Hipmunk demos at Travel Innovation Summit (video) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hipmunk.com/37090485

<comment><USER3> I work in the travel space and have worked on the business/marketing side for metasearch as well as dedicated hotel sites. Based on what's been shared by the Hipmunk team, I think I have a ballpark analysis of their rev-mets:

150,000 searches/month 40% CTR to Orbitz/Suppliers - 60,000 outbound clicks 15% Conversion to Booking - 9,000 bookings $300/booking average revenue - $2.7M revenue (meshes with the comment that they generate millions of ticket revenue to suppliers per month) $3 bounty/booking - $27,000 / gross rev per month $324,000 annual revenue run rate $180 average RPM (rev/1000 searches)

It's cash flow positive and has no external marketing expenses really. The ITA agreement will entail cost per search but they will make it up by having access to all fares which will give them near price parity with the likes of Kayak and others. Hope this breakdown helps.

<comment><USER4> Looks good, although a little Drake Equation-y. Would you mind telling us where your figures are coming from? The figures all seem reasonable, but there's a lot of room for error there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's all the more impressive when you consider that Adam only graduated from college this year. If he'd gone to work at a big company instead of starting his own, he'd still be merely a promising junior developer or something.

<comment><USER6> I don't know anything about Adam and the team at Hipmunk, but I no longer even consider other sites when it comes to searching for flights. The people who I've recommended Hipmunk to have said the same. Their focus on user experience is (even for a startup) uncanny.

The word disruptive is thrown around a lot and often way out of context. I believe Hipmunk and Airbnb are _actually_ disruptive.

<comment><USER7> My gf said she couldn't figure it out. I seriously almost broke up with her on the spot. I LOVE hipmunk.

<comment><AUTHOR> You chose wisely, aberman. In the event that she breaks up with you, though, email me (email@example.com) your mailing address and I'll send you something from the hipmunk to ensure you get through the trauma.

<comment><USER8> Clearly I need to acquire and dispose of a g/f quickly so that I can get hipmunk swag ___

Btw: used you guys to get an upcoming ticket to Malaysia. Love the service :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha! Well, If anyone is reading these comments - you can email me your mailing address too. No break-ups required! We don't want to encourage anything like that :)

Enjoy the trip to Malaysia! Can't wait to visit one of these days.

<comment><USER8> Sent.

I actually got tips for the trip from Raldi on my thread in r/travel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I keep meaning to mention this in a context where Hipmunk people might see it.

One little piece of design advice I'd give you based on the reaction of _every single person_ I've shown the site to (which is in the tens at this point), is that, initially, the display for layovers is unclear.

A flight with a single layover looks like three flights because it is three separate blocks. I think you could fix this by extending the color of the boxes on either side into the connection box region. As that may not be at all clear, I've mocked up what this might look like: [http://dl.dropbox.com/u/144762/Screen%20shot%202010-12-22%20...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/144762/Screen%20shot%202010-12-22%20at%2010.56.00%20PM.png)

I think it makes it more obvious what's a flight and what's a layover. Just a thought.

<comment><USER10> /acknowledged

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wait, they are trying to patent tabs and hiding search results? You can seriously do that? Isn't that a little broad?

<comment><USER12> Yes, shame on them for that. I won't use their service for that reason.

<comment><USER13> I think there's a big difference between applying for a patent for protection vs. applying for a patent to wield it as a sword. If your company could get a patent that it could use as a defense against a big company that held other similarly-ridiculous patents, but with the deep pockets to sue you, you'd be foolish not to at least consider it. Not liking the rules of a game is not reason enough to ignore them if it means your opponent will leverage those same rules to knock you out of the game altogether.

<comment><USER14> > I think there's a big difference between applying for a _patent for > protection_ vs. applying for a patent to wield it as a sword.

Patents for protection... Like Sun's patents, right?

<comment><USER13> I didn't say that all patent applications are for protection.

<comment><USER14> I guess I was trying to express the following: I believe that Sun's patents really were intended defensively, but upon their acquisition by oracle this got turned on its head.

<comment><USER13> Gotcha. Didn't read it that way originally.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, sorry, it came off snarkier than I had intended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm totally impressed with how aggressive Hipmunk is being. Picking a fight with Kayak is awesome. The hardest thing they'll have to do is avoid being acquired.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

...

Oh wait, there's one more thing: <http://blog.hipmunk.com/hipmunk-is-excited- about-2011>

<comment><USER16> Hipmunk should be the person of the year ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Did yesterday's announcement by AA that they were pulling out of Orbitz affect Hipmunk and the other meta-search sites?

EDIT: I just noticed someone asked that question at the end of the video and Adam didn't have a very good answer. Also, boo on the patents answer.

<comment><USER18> I'm no fan of software patents either, but nowadays it really can be a matter of company survival. If some big, entrenched player starts picking on you with their patents, and you don't have anything of your own to defend with or cross-license, you're in bad shape.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

<comment><USER17> That's fine but the question was about what you will do when competitors start copying the features, patents is a bad answer to that.

<comment><USER4> The question was actually, "how are you going to protect your intellectual property and keep competitors from imitating you?" Patents is a fine answer to _that_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How does Hipmunk make money? Commissions on flights are extremely, extremely low. That's why sites like Kayak, Orbitz, etc. are plastered with ads - <USER2> make the majority of their money through advertising and upselling.

<comment><USER20> As I recall they make money on Orbitz' affiliate program.

<comment><USER21> They received VC funding of $1mm. So that will buy those 3+ [1] developers some time.

According to an Oct 2010 article by TechCrunch [2] "Orbitz pays Hipmunk the standard rate of $3 per flight sold". Hopefully they did some renegotiations recently or have some other contract in place that generates Hipmunk more income.

[1] [http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2010/11/alexis-ohanian- hipmunk...](http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2010/11/alexis-ohanian-hipmunk- digital-souveniers/)

[2] [http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/06/how-hipmunk-almost- became-b...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/06/how-hipmunk-almost-became- bouncepounce-com-and-other-strange-tales/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great presentation! I'm curious, where did you guys get your flight information from before the ITA deal?

<comment><USER3> Orbitz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> HipMunk is doing something smart and focusing on the presentation layer to win. Design and presentation seems simple and just a "feature" to many, but that's because it's done well. In travel search and many other areas, all things are virtually the same + a commodity. By focusing on the presentation layer, they actually bring about a very very strong advantage, especially in a process that people hate.

<comment> brown9-2 Is there any data available that backs this idea that flight travel customers will pay a premium for nice presentation and design?

<comment><USER24> it's not about paying a premium (they're referring users to the same tickets at the same prices). It's being about the site that consumers bookmark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like the 80s sitcom opening music.

<comment><AUTHOR> You have no idea how tempted I was to go all the way and replace it with Benny Hill...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The reason why the "non-stop flight" checkbox isn't checked by default on most sites is because flights with stops are much cheaper usually. Also hipmunk results are usually always more expensive than other traditional sites, at least for now. Maybe they should focus on getting the best offers, that's more important than UX on that kind of sites, I mean look at godaddy for example.

<comment><USER26> Different people place importance on different things. The "people who buy airline tickets" market is probably large enough to withstand some segmentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> very compelling demo</comment>


Ask HN: Presenting a company at TechCrunch50. Virtue/Vice? - <AUTHOR>

The TechCrunch50 is coming up in August sometime and the deadline to accept an application is at the end of June.
I am considering submitting my startup company for a shot at presenting at the TechCrunch50.  However, I am thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of it and am somewhat ambivalent which way to turn.  I would like to get HN thoughts on this.
Pros:
(1) You get a lot of publicity. (2) Resulting in which...you can get a nice amount of venture capital. (3) It sounds fun. (4) It gives your team a date to perform by as well as something to look forward to. (5) Anymore I havent thought of?
Cons: (1) You open yourself to the competition by giving out your idea. (2) What if you don't need VC...is there a need? benefit? (3) Can you think of anymore?
Thanks. <comment><USER3> (2) VC - When my firm began, one of our commercial goals was that a specific market leader would want to buy us. We would never, ever sell to them - <USER2> just wanted _them_ to _want_ to buy us. Maybe you should treat VC in the same way - have VC firms wanting to invest in you, even if you don't need or want it. You can always make a decision when that's a reality, rather than now.

Cons (1) - It's obviously a generalisation, but if you've had the idea then chances are other businesses have too. TechCrunch50 won't expose your idea to the competition - they've either already had it or it's not relevant to them. Getting the publicity, however, links your business to this idea, which gives you the competitive advantage.

The only other Con I can think of is that you won't be ready, and will present poorly. But I imagine if that's the case, you won't get selected, and the Pros (3) and (4) will outweigh that concerns.

Conclusion - Virtue, good luck, kick ass.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Great pointers. I especially liked your first one.

"Getting the publicity links your business to the idea" -- also a great point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For us as semi-finalist (Tc40) it helped get the ball rolling; press, other public opportunities and people talking about our product, as well landing seed money!

You have nothing to lose and if selected or invited you should go without much hesitation, especially if such will be your first experience dealing with Silicon Valley world!

</comment><comment><USER5> 1) Forget about it, chances are you suck at doing diligence and there is a startup doing EXACTLY what you are doing. If not, there are a dozen other startups doing the same exact thing. If not, the second you go live someone will start copying you anyways.

2) Publicity, you think you just throw up a page and you suddenly get a million users? TC50 will get you that first million or so users to try your thing out, and who knows maybe some of them will come back. Then a lot of other publications tend to copy paste ideas, so if you get covered by Techcrunch for TC50, you'll get a few dozen other mainstream articles to cover you.

I'd say the main con for techcrunch 50, is that there are 50 other startups being covered at the same time. So while you may have some awesome product, it will get ignored since everyone will be covering and talking about the new Mint.</comment>


Clojure is for Aristotelians - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/ThomasMeier/06095908c5a7ff009f8d <comment><USER2> From my outsider's perspective, I think the Clojure crew is absolutely brilliant (probably only the Haskell crew is smarter). That being said, I find Clojure folks perhaps a little too much in love with the process and not enough in love with the results.</comment>


Show HN: Top iPhone/Android apps lists that update every hour - <AUTHOR> https://appfigures.com/top-apps/ios-app-store/united-states/iphone/top-overall <comment><AUTHOR> We released a (free) page that shows the top apps for every country and category in both the iPhone and Android markets.

It's main benefits are:

1\. You can see the top 1,000 iPhone/iPad apps and top 400 Android apps (where other free resources are limited to < 100) 2\. All lists update every hour (where others update daily, and with a delay).

I'd love to hear what you think about this.

<comment><USER2> very responsive, looks nice. seems like a useful page. i bookmarked it. thanks for making it.

one small note: on my monitor, when I visit the Google Play Store itself to view the top ranked free apps, I can see about 10 apps horizontally displayed across the screen. but, when I visit your page, I see only 8 because they are displayed vertically down the screen. (my monitor is pretty wide, not that high.).

FWIW, i wonder if you might consider narrowing/shrinking the green "Top Ranked" banner at the top of your page. then I could probably see 15 or more of the apps down the screen without having to scroll. just a thought. thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it :)

That's good feedback! We'll look into optimizing that.</comment></comment></comment>


How did your start up survive during its infancy? - <AUTHOR>

I am curious to know how typical founders survived while in the initial development period of their site/startup?
Currently, my partner and I are looking at developing our idea and we are still trying to determine how to dedicate the time needed to build a beta version while also trying to earn enough money to live. We would like to put forth full effort towards the idea right now, but in order to do that we will need to quit our jobs which poses a serious issue given we still have debt and other bills to pay.
How did you pay for your basic living (food, shelter, etc.) and startup expenses (server space, cell phone, internet, electricity, etc.)?
Did you work two/three jobs? Did you do freelandce work? Did you spend all of your life savings?  Did you get funded before writing 1-line of code?  Were you on the unemployment teet? Did you do a kickstarter?
I understand we need to bootstrap, but you still need money to live. <comment><USER2> I encourage you go to the boot-strap route and keep working as well. I started out on a used laptop bought off ebay for less than 200 and a tracfone for a business number.

<comment><AUTHOR> How much did it slow you down working a job and working full time?

How difficult was it to transition to working your idea full time? Letting go of the income supporting you?

Thanks for the reply!</comment></comment>


Key points to look for in your next job if you are a developer - <AUTHOR> http://blog.davidtate.org/2010/08/key-points-to-look-for-in-your-next-job-if-you-are-a-developer/

<comment><USER2> Maybe it's just me, but I was under the impression that working on internal tools was one of the best places to be, at least at primarily software-based companies. You're insulated from whatever invariably boring domain your company happens to serve, you have far more range to innovate and try new technologies, you don't have to deal with customers who aren't also developers...

A disproportionate amount of interesting projects I've read about and seen were internal tools of various sorts: compilers, static analysis, testing, verification, building. If I was going to work at a big company like Google or Facebook, I would definitely prefer to be on a tools team.

Also, I think working at a financial company like Jane Street would be great, and that is also an internal sort of job. Really, the company doesn't have any external customers at all. Yet I'd go there over virtually any other standard software engineering sort of job.

<comment><USER3> Well, I think it also depends on what your company does, too. There's at least a few companies where the internal tools probably aren't nearly as cool as the external product.

For Google or Facebook, I imagine you're right in that the ops teams and the internal tools teams are the most exciting, but the products those companies sell aren't exactly super exciting to me, or at least the features they say they are currently working on don't seem very interesting. Perhaps, that's partially because they are both selling a product that is fairly mature. Ad words, search, gmail, and maps have been around or a long time. Perhaps Google drive or google apps still have a few things up their sleeves, but they are also fairly mature products. Similraly, the main facebook features (not ui) have been relatively stable (exceptions that i can think of: likes, timeline, graph).

OTOH, Apple has products at almost the other end of the spectrum (exceptions: the mac pro and ipod classic). On the hardware side, it seems like they are constantly iterating and updating macbook, imac, iphone, and ipad designs. And while I don't like what they've been doing by merging OSX and IOS over the last few iterations, I can hardly say that what they've been doing hasn't at least been innovative. I'd be very surprised if apple had any sort of internal tool that was as interesting to work on as some of the things I just mentioned.

For technology startups like nicera or meraki or arista, I bet most of the interesting work isn't related to internal tools as well, just because I doubt a startup has resources to build very interesting internal tools when they could just deal with what already exists and spend the resources they would have spent rolling their own version on improving the product.

Ultimately, I think the type of product the company sells and how mature their product is (the number of major features left to implement seems like it might be a good rough heuristic) matters quite a bit in determining in whether the internal tools are better than the product in terms of being interesting.

<comment><USER4> Apple - LLVM, Clang, and that whole ecosystem is pretty sweet to be involved in now. Wouldn't say it's 2nd rate.

Nicera - From working in Open vSwitch code for a while now, it's very clear that there were talented software engineers with a purpose to build something very real that solved a very real problem... I guess that is the basis of a 'product'.

Arista - FPGA in your switch? Sweet!

<comment><USER3> Product wasn't the perfect word to use. I just meant something intended for outside use, as opposed to tools not designed to ever be released, like many internal tools are. I'd even say that the tools you mentioned are more of an external product than an internal tool; eg the whole clang/llvm ecosystem is more of a "product" than an internal tool since apple began using it as part of their iOS sdk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nothing beats well-funded, happy environment.

Internal/external/customers/shmustomers - it is all secondary.

Nervous, always-over-the-budget, unrealistically deadlined environment kills all traces of creativity and joy.

Well-funded, peaceful, intelligent and happy environment makes for the best lifetime experiences to learn, create and deliver.

</comment><comment><USER6> That blog is a gem. At least for me as a student. One item that I found particular fascinating is this:

in [1] he quotes: Rigorous inspections [code reviews] can remove up to 90% of errors before the first test case is run (Fact 37)

How to implement this in a loosely organized group of 3 to 4 developers that each have other projects on their schedule but work on some common projects? I'm eager to write a long email to them explaining that we should do a "talk about your code hour" but I can also see the problems with such a approach. Shame, Ego, "no time for this shit", poorly spewed out presentations... are there patterns? or are pattern yet another problem layer?

(sorry for hijacking this thread)

1: [http://blog.davidtate.org/2011/12/5-minute-book-review- facts...](http://blog.davidtate.org/2011/12/5-minute-book-review-facts-and- fallacies-of-software-engineering/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Will you have an office or other quiet working area? To me this keeps bubbling up to the top of my list. I would rather work on absolute shit as long as I am in a peaceful environment.</comment>


Dijkstra: Philips and I – a few snapshots (2001) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1316.PDF <comment><USER2> The eminent researchers in Distributed Systems are so interesting. I find Edsger Dijkstra and Leslie Lamport to be very colorful and inspiring characters.

Edsger Dijkstra was a pioneer in computing. Yet he lived like a luddite. He did not own a television or go to the movies and did not even own a personal computer until much later in his career! He enjoyed playing the piano and left behind a large amount of papers and documentation - both personal and technical.

Leslie Lamport wrote one seminal paper after another in the field of distributed computing and concurrency. He co-created LaTex and the Paxos algorithm. He then rigorously defined the temporal logic of actions (TLA) which is a mathematically correct basis for a checking a program's behaviour/models at a high level. I took his TLA+ web course recently. The presentation of the course is fantastic. His mirthful yet sincere attitude really shines through in it.

Are there any pioneering researchers who you find fascinating?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing out TLA!

Hawking was great, and wrote a fantastic book called "God Invented the Integers" where he details fascinating seminal math contributions.

I'm a geek for Horn and Johnson of Matrix Analysis fame.

Munkres topology has been bedtime reading for a long time.

Quite a few philosophers strike my fancy, especially the existential school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The history of Philips' computer divisions through the years is interesting and rather obscure. After building mainframes in the 60ies (P1000) they went on to develop minis such as the P800 and P4000 in the 70ies/80ies. As far as I know this was both developed and marketed mainly in Europe, the P800 for industrial control and P4000 as an office computer. This was very proprietary stuff (both hardware and software) and details are sadly hard to find online these days. Later, Philips abandoned their home-grown efforts and went on to produce PC clones, although I believe there was also something Unix-based (P9000?).

</comment><comment><USER4> > ... I was introduced to the people who built computers at Philips Research > Laboratories in Eindhoven. It was a type of people I did not know, I found > them very strange and they did not inspire confidence at all. Later I > learned that I had been introduced to electronic engineers.

Brilliant. I'll be sure to share this with my electronic-engineer colleagues on the High Tech Campus (the former Philips Research campus) here in Eindhoven. :)</comment>


Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page - <AUTHOR> https://www.neowin.net/news/firefox-640-is-now-showing-a-bookingcom-ad-in-the-new-tab-page/ <comment><USER2> Honestly I don't care how harsh this sounds but they should fire their entire marketing department. Or the people who are approving the bullshit we've been seeing for the past what, 2~3 years?

They're either completely clueless, don't care about damaging the brand or are just malicious. And in the process, accordingly to themselves, they aren't even making money just partners and good feels, right?

We can't afford to lose Mozilla and Firefox.

<comment><USER3> Is Mozilla in any way a democratic organization? I understand that the Corp is 100% owned by the Foundation, but how does it work?

Can we do anything, as users, to stop these people from hurting Mozilla, without stopping to use Firefox everyday?

Are they, in any way, accountable to their bad performance for all those recent years?

<comment><USER4> The Corporation CEO answers to the Corporation directors. The Corporation directors answer to the Foundation. The Foundation is controlled by the Foundation directors. The Foundation directors elect themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is deeply upsetting to me because I have continually pushed Firefox to friends and family as the only alternative to Google's strongarm dominance of our virtual lives.

I have no other alternative to recommend my social circle and feel, daily, increasingly helpless to do anything about a future determined to shake down the miracle of humanity for pocket change.

Mozilla Corp--the for-profit business arm of nonprofit Mozilla Foundation--has sold out its users before in a partnership with German ad company Cliqz and again in a marketing blitz for Mr. Robot. No amount of outrage from its users has changed their behavior. Perhaps because we are locked into a browser duopoly, Mozilla Corp feels privileged to continue to abuse user trust.

How do we take back user privacy when the world's computing window becomes poisoned by those impassioned for money? It is deplorable behavior.

<comment><USER6> > It was not a paid placement or advertisement.

I would like that people were more explicit in why they despise ads. For me it is because they are unsecure, often outside the control of the site owner and heavily rely on tracking.

For a long time my impression of Mozilla is that they are trying to "sanitize" ads on the web by experimenting on advertisements that are non-tracking by design.

(this does not cover cliqz, I never found a good reason for that and honestly think they should be more transparent about it or cancel it)

Clearly we see that Mozilla has no interest in being an holy warrior against advertisements, but as said above ads can work while respecting privacy.

> How do we take back user privacy when the world's computing window becomes > poisoned by those impassioned for money? It is deplorable behavior.

non-profit or for-profit every company still needs money to keep existing

<comment><USER7> Reasons to despise ads?

> they are unsecure, often outside the control of the site owner and heavily > rely on tracking.

\- They attempt to influence me into buying things I do not want or need.

\- They take up some of my attention, a resource that I consider very valuable.

\- They create perverse incentives to create content that advertising buyers appreciate (particularly worrisome when we are talking about a browser, that I have to rely on to not sell out my privacy).

\- The are often promoting things that are often objectively bad for me (e.g. energy drinks).

\- They apply all sorts of psychological tricks, many with negative consequences (e.g. implying that I look bad).

The fact that Mozilla wasn't paid for this means very little. This is clearly Mozilla experimenting with a new channel of advertising that could be monetized in the future if successful.

<comment><USER6> My point is that ads are essentially the only way to gain visibility for a lot of products.

The fact that internet ads are in such an harrowing situation is a consequence of perverse incentives on ads delivery and reliance on clickbait titles.

wouldn't it be nice if there was a culture of treating your own site or page as a place for "editor choices"? If there was a model of trust between page owners (or admin on social media) to choose quality advertisements in a model similar to television? (I do not live in the US, here television ads are mostly reasonable)

My point is that ads are not just a way to monetize your own page, they are also a way to allow easy product discovery. In may opinion, before you can call them purely evil it is right to also point out the beneficial effects they do have.

Also many of you point also apply to most modern journalism and articles online. They are strong negative point but they do not imply that a whole practice is irredeemably evil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What I don't get is how they _keep_ doing those "it might look like an ad except we don't even get paid" stunts. Honestly, to me this seems even worse than actually inserting genuine ads. That would be horrible as well, but at least I knew they are a way to support Mozilla.

Those "partnerships" on the other hand seem all about showing that Mozilla is willing to sacrifice any kind of UI integrity or user control in order to advertise their user base as capital - without even gaining them anything.

What is going on there?

...or are some people in charge at Mozilla _really_ delusional enough to believe the "this is our thank you to our users" line?

<comment><USER4> Mozilla representatives stressed that Mozilla didn't receive any money for integrating Pocket. They conveniently left out that Mozilla _did_ receive money for referrals. The statement that the Booking.com ad "was not a paid placement" may be intentionally misleading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Response from Mozilla:

"This snippet was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner. It was not a paid placement or advertisement. We are continually looking for more ways to say thanks for using Firefox. In a similar vein, earlier this month we offered Firefox users a free opportunity to enjoy a live concert from Phosphorescent."

Well, maybe it's just me but it seems every single time Mozilla fucks up they respond with a excuse like "yeah, but it was just a experiment".

If they keep going on like this, thousands of former Firefox users will switch to Brave - which due to its latest codebase is basically technologically Chrome but designed from bottom to top with privacy and security in mind. And former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, who - politics aside - seemingly DOES know how to run a company focusing on PEOPLE using the web and building a browser with PEOPLE using the web in mind will be there and happily welcoming them to the Brave community.

And it's not like these idiots EVEN need the money because it is an open secret the likes of Google are giving Mozilla $300+ million dollars on a year- to-year basis to keep them afloat and "competing" with Chrome anyway!

<comment><USER10> Your thoughts about Brave haven't considered its model of collecting payments for people without their consent. See this recent discussion [1] and contemplate whether Brave is really significantly better than Firefox for the points you mention. I'm not condoning this experiment by Firefox, but just stating that Brave is not run by great thinkers either.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't actually have a problem with this, even though I have an ad blocker installed, since in Mozilla's statement they said they don't share any data to display the ad, and I have far more trust in Mozilla than other organisations. As long as there is a way to switch it off, it's all good with me.

<comment><USER12> Upvoted you as well as a number of the more sceptical replies.

I can understand a number of the things Mozilla does, but they have been so clumsy lately :-/

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've never been a big fan of start pages, even (or especially?) those with supposedly personalized content. Bookmarks are fine, but tiles showing most frequently visited sites seems like a pushy way of forcing the user use bookmarks, and I'm not really into that kind of user manipulation. Like this case, these personalized start pages always seem like they're designed to give the browser creator access to the user's attention (impeding the use of the browser as the metaphorical dumb pipe). It always seemed that, as in this case, these pages would be the first place for the browser maker to sell access to the user's attention.

On new Firefox setups I'll specifically turn off all the splash page widgets and/or set the homepage to about:blank. The search bar in the middle of the front page is just a shortcut for the super bar anyways.

<comment><USER14> I used to use Firefox's Recommended Stories, but eventually disabled them because they were very clickbaity, and usually when I was opening a new tab I was working on a particular task and it would distract me from whatever that was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't get how people can defend Mozilla over this yet blast chrome for simply being a Google product. Yeah there's concern over what Google tracks but I'd be using their search and services in Firefox anyways.

<comment><USER16> >"Simply being a google product"

which, like all Google products, are constantly phoning home and mining data across all your web behaviors. Recent changes are hostile towards privacy. Worse still, for mobile devices they don't allow add-ons given it will impact mobile ad-revenue, all the while the OS itself is mining user data. Disabling the data-mining is nearly impossible. Google makes tens of billions off this data also.

Firefox, on the other hand, is injecting an text ad to the default tab, but clearly it's not very targeted. It appears they're doing the equivalent of affiliate marketing, where they'll take a commission if they drive a sale. The lack of targeting will mean the effectiveness will be questionable.

Unlike Google, Firefox is also not in the data-hoarding business and this is a feature that's trival to disable. They just screwed up by not disclosing this test to their (privacy concious) users.

Firefox gets a lot of revenue by allowing Google to be the default search engine and they will need to figure out monetization strategies to get away from that model. Standing up their own infrastructure to monetize their users without selling them out to a competitor is a good starting point.

<comment><USER15> I think you missed my point. I would be using google regardless so the data mining in the browser is kind of a moot point. So my choice becomes a browser with ads or a browser without.

<comment><USER16> >my choice becomes a browser with ads or a browser without.

given Chrome is pro-ads and doesn't allow add-ons for mobile devices, your choices are Firefox, or perhaps Brave

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The more they pull stunts like these, the more i realize it's time to fork FF and get rid of all their garbage. Make Pocket optional, remove the (paid?) list of URLs that's apparently preloaded, remove all of the phone home shit.

<comment><USER18> > it's time to fork FF and get rid of all their garbage.

The nice thing about Firefox is that you don't even need to fork for that.

> Make Pocket optional

Go to about:config and set extensions.pocket.enabled to false.

> remove the (paid?) list of URLs that's apparently preloaded

If you mean the stuff that's displayed on new tab pages (like the snippet in TFA), you can get rid of it by changing "Firefox Home Content" at about:preferences#home .

> remove all of the phone home shit

I've deliberately enabled all telemetry, because I think it's data that Mozilla _should_ have (check about:telemetry to see what they're measuring) but you can disable it under "Firefox Data Collection and Use" at about:preferences#privacy .

I agree it'd be better if Firefox came with a sane configuration by default, but the fact that you can change it at all makes Firefox a good enough browser for me.

<comment><USER17> > Go to about:config and set extensions.pocket.enabled to false.

That doesn't remove Pocket, it merely disables it. It's a stupid feature and a stupid default. It should be an extension that users can choose to install (or not).

> remove the (paid?) list of URLs that's apparently preloaded

This might be an android thing only, but when I type, for instance "sea", the URL bar autocomplete will suggest "sears.com", even though I have search disabled and have never visited sears.com. There are a bunch of these which seem to have come out of nowhere.

<comment><USER18> > This might be an android thing only, but when I type, for instance "sea", > the URL bar autocomplete will suggest "sears.com", even though I have search > disabled and have never visited sears.com. There are a bunch of these which > seem to have come out of nowhere.

I honestly never noticed this, because I look at the keyboard when I type a URL on Android.

Doing a bit of research in Bugzilla, it appears that there are two different systems in Firefox to "seed" the browser with autocomplete results. The first was implemented in Fennec (Firefox Android) [1] and acts as a fallback to the Alexa top 500 sites if no other autocomplete result was found [2]. The second was implemented separately in all of Firefox [3]. Ironically, someone was worried whether this might appear to users as a paid advertisement, but proposed using engagement as a metric to measure the impact [4]. That implementation uses _browser.urlbar.usepreloadedtopurls.enabled_ and _.expire_days_ to stop using the preloaded list after two weeks (when the user probably has generated enough history of their own). But the earlier Fennec version doesn't respect those settings. Someone already complained about that [5], but it doesn't appear like they filed the report in the right place for someone on the Fennec team to see it.

I'm going to file a new report to hopefully get that fixed. In the meantime you can toggle _browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled_ to completely disable autocomplete, but I guess you might not want that if the suggestions are otherwise useful.

[1] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=858829](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=858829)

[2] [https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/file/tip/mobile/andro...](https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/file/tip/mobile/android/base/java/org/mozilla/gecko/home/BrowserSearch.java#l677)

[3] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1211726](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1211726)

[4] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1211726#c10](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1211726#c10)

[5] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1211726#c70](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1211726#c70)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A big dilemma for them. They need money, but they cannot demand it from their users, nor will they get enough (I guess?) by asking. Not sure what they should do. Perhaps dismantle the corporation, stick with the non-profit. I know I would pay them a monthly sub if it was just the non-profit.

Or perhaps just go for Apple and Safari, whose bottom line depends on respecting privacy.

</comment><comment><USER20> Someone has to pay their programmers. It's through ads via partnership with Google or other ads.

<comment><USER21> There are ways to go about this that are much cleaner and less suspect.

By simply shoehorning this into the existing Snippets functionality and deploying it without warning they're continuing a dark interaction pattern with their users.

Their response to the issue - a weird way of maybe saying they weren't paid for this and that it is purely to help users - is either a weasel words lie or a ridiculously out of touch action that is not cognizant of how much goodwill they've been tarnishing over the past year.

Neither bodes well for them.

<comment><USER22> What are those ways? Develop a separate search engine product where their primary revenue would be from ads there so they can release a web browser to track you more to increasse the reveneu from such ads that do not appear in your browser, but are aided by your browser?

<comment><USER4> At this point just admitting the ads are ads would be a good start.

<comment><USER23> Marketing types lie compulsively. They can't help themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> the language they used surrounding this is pretty gross:

it "was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner" and "not a paid placement or advertisement".

I think its concerning that Mozilla is that deep into the marketing double- think.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is Mozilla that lacking in money that they have to do this?

<comment> Paul-ish Mozilla struggles with diversity of revenue sources. They make 95%+ of their income from their search deal. That's a lot of eggs in one basket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wikipedia's campaign worked well enough that I now donate monthly. I'd rather Mozilla bugged me in-browser about setting up a monthly donation rather than paying marketing people to craft statements to explain these kind of bs decisions.

<comment><USER27> Ask any open source project how many donations they get and it might be just barely enough to run the severs, if they're lucky, and not nearly enough for much else. The idea that large OSS projects can be supported by individual contributor donations (or the other terrible idea: selling stickers or t-shirts) is just not in touch with economic reality.

Mozilla's handling of this situation is really a problem, but it's not hard to understand that they need to find sustainable ways to make money if they want to continue their mission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> C'mon Firefox... you can do better than this

</comment><comment><USER29> An unpaid ad is still an ad.

</comment><comment><USER30> I am sure all the people complaining here regularly donate to Mozilla.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's okay though because it's Mozilla and we trust Mozilla.

<comment><USER32> Sarcasm?

Mozilla burned their trustability with me at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I can see how upsetting this is but let's go on a hyperbole and compare it with Chrome. The fact that _we_ have a say about the future of Firefox is a feature that no other (proprietary) browser has.

Beware of your negativity bias.

<comment><USER34> Lets compare. Chrome has never showed me ads. Most developers target Chrome and you're less likely to experience issues. Chrome is also open-source (BSD) as Chromium, and I can use a fork (such as Vivaldi, MS Edge, Opera, Brave, or Ungoogled Chromium) if I have an issue with upstream.

<comment><USER33> > Chrome has never showed me ads.

Totally fair, but this alone by no means indicate that Chrome is more privacy- friendly than Firefox.

Firefox was the first browser to implement DNT (Do Not Track) alongside other major browsers in early 2011, whereas Chrome/Chromium implemented it nearly two years later at the end of 2012.[0]

> Most developers target Chrome and you're less likely to experience issues.

…and don't you find it worrisome that interoperability might one day completely fade away?

> Chrome is also open-source (BSD) as Chromium

Yet Google still has a _massive_ influence over the project. For example, see what I wrote about DNT above. Chromium also syncs all your data to Google's servers the moment you login to any Google service.[1]

[0]: [https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?revision=156566&view=...](https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?revision=156566&view=revision)

[1]: [https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/09/23/why- im-l...](https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/09/23/why-im-leaving- chrome/)

<comment><USER35> > Chromium also syncs all your data to Google's servers the moment you login > to any Google service.

You said something about Chromium and supported it with a link to a blog about Chrome. Though the terms can be confusing, it is very important to get them right if you run around making charges like this. I built a Chromium-based browser and it doesn't sync data with Google.

<comment><USER33> > __I built __a Chromium-based browser and it doesn 't sync data with Google.

AFAIK Chromium, by default, syncs data with Google as well unless you can disable it by some custom compile flags or something. Do we seriously expect (the majority of) users to compile their own browser?

<comment><USER36> I would expect at least the major linux distros to turn said flags by default.

<comment><USER33> As I've just checked, Ubuntu doesn't. Don't know about other distros.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Unfortunately that's inevitable given that the public expects a browser to be a free product. The money to pay software developers for keeping the product up-to-date has to come from somewhere: so it's either selling the users' data, or having a paid subscription, or something similar to what Wikipedia does.

<comment><USER38> Why does it have to come from any of these?

Companies need web browsers (and their component parts), too. They're going to pay engineers to work on them, anyway. That's how development is supported for Linux, Git, Postgres, Ruby, etc.

If every Git command started displaying ads tomorrow, would you say that that's "unfortunately inevitable" given that people expect version control to be a free product, and that the Git developers need to be paid somehow, and there's only 3 possible ways for that to happen?

("It was not a paid placement or advertisement", they say, so it's doubly strange to try to excuse it as a necessary revenue source. There _is_ no revenue for Mozilla here.)</comment></comment>


Vectored Signatures - <AUTHOR> http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1545 <comment><USER2> This is one example of a pervasive problem of the 1-bit social ecosystem or what I call the "like-only problem"

It's partly a technological problem and I really like this approach to that side. (one missing item would be nulls or no-opinion on one or more dimension)

The other more pervasive problem is the business problem if you will. So much value is in the first bit of the edge of the graph, that getting incremental bits onto each such edge is diminishing returns. Especially in venture land, the name of the game is mindlessly adding nodes and edges. It is rational for the graph owner because that's the way to grow value fastest, and because more dimensions or bits on each edge makes it all a lot harder for humans (think ad buyers) to grok.

A related issue is that from a human factors / psych perspective, recruiting for 1-bit likes / friendless / petition signature is much easier.

But critics, curmudgeon, creditors, and any number of others might point out that the ephemeral popularity contest of the graph of 1-bit edges is not a good representation of reality.

Presently the solution is "graph analytics" and trying retrospectively to bolt on additional info by inferring it from the graph rather than rich edges.

As a geek I love the idea of making our edges richer but as an investor I am skeptical it is something we'll ever see outside of carefully curated walled gardens / communities of devotees.

</comment><comment><USER3> 10px font because you hate humans?

<comment><USER4> Personally, I found that the body text being displayed in a normal size for body text to be refreshing, as opposed to the recent crop of sites which present body text in a size suitable for front-page headlines (a style which seems to be in vogue, but has bewildered me since I first encountered it a few years ago).

To each their own, but luckily browsers let us scale the text to whatever size we find legible.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately browser text resizing is fairly glitchy, at least in my experience with FF and Chrome.</comment></comment></comment>


TortoiseGit 0.1 - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/ <comment><USER2> Looks like someone is (or should be) taking GitHub up on their offer of a lifetime account:

<http://github.com/blog/256-tortoisegit-challenge>

<comment><USER3> Yeah, TortoiseGit being hosted in SVN seems ironic. Perhaps they're waiting for it to be stable enough to dogfood before switching to Git?

<comment><AUTHOR> The TortoiseGit source code is not hosted on Google Code (it's here: <http://repo.or.cz/w/TortoiseGit.git>).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I picked a good day to start using Git and Github. Literally just signed up today.

TortoiseSVN has always treated me well and getting similar functionality with git repositories will be fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've always hated TortoiseSvn, for reasons not limited to Svn.

<comment><USER6> Could you, please, list some of them?</comment></comment>


Why can't I download my videos from Picasa Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread?tid=6a9689f96c716dd7&hl=en

<comment><USER2> This policy seems to be a relic of the times before google docs allowed 10gb files of any type. Because the two services share a purchased storage pool but have different policies regarding taking items out. My assumption is this will disappear, especially with how close google is tying Picasa to google+, i.e photos and videos uploaded on google+ are stored in Picasa. Not being able to download videos from google+ kind of defeats the whole data portability argument google keeps talking up and using against facebook.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I paid for more storage to upload my daughters videos and now I can't get them back! I can hack a compressed .flv file but not the original WTF!!!</comment>


Ask HN: What is the status of Hyperloop? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> > But just how soon will we see that happen? Pishevar says his team is "full > steam ahead" to get us there by 2021 and that the first one will likely be > overseas.

> But we are getting closer to hopping aboard, according to Pishevar. The > company recently broke ground in Nevada for a new manufacturing plant and > conducted testing of its propulsion technology earlier this spring, yielding > a pace of 110 mph in 1.7 seconds — a fraction of the proposed 700 mph > speeds.

> The company is busy gearing up for its "Kitty Hawk moment" next year when it > begins testing on its passive levitation system.

From: [https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/14/shervin-pishevar-the- first...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/14/shervin-pishevar-the-first- hyperloop-will-likely-be-built-overseas/)

Note: There are multiple companies working on the hyperloop concept. The two main ones that I know of are Hyperloop One (the subject of the above comments), as well as Hyperloop Transportation ([http://hyperlooptransp.com/](http://hyperlooptransp.com/)).

</comment><comment><USER3> It may take off outside the US first.

[http://m.indiatimes.com/lifestyle/technology/indian-team- mak...](http://m.indiatimes.com/lifestyle/technology/indian-team-makes-it-to- the-hyperloop-design-competition-finals-could-redefine-the-future-of- travel-252473.html)

<comment><USER4> Some of the team members are from India.</comment></comment>


What does Atari mean? - <AUTHOR> https://japanthis.com/2013/04/09/what-does-atari-mean/ <comment><USER2> Atari is also a term from the game go. Based on the Atari logo it is obvious that this is the source of the name (the logo resembles the simplest atari configuration in go), and wikipedia confirms this:

> Before Atari's incorporation, Bushnell considered various terms from the > game go, eventually choosing atari, referencing a position in the game when > a group of stones is imminently in danger of being taken by one's opponent.

<comment><USER3> Can you link to the Atari logo that looks like this? I can only find the 3 lines "mountain/A" logo.

<comment><USER2> That's the logo I meant. I mean it's not an exact depiction of the position in go, but I had imaged that the three lines were an abstracted representation of three black stones on three sides of a white stone that's not depicted in the logo.

Actually it seems like this is just a coincidence though (and it wasn't supposed to represent a mountain either):

> Opperman designed it with two things in mind: the first was that the overall > silhouette was to look like the letter A, matching that of the company, > while the second was that its three "prongs" were based on Atari's first hit > game, Pong.

[http://kotaku.com/5864035/the-glory-of-ataris-original- logo](http://kotaku.com/5864035/the-glory-of-ataris-original-logo)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Who's Marky Star, why are people asking him what Atari means, and, if he doesn't know the answer, why did he make a post about it?

<comment><USER5> A nice short, informative article on this from 1981:

        Bushnell and Dabney submitted the list to the
        Office of the California Secretary of State.
        A few weeks later, their incorporation papers
        came back; the Office of the Secretary had
        selected their second choice, ATARI.

[http://www.atarimania.com/faq-atari-400-800-xl-xe-how-did- at...](http://www.atarimania.com/faq-atari-400-800-xl-xe-how-did-atari-get- its-name_91.html)

<comment><USER6> It was likely submitted because someone thought it was interesting. It got to the front page because other HN members thought it was interesting as well.

You've provided another useful resource, which is great! (Thanks!) Your lead- in distracts greatly from the resource. Leaving that out detracts nothing from your comment while avoiding gratuitous negativity.

Edit to add: I appreciate your edit. It's a great addition to this thread!

<comment><USER5> You're right. Although I really wasn't intending negativity, I think it's good to have a reminder now and again to just stick to a point, and that some remarks probably aren't worth making and don't contribute anything. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mh, I had always assumed it was inspired by the term from the Go board game: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms#Atari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms#Atari)

<comment><USER8> It absolutely was. Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, went on to found another company called Sente [ [http://senseis.xmp.net/?Sente](http://senseis.xmp.net/?Sente) ].

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Useless article; the name was _not_ chosen at random. There were a number of candidates, they decided to go with Atari. The Fuji logo was a separate decision.

</comment><comment><USER10> My god I've been bilingual my whole life and this never occurred to me (because the intonations make the words sound quite different).

<comment><USER11> This happens to me _all the time_ with song texts and band names. At some point they suddenly flip from a stream-of-samples to a meaning and I realize I've been missing something for years (sometimes for decades). Very strange phenomenon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's when a group of stones is in danger of being captured in the game of Go, by only having one remaining liberty.

</comment><comment><USER13> Well, there's yet another meaning for it in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries; "video game console". It became a genericized trademark for those who grew up in the 1980s. The phrase "Hey, did you get that new Atari, the SNES?" somehow made sense here back in the day.

</comment><comment><USER14> Bushnell plays go. Atari is a go term meaning approximately "almost dead".

</comment><comment><USER15> I always thought it was Japanese for "check" in the game of chess?

<comment><USER16> I can't speak to chess, but it is the word for "stones are about to be captured" in the game of go. Its the English word for this as well (most go terms in English are taken from Japanese).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> « the Japanese word 当たり atari which means something like "hit" or "strike" or "to be right." »

I'm going to be pedantic here, but that's what you would translate it in english in some contexts, not what it means (and I am, in fact, incapable of translating its meaning ; there's a dimension of contact in it, but that's not entirely that either).

<comment><USER18> To add to that the wikipedia page claims : "In Japanese, atari (当たり, あたり, or アタリ) is the nominalized form of ataru (当たる, あたる, or アタル) (verb), meaning "to hit the target" or "to receive something fortuitously". The word 'atari' is used in Japanese when a prediction comes true or when someone wins a lottery."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms#Atari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms#Atari)</comment></comment>


Cake or death: AMP and the worrying power dynamics of the web - <AUTHOR> https://trib.tv/2019/05/28/cake-or-death-amp-and-the-worrying-power-dynamics-of-the-web/ <comment><USER2> We developers and startup founders can vote with our feet. If we want to keep a free open web or turn it into a Google owned publishing platform.

If we want to keep it open, we can simply keep building great websites. Real websites. Without "amp" and "portals".

Example: HN itself. No amp, much joy!

Or take a hint from Google themselves. They don't offer an amp version of their search results. And will never allow anybody to embed their site.

<comment><USER3> We didn't vote with our feet regarding Facebook.

Every startup founder defected and surrendered to Facebook in favor of more pageviews.

It's like the prisoners dilemma only with startups and instead of going to prison you have to use Facebook.

<comment><USER4> > We didn't vote with our feet regarding Facebook.

Some of us did.

<comment><USER5> The visibility of non paid posts on Facebook is a fraction of what it used to be. When it was high, it made sense that companies built their businesses around it. Those companies, at best, are hobbling along, like Zynga or Buzzfeed, or at worst, dead, like most of them.

What matters a lot right now is something else: the direct timeline accurate and somewhat algorithm free, communication channels companies have with their customers (and you have with your friends.) That is email and messaging.

We should be paying a lot closer attention and giving greater caution to Gmail, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Particularly Gmail.

<comment><USER4> > We should be paying a lot closer attention and giving greater caution to > Gmail, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Particularly Gmail.

I agree. And I voted with my feet on those as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has anyone noticed that since a few weeks mobile Chrome shows a really curious behavior?

On a normal webpage:

\- I scroll down -> address bar is hidden.

\- I scroll up a bit and then down again -> address bar is shown

On any AMP page:

\- I scroll down a bit -> address bar is hidden

\- and then I can scroll in any direction I want and the address bar never appears unless I scroll to the very top

For me that feels like Google wants to keep me inside the AMP page and makes it harder to navigate to a normal page.

<comment><USER7> I just tested an AMP page in mobile Chrome, and I'm not seeing the behavior you described. Once I scroll up again, the address bar reappears.

Example: [https://photos.app.goo.gl/a8A3WukpMiFPMBaNA](https://photos.app.goo.gl/a8A3WukpMiFPMBaNA)

(Disclosure: I work for Google)

<comment><USER6> Thx for the reply! I did some more investigation and I can reproduce it the following way:

\- go to [https://news.google.com](https://news.google.com) and scroll down until the address bar is hidden

\- click on any of the AMP links

\- the AMP links loads and the address bar is still hidden

\- scroll around the page. The address bar only re-appears if I scroll to the very top, otherwise it stays hidden

I use Chrome 74.0.3729.157 on Android 7

<comment><USER7> Thanks! I see what's happening now: news.google.com is loading AMP links in a width=100% height=100% iframe. This means your scrolling affects the iframe and not the page. Chrome, however, uses scrolling of the top level page to determine whether the address bar should hide/show. So this gives two weird things:

* If you click on an AMP link without scrolling down enough to hide the URL bar, the URL bar remains even as you scroll through the AMP article.

* If you click on an AMP link after scrolling down enough to hide the URL bar (the case you saw), the URL bar stays hidden even if you scroll back up (unless you scroll all the way to the top, at which point you're scrolling the outer page).

I agree this is bad UX, and it happens because the Google News site is loading AMP pages in an iframe. Web Packaging fixes this: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-amp-real- url/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-amp-real-url/)

(Disclosure: I work at Google on unrelated things, speaking for myself and not the company)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So there's about four things going on here which are somewhat conflated, but I definitely agree with the approach of analysing this by power dynamics.

1) Link snippets. In the old days, there was syndicated news: org A could pay org B for the right to print bits of B's coverage. From this point of view, Google search looks like a syndication that they've not opted into and isn't paying. Of course, when they tried fighting back (some organisations in Spain and Germany, I think), they got removed from search results and ended up worse off. This is the view driving the "link tax" proposals in the EU.

2) "Snippets" that are in fact the whole article: both AMP and the proposed "web packages". In this case, Google end up publishing the whole article from their domain. The paper gets .. what exactly?

3) The bad recommendation problem: "This equates a responsible, expensively produced, extensively researched, professional newsgatherer with some guy who thinks the earth is flat for no reason other than that it 'kinda feels right'." See also Youtube's role in promoting flat earth, anti-vax, neo-nazi, etc viewpoints.

4) AMP etc. vs paywalls: "In AMP, the support for paywalls is based on a recommendation that the premium content be included in the source of the page regardless of the user's authorisation state."

<comment><USER9> For #2, the publisher gets paid for all the ads on the amp page: [https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/6352089?hl=en](https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/6352089?hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder why the author considers Facebook to be a lost cause, but not Google?

<comment><USER11> Anecdotally, a lot more Facebook employees I've interacted with understand they've been at least complicit with evil and want to do better. That's at least a good Step 1.

On the other side I feel like there are far too many Googlers that have drank the vile tautology Kool-Aid that because the unofficial motto is still supposed to be "Do No Evil" that what Google is doing cannot be evil, because it is Google doing it. They haven't even reached Step 1 yet.

<comment><USER10> Considering all the recent scandals like Maven and Dragonfly, I don't know what more they need ?!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Digit-Al Why is there a "Share on Google+" link? Surely Google+ is now dead.

<comment><USER12> Just for a laugh I clicked the button, and the post is now shared on my Google+ page. Google+ is not as dead as has been reported.

<comment><USER13> It is still available for google apps and for brand accounts I think but not free gmail accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The name of the article for the win... Izzard rules.

</comment><comment><USER15> I can agree with the author's point that when technology like Google's AMP incentivizes the wrong things by promoting what's quick over what's slow/accurate. I can agree with many of the author's criticisms of AMP.

But I don't quite understand the author's concern about Google's push for AMP being a "monopolistic land grab" _at the same time_ as the author's disgust that Google doesn't censor disreputable websites.

AMP is a technical solution to require technically-not-terrible sites; a reputability service is also a technical solution, but for a non-technical problem of terrible sites. Why is "cake or death" terrible for the former but not the latter? Especially since it seems like it'd be really hard to have a neutral reliability check that everyone could trust.

I feel there's a tension between "decentralised and open", and "centralised and curated". (You could have a walled garden as part of a larger decentralised web without needing control over others, though).

<comment><USER4> > AMP is a technical solution to require technically-not-terrible sites

AMP is a technical solution to a non-technical problem. And, in my opinion, that technical solution is worse than the non-technical problem.

<comment><USER16> > a non-technical problem

In what way is safely prerendering third party pages not a technical problem?

<comment><USER4> The nontechnical problem is the prevalence of bad website design. AMP is not needed in order to have performant websites. The case Google makes for AMP is "web designers suck".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is Docker Safe for Production? - <AUTHOR> http://container-solutions.com/is-docker-safe-for-production/

<comment><AUTHOR> Container Solutions also has a reference cheat sheet for security issues: [http://container- solutions.com/content/uploads/2015/06/15.06...](http://container- solutions.com/content/uploads/2015/06/15.06.15_DockerCheatSheet_A2.pdf)</comment>


Chasing Returns - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/chasing-returns.html

<comment><USER2> I think part of what's so scary about institutional investors failing to understand the means by which their investments produce returns is that their very job is to act as a proxy for those that don't understand the investments. That is to say, part of their job is to mediate between investors who lack the ability to understand that they're chasing pipe dreams and the investment opportunities they're after in order to ensure that the investment doesn't implode. Sounds like the guy with 40 years on Wall St. gets this. Sounds like many of the banks didn't.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think part of the reason there's a current boom in demand for startup investments is that returns elsewhere, like interest on simple savings accounts, are essentially zero, at least in the US. Add to this the fact that for software-centric startups so many of the costs have dropped (including developers, if you go with offshore devs.) Plus add to this all the good free info being shared on the web about startups and investment. It all adds up. I think most of those factors won't go away, except the near zero interest rates on savings.

</comment><comment><USER4> In the wake of the dotcom crash the Fed was forced to lower the cash rate to 1%. Cheap and easy money was a huge contributing factor in creating the subprime disaster.

Now the rate is 0%. This can end no other way than badly.

The words "too big to fail" should send a chill down your spine. Wall street as it stands now has absolutely no aversion to risk because if everything goes pear-shaped the Fed will probably bail them out.

I call this welfare for investment bankers. And it's a terrible, terrible idea.

Anyway, back to VC, we already see the early signs of a bubble: a system awash with cash, high seed valuations, some fairly dubious enterprises being funded, etc.

We all know how this song ends. At some point the house of cards will fall.some companies, VCs and investors will go under. Money will tighten up. Some real businesses will get caught in the crossfire and die. Valuations will go down. Companies won't get funding as a result (we've already seen this with companies seeking funding with 2007/2008 valuations; Mark Suster has written about this).

Oh and the other consequence of that collapse is that it will be a great time to start a business as talent will be much cheaper.

<comment><USER5> "We all know how this song ends. At some point the house of cards will fall."

You know, both vigilance and long-term thinking are admirable traits. But don't you think it's a bit premature to become gloomy about the next recession? I mean, our economy hasn't really started to recover from the last one.

Besides this, I doubt the financial markets had this level of introspection before the housing collapse. Most banks regarded subprime mortgages as a sure thing and were largely caught unaware (even if they were unaware because they ignored the facts). Don't assume that a collapse is inevitable. A bubble doesn't grow if investors don't let it. So there's a good chance that a collapse will either be averted or won't be that bad.

<comment><USER4> If history has taught us anything it's that cycles ofboom and bust are inevitable. The lengths of e cycles varies. The degree of the booms and busts varies. Bu the cycle is constant.

It's a fundamental part of human psychology: markets are riven by fear and greed. They overbuy on greed and oversell on fear. There's your cycle.

I'm not predicting the next recession other tbqnthere will be one but guarani more prophetic than saying "it will rain eventually".

The problem is that governments tend to make these things worse and more frequent. Letting banks fail would be q good first step to weeding out the bad participants.

We may not be put of recession but the Internet/VC cycle is closer to the peak (IMHO) than you might otherwise think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The federal reserve has everybody speculating with %0 interest rates. I suggest they raise interest rates! This will be a good thing as it will encourage capital formation.

<comment><USER7> The US government has a large debt, as does most of its population. While your solution is entirely correct, I doubt that there is that many who are interested in actually implementing it.

It isn't all bad though: siliconvalley may just ride the secession out, protected by a nice bouble. It sure beats unemployment:)</comment></comment>


Rails version 3.2.7 has been released - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/7/26/ann-rails-3-2-7-has-been-released/

<comment><USER2> Crap. I keep forgetting to submit these announcements to hacker news. I'm saving up my HN points to get a commemorative pin! ;)

If you have questions about the release, or the security issue, fire away. :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it just me or does it seem like everyone's stack is moving away from Rails? I mean, it's a great solution to many problems, I just feel that there's a lot more platforms that offer you even better customization and leave a far smaller footprint.

<comment><USER4> It is going through the "small, cohesive" -> "full-featured!" -> "bloated" -> "modular" -> "too many abstractions" cycle.. in terms of overall adoption, I'm not sure. Many people like having all the "hard" problems solved for them.

People tend to talk about what's new and shiny because there is greater social reward for being the advocate of something new/better than there is to say "what we have is good enough and so I like using it!"

<comment><USER5> Orthodoxy has greater social reward when everyone around you is orthodox...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't call to_sym on untrusted input!

<comment><USER6> Oh wow. rb_intern() is a mess.

<comment><USER4> is the badness in st_lookup or rb_enc_str_new ? I haven't traced the execution deep enough to see where things go south...

<comment><USER6> There's badness just in rb_intern, at least in 187.

MRI scares the bejeezus out of me.

<comment><USER7> I vaguely recall somewhere that Matz commented about how he felt that he was a good language designer, but not necessarily a good language implementor. I've always felt that MRI should be treated as a reference implementation, and the fact that there aren't _more_ alternate implementations of Ruby is a (maybe sad?) reflection on the Ruby community.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unexpected Ways in which Bitcoin Dodged Some Cryptographic Bullets - <AUTHOR> http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7781/satoshis-genius-unexpected-ways-in-which-bitcoin-dodged-some-cryptographic-bullet/

<comment><USER2> Page isn't loading for me :/ cache for anyone else hitting this: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WsX8NCw...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WsX8NCwh8nkJ:bitcoinmagazine.com/7781/satoshis- genius-unexpected-ways-in-which-bitcoin-dodged-some-cryptographic- bullet/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a)

\--

edit: tl;dr of it all is:

1) addresses are _hashes_ of public keys, not public keys themselves, so you can't really figure out the private key even with magic / quantum computing.

2) 21 million BTC * 100 million divisions = 2.1 quadrillion < maximum integer uniquely representable by a (double-precision) float (~2^50.9 < 2^53), handy for simpler programming.

3) elliptic curve chosen wasn't one of the dubious NIST ones.

The article is pretty well written, IMO, and does a reasonable job explaining why these are issues in the first place, and how it avoids them. Probably worth a read unless you grok it all from the tl;dr, and even then since it might help you explain things to others.

<comment><USER3> In essence, apart from 2, which wouldn't take too much hindsight to calculate, both items seem to be the work of a _real expert_ in crypto.

Not the ones that go for the "proven" way "because NIST said so" or the "internet specialists" that cry wolf more often than not (and miss or even suggest security holes)

<comment><USER4> Not really. The original bitcoin client did what was called direct-to-IP transactions, which didn't use hashed pubkeys, and which was vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks (oops).

Bitcoin's ECDSA curve was chosen because it was one of the faster ones, not because of any NIST connection (a "real" cryptographer of the day would have probably advised against the secp256k1 curve used in bitcoin in favor of one of the NIST curves, or DJB's curve which is superior in just about every way.

<comment><USER5> unless the "real" cryptographer knew about the NIST/NSA weakening of secp256r1

<comment><USER4> My point, perhaps too subtle, was that in 2009 there was not sufficient public evidence to suggest such weakening. Rather, the reigning opinion (supported by historical evidence) was that NIST/NSA routinely _strengthened_ standards by selecting parameters so as to make the algorithm secure against publicly unknown mathematical attacks. That is, after all, their stated purpose and what they did with the DES S-boxes.

Turns out, the NSA is a shadow of its former self. But you'd have to have had non-public insider information to have known that with confidence in 2009.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Who created Bitcoin?

This comment seems to offer many clues: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547590](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547590)

 _There are two groups that are on the suspects list for having engendered bitcoin, one group centers around Trinity College, another is a bunch of loosely affiliated international collaborators. Both groups are on the record with precursors to bitcoin (papers, software), neither has admitted openly that they were the ones._

Along with [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548093)

 _Investigations into the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto have been attempted by The New Yorker and Fast Company. Fast Company 's investigation brought up circumstantial evidence that indicated a link between an encryption patent application filed by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry on 15 August 2008, and the bitcoin.org domain name which was registered 72 hours later. The patent application (#20100042841) contained networking and encryption technologies similar to bitcoin's. After textual analysis, the phrase "...computationally impractical to reverse" was found in both the patent application and bitcoin's whitepaper. All three inventors explicitly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto._

Anyone care to speculate whether it's more likely the creators were based in Trinity College rather than being international collaborators?

It's interesting that the controller of the Satoshi persona managed to stay anonymous for so long. I wonder if they were careful to only write forum posts via Tor? Otherwise their IP address might've been logged. An IP address would be enough for an ISP to unmask them (or at least narrow down the suspect list quite a lot). Satoshi also made a lot of source code commits, which seems like another way their IP address could leak.

<comment><USER7> I have a related question. Why hasn't the creator(s) come forward? What reason is there for hiding their identity?

I'm starting to add more tin foil to my hat these days and this sort of thing worries me.

<comment><USER8> He wants to remain anonymous almost certainly because he is estimated to own ~1 million BTC ($200 million!); and a lot of thieves would track/kidnap/torture/murder someone for the chance to steal that amount.

<comment><USER7> I doubt that's it. There's plenty of more wealthier people out there: [http://www.forbes.com/lists/](http://www.forbes.com/lists/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-levin > As a result, most of the decisions that Satoshi Nakamoto made in 2008 we are > essentially stuck with.

Every single time I read something about what 'Satoshi Nakamoto' did in designing, implementing and securing Bitcoin, I grow more skeptical that one person, or even a small group of people, created Bitcoin. It is very difficult to believe that something this sophisticated was developed by anyone other than a well financed, possibly nation-state backed organisation.

This article suggests that Bitcoin was made difficult or impossible to fork by-design, which implies that the creator doesn't want to allow anyone to seize control of Bitcoin.

Paradoxically, the more you learn about Bitcoin, the more mysterious it becomes. Who would go through all that trouble to create it? What can they gain from Bitcoin's existence?

<comment><USER8> I think Bitcoin has been designed by a single person. The source code alone of version 0.1.0 was not very complex, see my post [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6561079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6561079) And most of the crytographic choices are logical and could have been taken by a person reasonably well-educated in computer security and cryptography who pays attention to details. This is my opinion as a pentester / IT security researcher / developer with experience in cryptography.

 _" This article suggests that Bitcoin was made difficult or impossible to fork by-design, which implies that the creator doesn't want to allow anyone to seize control of Bitcoin."_

Well, source code is easy to change and fork. But because this would create a fork in the block chain, you would end up with a _different_ Bitcoin network that does not recognize transactions of the _original_ Bitcoin network.

 _" Who would go through all that trouble to create it?"_

Version 0.1.0 is only 13k lines of code.

 _" What can they gain from Bitcoin's existence?"_

Someone wanted to experiment with his ideas about a revolutionary peer-to-peer currency/payment network, and maybe hoped to inspire others with his creation? Some people enjoy experimenting with cool ideas just for the heck of it. What was Linus Torvalds thinking he would gain from writing the first version of Linux? Anyway, the success of Bitcoin so far is probably beyond what Satoshi envisioned as probable (although he may have seen it as _possible_ ).

<comment><USER9> If there was one concrete point relevant to Satoshi Nakamoto's identity, especially that it is absolutely _not_ a single person, it's what he has never done...

Not that nobody else has found him out (definitely possible/plausible, and some people claim to have successfully used web tracking bugs to get an IP).

Satoshi Nakamoto:

1\. never publicly claimed any credit for the idea of bitcoin... think about it, he doesn't claim he invented the idea, he just put it forward and kind of said, what if... ?

2\. never spent or moved his massive holdings of BTC which are easy to identify because they are some of the oldest blocks in the blockchain

3\. never exercised his power to shape bitcoin, especially after the end of 2011 - aside from code contributions and that doesn't count since everyone involved can think about it and decide to accept it or not - each code contribution is a potential fork so don't underestimate the care taken on the official bitcoin client

4\. never slipped up and revealed his identity or even his _timezone_ !

That's a preponderance of evidence to me. I'll understand if you're not convinced but this is the kind of PR management that a single person just can't pull off!

What can they gain from Bitcoin's existence? Only all the economic benefits from a _viable_ digital currency. All previous attempts at digital currency are weak in comparison. And currency market manipulation is by far the most profitable game, like that even needed to be said.

Who would go through all that trouble? In a world where a US Agency (NSA) has successfully tapped almost the entire internet, maybe it's time to accept that this kind of advanced planning is within reach.

It helps to point out some common misconceptions about Bitcoin. Bitcoin does not guarantee anonymity, despite the p2p elements of the protocol - far from it. Bitcoin is much more flexible than you think, for example the "1" prefix on all addresses currently. Bitcoin does not have to succeed or last forever, the idea has been planted and isn't going away.

All markets are a mix of manipulation and organic behavior. Factor that into your plans and Bitcoin makes a lot more sense.

\- posted anonymously

<comment><USER8> I'd say points #1 through #4 promote the theory that Satoshi is a single person.

The more persons would be behind the Satoshi identity, the more chances there would be for mistakes or leaks: one of them spending/stealing the BTC, one of them boasting about the secret Bitcoin project, or revealing it while intoxicated at a party, etc.

<comment><USER9> That's a fairly normal response but you're basically acting like a conspiracy nut.

This doesn't have to be some crazy story. There's the means, the motive, and the opportunity to create Bitcoin. Why would a lone actor be so motivated to keep their identity a secret?

We obviously disagree.

<comment><USER8> Honestly, "the NSA or some secret group with a PR agency created Bitcoin" sounds more like a conspiracy theory than "a lone programmer wanted to experiment with ideas of a peer-to-peer currency"...

There are 2 simple reasons why Satoshi would want to remain anonymous:

#1 He is estimated to own ~1 million BTC ($200 million); many thieves would capture/torture/murder someone for the chance to steal that amount!

#2 Sometimes people just want anonymity _by default_ , like you who posts anonymously for no apparent reason ;)

<comment><USER10> #3 In his foot, I'd be paranoid against a governemnt declaring me some kind of enemy or terrorist.

<comment><USER9> That's a conspiracy theory.

Bitcoin will not be outlawed by the US or Europe. China seems like the only remaining threat as far as outlawing Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Matthew Green and Paulo Barreto were making fun of this on Twitter. No, the use of a hash does not mean bitcoin will survive quantum cryptanalysis. As Green --- not a stranger to the workings of bitcoin --- puts it, "if the elliptic curve discrete log problem is solved, bitcoin is toast".

Further, the "smart" curve choice bitcoin made was simply not using the NIST P-curves. But lots of stuff chose not to use the NIST curves; that's why we have Certicom's curves and the Brainpool curves. Unfortunately, bitcoin didn't do that much better than the NIST P-curves; the Koblitz curves they use also have problems that researchers are exploring.

<comment><USER12> The point in the article was that if you sent the coins to an address that never spent any coins (like the reference client does where it will always create a new "change" address for left over coins from a transaction) then the public key of the address that holds your coins will never be seen on the network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Regarding the choice of the secp256k1 curve: ECDSA signature verification is fairly slow and sipa, one of the Bitcoin developers, has been developing a faster implementation[1]. If anyone has any crypto expertise and can review the code, or otherwuse can provide further optimisations or patches, I'm sure it'd be appreciated.

[https://github.com/sipa/secp256k1](https://github.com/sipa/secp256k1)

</comment><comment><USER14> Besides dodging bullets, it amazes me that Satoshi had the foresight to include a scripting language into the outputs of transactions, envisioning a future where contracts could be built onto the blockchain. For a proof-of- concept, Bitcoin didn't need it. It could've just supported the ability for owners of addresses to claim outputs (in a hard-coded manner).

<comment><USER15> The irony, of course, is that last time I checked, large parts of this scripting language were disabled in the official client due to security concerns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is the first article I've ever read that managed to explain cryptographical stuff in simple terms without making my head spin.

<comment><USER17> Seems like there is a cryptographic explanation every few days. It's a popular topic to write about at the moment. This was well written however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting... 2.1 quadrillion satoshis divided by 20 trillion dollars is about 100, so eventually there will be about the same number of satoshis as there are normal money cents in the world. Very nice symmetry!

</comment><comment><USER19> This is the first time I've seen information addressing quantum computers and bitcoin in a meaningful way (between the linked text and the additional info it links). As a relative layperson when it comes to such things it's nice to finally have some notion of Bitcoin's ability to cope with the quantum world.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm not a crypto expert at all but I do have one question:

If there is a concept of "quantum-safe" (which I did not know until reading this article), why hasn't the broader internet (HTTPS) adopted them? Is there any plans for there adoption in the future?

<comment><USER21> The mathematics are less well researched, and at least for some algorithms the keys are quite large. (For instance, a pretty standard sized Niederreiter key and a single Niederreiter signature put the minimum size for a certificate over 1 MB, which is a lot less onerous than it used to be, but a bit big for doing a lot of copying on cellular networks.)

I haven't heard this expressed anywhere, but it could also be that the McEliece and Niederreiter algorithms have a bit of a feel to them like the Merkle-Hellman knapsack algorithm that was thought for a long time to be secure.

Though, if you're being paranoid and can spare the cycles, it wouldn't hurt to take Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (or ECIES) exchange, encrypt that using RSA (or ElGamal), and then Encrypt that using Niederreiter (or McEliece), like a bunch of Russian dolls nested by key/message size. All three crypto systems would need to be broken in order to recover the key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Thus, if your Bitcoin funds are stored in an address that you have not spent > from (so the public key is unknown), they are safe against a quantum > computer – at least until you try to spend them.

Uhm, no such thing? Every mined bitcoin is instantly sent to an address

<comment><USER23> No, freshly mined bitcoins are never 'sent' anywhere - they just appear in the mining address. Thus, the public key is not revealed until they are sent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "my own BitcoinJS fork (which also adds other improvements) does use plain numbers to store the number of satoshis."

Why wouldn't I feel tempted to use his fork?..

<comment><USER25> my thoughts exactly. For those who don't know, never ever use floats for things like money. Try in windows calculator for example sqrt(4) - 2 and see why.

Strangely enough he talks about floating point rounding errors in one of the next paragraphs?

<comment><USER26> > For those who don't know, never ever use floats for things like money.

This is normally a very good rule to follow. The reason is that floating point is binary, whereas cash is decimal, so even an innocent number like 0.4 has no exact representation in binary (it's actually an infinite tail: 0.011001100110011...).

Here, however, I'm using floats NOT to store decimals; every single value that I store is an integer. There is absolutely no danger in using floating point numbers to store relatively small integers like 1253251126; the issue only arises in the context of very large numbers (specifically, those above 2^53) and decimals. If anyone can come up with a remotely realistic series of integer manipulations that will cause an inaccuracy in Javascript where all values always stay below 2^50.9, I will certainly abandon my choice of moving to integers at once; otherwise, I see no problem.

<comment><USER27> Still seems risky to me. There are some numeric calculations where input and output values are small but intermediate representations might be many times larger. It's not certain that all the people working after you are going to be aware of the assumptions intrinsic in your code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> my takeaway from this article just reinforces the perception of Bitcoin I already had, namely: which do I trust more? a monetary system run by engineers & mathematicians. or a monetary system run by politicians/lawyers, government bureaucrats, and an old-money banking aristocracy? Choices, choices...

<comment><USER29> I've worked with a lot of engineers. Most of us aren't really that smart and usually we make problems much more complicated than they need to be.

I'd trust a unique and fairly original monetary system run by good engineers. But most engineers are really not that good.

<comment><USER28> I've seen evidence that suggests the leading engineers behind Bitcoin are good. In contrast, I've seen repeated evidence over decades that the folks leading the US government are dangerously incompetent on things which are incredibly important to get right for all the rest of us, namely the economy, the environment/ecosystem and health care.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any good imap client for cleaning of gmail? - <AUTHOR> I know about imapsize but there is no developer activity for over 10 years. <comment><USER2> I dislike the gmail trash waiting for 30 days to empty, so I have cron-job running a small Go script that cleans up the trash using the Gmail API. Right now I use Gmail's filters to send stuff I don't like to the trash, but I plan to do the filtering in the script too, when I find the time.

I'm still wondering why there isn't a "delete every email from this person automatically" built into either Gmail, or the underlying email spec, which I don't really know anything about.

</comment><comment><USER3> Actually, using labels will help you. Historically it took me about a day to get to a zero Inbox.</comment>


Ask YC: Best text editor for Windows? - <AUTHOR>

I'm stuck with a PC at work, and am missing TextMate. what editor should I use? Looking for something windows based (not XEmacs) for general use. Suggestions? <comment><USER2> Vim. Both for Windows and Linux I use it, it's a good and very powerful editor. However it's not the type of editor that you'll get how to use it in 5 minutes (well, this is true for the very very basic use, just press "i" to insert text).

Download the self-installing executable here:

<http://www.vim.org/download.php#pc>

<comment><USER3> Just upvoting ViM is not enough, so I put in this note. I have used Emacs and ViM and I am with ViM forever...

<comment><USER4> There is a vi mode in emacs, though it just replicates the keybindings: <http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/ViperMode>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I use Textpad a lot, cos its pretty simple looking, and yet has a lot of functionalities, and I open a lot of very huge xml documents in it(pretty stable), some other ex-colleagues of mine love(d) Notepad++. Some other people I know like Ultraedit, although I found it to be too complex for my liking.

<comment><USER6> Textpad can be as simple or complex as you want. I use nothing else any more.

<comment><USER7> I used textpad for years, recently switched to notepad++ and am very happy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Scite. Scite is the one I used in windows for couple of years and kept it with me when switched to linux a year and a half ago.

<comment><USER9> Notepad++ is a good editor built off Scite with some nice additions. I keep both installed on most of the systems I work on and would recommend you give it a shot. Other editors I work with are far to heavy for quick changes or random filetype testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> InType and e are fairly TextMate-ish. The latter costs money, and the former has announced plans to set a price. They're both basic but usable, and compatible to some degree with TextMate snippets / bundles.

<comment><USER11> I used to use Intype on my windows box before I made the jump to Ubuntu. Now I use VIM and never looked back. Intype is definitely not bad imho.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Emacs + customisations.. nearly like Textpad but easier to use. Emacs is not really a text editor. It is some sort of OS for making text editors. You can have any text editor you like. Why would you use anything else?

# There is a native Windows build. It is a normal Win app, with file selection dialogs, etc...

<comment><USER4> For the windows build see here: <http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html>

This is the emacs wiki page on emacs for windows: <http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacsForWindows>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cream (a GVIM variant, which is a VIM variant, which is a...) <http://cream.sf.net/>

you will need a day or two to get the hang of it, but once you do you won't ever want to go back. (you'll know when you start writing ":wq" in non-VI editors)

<comment><USER14> gvim is the only thing that keeps me sane in windows. I have not tried this cream you speak of however. Just downloaded it though.

<comment><USER14> eeppp, I think I'll stick with gvim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The fact that Textmate doesn't run on Windows is exactly why I stayed away from it on OS X - I am forced to use a windows machine at work, and am stuck in a terminal a lot of the time, so I decided to learn emacs instead.

Once you get over the initial Emacs learning curve its great - then install the emacs code browser, and the rails plugins (if you do rails obviously) for extra productivity. See [this tutorial]([http://sodonnell.wordpress.com/the- emacs-newbie-guide-for-ra...](http://sodonnell.wordpress.com/the-emacs-newbie- guide-for-rails/)) to set it all up.

</comment><comment><USER16> was going to suggest xemacs :(

</comment><comment><USER17> <http://www.e-texteditor.com/> : "The Power of TextMate on Windows"

</comment><comment><USER18> UltraEdit is a pretty adequate text editor if one is willing to do some minor configuration. It took me only 30 mins to master it.

A txt editor is like most tools, one has to customize it to their needs and wants.

The sword does not make the samurai. It is the samurai that makes the sword go. (General View)

<comment><USER19> I've been using UltraEdit for about 8 years now. Notepad++ is close, but the FTP plug-in just isn't quite as good (I use FTP a lot through my text editor and UltraEdit is the best). The best features of UltraEdit are it's macro recording and template (ie: code snippets) feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Maybe you're a Mac guy rather than a Unix dude, but I put this together a while ago as a wiki, then 'froze' it into an article:

<http://www.welton.it/articles/windows_for_linux_users.html>

</comment><comment><USER21> I haven't used Windows in a while, but I think something I discovered right before I made the linux switch was called Programmer's Notepad. Try <http://www.pnotepad.org/>

</comment><comment><USER22> Ultraedit+WebDrive was my wet dream. It was the only thing holding me back from switching to Mac 100% of the time, until Panic churned up Coda.

</comment><comment><USER23> Not XEmacs? I think GNU Emacs runs on Windows too.

</comment><comment><USER24> Eclipse for its mark occurrences feature, easy editor splitting, and variable width font support (when it's occasionally needed).

</comment><comment><USER25> \- editplus is great for general text editing (non-coding)

\- activestate komodo for python/perl/php

\- visual studio for c++

</comment><comment><USER26> I like to use jEdit for coding. EditPlus is commonly used where i work so I use that for general text editing.

</comment><comment><USER27> Notepad2: <http://www.flos-freeware.ch/>

</comment><comment><USER28> Real programmers use... <http://xkcd.com/378/>

</comment><comment><USER29> PSPad is good enough for me. PHP I use Nusphere PHPed (not free).

</comment><comment><USER30> I like Crimson Editor. I think it's a bit nicer than Textpad.

</comment><comment><USER31> GNU Emacs. :)</comment>


Damian Conway on Teaching, Programming Languages, Open Source and Our Future - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/interviews/14-mar-damian-conway

<comment><USER2> Can someone explain what we're supposed to get out of this interview? The questions and answers both seem to be very general and wishy-washy, without much meat to them. Mr. Conway seems like a nice enough guy, but I'm not seeing any special insight or deep analysis here.

<comment><USER3> The short answer: Damian is a long-time Perl hacker, and has given many excellent (and highly memorable) presentations, mostly on Perl. If nothing else, it's interesting to see what he's thinking about and working on. He's been at this game for at least a quarter century and has gained some perspective -- that's longer than quite a few here have been alive.

This interview gives a bit of perspective on how Damian came to be who he is, and hist thoughts on the present and future of tech. There's nothing terribly earthshattering, but it's interesting.</comment></comment>