Dear "Landlord" - <AUTHOR> http://raganwald.posterous.com/dear-landlord

<comment><USER2> This is well said and reflects my experience. These days I look for services that a) take money, b) probably won't get acquired soon. (a) is easier than (b), but if you look around you'll eventually find something.

Good examples are:

* Instapaper — Marco's one-man-shop, stable and profitable,

* Smugmug — family owned, users pay them money, stable and profitable,

* Dropbox — which I also pay for — but is still unlikely to find an acquirer.

I recently decided not to sign on several new services because I couldn't see a business model.

I'd like pg to address this in one of his essays, given that YC is all about building stuff people want without paying too much attention to the business side of things (e.g. actual cash flow), and with the explicit goal of reaching an exit for the founders.

<comment><USER3> YC seems (I obviously don't speak for them) to like companies like Smugmug and Instapaper --- see what Graham writes about Wufoo --- and over the long term, companies with established niches can obtain valuations that outstrip that niche. Black swans happen, and it's good to maximize your exposure to the good ones.

But fundamentally YC is about shooting companies out of a cannon. Charging users a fee puts user acquisition and retention at risk. For Instapaper and Pinboard that risk is well worth the reward. But most YC companies have acclimated themselves to the idea of working for a VC-funded board of directors; if you're going to take VC, the risk is very often _not_ worth it in the first year or two of your company, because traction trumps revenue in most VC-funded companies.

The overwhelming majority of YC's returns come from exits from VC-funded companies.

So the interests of free users and YC don't really so much line up here.

<comment><USER4> Actually, YC's real returns will come from IPOs of big profitable companies like Airbnb and Dropbox, not exits any smaller than them.

And I think there's room for more Dropboxes. What I find strange is that so few startups (YC-funded or not) even try the freemium model seriously. It took Dropbox a long time and a lot of experimentation to find a scalable business model, and they wouldn't have found it had they not been persistent.

Building something great is harder than making money, but even YC's success depends on startups that can do both.

<comment><USER3> Ok, but that just reinforces the point, right?

<comment><USER4> It reinforces jwr's point, not your argument that YC's interests are not aligned with free users.

It's only companies with a good business model that can support free users as a marketing cost in the long run. All others die once they run out of funding cycles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really wish I could pay for free services just for the peace of mind that they'll stick around.

I've got my website on Tumblr and by using their service I feel like I'm making a pretty big commitment to them, but since it's free it doesn't feel like they have the same level of commitment to me.

I freaking love Tumblr and would be happy to pay. But right now it's not clear to me if they're making any money at all and that's a big concern as a user. Just remind me, how do those guys make money again?

Also, Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski wrote on the topic of being a free user not that long ago: <http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/>

The TL;DR version was: Exploding growth + free service = losing lots of money. Ouch.

<comment><USER6> (It's _peace_ of mind. Piece of mind is something a brain surgeon finds stuck to his shirt when he goes home for the day)

<comment><USER7> There is also "to give a piece of mind".

<comment><USER8> I'll give you a piece of my mind if you keep going on about this! (not really, just giving an example :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think it's a little .----- and more than a little hyperbolic to suggest that Posterous wasn't a business, but rather just an exhibit for the team's portfolio.

The fact is, Posterous tried and lost. By all accounts, valiantly.

I find myself nodding when Maciej writes "Don't Be A Free User", because he is competing with free (and also because I want him to give me a tour of his vault of golden coins). Pointing out that your pricing scheme makes you a sustainable competitive alternative is fair.

But to the best of my knowledge, you aren't competing with Posterous. Why do you feel the need to rub this in?

I sincerely apologize if I'm just missing some parodic element of this post.

<comment><USER9> There is no criticism of Posterous or anybody else intended. _I apologise if it comes across that way_.

I did, however, try to make a point that I would never move my _business_ onto a free or pre-revenue site.

FWIW, I knew this could happen when I first started using Posterous, and I deliberately cut my blogging in two. The stuff that is just hot air—like this post—is on Posterous. I could honestly live with losing all of it, permanently. It's personal and not mission-critical to my livelihood.

The stuff that I cherish, the stuff with code, is on Github. That's my business, and I treat it differently. They seem to have a working business, and I have an automatic backup strategy, I have other places I can re-host it, I can Jekyl-ize it to a standard web host, I have my own exit plan.

So no quarrel with Posterous, I'm not losing a thing. I'm just pointing out that while I might do something personal with a pre-revenue business, I'm not betting real money on it.

<comment><USER3> Consider striking the "exhibit for the portfolio" bit.

<comment><USER9> Try the current flavour and see if it's still as bitter.

<comment><USER3> Way better!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure if it's the architects fault or the real estate investors. Land is so cheap, and investors seem to really like watching architects build stuff. For a long time, investors have believed if there are people in the building, the coffee bar or the valet parking will make them a lot of money.

The problem is that it has also conditioned people to believe that all office space should be free. Those who build incredibly efficient office space are still going to have a hard time charging rent.

These architect aquisitions are every bit as much about the investors as they are the architects. Until investors get selective and demand real value, I'm not sure it's going away.

(Wow, I might need to go to prison for extended torture of an analogy.)

</comment><comment><USER11> The biggest loss is the backlinks to your carefully created content.

For that reason alone I would never consider hosting something like a blog on real estate owned by another party.

Another risk is that the domain sooner or later ends up in the hands of some scammer or pill pusher.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yeah, this has happened a number of times, enough that I'm wary of investing time and energy into using a service that appears to not have any means of making money. Last fall, I evaluated Posterous for my personal blog, but one of the reasons I ended up going with Squarespace instead is because it's a paid service:

[http://kylecronin.me/blog/2012/3/13/my-thoughts-on- posterous...](http://kylecronin.me/blog/2012/3/13/my-thoughts-on-posterous- acquisition.html)

<comment><USER13> I don't think being a paid service makes it more likely that it will be around forever, but it is a good input to use when weighing and comparing different services. I would probably place as much emphasis on data portability and content license terms.

This is, off course, assuming you are comparing products that are like-for- like in features and that the product is good. Paying for a crap product won't save it.

<comment><USER14> Indeed. Google is a free service and Google Apps is a paid service, but I wouldn't expect significantly more longevity from the latter just because I'm paying them $x a year than I would from the loss-leader service.

<comment><USER15> I think it is a bad example because it is probably contributing less than 1% to Googles bottom line. Much easier to cut than if it were the primary revenue source for n individual company.

<comment><USER14> For exactly that reason it's a really good example of the point I was making: what you really need to know is whether a given product is strategic to its supplier. "Am I paying for it?" is one indicator that it may be, but it's not conclusive

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I use Posterous, Weebly, Hacker News, and twitter, and love them all. I don't pay a nickel to any of them and never will.

I hope very much that they all last forever.

But I will lose nothing if any or all of them disappear without giving me a chance to retrieve my data. Why? Because everything I've ever posted to any of them was already saved on my hard drive first. A simple solution for a frugal, OCD hacker who wants the best of all worlds.

<HN201203141055.txt>

[UPDATE: Several people have suggested automating this or making it easier. My response: If you're a hacker and more than 5% of what you type goes anywhere other than your code repository, you should probably reevaluate what you're doing before you make it any easier to do it.]

<comment><USER17> Interesting idea. I do a similar thing with OneNote on long outgoing mails that I write that take a long time to compose.

However, how do you deal with threaded conversations and tracking the 1 liner replies to those mails? There are a large # of mails that I write that fall into this category.

Someone I know wrote his own email client that is essentially a long text buffer where email conversations are persisted to a single text file. He has commands that allow him to select portions of text from that file to compose in his replies. He's used that system since the 1980's and still has all of his email from back then logged into individual files.

<comment><USER18> I don't get it, email is the easiest thing in the world to backup and view offline. You can just run e.g. offlineimap to periodically download the messages, and then you can use virtually any email client to view them

Tracking replies is done automatically as long as you actually click "reply", because mail clients add the In-Reply-To header with the ID of the message you're replying to.

I'm not trying to be obnoxious, I just don't understand what's the issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting metaphor.

The reason this doesn't happen with real-estate is because unlike startups - there are no Facebooks.

Someone once explained Disney's town of Celebration to me this way:

It took Disney more than a decade to develop Celebration. They spent several hundred million dollars. In the end, they made about $200 million. The ROI on _Pocahontas_ was significantly better.

<comment><USER20> Celebration is also ongoing PR for the Disney mystique, like Google's autonomous car project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Took me a minute or so to figure what he was talking about. I am not sure what the greater message is, here. Was Posterous "evil" for selling themselves to Twitter? Or, should users generally beware any company that does not have a revenue? At what level of revenue should users stop worrying? Not saying that it is likely, but should users of Dropbox worry that Apple will acquire them?

Completely separately, Posterous lost all personal credit when they did that anti-Tumblr campaign a while ago. Not that I care at all about Tumblr, but I felt it was in bad taste. When a company does bad things, I cannot help but imagine that they will do other "bad" things.

<comment><USER9> I think it's a question of lock-in. If someone wants to give a free service away and there's very little lock-in, great! If a new restaurant opens in my neighbourhood, maybe the owner gives away free lunches to all the people working nearby. Great, go have lunch.

But if there's a big lock-in, as users you have to do your due diligence (we used to jokingly call it "doing the dew"). Say there's a service for managing software projects. Well, if I'm going to bet hundreds of thousands of dollars plus my career and reputation on a service, I want to ask a lot of questions, that's natural.

I'm actually cool with Posterous, I hope the folks behind it do really well.

<comment><USER21> That makes sense.

I realized just now that I sounded very critical of Posterous. I also hope they do very well.

Posterous' "badness" is more of a matter of corporate moral personality. As a company develops, its leaders will have opportunities to make decisions which show their opinions on things. It doesn't surprise me when their future decisions also reflect those opinions.

For a high-profile example: Remember when Google decided it was going to start censoring search results in China? At the time, it was huge, extremely surprising news. However, it also showed a change in corporate opinion. Given subsequent developments, you can "see" the change in corporate decisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This used to be called "Who is not on LiveJournal[1]"

<http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/winolj.html>

Notes:

1\. An interesting story itself: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal>

<comment><USER23> > When Bubble 2.0 is dead and gone, we'll still be here.

of the alternatives he listed, 6 are dead.

of the supposedly dead and gone bubble 2.0 products he listed, all are up and running.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think it is an interesting point that people get more value out of your product when they are invested in it.

When friends call me for marketing advice, I enjoy talking about it, and am always willing to share some insight for free, but this makes me wonder if I am doing them a disservice.

Odds are, they just resent the advice, or even if they agree with it, how likely are they to use it if it's free.

Seems like sharing ideas and free advice is a lose-lose.

If you really want to help people, make them pay for it!

</comment><comment><USER25> In my limited but growing experience dealing with free and paid users, I see it this way: when a customer pays for your product, it's like they're saying "I trust you." When you charge for something, you are asking for someone's trust because you believe in what you've created. You owe it to yourself to make people pay for what you build.

Maybe Aladdin said it best...do you trust me? (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkwMEwenaQQ>)

</comment><comment><USER26> But what's the alternative?

Assume that Posterous was charging for their services with a monthly fee. Is this any guarantee that they wouldn't take the same offer to sell? Or would you just be out your monthly fees and still have to move?

The more money they have coming in, the more desirable an acquisition they become. In theory, they might have less pressure to sell if they have cash flow, but it's not clear this is enough to counteract their increased appeal to an acquirer. Rather than indicting "free" services, it would seem more rational to avoid "cloud" services whether paid or unpaid.

Perhap you should choose only services from companies you feel are too large to be acquired (Google) or companies whose code is available to run on your own if they were to close down (Github). Or stick with self-hosted solutions with that plan that you can change hosts as necessary.

For any company you chose, I think you have to presume that while they will try to keep their service running, they will be doing so primarily out of self-interest. The more you can align your interests with theirs, the better the chance that the service will continue and you won't have to move.

<comment><USER15> I think being paid there is more chance that they would be acquired for their product and not just the team. There is still no guarantee of course.

<comment><USER27> Paid product companies don't get bought nearly as often, either. In a lot of ways it makes you an _unattractive_ acquisition target.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think that Reginald is talking about social media platforms' APIs and other infrastructure that 3rd parties can connect to for whatever business they are in.

It is valid concern that, for example, Facebook may decide that providing their graph APIs is suddenly not in their interest and cut off the service.

Same thing happened with some Google APIs like the Buzz feed. I only briefly used the Buzz feed for a small customer task one time, and the termination of Buzz and the feed does not hurt me, but it could have.

I find the user experience using G+ to be good, but the APIs are not in anywhere near a form where I would build part of a business on them.

The situation is different with other infrastructure like AWS, Heroku, and AppEngine: I understand the long term business model of the providers and trust that these services will likely be available for a long time.

<comment><USER28> From reading the other posts, I see that I misinterpreted the article.

Saving blogging and other self promotion information is important. I hosted my own blogging solution in the past, but now I compromise: use Blogger, map it to a subdomain on my main web site, and make sure I back up Blogger's data so I could re-host it with some effort. So, I trade off some control for making life easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think we're currently in the era of the government-funded type of web projects that serve a great purpose for a large number of people who wouldn't otherwise be willing to pay for them. Right now the climate is such that developers with an idea can very inexpensively get that idea built and used, which can in turn, bolster their own resumes or possibly even result in an IPO exit or acquisition.

Profit is not crucial because the only asset that has seen substantial investment is time. However, I don't feel sorry for consumers of these services. The services are, after all, free, and don't usually make any guarantees that they will be around for ever. In this case we're talking about a blogging website that's been around for a few years, not a bank. A little perspective helps a lot.

</comment><comment><USER30> That's nice, but what's the alternative?

Putting the onus on contributors to back up what they publish would be a crap shot; even with backups there may not be a plan for recovery, and recovery may be impossible if the contributor is unable or unwilling to handle it themselves.

Commenters and other participants have it even harder, due to the variety of sites and platforms they participate in (Lazarus can help saving one's own comments now that CoComment is shutting down, wget can be used to rescue content with advance warning).

Maybe the best alternative would be a commitment from the platforms to keep a low-bandwidth, possibly throttled archive available; failing that, to outsource the work to an organisation like the internet archive. This would be a step up from the current standard, which is, at best, a period of warning (lets external participants make backups), or a commitment to data liberation, which unfortunately ends up with many contributors failing to republish their content.

<comment><USER31> It's probably well worth questioning the value of any of this crap above and beyond whatever immediate social value it gives. I can't think of anything more ephemeral and useless than blog comments--does it really matter whether those are backed up for the ages?

It's probably worthwhile giving your users a chance to recover their content. It's probably _not_ worthwhile to be a digital packrat.

<comment><USER32> _> I can't think of anything more ephemeral and useless than blog comments-- does it really matter whether those are backed up for the ages?_

You might be surprised. Archaeologists are forced to derive much of what they know about vanished cultures from bits of ephemera from their daily lives -- things you'd find in a midden heap, like shards of discarded pottery, spat-out plant seeds and gnawed animal bones, and the like. Why? Because _those are the things that survived._

Would our understanding of those cultures be richer if we could hear their songs and read their poetry? Undoubtedly. But we can learn an awful lot about them from their ephemera, even without that.

<comment><USER31> If we're worried about archaeologists, we should inscribe our blogs on stone tablets and bury them underneath our houses. Short of that, backup tapes will decay, hard drives will fail, and if the data somehow stays alive in the "cloud" in a form that's accessible to archaeologists of the future, then they'll surely have an utter surfeit of data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This reminds me of the advert Google put out recently where it shows a father documenting his daughters life in YouTube, and sending her emails (from birth) with the videos on with a note of what it was all about in the email. She comes back to the email 20 years later and sees the document of her life with it all in.

I just don't buy it, how do we know Google will be around in 20 years, never mind free solutions not supplemented with paid for services?

Nothing is guaranteed, nothing is secure, nothing is forever. I wish I could say I could make a solution that would ease this problem but my solution might not stand the test of time. Shit happens! Saving it to your hard drive means you are only backing it up to something that could explode (dramatisation). Further backing up to the cloud is relying again on a solution that you are expecting to work and stick around, it may not!

You need to go into any situation like this with some level of acknowledgement that it just might not work.

</comment><comment><USER34> For a second, he had me thinking that there were actually cool office buildings somewhere filled with interesting people providing free office space complete with coffee bars.

That actually sounded like a great deal. Easily worth the hassle of possibly having to move out and find space elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER35> This happens repeatedly outside the startup world as well. The company I work for has relied on technology that Microsoft developed, supported, and subsequently walked away from. That is the nature of both business and technology.

</comment><comment><USER36> Is the De-Stijl Schroder house now an office?

<comment><USER9> No, it's a museum. It just happens to be a favourite building of mine and an excellent example of making a complete break from convention, just like many start-ups :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is it a little ironic that the blog is posted on Posterous? I only say that cause the complaint may disappear before its intended effect ring through the rest of the startup community.

<comment><USER9> That was one of the things that delighted me about writing it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've setup <http://p.ostero.us> It's a paid Octpress based blogging service for the ex-posterous users - not more free rent - using an awesome blog platform - and a ongoing income generating service

Hopefully this will help other posterous user wondering where to go

* <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3713092>

</comment><comment><USER39> An interesting satire on what's happening in the tech world, however, I'd be hesitant to be quite as critical. In the end, the service is free, it's not something that has to be provided. You should enjoy it while it's there and appreciate it, not feel entitled to it. Is it a little bit of a dick move? Yeah, but then again, what would you do if you were in their position?

<comment><USER14> I don't think the issue is so much "what should they do now", because what they should do now is constrained by what they _can_ do. The issue is "what should they have done in 2008?" - should they for example have said "please note that our current business model is not sustainable, and while you are welcome to enjoy it while it's here you are cautioned not to behave as though it will be here for ever"? Providing a limited, ephemeral, or best-effort service is a perfectly OK thing to do provided your service users know that's what you're doing and can (as raganwald says he has) tailor their behavour accordingly

<comment><USER39> Great point, but it's unbelievably difficult do carry something like that out practically. Who are the CEO's customers, the market the company is targeting, or the company's employees? I'd argue both, the CEO is the visionary and cheerleader for the staff, and also the public image for the customers. If you come out and say we are not sustainable, guess how many employees you'll have at the end of the week? Guess how many customers? After putting 100's or 1000's of hours into something, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone willing to go that route

<comment><USER20> This is where honesty has to be given its due. I expect A CEO to honestly state the max plausible downside and upside of their business, and to have a decent argument (which I take with a grain of salt) for why they expect the upside to happen. Then I make my own estimate, somewhere between the extremes, and act accordingly. The CEOs I respect (as employers, vendors, and investments) behave this way.

<comment><USER39> not including warren buffet (ironic that he's considered one of the most ethical guys in the business and he's on top of the world), name a few CEOs. Not a call out, I just want to know who they are so I can start following them

<comment><USER20> Joel Spolsky and Stackoverflow is a good example. They build a quality product, treat users with respect, and (I guess) are on a good track financially, and make their money in an aboveboard way. They even go so far as to build in some defenses (like Creative Commons licensing) to proactively preempt future possible evildoing.

Stephen Wolfram (though an egomaniac that has picked some unfair fights against his employees) and his company Wolfram Research built a rather solid offering in "old style" proprietary commercial software with Mathematica and now Wolfram Alpha, making his money on incredibly high quality and pouring decades of revenue back into product development and offering a generous free tier of access and deep discounts for educational and personal use.

<comment><USER39> Thank you

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> So where in the world does this kind of thing happen? To me it sounds like a made up scenario and then an argument against the made up scenario. Could just be that it doesn't happen in the parts of the world that I have lived and worked though.

UPDATE: Thanks for the clarification everyone. I guess I'm way too literal early in the morning.

<comment><USER41> He's talking about startups getting acquired and then shutting down (see the last link of his post referencing Posterous).

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Spot-on. I looked at using Posterous, but decided against doing so because there was no way for anyone to pay them.

</comment><comment><USER43> In response to that all I can say is I have a landlord issue as well.

<http://bitchlandlady.tumblr.com/>

</comment><comment><USER44> Use a Key logger

</comment><comment><USER45> This is an interesting analogy, yet laughably impractical and wrong.

Paid business models do not guarantee success. If they did, Posterous would have charged. It seems land is so cheap, landlords have concluded the best possible chance to find a business model is to be a free landlord. That is a great world for tenants since they don't have to pay rent, and it's a tough world for landlords since they have to maintain beautiful buildings with donation boxes and ad banners.

Given the lack of tenant laws (imagine if there were tenant laws...) paying rent is no guarantee of anything. You can be evicted, abused, moved around, neglected, or anything else without warning or compensation. That's a good thing, which demonstrates how strained and poor this analogy is.

Good luck finding quality, innovative, paid services to match Facebook, Twitter, and Posterous. Let us know how that goes. You'll have some luck, but I'm not sure your chances are much better. I call bullshit.

<comment><USER20> Everything Apple and most of Microsoft is paid.

<comment><USER18> Apple is an hardware company that writes software to go with it. It's apples and oranges, if you excuse the pun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think we have missed the un-mentioned point...

What does this say about Twitter that they have to buy product staff? What does that say about the value of their IPO?

The Thiel proposition would be, long-term, we should be betting against every one who IPO'd thus far.

<comment><USER47> We saw a lot of this during Internet bubble v1.0

The issue is that a bunch of folks who will flip IPO shares need to quote a number-of-employees. The implication is that a high number of employees is an indicator of the viability of the company.</comment></comment>


Crimean accelerator packing its bags as region moves to embrace Russian ideals - <AUTHOR> http://www.geektime.com/2014/03/18/crimean-accelerator-packing-its-bags-as-region-moves-to-embrace-russian-ideals/

<comment><USER2> from the geektime.com OP:

Geektime wrote about previously, the lack of the entrepreneurial spirit is really what got them there and the reason that Russia goes from one dictator to the next instead of embracing individual opportunity.

any Ukrainians find this more than a little patronizing not to mention untrue?

the fact is that a couple of years ago, Russia signed a long-term lease for the Crimean naval base; Russian troops were lawfully deployed there (many with their families) prior to the current conflict. In a region comprised largely of Russians (lawfully deployed there) it's no surprise that those people will side with Russia--just like US troops deployed to Afghanistan don't become anti-US the moment they are deployed to foreign soil.

more objectionable is criticizing Ukrainians for "lack of entrepreneurial spirit" and for "not embracing individual opportunity." Seriously? This is a nation in which people have taken to the streets twice just within the past 10 years--and in doing so put their lives on the line. That's far better proof of "individual responsibility" than signing up to YC or whatnot.

<comment><USER3> Finish reading the article before commenting.

>Ant-Lab owner Petrov is now moving to Kiev, where the startup scene is more embraced. Ukraine's capital has six accelerators, GrowthUp, EastLabs, Happy Farm, WannaBiz, Founder Institute, iHub and Polyteco.

The article is railing against Crimeans, not Ukrainians, although yes that earlier sentence did seem a bit odd.</comment></comment>


Research project to record the "real world reactions" to a driver-less vehicle - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Driver-Dressed-Like-a-Seat-Spotted-Inside-Driverless-Van-439041863.html <comment><AUTHOR> From [https://www.arlnow.com/2017/08/08/morning- notes-1720/](https://www.arlnow.com/2017/08/08/morning-notes-1720/)

"VT Says It Is Behind 'Driverless' Van — The "driverless" van seen driving around Clarendon over the past week was actually a Virginia Tech research project designed to record the "real world reactions" to a vehicle without a driver. However, there was a driver: a man dressed as a car seat. The mystery was solved in real time on Twitter yesterday and quickly went viral."</comment>


Show HN: Hobnob – Beautiful Invites Sent via Text Message - <AUTHOR> https://hobnob.io

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, long time lurker but first time poster here.

We built Hobnob because we were tired of evite and FB events. We wanted something fast, beautiful and mobile friendly. We also wanted something where our guests wouldn't have to download or install anything to RSVP.

With Hobnob you can create and send a great invite in 30 seconds. Your guests can reply with Y or N to RSVP. Simple and easy.

Would love to hear your feedback!

<comment><USER2> Normally I don't comment on Show HNs, but there are a lot of good things to say about what you made. It was a great idea to make this SMS based, as it is a universal medium and most people aren't willing to download Yet Another App. Also if I am planning a gathering, it's more likely that I'll have everyone's phone number, and much less likely that I'll know all of their email addresses or even be friends with everyone on Facebook. The part I appreciate the most is that you don't need the app to RSVP. Most developers would text a "download the hobnob app to RSVP" link to people, but clearly this is far superior since it makes it super easy to respond. The text message picture is beautiful.

I honestly don't have anything negative to say, the app is beautiful and the entire experience is quite polished. Really nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thank you so much! Your comment made my day!

It's great to hear that our design decisions resonated with you. We worked really hard to make this great for the people using it. We tried to put the user experience ahead of the almighty download. Thanks again for the encouraging comment!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> As part of the first time tutorial, how about inviting new users to a fictitious event to help acclimate them? Also, it's feels so lonely after installing the app and seeing the message that there's no activity, so even a training event would help users feel loved. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> The fictitious event is a great idea. I'll share it with our team. :)

I completely agree about the first install experience. It needs to be better. We have several ideas to improve it. One thing we're toying with is using it as a way to showcase some great flyer designs in order to inspire new users to create their first invite.

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks great. Friends don't let friends use Evite. For events where your guests are people you already text with, this couldn't be easier. Perfect for "Let's do lunch!"

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly! We're hoping to make even the smallest meetup something fun by using Hobnob.</comment></comment>


The MakerBot Obituary - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2016/04/28/the-makerbot-obituary/ <comment><USER2> I have been in 3D printing for over three years now and it has been gut- wrenching to watch Makerbot's actions. Like watching a crash test dummy, you can see the moves coming and it's beautiful and destructive at the same time.

Makerbot systematically SOLD their founding values. Open source, open community, independant, and made in america (new york).

These values appealed to the early adopters. And by taking large amounts of venture capital, Bre effectively decided to accelerate crossing the chasm by incrementally tossing each of these values aside as they were potential liabilities for mainstream adoption. He was maximizing shareholder value rather than catering to the customers of his products. Their patent strategy was clearly to increase their value to acquirers (Stratasys or 3D Systems). And by aiming so high on the acquisition negotiations they tanked the stock of every single industrial 3D printing company, who have all operated for decades longer than Makerbot.

I hope that Ultimaker and Printrbot stick to their values and gain significant market share. I'm not confident that Lulzbot's libre values will translate to a thriving marketshare and ecosystem.

One note on the article though... There is no way that Zach and Adam walked away with $100M each, where did that come from? I'm sure they must have been diluted significantly. If not, I'm very interested how that happened if anyone knows!

<comment><USER3> Made in America isn't really an important scaleable value. For American customers it plays on their patriotism. For overseas customers it plays on the perceived quality of American products. In both cases, it's just marketing trickery to make people like them.

<comment><USER4> The trickery is based on the apparent politics. The question is whether the incentive was honest or not.

In reallity I'd guess that outsourcing is only really viable when the production volume is big enough and if the knowledge to select the right process is there. Homebrew is educative and saves a lot of money if the work hours can be deducted or counted as training, fun or early investment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have cupcake #40 with the wooden pulleys for belts. It was an incredibly fun project, assembling, soldering, general fuzing around to keep the thing working. It requires probably 2 hours of fiddling for each hour of printing. It felt momentous because it kind of was, me and perhaps a hundred other people toiling away, bringing the future to reality.

i'm sad to see the state they're in. I hope, dearly hope, that that spirit of the year or so i spent caring for my cupcake is how humanity ends up, at least for some of humanity. building kits, patching code, struggling with the odd issue. It really felt like pushing the frontier of the human experience. we can't all expand the frontier of theoretical knowledge, but we can all push a frontier. It's a lovely place to be.

Sitting in my basement week after week, heck, month after month trying to get a good sequence of prints, that was a great time in my life. I don't think much will come of 3d printing of abs plastic. Super customized shapes are just not that interesting. Perhaps VR will simplify the design process, which i kind of hated.

At the start, right at the beginning of makerbot, they were wonderful.

</comment><comment><USER6> It was interesting to watch an open hardware company wrassle with profitability and scale vs. "being a good citizen". The two aren't mutually exclusive, though it seemed like Makerbot thought that was the case. Oh well. Goodbye Makerbot. Thanks for building upon the RepRap and for pushing 3d printing out into the mainstream. Sorry you abandoned your roots and got swallowed up into the megabusiness garbagescape.

<comment><USER7> Bowyer's RepRap is GPL so the MakerBot couldn't build on RepRap derived work without violating the GPL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The real problem is that MakerBot didn't keep up with the technology. Extruding hot ABS filament and hoping it would bond to the previous layer just isn't a very good technology. The Form1, Form2, and Ember, all stereolithography machines, produce much better parts. There are half a dozen extruder type printers better than the MakerBot, and some are cheaper.

MakerBot just didn't get better fast enough.

<comment><USER9> DLP and FDM are totally different technologies...and the DLP stuff isn't as usable in machines as FDM is.

Just like powder, sls, paste and every other form...they all have their uses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the questions I have: what are 3D printers in this weight class being used for beyond novelty?

I like shiny tech as much as anybody here, and I'm certainly excited by the _potential_ of 3D printing. But companies eventually have to survive on _actual_ revenues. And for people who make tools, that generally means their customers have to use the tools to make money.

As an example, my brother makes custom wood furniture, so he buys saws and saw blades. As long as people want wood furniture for their homes, saw-makers get a slice of that. What are 3D printer makers getting a slice of to sustain their business?

<comment><USER11> I generally use mine to test fitment of parts that I'm going to machine. While 3d printing takes a while, hand machinging things on my manual mill takes a LOT longer and the material is more expensive. I made a mount for a motor for a skateboard with an irregular truck shape in about 8 prototypes with the 3d printer. Then I cut the metal part out in one go and it fit perfectly.

Also for custom brackets and enclosures they're great. You can make all sort of custom one off parts with a 3d printer and they're good for at LEAST mocking up a prototype if not even making a real working prototype.

Even more fun, I've got a project to convert my mill to a CNC, and round one of that is to 3d print the brackets, attach them and then cnc up the actual brackets from aluminum. Then replace them.

3d printers also let you do things like lost plastic casting, lost wax casting, etc.

But the fitment and layout thing is not to be ignored. When you're making parts that will go into real machines, it's really hard to get good measurements of the real part. Lets say I'm making a part that goes in a car. I can get lots of measurements by hand but I'll likely be off as it's kind of a free-hand thing. You can then cad up and print the part and then go shove it in there and see where you're off, measure those gaps, alter the cad, reprint... These parts are pretty cheap (generally less than $1 each for materials). Whereas having a dude in a shop cnc up a real one is quite expensive, running $100/hour machine time. The other benefit is you get to test placing your part into the machine. You can often make parts that work but you can't get them in to the machine without say taking THE WHOLE FRONT END OFF OF A CAR, which in itself could take 8 hours of mechanic time.

I've also got a bunch of misc things. I've got a flower vase my wife likes in black plastic that I sealed that just looks different. And I've got a bunch of coasters I cnc'd up that are custom that I use and I rally like. I also cnc'd up a custom kindle hard case for my son with his name and email on one side and a silouhette of Optimus on the other side. He loved it. Those things are just general crafting.

I've also learned CAD much better because design -> object is very quick so some weekends I'll just doodle in cad and then start the printer and start playing games while it does it's thing.

Then again the first 1/2 of my undergrad I was a Mech E, and I worked at a game studio for 3 years so I'm pretty fluent in 3d design compared to the average person. But if you can run around a map in a FPS once or twice you generally have enough 3d spacial awareness to do modelling. Computers make this much easier as you can rotate the object live which connects the dots in your brain that the old multiple view paper form was much harder to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think it was spring of 2012 when I visited Manhattan to buy a 3D printer. I wanted to see one first hand and visited the store in (or around) Soho, and while the store had some great models printed and the staff were enthusiastic, they really didn't sell me on why I should buy one from Makerbot. I did see 3D printing first hand, and decided I would definitely get a printer. Coincidentally, I visited Hack Manhattan that night and a fellow (forgotten his name...) was building a beta PrintrBot Simple and explained why he thought Makerbot wasn't a good design, why Ultimaker is a much better product (extruder feed motor placement, speed, accuracy, and reliability) and finally, the most important, that no one buying their first 3D printer should be spending 2000 dollars. Get a PrintrBot kit, spend a few hundred bucks and upgrade when needed. It was great advice. There are many design files on the Internet, but it was really CAD that I needed to learn. And in the meantime, there was so much to learn about printing: different materials, filament suppliers, how to deal with calibration, optimize slicing options, troubleshoot extrusion speeds, filament quality, and printing temperatures to name a few. It's been nearly 4 years, the little PrintrBot Jr kit has been discontinued, but it still works well and I will probably upgrade this year. The technology and features available are far better today (OMG auto levelling beds) and I want a much larger printing area and faster printer. Makerbot provided a brand for 3D printing, but also a promise that it was ready for consumers. They really weren't, and probably still aren't. Further, CAD and 3D modelling are not trivial skills to acquire. Regardless of the future of the company and their missteps, they did bring about massive consumer awareness of the technology.

</comment><comment><USER13> Relevant: Zach "Hoeken" Smith's (one of the founders of Makerbot) thoughts when the company changed direction (and he was out): [http://www.hoektronics.com/2012/09/21/makerbot-and-open- sour...](http://www.hoektronics.com/2012/09/21/makerbot-and-open-source-a- founder-perspective/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I followed MakerBot pretty obsessively since its early days. I have to agree with some of the comments here. It was very clear after they raised venture money that they became a marketing machine. I suspect they were burning quite lot of money to grab marketshare and become the de facto personal 3D printer. They pawned that thing off at the right time and let it become someone else's problem. Classic venture playbook.

<comment><USER15> In addition, Stratasys is also not a consumer peripheral company. They primarily make software and printers for the industrial 3D manufacturing market. But making the mistake won't hurt them much; they're still well seated in the industry.

They also don't have to worry about losing MakerBot because 3D printing/additive manufacturing is going to be freaking insanely big. Companies want to shorten R&D time and generate new products quickly.

Also, 3D printers for the purpose of manufacturing products won't be big in the home anytime soon. Why? Except for the new HP Multi Jet Fusion printers which are a small step towards the end goal with their ability to use different agents within a single part, most 3D printers only have the capability to print in a single material at a time. This is _great_ for parts, but not good for consumer goods which are made of many different materials. Today's 3D printer is very far away from a Star Trek replicator. There is a lot that goes into part design, determining how to best build the part, doing the design of the build which is different than the part specification so that parts can be built as designed, knowing how to use the printer along with maintaining/dealing with quirks caused by how the parts are built (which depends on technology/machine/material used and many other things), and removing structural supports and power/resin from parts after they are built.

Even when all of that becomes less complicated, and it will, home technology will almost always be behind the level of technology that exists in a company dedicated to manufacturing. Consumer 3D for most products is just not going to be a good market anytime soon.

The exception is food. Food is not nearly as complicated of a product as other consumer goods to make, and people love to make beautiful custom food at home, so 3D food printers could very easily become a staple in the kitchen. They could be every home within 40-50 years and in many food production facilities within 20 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > ignored the unspoken rules of Open Source hardware

Implied that the rule is "Open Source hardware can succeed if others (you or China) don't just clone it?" The rule is that it WILL be cloned.

</comment><comment><USER17> I bought a "Replicator 2, Dual Extruder" with the Mark 7 extruders, it was the last fully open source printer they made. What I liked about it is that it is so open source its easy to fix. Its also rather poorly implemented in that the drive mechanisms fail, the nuts loosen, it didn't come with an enclosed build space etc etc. However it has been a solid platform for experimenting on. Playing with the BondTech extruder ( _much_ better than Makerbot) the E3D hotend ( _much_ better melt zone control) different driver architectures. I think if I was buying one fresh I'd probably get a Lulzbot for the same reason.

On the one hand its sad to see them die, on the other it created some very wealthy folks who might angel invest in new even cooler stuff. Circle of life.

</comment><comment><USER18> My 9yo loved his 3-D printing spring break camp last week [0].

Any views on the Monoprice 3-D printers? [1] It seems hard to compete with Shapeways [2], if we're willing to wait a day for shipping. As with lots of technology, it's hard to buy a 3-D printer given how much they improve each year.

They used TinkerCAD at the camp. Should he stay with it or is there better online software for a beginner?

[0] [http://www.pixelacademy.org/spring/](http://www.pixelacademy.org/spring/) [1] [https://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=107&cp_id=10724&cs_id...](https://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=107&cp_id=10724&cs_id=1072403&p_id=13860&seq=1&format=2) [2] [http://www.shapeways.com/](http://www.shapeways.com/) [3] [https://www.tinkercad.com/](https://www.tinkercad.com/)

<comment><USER19> I've got the Monoprice Maker Select. You'll find it's a rebrand of the popular Wanhao Duplicator i3.

Shapeways printers are not really comparable to the cheap FDM printers. For example, they have Full Colour Sandstone as an option which just isn't possible on the Monoprice one as it will only do one color at a time.

I think the improvements in 3d printing aren't too huge like they are in other technologies. 3D printers can be upgraded too (with plenty of self-printed parts). For the popular Wanhao Duplicator i3, [http://3dprinterwiki.info/wiki/wanhao- duplicator-i3/](http://3dprinterwiki.info/wiki/wanhao-duplicator-i3/) .

Of course if you want something that just prints without having to do all these modifications/maintenance, you'll probably have to spend more on a printer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> _Like every aspect of a business, the value of the brand and reputation is tracked as an asset, and is called "goodwill" in company reports. For every quarterly report Stratasys has released after the acquisition of MakerBot, a goodwill impairment charge – a markdown on the value of the MakerBot brand – has been recorded. Including the 2015 yearly report, Stratasys has taken a total goodwill impairment charge of nearly one Billion dollars for MakerBot. Keep in mind Stratasys acquired MakerBot for $403 Million in stock. Stratasys has written off nearly double the value it paid through the failures of the MakerBot brand._

How exactly does "goodwill impairment" work? A billion dollar tax writeoff?! This sounds like some kind of scam.

<comment><USER21> Apparently it was commonly a scam in accounting scandals in 2002 and now there are more rigorous tests for it:

[http://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/goodwill- impairment.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/goodwill-impairment.asp)

Goodwill is the value of intangible assets -- name recognition, customer relations, intellectual property, etc.

Impairment is a reduction in that stated asset due to overpayment, negative publicity harming relations, etc.

So by impairing the total paid, they are essentially saying what they paid for was worthless, and by impairing _more_ than it is worth is saying it damaged their brand significantly in addition to being worthless.

It sounds like a difficult argument to make. Impairment on the total cost, maybe since the closing up the devices has made it last instead of first on most people's 3D-printers-to-get list. More than what they paid for it does seem like a scam -- I wonder if they have already justified it successfully? Does anyone know?

EDIT: I see skybrian's reply. Good catch. So the goodwill had increased in value temporarily and then decreased to essentially zero. Is that all of the goodwill of the whole stratasys company? Are they now saying "we have no IP/brand recognition/etc"? If so, that still sounds almost as sketchy for tax accounting as saying the MakerBot acquisition significantly damaged their own brand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> After I saw Print the Legend I assumed MakerBot would crash and burn.

</comment><comment><USER23> Really interesting read. I had no idea. Hope it gets some up votes so that more knowledgeable people will comment.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you haven't seen it, you should watch "Print the Legend", a documentary about a few 3D printer startups like MakerBot, FormLabs, etc. It's on Netflix streaming: [https://www.netflix.com/watch/80005444](https://www.netflix.com/watch/80005444)

<comment><USER24> Such a good documentary. I feel it is a great behind the scenes on the stresses of startups in general.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The average consumer hasn't even heard of open source. I think this point is really overstated in the article.

<comment><USER26> Community matters, though. Word-of-mouth advertising should not be undervalued. And if you turn that into negative, you'll have a bad time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Anyone want to buy my Makerbot Replicator 2X?

<comment><USER28> what did you use it for?

<comment><USER27> Mostly little experiments. Didn't use it much. I still haven't got through a 1kg spool of ABS.

Printed a toilet-roll holder, some tank-tread link experiments, a miniature head, and various cubes / cylinders / prisms.</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft doles out PowerShell 7 preview. It works. People like it - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/31/microsoft_doles_out_powershell_7_preview/ <comment><USER2> The biggest change: The tool uses the.Net Core 3.0 and is said to be compatible with some Windows native APIs like WPF and Winforms. [https://www.revyuh.com/2019/06/first-preview- powershell-7-ba...](https://www.revyuh.com/2019/06/first-preview- powershell-7-based-net-core-3-0/)</comment>


Choose Shipping Over Using the Latest Shiny Framework - <AUTHOR> http://shoganai.io/programming/2015/06/14/Choose-Shipping-Over-Latest-Shiny-Framework.html <comment><USER2> Here's a confession: I'm afraid to ship. I'm afraid of being rejected and of being dismissed, and of being seen as a failure. So I bullshit myself that "doing the thing" in the latest and greatest new framework, new language will at least mean that I "learnt something". Failure sounds less irredeemable when you count the dividends of new frameworks learnt!

It has taken me decades to confront this thinking in myself and even now, at times, I run into this logic. It's automatic thinking.

I like the article. You have to be 100% crystal clear that you are interested in the delivery of the finished concept and not the tools you used to build it.

<comment><USER3> Just remember that that is common and that all businesses are held together with strings and chewing gum, but you can only see yours. The rest are not as polished as they look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's really weird seeing advice on getting things done from a domain that's essentially a resigned "oh well."

<comment><USER5> I'm just worried other people will start catching on that Japanese words make amazing domain names.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If your rent depends on it, I agree. Otherwise, without the exploration, it will bring stagnation. Sometimes it's okay to choose the latest framework.

<comment><USER7> > Sometimes it's okay to choose the latest framework.

Choose what works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Agreed, but it can be balanced. Dedicate 1h/d to learning, no more. Balance that 1h w/ new vs current tech. Some technologies really _are_ a major investment; while others are smaller improvements than is worth sacrificing your expertise, as you pointed out.

I've had "1h learning" as a daily task for many years now, it's how I transitioned from PHP to Node. Shiny and hot, yes, but more importantly it's one language across all the work I do, and that saves me _tremendous_ amounts of time from when I was on PHP. That was a worth-while investment. Now I'm using Angular while React is getting hot. I'm not convinced that'll boost my productivity substantially, but I have that 1h/d to learn so why not? If it turns out to slow down my productivity compared to my Angular expertise, then I'll veer that 1h/d towards something else instead (VR + Unity is sounding super interesting, or maybe I'll explore this functional programming stuff everyone's raving about).

</comment><comment><USER9> Yup. Developers writing about small performance differences between JavaScript frameworks, or the antics of this language over that one. It's gotten to the point where people are actually choosing friends and enemies over what framework they use, what programming language they prefer, or what tools they like.

It's becoming a bit counterproductive. I wrote a post about this because of how often I've come across it that's worth reading: [http://room4debate.com/debate/tech-stacks-frameworks- languag...](http://room4debate.com/debate/tech-stacks-frameworks-languages- and-the-developers-narrow-world-view).

</comment><comment><USER10> I think you should have a timeframe. It's ok to try a new framework or language after a couple of years, otherwise you will be stuck on something old. That doesn't mean you must use the newest js framework at all times (probably impossible). You might also start a project where your current framework+langauge is a bad match and then it might be time to try something new. Just budget a lot of learning time for it.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm (proudly) launching my SaaS offering using ASP.NET webforms. "Deprecated", "clunky", "not ideal", "at least switch to .NET MVC" are the usual responses I hear from other programmers.

I've got presales, and none of those customers give a shit about the platform.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nothing is absolute. For new, small projects, choose a new unknown. For a big, important one you obviously don't just jump into something brand new.

<comment><USER13> Why would you choose an unknown though when there are tons of battle tested frameworks out there? The only reason I can think you would do this is if the framework offered something totally unique or revolutionary, but I really haven't seen that in many frameworks for a long time now.

<comment><USER10> Then why aren't you using Cobol (I assume you're not) :-)

Seriously it is probably a good idea to look a little at new things and possibly try one out and later switch every few years. I could be after 5 years or after 10 years but you can probably find things that helps a lot with some projects. Regarding the unknown one might want to differentieate between things you don't know and things almost no one knows about (ie very new things), the latter aren't really battle tested yet but the former might be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> But don't let this line of thinking make you blasé about technology choices.

</comment><comment><USER15> Oh yeah! False dichotomy and praise of the duct-tape programmer ("The most important thing is shipping"). There is no progress in software engineering, just continuous adaption to broken processes.

<comment><USER16> So, using a shiny framework, which probably will not work (again!) is "progress"? And using proven methods to ship is what "duct-tape programmers" do? I see a false dichotomy here, but not in the article.

<comment><USER15> "Shipping" vs. "Using the Latest Shiny Framework" is a false dichotomy whichever way you look at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fuck it, ship it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Agree! Like they say: You're probably going to be the only one bleeding on the bleeding edge.

Choose whatever takes you to MVP the quickest. Avoid the #beliebers in the echochamber[like this one!]. Choose something that you're familiar with, and probably aren't immersed deep enough yet. So that there is still ground to cover. Usually there is always much to learn.

Focus must be on the MVP and not on the quality of the framework or the hipness of stack. Those things are unimportant until you're ready to hire. Once a bit more stable then play around. Contribute into the system. Push it forward. Avoid stagnation. Have beer. :)</comment>


Looking for co-founder (user support startup). Anyone? - <AUTHOR> Looking for somebody who is really crazy, who can write code in js (es6, react, angular, express) and rails.<p>Just leave your email in comment and I will contact you. <comment><USER2> I am Dentist . I am working on Start up with scientists and great team. Would love to talk with you.

Thank you.

<comment><USER2> email : drchirag51 number one (again) at gmail

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are you a technical cofounder?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I am</comment></comment>


Inuit Cartography: Wooden Coastline Maps That Fit in a Mitten - <AUTHOR> https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/inuit-cartography/ <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting to contrast these with Polynesion Stick Charts: [http://thenonist.com/index.php/thenonist/permalink/stick_cha...](http://thenonist.com/index.php/thenonist/permalink/stick_charts/)

The Inuit maps have the characteristics of Inuit art: solid, smooth, compact. The Polynesian charts are remniscent of Polynesian architecture: airy, lightweight, resilient.

<comment><USER3> I'd never seen Polynesian stick charts before, they're incredible. Thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER4> You may like this article then. "The Secrets of the Wave Pilots"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11320127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11320127)

"...the Marshallese use stick charts, wood frames crosshatched like dream catchers to represent swells coming from four cardinal directions, with shells woven in to symbolize the position of the atolls."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The mapping between the coastline and the maps looks distorted though - <USER2> seems that what matters on these is the succession of capes and creeks rather than proportions or topography. Any insight on how useful this would be while navigating in the dark ?

<comment><USER6> I've heard of indigenous maps scaled by time of travel rather than physical distances. Maybe that's why these Inuit maps look distorted.

I've never seen such maps (only heard of them), so if anyone has a link to such a map I'd be interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like these wooden maps but I'm wondering if they are really practical : if you don't know the terrain I'm not sure how it can help you and if you know the terrain you probably don't need the map.

Maybe it's used as an educational tool : you have to learn all the fjords on your map as a rite of passage ?

<comment><USER8> As I've rediscovered time and again while hunting and hiking; if you haven't been to a place in a couple of years you may recognize landmarks but not remember exactly how they fit into your mental map of the area. This kind of problem would have been deadly in places like Greenland, so any kind of mnemonic could be a life saver.

Also, when you are hungry, thirsty and tired, self doubt can be debilitating; a map can give a little extra assurance that you are heading towards fresh water.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> These seem so similar in shape to Native American totem poles, could there be a stylistic influence, or a tradition of coastline mapping in the Americas ?

</comment><comment> awinter-py awesome UX tool</comment>


Ask HN: iPad vs. Netbook - <AUTHOR>

If you needed a mobile computer for Internet use, reading, writing long-form documents or articles, perhaps basic web dev (CSS or HTML editing), or basically any less demanding computing tasks, would you choose an iPad or a Netbook?  Why? <comment><USER2> Netbook.

I have an iPad, and it's great for most of the things you mention, but extended typing on it can get a little tiring.

The iPad isn't quite a "mobile computer", IMO. It is limited in that regard to what you can easily install/run on it. And I don't mean that as any kind of anti-appstore comment. I just mean than if you want to download, unzip, and hack around with with template or script you can't do that directly on the iPad. Not sure how you operate, but I've been using linux and now OS X laptops for the last ~10 years. I like being able to test some things locally on my development machine.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, what an iPad can do, is everything you've stated except (for what I know) basic web dev. You could go to docs.google.com and write long documents and the screen is ideal for reading and Safari on the iPad is phenomenal.

A netbook is most likely a better choice for what you want to accomplish. A physical keyboard makes writing long documents trivial, and you get access to a terminal for your web development.

The iPad was made for recreational use, basically for 'having fun', playing games, going on Facebook, ect.

</comment><comment><USER4> MacBook Air 11".

I used to run around with an iPad. But now I have the 11" MBA in my little Crumpler bag. And I can do so much more than on the iPad .. Love it.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would pick a netbook, or maybe even a really cheap full size notebook, because if I need to do any amount of typing I'm going to enjoy it more (or hate life less) if I can do it on a real keyboard. For any sort of development I'd much rather have a real computer that I could set up my preferred development environment on.

</comment><comment><USER6> Netbook. The best ones (like the Asus eee series) have huge battery life, and bags more flexibility than the iPad.</comment>


How to defeat naive image steganography - <AUTHOR> http://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/image-steganography.html <comment><USER2> There is a less naive steganography tool in the Debian repos named steghide. According to the manual:

           Steghide uses a graph-theoretic approach to steganography. You do not
           need to know anything about graph theory to use steghide and you  can
           safely  skip  the rest of this paragraph if you are not interested in
           the technical details. The embedding algorithm roughly works as  fol‐
           lows:  At  first, the secret data is compressed and encrypted. Then a
           sequence of postions of pixels in the cover file is created based  on
           a pseudo-random number generator initialized with the passphrase (the
           secret data will be embedded in the pixels at  these  positions).  Of
           these  positions  those  that do not need to be changed (because they
           already contain the correct value by chance) are sorted out.  Then  a
           graph-theoretic matching algorithm finds pairs of positions such that
           exchanging their values has the effect of embedding the corresponding
           part  of  the secret data. If the algorithm cannot find any more such
           pairs all exchanges  are  actually  performed.   The  pixels  at  the
           remaining  positions (the positions that are not part of such a pair)
           are also modified to contain the embedded data (but this is  done  by
           overwriting  them,  not  by  exchanging them with other pixels).  The
           fact that (most of) the embedding is done by exchanging pixel  values
           implies  that  the first-order statistics (i.e. the number of times a
           color occurs in the picture) is not  changed.  For  audio  files  the
           algorithm  is the same, except that audio samples are used instead of
           pixels.

I wonder how hard it would be to detect (not decode) content hidden by steghide.

<comment><USER3> There is a series of lectures on stego at Oxford [1]. The lecturer uses simple machine learning (average perceptrons I think) and achieves 99% accuracy with little effort although that was for LSBR[2]. Later he discusses problems with the graph approach [3]. Simply put whilst it preserves 1st order histograms it will probably mess with 2nd or 3rd order histograms.

[1][https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/advsec/](https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/advsec/) [2][https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/materials15-16/advsec/advse...](https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/materials15-16/advsec/advsec- notes-ch01234.pdf) p48 [3] ^ p58

<comment><USER2> Your second link is behind authentication. Is it freely available somewhere?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always expected steganography to be used to encode a compressed and encrypted datastream, not uncompressed images. Such a compressed and encrypted datastream should be indistinguishable from noise, so not show in this kind of analysis.

My pet idea for doing steganography was to use nonstandard or suboptimal encoding sequences. For compressed data formats, including images, music, video, and general files, there is almost always a choice of various encodings which will decompress to the same result. Systematically varying a compression choice gives an invisible way to encode data.

<comment><USER3> Actually there are properties of images that meant that the noise introduced through stego is actually, especially for LSBR, VERY easy to detect. [https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/materials15-16/advsec/advse...](https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/materials15-16/advsec/advsec- notes-ch01234.pdf)

<comment><USER5> That page requires an Oxford University username and password.

I'd be interested to read this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wouldn't this be completely defeated by just simply encrypting the data beforehand?

<comment><USER7> Yes.

And, in general, people don't hide the image of some text inside another image. They hide the text. And that isn't so linear (blocks of 0s or 1s)

<comment><USER8> But we agree that the bar for something non-naive is extremely high if you want to defeat the well-funded adversaries and whatever they come up with in the next few decades (future algorithms will be applied to today's images). I'm sure they have nice libraries of the artifacts most cameras and compression algorithms _should_ leave in any image and if it isn't there, well, let's look for some steganography?

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure you are overestimating the capabilities of government agencies. At least I hope so.

<comment><USER10> Ha! In general I assume that the NSA is ahead in many areas that remain classified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is why the steganography tool PixelJihad uses a schedule to scatter pixels randomly around the images, instead of changing LSB sequentially (and derive the same schedule to retrieve the pixels: [https://sekao.net/pixeljihad/about.html](https://sekao.net/pixeljihad/about.html) )

Definitely not naive, but an interesting hack.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have been thinking a lot about stenography. If we can make the technology a little more common place ( couldn't find a good book on the topic ) - it would effectively make the arguments made by FBI,GCHQ ineffective. But something tells me large scale usage of stenography is not simple to implement.

<comment><USER13> There are two big problem with stenography: 1) as it is inefficient, you need a "normal"/casual way to send a big amount of data. It used to be rare, but nowadays I doubt that this is a big issue. 2) you need to coordinate how you're going to use stenography. That is the real big issue, same as key distribution in cryptography.

<comment><USER14> When it was reported that OBL had a big porn stash in the house at Abbottabad I presumed that it was (at least partly) to be used with steganography.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice.

Here's some messages hidden in audio 'noise' generated from stretching out all the black and white squares of a QRcode and generating some audio from it.

It can also be decoded back to the QR code and back to the message.

Neat.

[http://qrdio.com](http://qrdio.com)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just realised I obviously cocked up the bit planes for the Lena+Walrus example. There's some grey in there as well as black and white!

EDIT: Fixed. It was because I changed it down to greyscale too late in the process.

<comment><USER16> Knowing nothing about steganography, how far would I get from this detection by making the last bit-plane the xor or the second last one and my data?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've not tried it, but it seems like it could work. The only potential problem is that you'll have around the amount of noise expected in the (n-1)th bit instead of the nth bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've posted it elsewhere in the comments but Dr. Andrew Ker at Oxford Uni runs a course on steganography [1]. It's worth a read as he covers several different methods for stego and then methods for detecting said methods.

[1][https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/materials15-16/advsec/advse...](https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/materials15-16/advsec/advsec- notes-ch01234.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> "This service is accessed via the University of Oxford Single Sign-On system."

Are you able to exfiltrate this information?</comment></comment>


Twitter to Add Photo Filters to Compete With Instagram - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/twitter-will-introduce-photo-filters-to-compete-with-instagram/?smid=tw-nytimes <comment><USER2> Almost all the photo filters that I've come across in apps other than instagram, have sucked! For example the filters in Path really look a lot less impressive. I'm not sure what it is, but I presume its just the detail that instagram put into each filter.

Saying that I'm sick to death of all these filtered photos now, its now a nice change if I see a normal, unfiltered photo being posted on facebook.</comment>


Buy Personal Bad Student Debt UK - <AUTHOR> I am a student from the UK currently in student debt. I am not sure if I will be able to fully pay back the loan, I know that bad student loan debt is often bought by private firms for a fraction of the value, do you guys think it would be possible for me to setup a debt firm and buy back my own debt from the government. I know that John Oliver did it with student debt in the US. <comment><USER2> Government (SLC) student loans debts aren't sold off in the UK, so... no.</comment>


Google releases open source Bitcoin client - <AUTHOR> http://www.cio.com.au/article/380396/google_releases_open_source_bitcoin_client/ <comment><USER2> Topic is misleading. This is a 20% project from one of the Google engineers (which the article says, but still uses the misleading title).</comment>


How Green Are Electric Cars? Depends on Where You Plug In - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/automobiles/how-green-are-electric-cars-depends-on-where-you-plug-in.html?ref=science

<comment><USER2> It's nice to see some numbers behind this problem, but there is a significant flaw in the logic behind their numbers: it assumes fungibility of electricity sources by ownership, rather than by location.

For instance, Las Vegas' power utility may rely heavily on its coal and natural gas holdings, but the hydro plant at Hoover Dam, within its service area, isn't counted toward its greenhouse gas footprint; that credit goes to southern California.

Pristine-looking Utah, on the other hand, gets 74% of its capacity from 8 coal-fired locations, but since these aren't owned by the local utility, they get counted against customer utilities in places like Nevada and Arizona.

Maybe it's fair this way. If my utility puts clean energy into the grid in faraway lands, but the bulk of the electromotive force charging my EV is coming from the smoke-belching plant next door that's owned by some out-of- state conglomerate, how guilty or smug should I feel?

Moving the pollution out of the city and into the boonies also has its benefits, even if it's an even amount of pollution for the trade.

A final point that EV apologists (I'm one) almost never put out there: oil refineries use prodigious amounts of electricity too. So while you can argue that an EV is only moving the tailpipe, you need to also observe that a gas- powered vehicle similarly moves some of its tailpipe to the same place (the power plant smokestack).

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a very static analysis. It takes the current spread of power generation emissions and applies it to the future electricity load of EV's. This is fundamentally flawed reasoning.

EV's will constitute a significant new load on the grid and we will have to build modern power plants to supply the extra load. New power plants produce significantly fewer emissions.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a largely FUD story. Scaremongering people over if their electricity is green, so they should buy a gas guzzling turd burner or not is insane.

Electric cars come first, then green electricity to go with it. And guess what? We're in orbit around a gravity fed fusion reactor, it produces more power per second than the entire human race has used in our entire existence.

To quote Neil Tyson: the tax dollar? NASA's budget doesn't even get into the ink. And what Neil doesn't mention? Green energy research and deployment doesn't get into the ink either.</comment>


20% projects at GitHub are maintained by sole contributors.Let's contribute. - <AUTHOR> http://cadeify.madroids.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Our aim is to provide a platform for bringing those Github projects that're maintained by single user to a wide range of developers and community out there. Cadeify is GitHub discovery project — inspired from Forgotify. About 20% (approx 238424 out of 1 million — current crawling) projects are maintained single handed. If you like it, help us speard the word — #Cadeify. Lets collaborate, Lets contribute, Lets commit. If you think it can be more better then please leave a comment below.

</comment><comment><USER2> You could add the option to filter by programming language, to avoid seeing repositories using languages the potential contributor doesn't know or has no interest in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that's around my head. Filtering by language will play a pretty vital role.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Please post your feedbacks and suggestions to improve the service.</comment>


Anthropomorphic Robotic Hand - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/medical-robots/biomimetic-anthropomorphic-robot-hand <comment><USER2> Now all they have to do is run a DNN on the input (to the robotic hand) signals!

</comment><comment><USER3> Url changed from [http://singularityhub.com/2016/02/18/this-remarkable- robot-h...](http://singularityhub.com/2016/02/18/this-remarkable-robot-hand- is-worthy-of-luke-skywalker/), which points to this.</comment>


Deciphering China's AI Dream - <AUTHOR> https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/deciphering-chinas-ai-dream/ <comment><USER2> History does not repeat itself but it rhymes.

Strong rhymes from the 80's and 90's when Japan was the boogieman. Replace Japan with China to update into the present moment.

1) Fear of Japanese AI was real in the 80's. The fifth generation computers (massive parallelism with prolog programs)[1].

2) Fear of Japanese buying the rest of the world [2] and unfair trade tactics.

3) Trump attacking Japan for trade and considering a presidential run with trade war and tariffs [3].

4) The war with Japan is inevitable [4].

5) Under all this Japan had 'demographic time bomb' and real estate boom reaching the maximum.

China will undoubtedly face many of the same problems as Japan did, but the scales are different (both time and magnitude). China has still at least two decades to go. The country is still undergoing urbanization and has to fit over 100 million people into cities. While Chinese growth can't be as high as in last decades, their growth will still outpace the West for a long time.

It's very unlikely that China just fizzles and stays paralyzed for more than a decade like Japan did. Either Chinese solve their problems or the problems will destabilize China internally.

\---

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

[2]: [http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america- buyin...](http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america-buying- spree-2014-9)

[3]: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/over-four-decades- tr...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/over-four-decades-trumps-one- solid-stance-a-hard-line-on- trade/2018/03/07/4b1ed250-2172-11e8-badd-7c9f29a55815_story.html?utm_term=.591792e550ca)

[4]: The Coming War With Japan by George Friedman , Meredith Lebard [https://www.amazon.com/Coming-War-Japan-George- Friedman/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Coming-War-Japan-George- Friedman/dp/0312058365)

<comment><USER3> It would be ironic if the fourth AI winter came about because China over invested in AI. China's real estate boom has already hit peak Japan.

<comment><USER2> I'm certain that AI business will plateau and there will be yet another AI winter without new big breakthroughs in fundamental research.

We are currently living in a era where the results from Hinton & Canadian Mafia are still begin adopted and refined. It's just alternating layers of affine transformations and nonlinearity with lots of tricks and improved routing.

There needs to be fundamental theoretical breakthrough in every decade or so, and not just refinements and new applications. Hinton made his "What is wrong with convolutional neural nets" speech years ago "[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTawFwUvnLE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTawFwUvnLE) I believe that Hinton's capsule networks type attempts are what we need more. They may not deliver immediately impressive results because fundamental research involves lots of setbacks.

<comment><USER4> > It's just alternating layers of affine transformations and nonlinearity with > lots of tricks and improved routing.

and a computation is just 0s and 1s, with lots of if/then statements.

<comment><USER5> Not necessarily. Lambda calculus is Turing-complete under Church-Turing thesis, and it has nothing to do with 0s and 1s. That's just von-Neumann architecture encoding.

<comment><USER4> youve missed the point.

the point is: anything complex can be dismissed as "just x,y,z" if you dont appreciate the massive body of work behind it.

i made that point because OP observed that "ml is just affine transformations" or something to that effect. yes, that's one way to frame it - if youre okay overlooking roughly 30 years of research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Although not explicitly what the report is focussed on, this resurfaces my, perhaps mislead, hope that AI will be the field to prove that the Chinese style of eduation will prove unfruitful. As someone attempting to work in this field right now I intepret it as something that although on the surface is highly mathematical/statistical at its base still rests on critical thinking and creativity.

The latter attribute, creativity, is something I have always thought was necessary to foster with freedom in thought and expression, two things I see incompatible with the authoritarian system currently in place in China. Maybe I'm naive and romantic about the Canadian/Western style of education and China will inevitablly dominate AI through force of will. However, my personal experience working with it, and experimenting with improvement in my own small corner of applied science tells me otherwise.

Would be very curious to hear others thoughts on this, perhaps from people further along than I (still a lowly undergrad).

Edit: I don't want my comment on math to imply that there is no creativity within mathematics. I've gone through too many heavy math courses to believe that. I'm instead trying to say that there is a place, even beyond mathematics, for creativity and intuition, where you don't need the mathematical understanding to build something novel.

<comment><USER7> Having gone to school in China I think that the Chinese people not being creative is incorrect. The public US education system is just worse all around. However there are pockets of extremely high quality that exist but aren't indicative of the US as a whole.

What is an advantage however is the US culture which promotes a certain type of courage. In degenerate cases it combines with bad education to become a naive form of arrogance and self indulgance. In the most actualized forms it combines with strong work ethic and refusal to look away from reality to create very big change. (ironically this freedom culture combines best with immigrant mentality)

The Chinese are very creative, except this creativity is often expressed in trivial ways because the culture creates a sense of "fineness" with things. The US culturally has what the Chinese refer to as "the heroe's dream" where everyone imagines themselves the hero. I suspect Chinas large population as well as it's more authoritarian government plays a role. Historically pre- communist era even the "important" things were left to the imperial elite.

<comment><USER8> My doubt is that Chinese businesses will be able to produce competitive products that break new ground with markets outside China.

In a political culture that largely will prevent outsiders from participating in business or non-tech academia _inside_ the country (who will want to live/teach inside China, micromanaged by Big Brother's social score — other than the Chinese?), I think China's heavyhanded political leadership of the future will form an insurmountable obstacle against the country's ability to compete in any/all of tomorrow's critical revolutionary exponential multiplier business spaces — the ones that silicon valley startups excel at, that require dynamic multicultural madhouse environs, and that engender future Googles or Apples. Without the freedom and chaos needed for this space to thrive, China will forever relegate its rising business geniuses to pursue mere optimizations of The Next Big Thing, that will be invented where new ideas are free to run amok.

In the not so distant future, China's cut-rate factories distributors and e-tailers will be automated, like everyone else's, and her political stranglehold on the genesis of new ideas will lead to her uncompetitive downfall. That is, if a billion unemployed don't do it first.

<comment><USER9> > My doubt is that Chinese businesses will be able to produce competitive > products that break new ground with markets outside China.

Thanks to capitalism - they can just buy makers of competitive products. Have you looked at the 2018 Volvo lineup? I think they are fantastic cars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is news to me. Will it likely affect Nvidia in any significant way?

From p.18 of the report:

"What is new in the hardware driver is that Chinese tech giants and unicorn startups are competitive with some of the world's leading companies in designing AI chips. For instance, Chinese company Cambricon, a statebacked startup valued at $1 billion, has developed chips that are six times faster than the standard GPUs for deep learning applications and use a fraction of the power consumption.65 Moreover, equipped with a new "neural processing unit," Huawei has arguably overtaken Apple in mobile AI chips.66"

<comment><USER11> Nvidia will face more competition in the future, but it has technological edge.

So far Nvidia has build microarchitectures that are generic. They just put tensor cores, F64, F32, F16 units and 8-bit inference support into the same GPU. They are used in HPC, graphics, DL inference and training. That's four different domains.

I suspect that in the future Nvidia builds 2-3 different microarchitectures.

One for HPC + graphics.

One for DL training.

One for DL inference.

<comment><USER12> Right, I wonder just how specialized these chips are. There are still changes in modeling and architecture coming hot off the research presses. It's easy- ish to hard code a specific architecture in your Verilog and claim massive efficiency improvements. While AI is still very much in the research stage, general-purpose is what really matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not loading for me. Cached on the Wayback Machine:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180318140130/https://www.fhi.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180318140130/https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/deciphering- chinas-ai-dream/)

EDIT: Hrm, guess it only cached the abstract.

<comment><USER14> The Wayback Machine doesn't appear to have the PDF, but the direct link worked for me:

[https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp- content/uploads/Deciphering_Chin...](https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp- content/uploads/Deciphering_Chinas_AI-Dream.pdf)

Mirror: [https://archive.fo/QhRnC](https://archive.fo/QhRnC)

<comment><USER15> I uploaded the PDF into Dropbox, and shared the file at the following link: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/dm9eew6jf1t42wp/Deciphering_Chinas...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/dm9eew6jf1t42wp/Deciphering_Chinas_AI- Dream.pdf?dl=0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here is what I am worried about: as China takes more and more steps to become authoritarian -- CCTV cameras everywhere and recently banning people from trains and planes if their citizen score is not high enough -- aren't they a few steps away from ushering in an AI-overseen human population, tracking everyone's actions and gradually increasing the amount of control over the population until there is nothing anyone can do, including the politicians? There MAY be one or more humans at the top, but it might just be completely run by itself in the end. My worry is that it might have some serious problems from the AI not understanding human needs.

As one AI researcher said, the temptation to try it just too _sweet_. And China's motto of already "once untrustworthy, always restricted" for the social credit score system isn't very encouraging.

<comment><USER17> "banning people from trains and planes if their citizen score is not high enough"

This is a myth created by inaccurate reporting. For details on what the policy is exactly see my earlier comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16604551](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16604551)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, the entire fhi.ox.ac.uk subdomain is unreachable. I thought Oxford uni servers would have been able to cope with a little traffic surge!

<comment><USER19> I hope it is just a traffic surge, not a great cannon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > _By 2020, China's AI industry will be "in line" with the most advanced > countries, with a core AI industry gross output exceeding RMB 150 billion > (USD 22.5 billion) and AI-related industry gross output exceeding RMB 1 > trillion (USD 150.8 billion)_

And I'm confident the goal will be reached. Incidentally, much of the software that today is classified as "just software" will be called "AI".

Not that it's different from elsewhere, of course (I saw screenscraping being called "AI"), it's just there are government incentives to do so.

</comment><comment><USER21> The most worrying trend I note is how closely China and the West are when it comes to the use of AI and data collection for the manipulation and control of the masses.

The financial system is different. In the West, there's no central authority requesting what needs to be done, but small and big companies are allowed to go crazy with user data, as long as they provide access to government agencies too. In China, the whole thing is managed by governmental entities, but it functions strikingly similar. The Chinese also lack a lot of the tact and PR management that western companies are so good at - but the differences aren't that big in the surveilance. One other key difference is that the Chinese aren't afraid to prosecute people based on that data, while in the West we still have some due process, but the future plans aren't looking good.</comment>


A curated list of awesome applications,softwares,tools for OS X - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/iCHAIT/awesome-osx <comment><AUTHOR> Contributions are most welcome.</comment>


Free browser-based PHP IDE - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingapps.com/2009/09/01/now-use-phpanywhere-to-code-directly-from-your-browser.html

<comment><USER2> This looks like a really cool app, but I'd rather see it released as something you could install on your own server, like phpMyAdmin. It looks like it runs from their website and accesses yours via FTP, which I'm not really that comfortable with.

<comment><USER3> This is precisely how I feel. I would not be willing to FTP through someone else's site, no matter how convenient it was to use. On the other hand, I would be willing to pay a reasonable licensing fee (say, $20-30 a year, w/ updates, or $30-50 as a one time fee) and host it on my own servers.

As awesome as this is, I can't imagine the target audience (people who do web programming) be willing to put their credentials for their own sites into another site. I know I don't even trust my credentials for my web server on my own local machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We thought seriously about turning AppJet into this, before we decided EtherPad was a better business. We even built version 1 of a virtualized php- hosting backend. In the end, we just couldn't get our hearts into it because we liked programming in JavaScript so much better than PHP.

<comment><USER5> I seriously hearted appjet. And amen for javascript over PHP. Now, about releasing appjet as OSS? Maybe on AppEngine? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Neat concept, though as other commenters have pointed out there are some security issues.

On the plus side, I can't imagine it being that hard to add syntax highlighting for additional languages.

</comment><comment><USER7> it looks like <http://phpanywhere.net/> is down right now.

<comment><USER8> It's down for me too I think HN effect may have knocked it over.

<comment><USER9> It was on the front page of digg as well - and when I clicked the link from there an hour or so before the story was on here it was having trouble loading all the images etc. so I am sure hitting hn was just the cherry on top of their server meltdown.

<comment><USER7> What is the relative effect of being posted on the front page of digg vs being posted on HN ?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dick's Goes All Out on In-House Software - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/dicks-tech-chief-goes-all-out-on-in-house-software-11553598001 <comment><USER2> I think it's interesting that companies are starting to tailor their software toward "millennials" \- which I assume means writing iOS/Android apps instead of putting a web front end on an IBM 3090 screen. I wonder what the users of these systems are saying. Sure the management says that everyone loves them and it helps get work accomplished better/faster but that message is often not universally accepted.</comment>


The building and dismantling of the Windows advantage - <AUTHOR> http://www.asymco.com/2012/07/04/the-building-and-dismantling-of-the-windows-advantage/

<comment><USER2> "The consequences are dire for Microsoft. The wiping out of any platform advantage around Windows will render it vulnerable to direct competition. This is not something it had to worry about before. Windows will have to compete not only for users, but for developer talent, investment by enterprises and the implicit goodwill it has had for more than a decade."</comment>


Google says Java, Ruby, and PHP are coming for AppEngine - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/daveman692/statuses/832155032 <comment><USER2> Wow, reputable source. A friend of a friend's twitter post says a friend heard that it was true!

<comment><AUTHOR> His twitter history seems to indicate he's at Graphing Social Patterns East, where Google presented on AppEngine.

(I went through Google's slides for that presentation and they make no mention of supporting more languages.)

Make of that what you will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been enjoying the quality of news posts on Hacker News, but this link is lame. Generally speaking, I'd like a little context, maybe some informed opinion, or a first-hand account of some session being held somewhere, not someone's twitter post.

</comment><comment><USER4> Would love to see some official word on this. The languages are certainly ranked high on the bug tracker:

<http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list>

</comment><comment><USER4> The one thing that will be interested to see: will they require those languages use a framework like the current iteration of AppEngine?

<comment><USER5> You can use whatever framework you want, not just webPy. I am using Django.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks google!

PHP is awesome.</comment>


US computer science grads outperforming those in other key nations - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/03/us-computer-science-grads-outperforming-those-in-other-key-nations/ <comment><USER2> duplicate, please check before submitting: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19430880](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19430880)

</comment><comment><USER3> No European?

I'd expect elite US schools to beat EU schools, but non-elite EU school to perform better compared to their US counterparts.</comment>


Ask HN: When will PS3 be available again? - <AUTHOR>

Last week I asked y'all if I should get an Xbox or a PS3 -- with 135 responses, I got a 50/50 split between the two! All results here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tQ_S9H40SLxVJ0wwCcSRG3w&single=true&gid=0&output=html
I decided to go with PS3. But, as I discovered over the last 3 days, it's sold out EVERYWHERE. EVERYWHERE! And no one has a clue when it will be in stock again.
Has anyone heard any rumors or have any knowledge here? Googling for info on the shortage is a bottomless pit of crap news. I need a real answer. <comment><USER2> [http://www.amazon.com/PlayStation-3-120-GB/dp/B002I0J4VQ/ref...](http://www.amazon.com/PlayStation-3-120-GB/dp/B002I0J4VQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1268894327&sr=8-1)

first google result. 34 for sale just on that page

<comment><AUTHOR> aieeeee, just checked availability before i posted, and there was nothing. sweet baby james!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think a new version of Final Fantasy was released. It was probably a tipping point for many people to go out and buy a PS3. I'm still waiting for my killer app, GT5, to come out.

<comment><AUTHOR> yea, gt5... mmmm</comment></comment>