two feet can be valuable when carrying oversized loads. Frankly, this _all_ falls on the driver of the oversized vehicle, the driver of the pilot car, and the hauling company.

\- The driver of the oversize vehicle is responsible for knowing his load height. A hauler I've worked with before has it in their manuals that the driver must personally measure the load if there is any question. That driver must also stay far enough back of the pilot car to stop in case of a problem.

\- The driver of the pilot car fucked up royally by missing the sound of the height-verification antenna hitting the bridge. That is a massive error that should see that pilot car driver drummed out of the industry.

\- The hauling company erred drastically by not pre-running the route, or at least the low clearance segments, to verify where the clearance exists. That is "oversize hauling 101."

The article says the state "rubber stamped" an oversize permit. No, they didn't. The hauler certified that the hauler had pre-run the route. It is required that the hauler state that the route has been verified when the permit is issued.

"It is the responsibility of the permit applicant to check, or prerun, the proposed route and provide for safe maneuvers around the obstruction or detours as necessary."

\- WSDOT bridge clearance tool ([http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/data/tools/bridgeclearance/](http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/data/tools/bridgeclearance/))

0 - [https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/50167q/new_analysi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/50167q/new_analysis_of_the_2013_skagit_river_bridge/)

<comment><USER15> What you are saying makes no sense and certifiably wrong because a team of experts recommended changing the standard to ensure min height is always reported, not max height.

<comment><USER16> Both heights should be available. If only _one_ number is to be reported, then yes, report the lowest height. But, for more advanced scenarios, such as electronic Maps, you should report the lane heights as appropriate.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Open-source Canadian COVID-19 bot - <AUTHOR> We have just released a chatbot that assembles a personalized information packet based on users' risk factors. We get the content from Canadian federal and provincial governments and vet it with our team of doctors. The point is to have hyper-local clean data, no spin, no irrelevant panicky news stories.<p>Canadian site: https://covid19.dialogue.co/
Contribute content or fork and run it for your own geo: https://github.com/dialoguemd/covid-19 <comment><USER2> How is the content updated?</comment>


Ask HN: Physical Address Normalization - <AUTHOR> Can anyone recommend an open source library they have used that can perform Physical Address Normalization.<p>Ideally this would cover global addresses.  I know it is a challenging problem. <comment><USER2> [https://www.easypost.com/address-verification- api.html](https://www.easypost.com/address-verification-api.html) is a great place to start with growing international support. It's not open source though</comment>


[video] 4 Cold Email Subject Lines That Got InspireBeats to $4m in Revenue - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm38Akl2NOo <comment><AUTHOR> Subject lines covered in the video:

1\. The referral or fake referral

You can use linkedin or interviews they've done and call them out in the subject line to make them open the emails. A Good example is "Hey Mark - <USER2> you through Tim Ferriss"

2\. Congrats on the News item

Google around and find recent work completed by the target, new hires or announcements of funding. "Hey Mark - great article on ecommerce optimization"

3\. Generic but customized

Use this one if you can't find that much information on the target. The example in the video is "Hey Mark - about <Company> and InspireBeats"

4\. Fully generic

Finally if there's no info on the company or you're too lazy to do the research, you can go full generic with a subject line like "Hi from Alex" or "Quick Question"</comment>


Be Careful What You Code For - <AUTHOR> https://points.datasociety.net/be-careful-what-you-code-for-c8e9f3f6f55e#.mow3f6y8l <comment><USER2> The money quote: "I don't care what your politics are. If you're building a data-driven system and you're not actively seeking to combat prejudice, you're building a discriminatory system."

This is extremely important. The weight of existing prejudice drives and reinforces future prejudice. Garbage in, garbage out. If you start with biased, flawed data, and you look for patterns like the biased, flawed data, you'll just add to the biases and flaws. You need to account for the poor data quality explicitly.

<comment><USER3> This proposal shows more concern about being politically correct than actually correct. A truly unbiased system would just make the best analysis possible given the data available. What you propose is to make a biased system in order to give an advantage to one group of people rather than the other group. This type of political correctness fuels resentment.

<comment><USER4> If the data itself is bad and known to be bad, the results will reflect the bad data.

In the case of policing, the arrest record is racially biased (the US releases data that shows this bias and it's well researched). If you train on arrest records, it won't predict actual crime because the results will be racially biased.

Being unbiased is actually a very difficult problem. Especially when we are predicting things rooted in social / cultural trends.

<comment><USER5> There's a difference between something being "offensive" because it's _incorrect_ , and being "incorrect" because it's _offensive_.

Our job is to be correct. If we avoid offense in the process, great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel like this is a politically-correct rant thinly disguised as programming related.

> I don't care what your politics are. If you're building a data-driven system > and you're not actively seeking to combat prejudice, you're building a > discriminatory system.

Fuck that. Build _correct_ systems first. If you're making a system that intentionally distorts data for the sake of "combating prejudice", you're _lying_. That doesn't help anyone.

<comment><USER7> What you call "intentionally distorting data", I would call "correcting for a confounding variable".

Unrelated Example: Every morning, I weigh myself. Today, I found that my scale is inaccurate, and understates my weight by 5%. Therefore, if I am to predict my weight in the future, I must account for the inaccuracy of the scale.

Related Example: There exist police statistics for arrests. Studies have found that arrests are racially biased, and therefore those police statistics do not accurately represent the crime rate, only the biased arrest rate. Therefore, if I am to predict the crime rate in the future, I must account for the inaccuracy of the data set.

<comment><USER8> But the problem you describe isn't biased data, it's state law enforcement agencies practicing discrimination. Seems like it'd be more effective to strike at the root, not the branches.

<comment><USER7> Whether or not data are biased depends on what you want to measure. If you are trying to measure the arrest rate, then the arrest rates are an unbiased predictor. If you are trying to measure the true crime rate, then the arrest rates are a biased predictor.

I certainly agree that racially motivated arrests are a large issue, and should be dealt with. Avoiding misinterpreting data is a widespread issue that in these cases happens to have prejudicial consequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't care what your politics are. If you're building a data-driven system and you forget that empirically observed covariation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for causality, you're building flawed system, which is inaccurate at best, discriminatory at worst.

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems perfectly reasonable to station police in places which are indisputable hotspots for crime.

I mean, is it discriminatory to say that Compton has a lot of crime and police should patrol it?

Or is this just loosely using the tech community as a demographic to drum up clicks while scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as looking for topics to write about?

<comment><USER11> Hotspots for crime? Or hotspots for arrests?

<comment><USER6> Why not both? What if all races commit roughly proportional amounts of crime, but there's a higher _density_ of crime in black neighborhoods?

There are way too many variables to say anything about whether "blacks commit more crime" OR "police arrest blacks too much".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's those funny/sad stories of how face recognition software has categorised black people as either invisible[1] or gorillas:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/google-tags-black-people- as-g...](http://www.businessinsider.com/google-tags-black-people-as- gorillas-2015-7)

[http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/22/hp.webcams/index.html](http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/22/hp.webcams/index.html)

The prejudice of the programmer (unintentional, as all prejudice really is) can show up in the code just because they forgot to include enough data in their training set.

\---

[1] In light of which Ralph Ellison's novel is particularly prescient:

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

<comment><USER13> If you forget I exist, you are not judging me in any way. If my training data consists of one face, I'm obviously incompetent at machine learning but not prejudiced against everyone else in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ugh, more garbage from the technical bubble children who are perpetually an exposed nerve.

</comment><comment><USER15> "ignore the data and do what's good for the feels."

If you are writing a system that is designed to predict arrests for any reason other than telling police officers where to go, then arrest records are precisely the data you want to use without these political correctness coefficients. So advertising legal help for criminal arrests to someone that matches arrest demographics is the correct thing to do. Anything else is stupidity.

<comment><USER16> This is a good point. If you are trying to design a system that "tells police officers where to go" then you shouldn't be using data to predict arrests, you should be predicting crime, which we don't have unbiased data for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I thought this was going to be something interesting until I hit the "Environmental Consequences" part. I mean, really? We have environmental problems as a result on agriculture and manufacturing and transportation and construction and literally any other industry, and you're going to complain about the cost of running some servers? We are _orders of magnitude_ away in impact. Actually, I suspect its even worse - the more computing power we make available to those industries, the more efficient they become. Please, tell me how making digital designs is environmentally worse than physical prototypes, or simulations are less power efficient than real-world tests, or data-driven irrigation is more wasteful than spraying water into the air for hours.</comment>


Yellen on Bitcoin: Fed Doesn't Have Authority to Regulate It in Any Way - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/02/27/yellen-on-bitcoin-fed-doesnt-have-authority-to-regulate-it-in-any-way/ <comment><USER2> Three cheers for not overreaching one's mandate. I know we rag a lot on Federal Reserve chairpeople for not doing NGDP level targeting, but in a lot of ways it's one of the most sensible branches of government.

<comment><USER3> The Fed isn't a branch of government. They also typically target 2% inflation, a la the ECB. The difference being that the Fed doesn't have a specific requirement to target it, whereas the ECB does.

Edit: They do the targeting through a variety of ways--and none of them touch Bitcoin or in any way are influenced by Bitcoin. Just like the Fed has no authority nor mandate to regulate any other currency than the USD.

<comment><USER2> Of course the Fed is a branch of the government, and one of the more powerful ones. Next you'll be telling me that the Supreme Court doesn't legislate civil rights because someone painted a word saying "judiciary" above it. I go by what things are, not by what they're called.

<comment><USER4> I can't tell if sarcasm or severely misinformed.

The fed, is anything but federal. They are a group of private corporations owned by groups of banks within each reserve banks district. They can be somewhat controlled by congress by way of statute but rarely are and currently answer to no one but themselves. There is a lot of conspiracies around who or what group really owns the majority shares. I'm not going to go into the theory here as they are just that, theories.

In response to going by what they are not what they are called they very much are not a branch of government. They say this very plainly on their own website:

[http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm](http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm)

<comment><USER5> > I can't tell if sarcasm or severely misinformed

* Describes itself as "within government"

* Subject to congressional oversight

* Governors and Chair appointed by POTUS with oversight from the Senate

<comment><USER6> They aren't part of the government elected by the public, that's what many people class as important.

As for subject to congressional oversight, seems like pretty loose oversight if you ask me... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY8xz3Q7aig](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY8xz3Q7aig)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is an amazingly misleading article. What Yellen said was: the Fed only has the authority to regulate banks, and if Bitcoin stays extra-bank, then it has no authority to regulate it. However, she said, the Department of Treasury _does_ have the authority to regulate it.

<comment><USER8> Some people may think "Fed" means "US Government", but it's explicitly stated in the article that "The Federal Reserve simply does not have authority to supervise or regulate bitcoin in any way."

It's just jurisdiction, and the Federal Reserve Chairwoman says they don't have it.

As for the rest of the government? Well, there's literally nothing they can't try to regulate.

<comment><USER9> > Well, there's literally nothing they can't try to regulate.

You did say _try_ , but according to the constitution they aren't allowed to regulate speech, religion or the press. (Congress "shall make no law .." abridging these rights).

<comment><USER10> The Constitution also says that the states cannot coin money, issue paper money, or make anything but gold and silver coin tender in payment of debts. (Article I, sect. 10, clause 1)

Technically, they shouldn't be accepting Federal Reserve Notes as payment for any state taxes, including sales taxes.

Note that this clause does not authorize the federal government to declare a legal tender or issue paper money; it simply prohibits the states from doing those things. Thanks to the 10th Amendment, those are reserved exclusively to the people. The wording is a bit tortured, but a logical parse is that powers not delegated to the federation are reserved to the states, and that powers prohibited to the states are reserved to the people. Legal tender, and paper money are not delegated to the federation, but prohibited to the states, therefore they remain the province of the people.

There should be no problem with the Federal Reserve printing its own notes, but there's no way in hell that making them legal tender or accepting them for payment on state or federal debts is constitutional. They do it anyway. Hardly anyone cares. Those who do are ignored.

As usual, they will do as they please, damn the consequences, and hang it all up under the interstate commerce clause.

Edit: Article I, section 8, clause 5 does give the federation the power to coin money and standardize its value. It still doesn't give them the power to accept those coins as payment for debts unless they are gold or silver.

<comment><USER11> I mean there's likely no convincing you - but there's plenty of scholarship to disagree. The Constitution quite clearly gives Congress the power to "coin Money and regulate the value thereof." It of course makes no additional statement as to how that should be done. It's a pretty tortuous reading in my opinion and one that would basically be invalid going back to McCulloch v. Maryland to say that coin Money, must only mean metallic alloy coins.

Between Expressed Powers and Necessary and Proper there's certainly enough justification - it relies even less on the Commerce clause.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately, it doesn't matter one little bit if you can convince me or not, as I am neither a federal circuit court judge, appellate judge, or supreme court justice.

I think it is less important that our money be a particular commodity than it is that the government lack the power to manipulate its value for its own convenience.

In my opinion, it is clear that the power to "coin money and regulate the value thereof" is to standardize the exchange rates between coins, probably by weight of the metal, but not necessarily. It is also clear that the coins need not be metal, but also that no one could be forced to accept coins other than gold or silver coins.

Thus, they could stamp out wooden nickels, but that wouldn't make them worth anything to anybody, except possibly for payment of federal taxes. As long as we have those, it is only a short hop to rectangular paper "coins". They can do it, but nobody has to accept them.

But since nobody is trying to pay taxes with Bitcoin yet, and the federal government isn't mining them, as far as we know, there is no justification for them to be standardized or otherwise regulated whatsoever. It might arguably be _authorized_ under whatever clause, but it certainly isn't _justified_.

<comment><USER12> What would be done if massive deposits of precious metals were found, rendering those metals little more valuable than perhaps copper or aluminum? You could still make coins with the same value of course, but they would be a bit impractical to carry around.

A copper coin worth $20 in todays USD would weight nearly 3 kilograms!

Surely at least paper gold and silver certificates would be a reasonable concession.

<comment><USER10> Gold and silver certs are negotiable debt instruments, covered by the government's power to borrow. You lend them a gold or silver coin, and they write you a note promising to repay the bearer of the note one gold or silver coin of equal weight on demand.

It's sort of a bogus loan, with a variable term and zero interest rate, but it's still allowed, and certainly makes things more convenient for a lot of people. And the government can still profit from the seignorage from the mint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's kind of funny, but on one hand, that statement is probably the best thing a libertarian reader could imagine hearing from Yellen. That's how I read it at first, and was thinking, "wow, that's pretty radical for the government to intentionally take itself out". Yet, upon second reading, I think the intention was probably more to cast Bitcoin as a wild-west, do-at-your-own- risk, good-luck-to-ya type of asset to work with. I think the message was meant more for banks and investors. The real subtext being, "if you lose your shirt, get defrauded, or there's large scale tampering, don't come crying to the Fed".

<comment><USER14> Proponents of Bitcoin tend to view the lack of regulation as a feature, not a bug. With that lack of regulation comes higher risk of losing everything in the event of a catastrophe. It's hard to have it both ways.

<comment><USER15> Governments don't regulate technologies, they regulate people. There are a million ways governments (who are also made up of people) can and will regulate bitcoin and the like. The persistent belief among some cryptocurrency proponents that they're invincible to the powers of government is really naive.

Just because there isn't regulation now means jack squat. It's not a feature, it's a side effect of newness and reactionary politics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Fair warning: she means the Federal Reserve doesn't have the authority to regulate Bitcoin. The Federal Reserve is not the nexus of financial regulation in the US Government, and Congress can delegate additional authority to the Fed any time it wants.

<comment><USER17> Yup, no mention of the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and for that matter the US Congress. And it certainly seems the SEC would have some authority over entities that seek to act like banks or exchanges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The letter Manchin wrote was not to the Fed but to the secretary of the Treasury and a few other Treasury-related officials. They haven't responded, as far as I know. This is a separate (and very dumb) line he is pursuing. I consider myself fairly ignorant of government issues like this but even I could tell you the Fed would be the wrong institution to ask about regulating Bitcoin (already a foolish notion).</comment>