Norway – An Inside Perspective (1986) - <AUTHOR> http://www.robertpriddy.com/Nos/Nor1.html <comment><USER2> I'm Norwegian and I find this to be a fascinating read. I don't want to comment on the content until I've read it all the way through. I just wanted to say that I would __love __for this to be a live document, kept up to date on a platform like GitHub. I wish I could see what those 2015 changes were. And it 'd be even more amazing if you did another revision in 2035.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't miss part 2:

[http://www.robertpriddy.com/Nos/Nor2.html](http://www.robertpriddy.com/Nos/Nor2.html)

that goes in to a lot of detail on other aspects of Norwegian society as the author saw it.

I'd love to hear your reaction and that of other Norwegians. How accurate or fair is the depiction? How does your perspective differ? Would you have anything to add?

<comment><USER3> I'm a Norwegian (born mid '80s) and feel like this is a rare window into my country's past. A lot of what I have learned at school and trough other typical sources has never been able to give me a neutral and observing perspective.

Remember, the young people of today (below 30y) has only experienced the oil- fueled side of Norway, and a rapidly increasing globalized version of our culture.

I have not read everything yet, but sure will!

<comment><USER4> Most recent immigrants only know the oil-fueled side of Norway, actually. I'm one of those, and found this reading absolutely fascinating. I'm probably also somewhat lucky - my Norwegian mother in law and extended family fill me in on some history. I did speaking practice in a nursing home, and learned quite a bit from some of the residents, and had a few language teachers that taught a broader view of Norwegian history in class alongside language.

I read some passages to my spouse (Norwegian) and he found some parts outright funny, though he agreed with some as well.. though, our perspective probably is slightly different as we are from the previous decade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This article really shattered some of my illusions about Norway being a progressive utopia.

The accounts of human rights abuses, imprisonment without trial, judicially condoned murders perpetrated by police, and their coverups and falsification of evidence were truly terrifying.

The section on Norway's ill-informed and close minded drug war seemed to mirror the United States, and was the very opposite of progressive.

On the other hand, the country's political and social egalitarianism (for those compliant enough or fortunate enough to escape being victims of the police) certainly seemed to be quite admirable in comparison to what I know about most other countries.

It would be interesting to find out how things have changed since the article was written.

<comment><USER5> What does progressive really mean? If you think drugs should be legalised then relaxed drug laws are progressive to you. But if you think drugs must be eliminated then maybe you would think that harsh drug laws are progressive towards that goal? I'm not really sure 'progressive' means anything then. Anyone except literal conservatives not wanting to change anything thinks that the changes they want to make are in order to make progress towards a better world.

<comment><USER6> Who is literal conservatives though? If they're the ones who want to keep status quo, then center-left would be current europe's conservatives. The traditional right-leaning conservatives would be kinda progressive at the moment..?

<comment><AUTHOR> The accusation towards conservatives which want to change the status quo is usually that they're being reactionary -- usually trying to change society back to some idealized, mythical "golden age" that never actually existed, and to bring society back from the ashes of moral decay to some kind of ancient purity (of "blood", race, ethnicity, culture, or nationality).

<comment><USER6> If that golden age never existed, wouldn't that technically be progress?

<comment><AUTHOR> The golden age may not have existed as a reality, it reflects old ideals that did exist -- especially for those of certain privileged classes, sexes, and races, and to the detriment of the rest. That's why they're opposed and called regressive or reactionary by progressives.

I'm sure conservatives would consider it "progress", but I doubt many of them would want to adopt the term "progressive" to their cause, as that term has an anti-conservative connotation. And certainly those who do label themselves "progressive" would not call that "progress" but "regress".

Also, it should be pointed out that the golden age that conservatives often refer to did not exist _as they describe_ , but aspects of it did exist in a much seedier and painful form.

For instance, the golden age that some conservatives paint of the institution of slavery being a benefit to and desired by slaves -- that did not exist. But slavery and slaves did exist. Those conservatives that do favor slavery would have us go back to a slave-owning society, and would paint a rosy picture to convince those gullible or uneducated enough to think it would be a good idea, or to try to give themselves a fig leaf of respectability or deniability.

<comment><USER6> So it's just a label for leftists. Even if they are being conservative at the time.

Fun story. During the collapse of USSR, a local band wrote popular song that had a line saying "conservative idiots strangled us in wires". Later on, most of independence movement formed Conservatives party. As in, the word itself is party title. Song quickly dropped the "conservatives" word :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Dear deity this is an old one...

<comment><USER8> Historical material is warmly welcomed here, and some of the best posts we see. Interesting historical material that hasn't appeared on HN before is particularly great.

We've added 1986 to the title, although the author says he updated the article in 2015.

<comment><USER7> While the document may be labeled 1986, much of what he described was from the 50s-70s. And quite a bit of it is no longer valid, thanks to changes pushed both from above and below.

<comment><USER9> Hopefully people will take the age of the writing into consideration. As someone who has learned about Norway over the past several years, it was very interesting to read this account.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


My 2 Bucks on Pricing - <AUTHOR> http://chrisashworth.org/blog/2010/06/09/my-2-bucks-on-pricing/ <comment><USER2> This is one of the best (and easiest to read) articles on pricing I've ever come across. No formulas, no complexities explaining A/B tests and other scientific research, just a story of a guy who made some software and heavily underpriced it.

I also found the link to indie theatre incredibly interesting as well.

<comment><USER3> 100% agree.

The article was actually inspiring, it's nice to see such a supporting user base.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Excellent article, but I think it's important to point out that in both his examples (his own sales and the theater) the products/shows are being compared to products/shows that are vastly more expensive. Even after raising his price, qlab sounds pretty cheap next to other similar programs prices at $1000+. Even if the theater tripled their prices, they'd be pretty cheap compared to broadway.

If the standard price for an audio suite like his was $50, I bet the increase in price to $249 would not have been as warmly received (to put it mildly). I don't think this works if your product isn't comparable to some other product that costs an awful lot more than what your charging.

<comment><USER5> I think that is part of the point. Your customers know your market (them) better than you do and they will point out if you're way off.

This article assumes someone is coming from the position of pricing cheap because they are afraid they won't get enough sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like that the title of his post reinforces his point, using "2 bucks" instead of the common "2 cents." It suggests that this information is worth more than a typical opinion (and given the detail and outcome of the post I think he's right).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> (I submitted this story.)

I would really like to see Chris Ashworth interviewed on Mixergy. I think he's got a great story on niche marketing, problem solving, and pushing things forward.

(Edited for grammar.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I wouldn't have even bothered to click on this article if it said "My 2c on Pricing" -- but somehow, "2 bucks" made it seem worth it.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you're doing SaaS and discovering your price is too low, do you raise your price grandfather in your current users for a certain period of time?

Conversely, if your price is too high, do you lower your price give your current paying users freebies (an extra month or two) for paying at the higher price?

I know at the very least I'd want to avoid another ZenDesk situation (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357592>); having happy customers seems very important. Obviously there's a certain point where one needs to cut bait, though.

<comment><USER9> I'm in the "Grandfather Everybody in at their current price" camp on this one. It gives you a ton of upside, and not much downside.

Grandfathering somebody in at a low price messes with their head in a good way. Suddenly, they're getting a better deal than everybody else. They're saving money. Hell, they're _making_ money every month they keep that thing. No way anybody's going to make them give it up. They _earned_ it by being an early adopter.

I did this with S3stat when I raised the price from $2/month to $5/month. Here it is a year later, and most of those two buckers are still around. Attrition is fairly high among the five dollar camp, but the early guys are holding on to their cheap subscriptions like they were gold.

Better still, when their credit card expires or they accidentally cancel their account, I get to send them this email:

      Looks like your card expired.  Head over to S3stat.com when
      you get a chance and reactivate your account.  It looks like
      you were on our old $2/month pricing model, so that's what
      we'll set you back up with when you reactivate.

... Six hours later, I generally get a little ping in my inbox telling me I've gained a new "Legacy" subscriber.

So sure, there's a downside, in that you miss a chance to convert those folks to the new pricing model. But in doing so, you'd need to factor in the immediate loss from a percentage of them simply saying "No. It's not worth that much to me", plus the even scarier "What? I'm still paying for that??? Thanks for reminding me to cancel", as well as the long term higher attrition rate from people who aren't eternally grateful to you for giving them such a good cheap rate while you're charging everybody else more.

I think that about sums it up. Grandfathering: good. Not Grandfathering: possibly bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if this effect applies to games too? I sell games and unfortunately I don't think it does. I would love to be proven wrong however.

<comment><USER11> I can think of two big differences:

1\. Few gamers make a living out of doing it.

2\. There is a much wider selection in the number of video games they can choose to play.

So you have two forces working against you. First, if you raise your prices, there are a lot of other games people can play. Second, if you raise your prices, people can simply choose not to play at all.

Not so with audio engineers. They must have the software to make a living, giving them a lot less choice in the matter. They also probably become more intimately familiar with the software than most gamers become with video games. Finally, the context encourages a level of maturity that recognizes the impact of freeloading and fosters good-customership.

So, that's why you probably won't be able to charge more for a video game. Although they do get away with it in some contexts (rock band, some racing games).

P.S. as much as you would like to believe gamers will pay for quality wherever they find it, there's also this issue that in your industry (apparently roguelike games) there's this huge norming influence toward free-to-play games. That probably doesn't help you much.

<comment><USER12> Also, gamers are notoriously cheap. Consider WoW players who whine about the servers being down, and their justification: "I pay 15 bucks a month, and they can't even keep the goddamned servers online!? WTF!"

Frustrating, to say the least. $15/mo for (in many cases) 60-80 hours of entertainment per month, if not more for the extremely hardcore.

<comment><USER13> I don't agree that gamers are cheap as a group. Most gamers I know not only own several consoles and a graphics card that cost more than many peoples computers, they also happily buy $60+ games on the day of release several times a month. If you try to tell them that by waiting 6 month they can get the same games for half the price, they'll look at you as if that was the stupidest thing they've heard in their entire life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Remarkably well-written. Wordy, yes, but entertaining, and insightful.

I'm inclined to agree with his points; and, I wonder how it relates to free (libre) software. Maybe not at all, but it would be really fulfilling to have that kind of user.

</comment><comment><USER15> oddly enough I have heard managers at my own company deride a product for being too cheap.

<comment><USER16> Interesting, and I think that might identify the dividing line--if your customers are managers then they're probably using Other People's Money, and may not be as frugal as founders, freelancers, and direct consumers.

<comment><USER17> ..and they're the ones you want to be selling to. The easiest sales are to the people who aren't spending their own money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Articles like this are why I love HN.

</comment><comment><USER19> Great article. I think the importance of starting with a low price point to generate a customer following remains key in this story however. So raise your price but don't expect all customer groups to react like the Qlab ones did!

</comment><comment><USER20> Like my co-founder said, "if you price it too low, customers would think it is worthless." However, this is totally different from the micro-pricing ecosystem so don't get me wrong.

<comment><USER21> Like Joel said, pricing sends a signal <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/11/18.html>

<comment><USER20> Works both ways then. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Matrioshka brain - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain <comment><USER2> Huge brains would have no real advantage over microscopic brains. Computers get every advantage from being smaller. Why would it be different for this?

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do people do this? Just link to some random wikipedia page.</comment>


John Kerry: "The Internet Makes It Much Harder To Govern" - <AUTHOR> http://thestateweekly.com/sec-of-state-john-kerry-bashes-the-internet-says-its-harder-to-govern-people-with-internet-2/

<comment><USER2> The Internet makes it much harder to govern in the same way that a free press in the 1700s made it harder to govern - when you have viewpoints outside of government propaganda available people might choose to take those viewpoints over the government's own. So the government has to listen to the people to have at least an air of legitimacy, and there's nothing that pisses off a bureaucrat more than having to listen to those they are accountable to.

</comment><comment><USER3> By govern he means control people.

</comment><comment><USER4> I certainly would hope so. But they're working on it, just give them some time.

</comment><comment><USER5> The Internet makes it much harder to abuse the people and government powers. Go figure.

<comment><USER2> The Internet does no such thing. It just makes it harder to keep those abuses secret, and it makes it harder for the government to prevent people from talking about it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you get beta users? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> You're solving a problem for people so start by thinking about what kind of person has this problem - are they in a specific job or industry, are there subreddits that overlap those people, maybe you can use facebook and google ads to hook them, or twitter to reach them directly. Maybe you know some of them personally. A small number of your ideal users can make great beta testers and then customers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Agressive acquisition. I remember that Reddit had 0 users for a very long time and the owners were just creating fake accounts making fake posts and acting like it was populated... then suddenly people thought hey this is cool and started joining in. Then they hit critical mass.

So, aggressive acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ask friends or existing customers.

Failing that, I create a marketing page with screenshots, explanation of why it's cool, and a "register your interest for early access" form.

Then try and do some SEO so it appears in searches (Google Webmaster Tools help me see if that's working).</comment>


Overpaying to save some endangered species, and barely funding others - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/were-overpaying-to-save-some-endangered-species-and-barely-funding-others/ <comment><USER2> My uncle works with the endangered Desert Tortoise in the Mojave. It's big and it's an indicator species.

There are these conservation contractors who primarily do two kinds of work:

1) Study the tortoise population in an area. They walk grids in the desert locating all the individuals. They take their vitals in situ, tag them and possibly affix a radio transmitter and leave them in place to re-find again at a later date. This gives them of how the individuals and population is doing over time.

2) They find and relocate tortoises prior to large development projects in the desert. They did this for the Ivanpah solar plant on the 15 near the CA/NV border and for the expansion of Fort Irwin's bombing range. The animals they find here are captured and moved to another location they've selected in the area.

The teams he works on are probably 6-10 people who spend several months at a time in the spring and fall when the weather is acceptable living out in the desert doing this work. _They make software engineer money doing this._

<comment><USER3> > They make software engineer money doing this.

You say like that is a bad/surprising thing.

<comment><USER4> My take-away from the parent post is that some people are extracting monopoly rents from 'conservation' efforts, and this waste is partially responsible for neglect of other endangered species.

<comment><USER3> ...and so you are saying that software engineers should be extracting monopoly rents, but conservationists shouldn't? (I'm not sure I'd agree with either point.)

As the article points out, this is the least of our worries.

<comment><USER4> Oh, I don't think (any kind of) engineers should be entitled to extract monopoly rents, which is why I am against all (or almost all) occupational licensing.

The concern which the (great-grand-) parent brings up is that a great deal of money is being spent on 'conservation' efforts which may be a poor allocation of limited resources that could be better used (to protect a greater variety of more endagered species).

<comment><USER3> > Oh, I don't think (any kind of) engineers should be entitled to extract > monopoly rents, which is why I am against all (or almost all) occupational > licensing.

Then it doesn't matter how it compares to what software engineers are paid.

<comment><USER4> > _" Then it doesn't matter how it compares to what software engineers are > paid."_

I never said (or believed) that the relative amount was particularly relevant; I had (correctly) assumed that the comparison had been made to give the HN crowd some idea of the amount those particular workers were paid without divulging exact figures.

<comment><USER3> I had presumed (correctly) it implied something about how much these people are being paid as if that was part of the problem.

It isn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's the same with diseases.

I meet some guy I was a grad student with he tells me he is working on cures for cancer at his startup and I think he's a Poseur, now if he was working to cure Tourette's syndrome I'd take him seriously.

Joe Biden has a personal reason to advance Nixon's "War on Cancer", but let's see a government or private effort to cure chronic pain -- it is such a tragedy to see people dying left and right from opioid addiction which comes from a lack of safe and effective treatment for non-cancer pain.

You can go after it after the fact with addiction treatment, law enforcement, etc. but it is much better to catch that horse before it leaves the barn.

<comment><USER6> This is always going to happen given the nature of democracy. For afflictions that have a well-defined demographic (HIV, breast cancer) you get an easily- organized voting bloc, and diffuse costs across a broad population. But when the afflicted are themselves more diverse, it's much more difficult to mount the same activism.

I don't mean to get political, but this is a danger of governmental involvement in health care. Given scarcity of resources, it's necessary to prioritize their allocation. Somebody's got to decide where that funding goes, and this is the kernel of truth that was exaggerated into the "death panel" meme.

<comment><USER5> Private organizations can feel the pinch from activists too.

I think also some groups are better or worse at marketing and/or lucky vs unlucky. For instance, diabetes is a diverse condition and the American Diabetes Association is right up there with the Breast Cancer Industrial Complex. We even see medical clinics in our area that are working pretty hard to figure out how to treat medicare patients with that condition both properly and effectively even though it has taken a long time.

So far as politics goes, chronic pain is connected strongly with disability and pushing it back could get a lot of people off disability and back in the workforce again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know if the study's author has a link to her compiled data but I was curious to see if the data was easily available officially...and it turns out there's a convenient (convenient, if you know how to scrape and parse PDF tables) list here:

[http://www.fws.gov/Endangered/esa- library/index.html](http://www.fws.gov/Endangered/esa-library/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Pricenomics, everything is bullshit book had this problem described, where cute-species get the love and not so cute ones even though more endangered and vital to eco system, do not get love and subsequent funding. That is why WWF has a Panda, cute animal vs. some smelly weird looking frog.

<comment><USER9> But whales get a lot of support, and whales are not very cute. They have tiny eyes compared to their head, and eye:head ratio is probably the most important factor for determining cuteness. And humpback whales, one of the most popular species, have ugly tubercles on their skin which you'd probably mistake for a disease if you didn't know better. There must be more to popularity than just cuteness.

<comment><USER10> Whales:

* Sing songs to each other

* Are graceful, gentle giants

* Most are herbivores so don't kill other cute stuff

* Are famously intelligent

* Raise their young, live in groups, and communicate socially

They may not be cute, but they have a lot of appealing characteristics and few unappealing ones.

The bumps are a little funny looking, but they just make whales look like giant pickles to me.

<comment><USER11> Probably the most charismatic of the whales, of Free Willy and Seaworld fame, the Orca, is kind of an asshole and kills sharks and seals for fun, stunning and tossing them back and forth like a hacky-sack[2].

[1] [http://www.tvthrong.co.uk/2009/10/nature-shock-series- premie...](http://www.tvthrong.co.uk/2009/10/nature-shock-series-premiere-the- whale-that-ate-the-great-white/)

[2] [https://youtu.be/TuUFjvBnu9g?t=70](https://youtu.be/TuUFjvBnu9g?t=70)

<comment><USER10> Yeah, orcas are bastards. But they look like cuddly sea pandas!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It takes constant fighting to prompt saving a single species. Take a look at the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrocercus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrocercus) for instance. They are endangered by husbandry and mineral mining which both have deep pockets. Most of the population isn't an issue. The Sage-grouse had a PBS special made out of it even. I think that makes a big difference to make a detailed documentary of the life cycle of endangered species.

Spreading the money out evenly would doom them all I bet.

<comment><USER13> > Spreading the money out evenly would doom them all I bet.

People can answer that question with science. (And no one argued for spreading the money out equally. The argument is for a cleverer more effective use.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There must be many groups like this these days. There's one large lab I know [1] where they use a pile of statistics, modelling and optimisation to investigate these types of problems. Maybe check out the publications of the group leader [2].

[1] [http://www.possinghamlab.org/](http://www.possinghamlab.org/)

[2] [https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=lSYOB3cAAAAJ&hl...](https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=lSYOB3cAAAAJ&hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER15> I had a similar viewpoint about indian government funding the tiger reserves to preserve the last few knowns tigers - but I was told by a range officer (people who work at forest) that this preserving tiger plays into the hands of the Food Chain and there by preserving the eco-system as a whole.. Hence, I dont think its fair to say you are funding only endangered species but you are funding for the eco-system..

</comment><comment><USER16> I always think of panda's when talking/reading about endangered species. They likely receive an incredible amount of funding and effort to save the species. I wonder if the goal is to save the national symbol rather than to save the species.

<comment><USER17> A useful phrase to know if you want to read up on this topic: "charismatic megafauna." It is well-discussed in the literature.

<comment><USER16> Interesting, summed up nicely in this line from the wiki page "By directing public attention to the diminishing numbers of giant panda due to habitat loss, for example, conservation groups can raise support for the protection of the panda and for the entire ecosystem of which it is a part." With the last few words being key.

Thanks for letting me know about that topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I thought this was going to be about COBOL. :)</comment>


China: "Will Use Military Force to Take Control of Taiwan If Diplomacy Fails" - <AUTHOR> https://www.newsweek.com/china-military-force-taiwan-diplomacy-1507263 <comment><USER2> There is absolutely nothing new in the statements reported in this article. It would have been more informative to report on the weather in Taipei.

Sometimes I feel that this sort of article is simply timed to be inflammatory, not least by using sensationalist titles (the quotes are not that they will use force, bu that they will not rule out anything).

<comment><USER3> Nothing new ... that has been a standard statement made by the military at every CCP session i.r.o Taiwanese independence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That is standard operating procedure when a part of a nation secedes. That is exactly what happened in 1861 when the Confederacy proclaimed independence from the Union. The result was a vicious Civil War which killed more Americans than any other war since then.

In the case of China, Taiwan and the Mainland are in a state of suspended Civil War anyway. With the Taiwan Straits between them, Mao's Red China was unable to take over Taiwan, and Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalist China was unable to take over the mainland.That was in 1949, and the basic situation hasn't changed much since.</comment>


Why do CPUs have multiple cache levels? - <AUTHOR> https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2016/08/07/why-do-cpus-have-multiple-cache-levels/ <comment><USER3> When my son was 5 or 6 I had a great discussion about salt containers - <USER2> little one you have on the table, the big packet in the pantry, the pallet that gets delivered to the supermarket, the vast piles of salt at the salt mine, and all that salt in the ocean.

Next time we had an egg and he wanted salt I scratched my head and asked him what should we do .. take our egg to the supermarket or we could take a pack lunch to the beach, and maybe wave the egg around in the water ? "No daddy, remember, we have a little salt cache in the kitchen." hehe.

I guess a lot of the world can be seen thru the glasses of caching data or physical things.

<comment><USER4> That's a beautiful analogy. I wonder if we would still use small salt shakers if they cost 1000x a large salt container.

Edit: Cunningham's Law in action! [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law)

<comment><USER5> From 100x to 1250x

                  container (40')     shaker
        payload:  27,600 kg           100g
           cost:  1000$ to 5000$      2$ to 5%
        cost/kg:  0.04$ to 0.18$/kg   $20/kg to $50/kg

<comment><USER6> Farming is similar $200/tonne of potatoes and one 25kg bag is $10. Quite a difference in what a farmer gets and what the end products costs although not as bad as salt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was "enlightened" many years ago when I asked a colleague (a great electronic engineer) why we didn't do fast task switching by having two sets of registers. His reply was that this would require every regular access to a register to go through an extra gate (to decide which bank of registers you want to hit), making every access slightly slower.

Larger registers/caches/memories are slower because they need more address decoding, that time scaling approximately linearly as the storage doubles in size.

<comment><USER8> What's the "cost" of registers on an x86-64 chip? How hard would it be to introduce 10 more general purpose registers? Ones that are used by the kernel, say, and one set for user space.

<comment><USER9> There are about 180 registers in the register file already. There are only names for 16 or so registers, the CPU internally does renaming for them. It would be possible to specify an API that leaves a part of the named registers reserved for kernel, but that wouldn't really help.

When an interrupt or system call happens, all the registers get pushed to the stack. The stack is typically in L1 cache (and subject to various CPU optimizations), so it's really fast to push the 16*64 bit registers to the stack.

System calls, interrupts and context switches are "slow" not because they have trivial overhead like pushing registers. What's really consuming the time is secondary effects like TLB flushes, changes to the page tables, polluting the branch predictor, etc. It takes a very long time for the CPU to "warm up" again after a context switch.

<comment><USER10>
      it's really fast to push the 16*64 bit registers to the stack

Since the CPU has 180 registers (with only 16 names), why don't we need to push all 180 to store context?

<comment><USER11> All that extra state is there to help overlap instructions on a time scale of nanoseconds. Every instruction has its own name->register mapping. If you're switching to kernel mode or maybe if you miss a branch or for whatever other reason, the CPU consolidates you back down to running one instruction. Once that happens, you only have one name->register mapping and all the registers have their correct values. The hidden state is reduced to nothing and you only have to save the "real" state of those 16.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Suppose you want to make a salad.

register: a tomato in your hand level 1 cache: a tomato on the counter level 2 cache: a tomato in the refrigerator level 3 cache: a tomato at the store main memory: a tomato on the plant at the farm disk: a tomato seed being planted

<comment><USER13> This analogy is not explaining why.

Why not just make more hands? Why multiple levels?

<comment><USER14> We are limited to two hands. The kitchen can only hold so many tomatoes and other things you need to cook. You could buy all the produce you needed for the year and store it at your house, but it is wasteful (you actually don't need it, storing it is expensive, and it displaces other things you need in your house like your toilet).

In the old days, humans would live near their wild food and not cache much. Then the Neolithic revolution happened, we started caching seeds and then surplus produce in cities, and eventually refrigeration came along and we could cache more. Each new level of caching allowed us to do more (increase population). Ya, we could still live as hunter gatherers, but we would be doing less. We could still be using Eniacs, also, we would just be computing slower.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _For a "Haswell" or later Core i7 at 3GHz, we're talking aggregate code+data > L1 bandwidths well over 300GB /s per core if you have just the right > instruction mix; very unlikely in practice, but you still get bursts of very > hot activity sometimes._

Reading that reminded me of [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8389648/how- do-i-achieve-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8389648/how-do-i-achieve- the-theoretical-maximum-of-4-flops-per-cycle). I don't 100% understand either domain, but I think this link is relevant - it's asking how to achieve the theoretical max of 4 FLOPs per CPU cycle.

<comment><USER16> > it's asking how to achieve the theoretical max of 4 FLOPs per CPU cycle.

Nowadays you can do 32 FLOPs per core per cycle, single precision (counting FMA as add + mul).

<comment><USER15> Wow. What's the minimum CPU series for that?

<comment><USER16> Haswell.

<comment><USER15> Ah, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find the real world analogies quite weak and unnecessary.

If you haven't read it already, this is worth mentioning: [https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf](https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf)

<comment><USER18> I think they are great for building intuition. What don't you like about them?

<comment><USER19> I generally like real-world analogies, but in this case I do find it too elaborate and unnecessary, too.

As a straight answer to the question, it would have sufficed to explain that accessing a larger cache takes more time and resources than accessing a small cache.

Then one could have compared that to desk vs. cabinet once to make it visual, but there's no need to extend that analogy for each individual cache level.

That just exhausts the reader and makes it near-impossible to tell which parts of the analogy are relevant/accurate and which parts are just fluff to make the analogy work.

Alternatively, if you really want to explain each individual detail of caches, then do go with such an elaborate analogy, but then explain at every step to what it corresponds and which part of the analogy is relevant.

You shouldn't write out a page-worth of mostly accurate text and then write a paragraph afterwards to explain how the analogy fits.

Chances are you've lost half of your readership at that point and many (myself included to be honest) will quit reading at exactly that point, because they feel like you're repeating yourself.

<comment><USER20> > it would have sufficed to explain that accessing a larger cache takes more > time and resources than accessing a small cache.

I think the point of the long analogy is to hammer in the intuition that physical locality has a concrete price in the real world, and the cache hierarchy is simply a consequence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One article worth reading is :

Machine perception of time, if only nanoseconds were seconds

[1] [http://umumble.com/blogs/hardware/machine-perception-of- time...](http://umumble.com/blogs/hardware/machine-perception-of-time,-if- only-nanoseconds-were-seconds/)

<comment><USER22> This is great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I though having multiple cache levels was about a trade-off between performances and costs. The closer to the cpus (or the fater cache lvl), the more expensive it is.

<comment><USER24> Yes. I don't know where he gets the idea that a large L1 cache is to a CPU the same as a 150mx150m desk to a human. Address decoding is done in parallel, not sequentially. And desks are as large as people are comfortable to produce and use.

Likewise, if the RAM would be as cheap to produce as SRAM like it is as DRAM, it would be as fast as the CPU (since it is using the same technology as the CPU) and we would not need the cache at all. Imagine gigabytes of L1 cache!

<comment><USER25> Well, address decoding can be _started_ in parallel if your page size lets you do virtually indexed, physically tagged caches which applies to only some processors. But that's a separate issue from the relationship between cache size and cache speed. That's governed by three things.

First, the larger your cache the more layers of muxing you need to select the data you need, meaning more FO4s of transistor delay.

Second, the larger your cache the physically bigger it is. That means more physical distance between the memory location and where it is used. That means more speed of light delay.

And third there's the issue of resolving contention for shared versus unshared caches.

So despite the fact that you're using the same SRAM in both your L1 and L3 but access to the former takes 4 clock cycle but access to the later takes 80.

<comment><USER26> There's also the fact that as you get down the cache hierachy the cache becomes more complicated. An L1 does lookups for a single processor, and responds to snoops. An L3 probably has several processors hanging it off and may deal with running the cache coherency protocol (e.g. implements a directory of what lines are where and sends clean or invalidation snoops when someone wants to upgrade a line from shared to unique). As a result you've got layers of buffering, arbitration and hazarding to get through before you can even touch the memory array.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why have L1 caches have been the same size for quite a few generations of Intel Core processors?

"Currently Intel's L1D (level 1 data) cache is 512 lines with 64 bytes each, 32 kB. Been that way for a pretty long time. L1D latency with a pointer is mostly 4 cycles. Not sure, but I think having 1024 entries would increase that to 5 cycles.." \- vardump, 550 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9001238](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9001238)

The total L1 cache increases as you increase the number of cores though.

</comment><comment><USER28> Isn't cost the reason ?

That is, the reason you don't use battery backed DRAM for all of your photos is not because you don't want to, but because 8TB of the stuff would be very expensive. And so most of us have RAM leading to SSD leading to spinning platters.

So the reason to have a CPU cache at all is (insert interesting explanations of caches here). But the reason to have more than one CPU cache is because of the relative cost of the first cache, right ?

If cost was no object, wouldn't you just have a huge primary cache ?

<comment><USER29> Not really, SRAM(what most caches use) isn't just more costly is also consumes a _lot_ more power. You'd be hitting thermal limits much sooner than with traditional DRAM.

<comment><USER25> Is that right? Traditionally DRAM has used much more power because it requires a periodic refresh whereas the power consumption of SRAM is purely leakage. Now, maybe leakage power has grown so much in recent years that this is no longer true but if so I'd find that very surprising. Do you have any numbers?

<comment><USER29> In SRAM you get Leakage + Switching current. For cases like a cache where you're going to be constantly churning bits this can drive up power quite a bit.

I don't claim to be an expert so there are probably cases where it's lower. However when I was looking into fast RAM for storing data from an FPGA for a simple Logic Analyzer most of the SRAM was almost 2-4x what DRAM was for power consumption at the same storage size(with SRAM being a blazing fast cycle access).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If you're going to combine all the CPU caches into L1 why not also put the RAM and the SSD into the CPU L1 cache as well and just have 1TB of L1 CPU cache?

Working out the cost and power consumption and die size of that might be instructive -- as a kind of reductio ad absurdum...

</comment><comment><USER31> So this document surely belongs here:

What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory

[https://www.akkadia.org/drepper/cpumemory.pdf](https://www.akkadia.org/drepper/cpumemory.pdf)

You also get an answer for the question asked by the headline of this thread - in great detail (most people will probably skip a lot of details).

<comment><USER32> I also recommend: [https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Fifth- Quantitat...](https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Fifth-Quantitative- Approach/dp/012383872X)</comment></comment>


Why Instagram is So Popular - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/27/why-instagram-is-so-popular/

<comment><USER2> > _Even if you compare Instagram photos to professional Adobe Lightroom plug- > ins, Photoshop Actions, and all the tricks and desktop software that > photographers use, Instagram photos have a decent quality. The Instagram > images are certainly not comparable, in terms of quality or resolution, duh, > but the images are at least interesting._

These two sentences are exactly contradictory. 1) "If you compare... Instagram photos have decent quality." 2) "Instagram images are certainly not comparable in terms of quality".

In any event, the second version is right. Instagram photos are cute gimmicks, and applying predetermined filters to snapshots can be fun, but the results are not remotely comparable in terms of "quality" to work by competent photo printers (whether in a darkroom or in Photoshop).

<comment><USER3> As someone who sees dozens of portfolios every day, I think you vastly overestimate the "quality" of most people who call themselves professional photographers–especially those who shoot weddings and portraits.

Also, the latest version of Instagram saves high-res versions of manipulated images to your camera roll. With the iPhone 4s having an 8mp camera, resolution is not the issue.

Yes, Instagram's filters are exaggerated and images are cropped square, but they aren't _that far off_ from a lot of things I see people doing for money.

People buy a DSLR at Costco for $600 and a website for $250 (hopefully from me), and they are now a "professional" and shooting weddings on Craigslist for $800 or portraits for their Facebook friends. Without technical skills, high- contrast, over-saturation, blown-out, tinted looks become "in".

Similar to the bible verse, _"Photoshop filters cover a multitude of sins"_

<comment><USER4> So true. Just like everyone who buys "Websites for Dummies" and becomes a professional web designer. I see that a lot too.

By the way, how do you only charge $250 for a website? Is this like a hobby or do you have a bunch of templates you sell or do you just do small sites super fast and work in bulk? I'm in the website biz myself and my minimum is $1200. Just curious how others run their pricing models.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like what they said about the amount of media thrown at us sucking our souls and numbing our senses. It's so true! I think that's why there's such a big push toward minimalism on the web today. People can no longer handle having so much information thrown at them at once with things flashing everywhere, gratuitous onMouseover events, and especially the huge amount of choice we have to deal with.

I think it boils down to choice. Instagram takes much choice out of the equation. Just like they said, there isn't a huge grid of photos to choose from and that's a good thing.

On kind of a side note, I'm so baffled by the funding of sites like this. Please don't take this as a criticism, I'm just genuinely curious about why instagram or any small online startup needs funding? First off, aren't a lot of these companies something that people can just run on a shoestring budget from their home? From what I see, a lot of startups require a competent coder, servers to handle the load, and a budget just large enough to handle that. Also, how are these companies making money? How is instagram worth 7 million? I don't see ads or any membership model so how wil they pay back that money? From where I sit (living off web design while building my own web app on the side in Chicago with no employees or funding or even an office) it seems these companies could run without the millions and actually be n a better position once they get big as they won't be beholden to VCs and have heavy debt. I know it's off topic but damn does it bug me. I honestly don't understand.

Edit: the only thing I can think of that requires a lot of money would be the momentum (marketing) and hype that money can buy. Otherwise couldn't it just start as a weekend project for $20 a month with a VPS and elegant code?

<comment><USER5> To me, Instagram and a gazillion other companies on the web exist solely to be acquired. I mean, what can Instagram really charge for? It has basically become a chat app but with pictures to start the conversation instead of "hey!".

<comment><USER4> Thank you! I thought I was the only one. I feel like saying this sort of thing on HN is blasphemy and stuff people don't want to hear even if it is only out of sincererity and curiosity.

Acquisition makes sense but there are far too many startups out there tht seem to have this model. That's going to hurt a lot of people in the long run. Those who aren't acquired will have gotten rich but the VCs will get burned and then there will be far less investors willing to spend some money when a startup that actually has a valuable product with a profitable model comes around. It's like a big race to get in on the startup trend before the bubble bursts.</comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Share Your Rejection Therapy Stories with NPR.org - <AUTHOR>

A quick note for anyone who has played Rejection Therapy. National Public Radio is doing a story about Rejection Therapy and would like to speak with people who are using it in their own lives in big and in small ways.<p>For more information, see http://rejectiontherapy.com/share-rejection-therapy-experiences-npr/ <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: [http://rejectiontherapy.com/share-rejection-therapy- experien...](http://rejectiontherapy.com/share-rejection-therapy-experiences- npr/)</comment>


The Joy of Erlang Or How To Ride A Toruk - <AUTHOR> http://www.evanmiller.org/joy-of-erlang.html

<comment><USER2> Thanks. I intend to learn Erlang, because of its said performance and reliability for scalable network services, but it was hard to find a friendly introduction.</comment>


What Silicon Valley Insiders Think of Peter Thiel's Speech at RNC - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/21/what-silicon-valley-insiders-think-of-peter-thiel-speaking-at-trumps-convention/ <comment><USER2> A related article that does a good job of explaining why Thiel supports Trump:

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/peter- thi...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/peter-thiel- republican-convention-speech)

EDIT: (to explain why)

No other analysis I've seen anywhere of Thiel at the RNC takes into account this very, very important attempt at explaining Thiel's reasons:

""" Now, in 2016, Thiel has finally found a politician capable of seizing that opportunity: a disruptor-in-chief who will destroy a dying system and build a better one in its place. Trump isn't just a flamethrower for torching a rotten establishment, however – he's the fulfillment of Thiel's desire to build a successful political movement for less democracy. """

Thiel doesn't want less government, but he does want less democracy, because he can achieve his aims more easily if this is the case (or so he believes).

Lest anyone read the above and somehow believe I'm a Trump or Thiel supporter/advocate/etc, I'm solidly NOT.

<comment><USER3> I found it a relatively poor article actually. It's longer than the speech itself yet says less:

[http://time.com/4417679/republican-convention-peter-thiel- tr...](http://time.com/4417679/republican-convention-peter-thiel-transcript/)

From the man's own words, it seems to be a combination of:

• A shared feeling that America was once great, and it can be again, but currently is in decline. No other politician except Trump says this.

• Dislike of foreign wars, a feeling that only Trump says "end foreign wars" and really believes it.

And that's it. I'm not sure it really needs more analysis than that: Thiel feels America doesn't work as well as it used to, and like many libertarian types, is against foreign military intervention. If these two things are much more important to you than other things, it makes logical sense to support Trump.

<comment><USER4> I understand trump over Clinton, but I don't understand why trump over Gary Johnson. He is a self proclaimed libertarian and the libertarian party is polling the highest in their history. Other than being anti war trump is the furthest from being a libertarian in Republican presidential history.

<comment><USER5> Because he can't win and people don't like throwing away their votes on ideology. First-past-the-post voting systems all but guarantee that when you vote for a third-party candidate, you're only really helping the first-party candidate most unlike the one you voted for (which is how we got Bush over Gore in 2000).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As an attorney and someone in tech, I used to strongly admire Thiel. He left biglaw and took a gamble, and it paid off. But between his support for Trump and the Gawker nonsense, I no longer have any respect for the man. Anyone on record supporting trump is on the wrong side of history.

<comment><USER7> On some issues maybe, on others probably not. I think he's on the right side of one key issue: [http://www.salon.com/2016/06/22/donald_trump_is_no_lgbt_ally...](http://www.salon.com/2016/06/22/donald_trump_is_no_lgbt_ally_he_shouldnt_be_the_only_voice_criticizing_islamic_intolerance). As a Bangladeshi with a beard I don't say that lightly, but we're at a weird point in history where only a guy not afraid of being called racist,[1] can take a stand (however opportunistic) on what is becoming a worldwide assault on cherished liberal social values.

[1] As an aside, calling facially race-neutral comments about particular immigration statuses or religious beliefs "racist" is kind of offensive to people of that race who don't share that immigration status or those religious beliefs. I'm sure there are a lot of Hispanics in the US who came here legally who don't appreciate liberals saying that Trump wants to deport their families, as if all Hispanics are here illegally.

<comment><USER8> Replying to your aside... You are absolutely correct. Thank you.

I'd add that implementing security "at the border" is the lightest touch option available and doesn't infringe on the rights of any citizens. But our leaders won't do it.

Instead they create the TSA to eliminate free travel and get access to our emails & phone calls to eliminate privacy.

Also, while I see both sides of the gun argument, it worries me that the government uses an obvious Islamic terrorist attack as an excuse to push gun control.

In fact, it's almost like our government doesn't mind terrorist attacks, because with every attack they have an excuse to infringe on more of our rights and expand their power.

<comment><USER9> The US government commits terrorist attacks on a regular basis. I may not convince all of you about the air strike in Syria the other day, or the hospital that was intentionally hit a few months back, but can any of you deny that the Shock and Awe bombing campaign at the outset of the Iraq war was terrorism? Shock and Awe was the "use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy's perception of the battlefield and destroy its will to fight". The stated purpose was to terrify the civilian population. The Oxford Research Group estimated that there were 6,616 civilian deaths.

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

<comment><USER8> that's not the common understanding of Terrorism. That's just war.

I'm sympathetic to anti-Iraq war views.

Less sympathetic to those actually against the war. Most seemed like they didn't want any response to terrorism at all, which is unacceptable.

There's an ideology out there that wants to come to my country and kill me and my family. I'm perfectly fine killing those people first - or at least making sure they can't come here and commit the ultimate hate crime.

<comment><USER10> You can't respond to terrorism with overwhelming force, its a concept. A tactic. It just goes underground when stamped out or gets taken up by other idealogues who act alone.

We went to fight extremists who happen to use terrorism. We also spent most of our time and money with our dicks in our hand instead of 'killing them before they killed us.'

They don't want you dead, anyway. they want you terrified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > 14 said they would not personally do business with him as a result.

One of the most interesting things about current politics.

I've always found it odd that republicans haven't picked up on this and tried to seize on the opportunity to create an incubator for republican leaning/apolitical companies.

Seems like there would be a tremendous amount of opportunity there given the success of fox news, particularly for an apolitical twitter given recent censorship issues.

<comment><USER12> The idea just might be in the air, but there are several ways an attempt at implementing it can go, some of which are less likely than others to succeed through differentiation. Those details should not be neglected.

For one, "libertarian" (but explicitly not left-libertarian) would probably be a better first-order approximation of how to position such an incubator (or conference, or...). A Republican incubator could plausibly reject Curtis Yarvin on ideological grounds, which doesn't seem like the goal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article fails to address the growing divide between east coast and west coast technologist and entrepreneurs. Many of us in New York are ashamed and embarrassed by the valley, and are looking to change it via negation.

<comment><USER14> Absolutely. I'm in NYC for HOPE this weekend. Coming from Silicon Valley where 1% of the workers are black, I was so happy to see such a huge diverse crowd at the conference, all there for the shared love of exploring technology and hacker culture. SV has some incredibly smart people but, in my experience, all they care about is making money. Feels like the hacker spirit has absolutely vanished

<comment><USER15> As a NY (and India) guy who occasionally visits the west coast, seriously? NY loves tech but the valley only wants to make money?

Consider the blockchain. Out west they try and rebuild the world with it - consider the (thiel funded) urbit. Back east we just replace banking clearinghouses with bank built blockchain.

What makes you feel differently? Also curious what the ancestry of the people doing tech has to do with anything.

<comment><USER14> Urbit, to me, is an elitist joke filled with needlessly obscurantist terminology. If it takes off I will eat my foot but I doubt it. To me it's just another example of the Valley bubble where they want "to change the world" but have no connection to the world they so desperately (for mostly egotistical reasons) seek to alter.

The NYC scene I've witnessed at HOPE is not nearly as pretentious as SV people. Whenever I hear "changing" or "rebuilding" the world my bullshit meter explodes. To me the NYC scene doesn't want to change the world in grand capitalistic gestures, they want to help out people and have information be free. I'm a big fan of 2600 and that whole ethos. Not to say SV is devoid of that, it's just so much more focused on the glitz and bullshit.

The ancestry / ethnicity of people in tech has to do with everything. Algorithms can be racist - whether it's insensitive snapchat filter (the Bob Marley one comes to mind) or facial detection algos that can't detect black people because the devs only tested it on lighter-skinned people. Diversity is a beautiful thing, especially in these polarizing times, and so its meaningful to me for there to be a large amount of different folk involved in our profession and interests. Only 1% of people working in Sv are black. That's just wrong.

<comment><USER15> Urbit may or may not take off - I'm skeptical myself. But unlike most of the NY tech scene it is an _attempt_ at replacing democracy with cryptographically secure monarchy (which I may be misrepresenting as "blockchain"). I can't imagine anyone in NY even attempting something like that - can you?

Algorithms failing to detect black people is not "racist." It's simply a reflection of the fact that contrast matters. Any algorithm out there will detect `5f(x) + noise` more accurately than `0.5 f(x) + noise`. Black people reflect fewer photons than white people, that's just how physics works. Why do you believe Black Americans can change this? And why can't dark skinned Tamils (probably the stereotypical data scientist) do the same thing?

I have absolutely no idea why you consider some specific demographic breakdown "just wrong". What's your underlying moral principle? The most I can come up with is some kind 1930's Italian style corporatism with certain specific ethnic groups as the corporates, but that seems uncharitable.

<comment><USER16> >Algorithms failing to detect black people is not "racist." It's simply a reflection of the fact that contrast matters. Any algorithm out there will detect `5f(x) + noise` more accurately than `0.5 f(x) + noise`. Black people reflect fewer photons than white people, that's just how physics works. Why do you believe Black Americans can change this? And why can't dark skinned Tamils (probably the stereotypical data scientist) do the same thing?

Actually, it is passively racist, since many of these algorithms have nothing to do with contrast and everything to do with improper tagging and insufficient and incorrect training data. It is how black people got labelled gorillas by google, and how I can name some names of how to get through a prominent AI/ML driven filter with Japanese woodblock shunga prints from the late Tokugawa period (go look it up yourself for examples)

Dark Skin Tamils can and should be part of developing tagging. I also tend to think that for things as complicated as porn or race, you may want to even do different training data in different places for different cultures. I don't honestly know how a Tamil would take an american's view on the imagery at the temple at Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh. To many Americans, the sculptures on the temple may be outside the pale for work, but for a Hindu Tamil, it may be a place of great religious significance and may not bother them in the slightest.

> But unlike most of the NY tech scene it is an attempt at replacing democracy > with cryptographically secure monarchy (which I may be misrepresenting as > "blockchain"). I can't imagine anyone in NY even attempting something like > that - can you?

The better question is why? Even Hobbes hated monarchies, he just thought they were the best of bad options under the conditions of you magically get a benevolent ruler, and only because he lived through too many radical revolutions in england. Almost everyone else disagrees with him.

What happens when you are on the outs with your monarch/dictator. What is your counterweight in the state to have real rights? (bitcoins and the blockchain are not them, especially for a mass group)

How do you plan on dealing with that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Silicon valley is increasingly adopting way too much of the PC groupthink as of late. There's absolutely nothing and nobody that is truly disrupting anything. Even the word "disrupting" has become a cliche adlibs fill in the blank for pitching "new ideas".

Gone are the middle-class rebels (jobs/clark) that don't care what anybody thinks, in are the ivy-league-ish conformers that want wall street funding and friendly government regulation (basically everybody.

And hey, if wall street and friendly government regulators is what you want and if you have a few hundred grand (maybe a few million) to throw at her foundation or her friends, then Hillary is your gal.

<comment><USER17> > There's absolutely nothing and nobody that is truly disrupting anything

It's not for want of trying.

[http://urbit.org](http://urbit.org)

And my own humble efforts in this regard:

[https://sc4.us](https://sc4.us)

<comment><USER8> Thank you for your efforts. I will read more of this when I get a chance. You are right that the new tech barons are waaaaay too cozy with the government. They travel by private jet with armed bodyguards and share our info with the government and tell us to "relax" and "get along" while we are getting felt up by TSA and having our emails read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Speaking privately, Thiel's allies could only conjecture reasons for his > unexpected partnership with Trump; many expressed frustration with how > anyone could support a candidate so unpredictable.

I could come up with a few pretty obvious reasons why a gay libertarian like Thiel would support trump.

1) Democrats support the resettling of millions of Muslims to the West that have been indoctrinated in an ideology that calls for killing gays. Currently in 11 Muslim countries acting out homosexuality is punishable by death. In most others they imprisons gays and extra judicial killings of gays by mobs are not persecuted.

It is not unreasonable for a gay man to fear Muslims and Muslim culture.

2) Democrats engage in political correctness and in vilification of their political opponents (You don't agree with me? You are like Hitler!) to a degree that people who say the wrong things or support the wrong candidate must fear for their financial and in some cases even physical security.

Even a billionaire like Thiel will face repercussions for this as was mentioned in the article:

> In my anonymous poll of 42 randomly selected start-up founders from the > database CrunchBase, only nine people supported Trump. Fifteen of them > opposed Thiel's speech for Trump, and 14 said they would not personally do > business with him as a result.

In many areas it is basically open season on anyone that openly supports Trump, people will attack you, people will key your car and strangers will insult you.

It says a lot when people like Dilbert creator Scott Adams endorse Clinton because they fear for their personal safety: [http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145456082991/my-endorsement- for...](http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145456082991/my-endorsement-for- president-of-the-united-states)

This vilification pushed by the Democrats is the exact opposite of freedom and democracy. I totally get why a libertarian would support Trump even if he doesn't like him to at least restore the most basic personal freedoms.

3) Trump is very much anti big government. He wants to reduce its size and remove regulations that inhibit the growth of the private sector. Few libertarians would have a problem with that.

Also it isn't sustainable to permanently have a large portion of society completely dependant on government as we can obviously witness by the insane growth of government debt everywhere in the West.

This system almost guarantees that poor people will always stay poor and that their children will be poor too as all they know is dependance and submission to the social system.

Social systems do not help the poor, they never did. Over the last decades it has gotten bigger and bigger and yet poverty never went down, instead the opposite happened.

The same is true for public education which was basically run by liberals since the 80ties. It has gotten so bad that today it can't even guarantee that a child going through this system will not end up as a functional illiterates.

<comment><USER19> _" Democrats support the resettling of millions of Muslims to the West that have been indoctrinated in an ideology that calls for killing gays."_

Full stop. What? I stopped reading right there.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I've never even heard such a stupid idea before.

Oh. "The West", not the USA's West Coast. You're channeling David Rubin.

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

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11553708](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11553708)

The "regressive left" and endorsing terrorism and other fever dreams. He's just making shit up.

<comment><USER18> Sorry I don't understand, I don't even know David Rubin.

I'm living in the EU which is run by liberals/lefts and I can clearly see that they are pushing hard against the peoples will to allow millions of Muslims to resettle here. (And Obama/Hillary never fail to support this policy)

I did not say that these liberals endorse terrorism, I just say that they are doing it against the will of the people and that there are a lot of legitimate concerns that we have (terrorism, violence, sexual harassment) which are being ignored or often shut down by creating an atmosphere where everyone who disagrees has to fear being labeled a racist or Nazi.

These people don't even know what Nazis were. Nazis themselves were Socialists! Their party name was "Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" \- in English: "Nationalist Socialist German Workers Party"

<comment><USER19> _" Nazis themselves were Socialists!"_

Calling my grandmother a trolley car doesn't make her one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The Left has not helped Silicon Valley much.

1) ageism -- once you hit 40-45yo, you're done. Take a survey of the ages of the people at your company for evidence. Most engineers in their 20s; some in their 30s; almost none in their 40s and beyond

2) sexism -- females are about 50% of the population. But in Silicon Valley? Hiring favors males. Again, look at the companies you have worked at in Silicon Valley over your career. Mostly all male.

3) racial stereotyping -- take a look again at the companies you have worked for over your career. How many blacks there? How many Hispanics? VERY FEW.

So the idea that the Left is playing an effective role in the Valley is BOGUS in several dimensions:

\- AGEISM

\- SEXISM

\- BLACK AND LATINO HIRING

<comment><USER21> The candidates applying to those jobs are overwhelmingly male, with few blacks and hispanics. Imagine an unbiased hiring process: how would its results look different from what you see now?

<comment><USER22> That's a reasonable argument, but some of the facts don't fit it. 7% of tech roles in Apple are black [1], while at Google that figure is just 1%.

A 7 times difference is very large. But let's be generous and say that the 1% is 1.5% that was rounded down. The percentage of black tech workers is still almost 5 times higher at Apple than at Google.

These are massive companies, not small startups where a single hire skews the figures. So it's fair to say something is going on here - one of those companies might have a biased hiring process.

And it looks like it is Google that is biased against black people, since 9% of CS graduates are black [3], far closer to Apple's 7% than Google's 1%.

[1] [http://www.apple.com/diversity/](http://www.apple.com/diversity/)

[2] [https://www.google.com/diversity/](https://www.google.com/diversity/)

[3] [http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/12/silicon- valley...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/12/silicon-valley- diversity-tech-hiring-computer-science-graduates-african-american- hispanic/14684211/)

<comment><USER18> I don't buy it that Google is biased against black people, it's just that Google has more jobs that require a higher education in STEM fields whereas Apple has many people employed in stores and factories.

I believe that there are just fewer black graduates in STEM fields from top universities and that's why Google can't hire more of them.

<comment><USER22> I agree most Google employees are probably not racist against black people.

But they do have a bias similar to the one you just mentioned - they tend to only hire from "top schools". It's true that the top schools tend to produce good people, but it's elitist to think that only they do. Perhaps Apple recruiters look at a broader range of universities, including historically black ones, for example.

Regarding what you said about stores and factories at Apple, those figures were for tech roles, not retail, so that isn't why Apple has 7x more. Although, what "tech" precisely is is not defined by either company, so it's possible there is a significant difference there that we can't see.

<comment><USER23> Those figures are not for tech roles but company-wide. Apple does not provide figures for % of engineers who are black.

If you want to prove that companies discriminate, look up percent of engineering PhDs (like CS) who are black that graduate per year. If that number is above what companies hire - you will have a reasonable claim.

Otherwise it's nothing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Yahoo Keeps Killing Everything It Buys - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/05/yahoo-blink

<comment><USER2> It is a shame that yahoo is shutting those apps down. I wonder how easy it would be for yahoo to keep the team. With an exit under their belt, why wouldn't they just leave after doing their time?

</comment><comment><USER3> Couldn't it be they bought those startups only to integrate the userbase?

</comment><comment><USER4> Simple answer: these are aqui-hires, not acquisitions.</comment>


Public Domain Day 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2020/ <comment><USER2> Reading this page managed to make me deeply unsettled and unsatisfied. 1924. How many people do you know who were in their teens or twenties during 1924? You don't. It's completely ridiculous. Our history is being ripped away from us. We should be getting works from the 1960s now, not table scraps from _96 years ago._

This is said all of the time, but the people who caused Eternal Copyright are going to go down in history as men and women who intentionally handicapped the human race, if there are even history books by then: who knows, they may apply copyright to history itself! Only the Walt Disney Company gets to write history, and in it Mickey and Bob Iger shall save our children singlehandedly from the horror of media that dares not to be owned by a gigacorporation.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd argue we should be getting works from the 90s now. 25 years is enough for patents, why not for copyrights?

<comment><USER3> Because that would force media companies to compete with their own old content. If people could see movies from the 80s and 90s for free, many might choose them over newer stuff.

<comment><USER2> Actually, free viewing isn't the problem. Production is. I'm sure if Disney were offered a choice between "Allow everyone to view old content free" and "Allow anyone to make Disney content," they'd pick the former.

Copyrights make sense for producers for a large span of time, just not _this_ large of a span of time.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Interested in building "A Dark Room" clone in AngularJS? - <AUTHOR>

Anyone interested in building a hybrid-clone of the game "A Dark Room" http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/ using AngularJS?
I have been working as a Software Engineer for quite a while now, and recently I've come across AngularJS and love it.
I also loved the whole game concept and minimalism of the "A Dark Room" game and would like to learn more about AngularJS while doing something fun.
I already have several ideas, but it will probably be more productive to work with someone else with a similar interest.
Let me know what you think. <comment><USER2> a little self indulgence - I built [http://clickortre.at](http://clickortre.at) with (mostly) AngularJS, inspired by [http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/](http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Ever since playing: [http://clickingbad.nullism.com/](http://clickingbad.nullism.com/) i've wanted to make a clone of it using some js framework.</comment>


Show HN: I am selling real estate CRM software on eBay - <AUTHOR> http://ebay.to/1p6Mjis

<comment><USER2> Why spend $50k to build something you can't follow through to completion? If there isn't enough intrinsic value for you to set it up as a real service yourself, what makes you think people will buy it?

(Honest, not rhetorical questions. The Internet can mangle your tone.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Spollow was one of the ideas we incubated. Our other project has gained significant traction with over 5m pageviews and 1,000 registered users in about a week. So we want to focus on this only going forward due to resource constraints. And selling Spollow will create more runway for us...

BTW, we did not spend $50k :) By expenses I meant actual time spent on building the software.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I see it's on the front page. Spollow was one of the ideas that we worked on. We currently don't have bandwidth to give the time commitment it deserves to continue with it. Hence, we are selling it on eBay to recover for expenses.

</comment><comment><USER3> What are revenues? MRR/ARR?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't have revenue.

<comment><USER3> Ok. What makes it worth $50k? Know someone in this space but it's not clear what they'd actually get of value.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I am not a securities analyst so I don't have a concrete answer. The starting bid was priced based on how much work was put into building the software.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, it's not likely worth that much to a buyer - if someone had you do 50k worth of work, they would have gotten something custom-tailored to their needs.

By building this for yourself, you were trading that guaranteed income for the potential of this making much more than that if it caught on in the market. Whether it could possibly do that is an unanswered question ATM.

That said, good luck, I hope someone makes your day!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How many users does Spollow have?

<comment><AUTHOR> Founder here. We have seventy one buyers and one agent. However, we are not selling user data but software.

<comment><USER6> Sorry to break the truth to you - but this line of thinking is a bit naïve. Software (and software companies) has commercial value ($$) for one of two reasons: customers or IP. Since you don't have customers, and you don't have anything that appears to be patentable, it's going to be near impossible to sell this for more than $1.

<comment><AUTHOR> We cannot give away customer data as it is owned by realtors on our platform.

<comment><USER7> The realtors on your platform are your customers (and that's what provides value to a potential buyer). The contacts they have are their customers (and worthless to a potential buyer).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


United States Strategic Approach to the People's Republic of China [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/U.S.-Strategic-Approach-to-The-Peoples-Republic-of-China-Report-5.20.20.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> US Administration Vows 'Fundamental Reevaluation' Of Strategic Relations With China</comment>


Ask HN: Why is HN in such a flap over Flappy Bird? - <AUTHOR>

I don't understand this, so I thought I'd ask directly.  The creator of "Flappy Bird" (whatever it is - never heard of it before, and still somewhat perplexed by the fuss) has announced it's being taken down.  Suddenly it's submitted several times[0], one of the submissions has 70 points and 50 comments, ...
Why?  I really just don't get it.  Can someone explain the fascination with this whole thing?  I appreciate that I'm really not up with the latest fashions or fads, but I'd like some insight.
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=flappy#!/story/last_24h/0/flappy
Added in edit: Currently #6 on the front page. What are you guys seeing here that I'm missing?  What lessons are you learning that are passing me by?  Why is it interesting?
Added in further edit: currently #7 +and+ #9 on the front page. Really? <comment><USER2> Venturing a guess: We're all stuck somewhere between hacker and entrepreneur, and out of nowhere this guy makes a game that explodes. Then, almost as quickly, he pulls it. So we're one part jealous that he was able to do what we're all trying to do (I'd love to make $50k a day), and one part confused as to why he wouldn't want it. I mean, it's counterintuitive to the overwhelmingly popular goal of building something, selling it, and starting over again.

</comment><comment><USER3> The app is making $50k/day, and the author is taking it down because he doesn't like the press attention. Taking down your app because it's _too popular_ is unusual, and suddenly you won't be able to download one of the most popular games.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's unusual, OK, I get that, but is it #7 and #9 on HN front page just because everyone is looking at each other going "WTF"? I get that you're all surprised, maybe I would be too if I'd known anything about it. Or cared.

I guess the questions are:

* Why do you care?

* What are you learning from this?

* Why is it worth your time?

<comment><USER3> Lots of people claim that the only thing that matters is being able to sell your product. But it's clear that our culture is incompatible with some people's personalities. Only certain types of people can have success.

We're going to learn how bad the fallout will really be when a game maker turns his back on a huge audience. Will people forget him, or will the harassment increase?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why do you care what everyone else cares about?

Does everything have to be a learning experience?

Isn't this thread a waste of time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Various external forces have prompted me to re-assess some of the things I spend time on. I have spent a reasonable amount of time on HN and I've learned a great deal, but more recently I've felt that I'm seeing the same things over and over again, or things that genuinely have no value to me.

Note that I say "to me" \- I'm not judging anyone else - different people have different interests and different goals. But I'm starting to question my time here.

As part of that I'm wondering if maybe I'm just missing the point, and that skimming the front page and skimming the newest page means that I'm missing what really matters. As part of trying to work that out I'm looking at what the HN community thinks is interesting and important. And this thing about Flappy Bird has me baffled.

So to answer your questions:

* it's not so much that I care what HN cares about, I'm just trying to work out if I'm missing something;

* no, not everything has to be a learning experience, but HN isn't especially entertaining or relaxing, so if it's not educational, it's of negative value to me;

* and maybe this thread is a waste of time for you, in which case why did you take the time to contribute to it?

So, just thinking out loud, trying to learn ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The current flap [sorry] was preceded by this fairly popular item here on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7192265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7192265)

HN is also a receptive audience for stories about the unexpected costs of success when a product takes off [sorry].

</comment><comment><USER6> I think much of the audience of HN is surprised that something so rough and unpolished could be so successful. A popular assumption is that you need to professionally use modern technologies to standout and be successful. Flappy Bird shows that in this segment (mobile gaming), it just has to be fun. Nobody really cares if it's rough around the edges, especially when it's free.

I think the open question is whether 'unpolished but delivers the MVP' will "fly" in other markets? I think a takeaway from the whole Flappy Bird saga is that delivering on the MVP is what matters, not necessarily how polished it is. Flappy Bird simply had a lot more latitude to be unpolished due to cost and what it was promising. Experienced developers are left shaking their heads wondering "they hit top of the charts with THAT?"

</comment><comment><USER7> Because we all wish we'd come up with something that big.

</comment><comment><USER8> You've never heard of it, but you most people here have.

Flappy Bird is the most popular app (#1 on iOS App Store) in the world right now, and has been for a month. Realize that, and you have your answer.

</comment><comment><USER9> Flappy bird is so awesome some people reacted a like to much the people that smash there phones just because of flappy bird is just plain old straight up stupid you are not going to win at everything

</comment><comment><USER10> If HN is fascinated (based on the number of posts coming) with an old poorly- designed script language, why wouldn't it be fascinated with a small but well- designed game?

</comment><comment><USER11> HN is in such a flap for the exact same reason it got into a flap over Nick D'Aloisio when Yahoo purchased his app.

<comment><USER12> Hating when young programmers see huge success?</comment></comment>


Why doesn't Hacker News offer more features? - <AUTHOR> It seems like a seriously missed opportunity to spread and conserve the rich knowledge that HN contains.. I'd like the opportunity to search for articles and save posts to my personal account among other features..<p>Matter in fact, why can't HN take some formatting pros from reddit? <comment><USER2> > It seems like a seriously missed opportunity to spread and conserve the rich > knowledge that HN contains..

Hacker _News_ , as the name suggests, is about news, not about knowledge. Wikipedia is about knowledge. For what it meant to be, HN does an excellent job.

> I'd like the opportunity to search for articles and save posts to my > personal account among other features..

How would you like to search for articles other than what's currently available in the box at the bottom of the page?

And you already can save the articles to your account. That's what "favorite" link below the article's title is for.</comment>


'Quantum coat' makes batteries child-safe - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29885832

<comment><USER2> An impressively simple solution, although as described it is so obvious I'm not sure if it is patent-worthy.</comment>


Experian CEO trying to lobby his way out of responsibility for T-Mobile breach - <AUTHOR> https://www.youbetrayedus.org/experian <comment><USER2> The site claims that CISA would "give them total legal immunity when they get hacked, as long as they share your personal information with the government".

Here is the text of CISA: [https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th- congress/senate-bill/754...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th- congress/senate-bill/754/text)

What specific sections of it support that claim?

<comment><USER3> (Answer: none of them; FFTF is simply making that up.)</comment></comment>


Show HN: A frame by frame GIF editor with Photoshop vibes - <AUTHOR> http://gifexplosion.com/app.php <comment><USER2> I am working on a photo editor [https://www.Photopea.com](https://www.Photopea.com) and I added the GIF capability some time ago :)

Simply put, each layer, whose name starts with "_a_", defines a frame. Layers with other names are visible in all frames.

An example: go here [http://photopea.com#iL9sRwekM](http://photopea.com#iL9sRwekM) and press File - Export As - GIF :)

<comment><USER3> Hey Ivan, what's the deal with pixlr pro ([https://pixlr.com/pro/](https://pixlr.com/pro/)).

It looks exactly like photopea - not just the same idea - but like someone copied and pasted the site.

<comment><USER2> Hi, we licence Photopea to them. They provide it to their customers, together with the access to their stock photos and other features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to edit gifs, frame by frame like in stop motion movies, so I made this app that allows you to build and animate gifs without the overhead of photoshop. It splits a premade gif into frames then allows you to edit these frames one at a time directly on the app

<comment><USER4> Add some example gifs to play with! I don't have any gifs on hand, and I'm unlikely to go through the hassle of finding a good candidate gif, downloading it, and then reuploading it to your site. Would love to play with some good examples!

<comment><AUTHOR> awesome I will get to work on it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice work. Something I've wanted before, but I'm a little confused by the UX.

I upload a gif, select a frame, modify it. But then I seem to only be able to add it to the end of the gif?

Changes are not made to the existing frame.

And I don't seem to be able to change the order of frames (ie: move the modified frame to it's original position).

I recently used this tool ([https://ezgif.com/add-text](https://ezgif.com/add- text)), which got the job done. The most useful feature on it was the capability to set "x frame to x frame". ie: add text from frame 25 - end or 25 - 40.

The combination of your layers feature, plus frame x to x, would make this quite productive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback. You can modify the frame by pressing the up arrow on the frame. The up arrow sets the frame to the current value of the canvas, the down arrow sets the canvas to the given frame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is quite similar to [https://giflr.com/](https://giflr.com/) – a web app I developed in 2014.

Liking the way you can build animations by adding one frame at a time and preserving what you drew on the previous frame.

I was a bit confused about how to select and edit frames after having uploaded a GIF to edit it.

</comment><comment><USER7> This brings back so many good memories.

I remember when AIM was a hyper-popular thing with my generation (Millennial) in the early 2000s. The communities around buddy icons all passed around a pirated copy of Jasc Animation Shop to create buddy icons. So many great things were made with that piece of software. It just worked and was so easy to use that 10-year-olds could pick it up and go.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice work but I'am not able to zoom in on the canvas? E.g. this one, everything is to small to do any meaningful editing:

[https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8c/48/5f/8c485f66cc5831d30ee2...](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8c/48/5f/8c485f66cc5831d30ee2c20cc3865c75.gif)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is excellent. Thanks, bookmarked!

Handy to combine with peek ([https://github.com/phw/peek](https://github.com/phw/peek)) which does a good job of recording gifs.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ahem. Photoshop* vibes. While the tool has utility it falls nowhere near the "photoshop vibes" category. I understand it's all marketing but come on man...

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know a good real gif editor which show you advanced gif options? such as per frame delay, left, top offset..</comment>


Independent Peer-Review Initiative - <AUTHOR> http://www.openscholar.org.uk/independent-peer-review-initiative/

<comment><USER2> The implementation of their ideas can be found here: [http://www.lib- res.org/](http://www.lib-res.org/).

I have to say that I am essentially 100% in line with their views on how the peer review system should be structured. However, the site, for lack of better words, sucks. It is slow, buggy, and poorly designed. What researchers actually WANT is the simplicity of arxiv.org with a login feature and peer- reviewed commenting.

Another group has another attempt here: [https://publons.com](https://publons.com). The website is much cleaner and better functioning, however, their idea is that peer-review may or may not be made public. It is mostly for people who want recognition for their peer review work.

I wish they would just team up, implement the ideas of the first group with the coding and design talent of the second.</comment>


Show HN: Prepare for technical interviews with real questions from companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.stratascratch.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I've spent my career continuously prepping and practicing for technical interviews, specifically SQL and python, and mainly for marketing analytics and some data science. I also teach SQL and python on the side and need a platform for my students to play around with.

I built Strata Scratch to help people prepare for their technical interviews and brush up on SQL and python. I loaded it with technical interview questions I've sourced from various sites. We created our own underlying datasets and changed the questions a bit keep original and test specific concepts that are often found on interviews.

The platform is MVP-ish, as it's only a side hustle but it's continuously improving. It's free to try out but has a monthly subscription if you want to unlock all the questions. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Here's a link to a Youtube we did also: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6gM265zG68](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6gM265zG68)</comment>


Ask HN: For a startup which SSL certificate authority would you recommend & why? - <AUTHOR> I am trying to find a trusted & not too expensive SSL certificate authority with wild card support for multiple subdomains.
This is what I found so far:
DigitCert - Seems to be a good option. Their support & ratings seems quite good based on reviews. $595 for their unlimited wildcard plus certificate.
Thawte - Comparatively higher price compared to Digicert. Not sure how their support is.
Verisign - Submitted request to find which plan of theirs supports wild card certification.
Comodo - Cheaper but several issues were reported even recently in HN few months back - especially the issue in Iran where their Private key was released.
Godaddy - We do not want to go near it anyway.
Your recommendations for any good providers who are priced much lower for startups will be very helpful. Thanks! <comment><USER3> I'll probably be downvoted for this, but if I were you I would try to avoid getting wildcard certs.

Once you have a wildcard cert, you'll find all kinds of places you want to start using it...the web site, the production system, the blog, the mail server, the remote access server, and so on. But effectively they mean that if, say, your blog gets pwned, then _everything_ in your production is pwned and has to be revoked and re-certificated (and the security advisory is much uglier).

Find an inexpensive one of the top 10 CAs (other than GoDaddy of course) - <USER2> hardly matters which. IMHO there's no reason you should have to pay per-server for a cert. It makes disappointingly little difference who you go with on the server side, especially if you generate your own keys and CSR, then the CA never even sees your private key.

Comodo's private key was not hacked. They did issue some fraudulent certs through hacked resellers, but that compromised the security of _all users_ equally.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. For my SAAS app where I need to issue <<customername>>.<<mydomain>>.com it will be very expensive to start with if I do not go for wildcard.

I understand the risk & re-certification issue and will look into this further.

<comment><USER3> You should fully understand the same-origin implications of such a design before deploying it.

For example, if <<customername>> is able to set cookies or run script (e.g., via XSS), they will be able to set cookies that affect _everything_ under <<mydomain>>.com. Under some circumstances they will even be able to read back the values.

Here's a good site to keep you awake at night: [http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2010/10/http-cookies-or-how- not-...](http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2010/10/http-cookies-or-how-not-to- design.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> With the caveat that I realize Namecheap has been getting a lot of positive publicity here, lately, I'll mention that they continue to offer low prices on RapidSSL certificates. I haven't used them, but comments I've read over the last several years have left me with the impression that RapidSSL certificates are fairly well regarded and are generally considered a good, economical choice.

As you can see from the page, Namecheap also has a significant variety of other certificate choices.

HTH

(And I've nothing to do with Namecheap, other than being a small customer of theirs.)

[https://www.namecheap.com/ssl-certificates/geotrust-ssl- cert...](https://www.namecheap.com/ssl-certificates/geotrust-ssl- certificates.aspx)

And if you want organization validation, for example:

[https://www.namecheap.com/ssl-certificates/geotrust-ssl- cert...](https://www.namecheap.com/ssl-certificates/geotrust-ssl- certificates/business-validated.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER5> At freshdesk we use Digicert and are quite happy with them.No major problems in setting up or ongoing maintenance. Whenever we needed support they have responded promptly. Would gladly recommend them.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have used StartCom for a few years, and have had positive experiences every time I needed to contact a person for help. They seem to be an ethical company.

</comment><comment><USER7> We use instantssl (comodo) and are very happy, no issues [yet].</comment>


Email Provider VFEmail Suffers 'Catastrophic' Hack - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/02/email-provider-vfemail-suffers-catastrophic-hack/ <comment> m-p-3 I guess that's what you call a disaster recovery test and they were caught as unprepared.

<comment><AUTHOR> They are actually called disaster recovery exercises and they are not pass/fail, they are used to learn gaps in their plans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I think that email service was always a 1.5 person operation so something like this was probably bound to happen. Running a complicated service like email is hard and with the growing complexities of attacks, it's only going to get harder.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What was the motive? Perhaps this could be a nation state (Russia?) covering it's tracks on manipulating the U.S.A. elections?</comment>


Ask HN: Braintree shut me down with zero notice. Who do I migrate to? - <AUTHOR>

Background: I run an online medical marijuana evaluation service (which is 100% legal via state and federal laws).
I've been processing with Braintree for the past few months, and 10 minutes ago I got an email saying they are shutting down my account immediately.
Obviously I am disappointed with Braintree's decision and lack of notice, but it is what it is.
Are there any processing providers out there that will work with a company that has the word "marijuana" on the site? I know I saw a similar story a few months back about Stripe shutting somebody down, but at least they gave a week or two notice.
Any help is appreciated. <comment><USER2> I doubt you will find a processor that will do it, regardless of whether it is legal or not. The ability to accept credit cards is both regulated by federal law and also further regulated by the credit card gateways, issuers and banks. Even if you are not selling marijuana you may get classified as paraphernalia which banks and processors will not accept. If you are in any way providing the actual medication, even if legally, then they absolutely will not allow it. Just look at the industry in Colorado, they have to deal in cash because banks will not open an account for them do to conflicting laws etc. I am not an expert in this area, but I have read about it a few times and I don't think you'll have a lot of luck finding an online processor if you are selling either paraphernalia or the medication.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hmm, the way the risk aversity in the payments climate is going, my instinct would be to look for the smallest/youngest company with the least to lose? It's a tough line to walk. Balanced is out, and if Stripe's not having it, maybe something like bluepay/bluesnap?</comment>


Show HN: I'm building an AR/VR glove (inertial tracking, no cameras) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxeAgxs409A

<comment><USER2> Very interesting. I want to have Wizard battles with VR gloves. The Quake (Live) lightning gun works.

</comment><comment><USER3> this is super cool! but how do you track the position of the hand (like how far it is from the screen?).

<comment><AUTHOR> i don't yet, but it can be done. actually, i have slightly different plans with all this and for that it may not be necessary</comment></comment>


The difference between HTML5 and HTML4 - <AUTHOR> https://code95.com/blog/the-difference-between-html5-html4/#.V6I5PutB83E.hackernews <comment><USER2> Why is the lang attribute on the HTML element set to en-US when this blog post appears to be written in Arabic?</comment>