The dropbox endgame - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/the+dropbox+endgame

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I agree at all with Jacques maths, the cost of local storage is tiny compared to the cost of Dropbox itself, and that's unlikely to ever change

A hard drive costs maybe $30 for 100GB, higher capacities have much better GB/$ ratios. Dropbox costs $240 per year for 100GB, which has to cover both the storage and bandwidth costs.

At the moment, the growth in data stored is increasing at much higher rate than the rate at which the cost of storage and bandwidth is decreasing.

Sure Dropbox is great and a local/remote sync process is likely to become normal over time, but it won't be for cost saving reasons.

<comment><USER3> But most of that data stored is things like illegal music and film downloads.[* ]

With the rise in popularity of Netflix, Spotify, Pandora, etc. people will only use local storage for a cache. Why would you waste time downloading it, when it's on tap?

* Media producers are a little different in this respect and are always going to want local storage. However Jacques is mostly talking about the 95% of users who just have few 100mb of docs.

<comment><USER2> There's a lot of people buying legitimate music and films now you know..? Plus photos and videos that people make themselves will always take up a significant amount of space.

I don't dispute that remote storage and streaming will become normal - I just think anyone who looks at the costs and thinks it'll be cheaper than having it locally stored is kidding themselves.

It'll definitely be better than having it locally stored, but it'll cost more too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure this is also the current vision of the Dropbox team. They are making a lot of effort to become a platform not just a product.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does the author mistake the past with the future? A cloud-based home dir is basically a network file system (samba,afs,nfs,...) We had them for decades and they suck. Dropbox is an improvement, because is not necessary anymore to be "always on".

<comment><USER6> The difference is Dropbox has some 21st century common sense that actually make it a viable solution for the cloud:

 _Eventual consistency is good enough_

but I agree, many of the points he's making are nothing specific to Dropbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Doesn't seem wise to entirely trust your data to a single entity. Can we be sure dropbox will still exist in 5, 10 years time?

What happens when your net connection fails?

Local storage will forever be around, in some form.

<comment><USER3> Millions of people don't appear to share your concern when it comes to their personal email accounts, which are arguably more valuable than a few documents...

Actually the majority of computer users have no form of backup, despite how easy it should be. Lose your laptop/iPhone/hdd crash, and many people find themselves lost with no backup.

Of course local storage will be around, in some form. But my guess is that that form will just be a cache, and for some people, a mirror of everything on a small box (NAS/plugpc type device) at home, which they can take everywhere for convenience.

<comment><USER7> Fair point, although with email we're talking (for the majority of users) about huge companies which will almost certainly linger.

<comment><USER6> It seems like Dropbox is going to be a pretty big company, and their infrastructure largely runs on Amazon.com, which is a company with more revenue than Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Dropbox's core competency isn't cloud storage, it's continuous client syncing. If anything, moving towards not using the local file system at all hurts Dropbox, as they lose the part of their service that makes them special - syncing all files locally.

On top of that, I can't imagine removing a local file system would work as a general purpose solution. By the time network bandwidth catches up to today's bus speeds (probably years away), the new bus speeds will be that much faster, and that's what people will want. Managing files locally may be a pain, but that's a UI issue. Users want native performance. Cloud files are a leaky abstraction. Dropbox gives you local files and abstracts away cloud storage and syncing. That's the way to do it.

</comment><comment><USER9> This article is very interesting. The iTunes example in particular shows that these measures _have_ to be transparent or they won't work very well.

I think this was very much Microsoft's vision for Livemesh; they were thinking about desktop apps running data across the cloud.

There's a real potential for dropbox if they could somehow hook into a variety of web apps and provide a common back end.

The problem at the moment is that if you assume much of the app work people do will move into the browser, you're losing the common file base. You have several app-specific silos across the web.

</comment><comment><USER10> Very interesting idea. However, it made me think that one major flaw of Dropbox will limit its potential as the "ultimate storage."

Dropbox is very memory intensive, even for my 5 gigs and my 40,000 files in the Box. If you cover my entire hard drive, that's over 100 gigs and millions of files. Each file (and each sub part of a file, sort like like a Merkel Tree) must have its finger print stored in memory. Currently those 40,000 files use about 70 MB, and when syncing, consume an entire CPU. I can't imagine how resource-intensive it would become if I indexed my entire hard drive now.

I don't think Dropbox can push order-of-magnitude improvements in resource usage, even if they move away from Python. I'm sure they're already doing very well. I have multiple friends working there, and I have talked to Drew and Arash. All of them are very brilliant people and I doubt that they haven't consumed all the low hanging fruit in performance.

Sure, in the future using 20x the memory may be OK. That's just 4.3 doublings, so maybe memory increases may balance it out. But don't forget that the amount of data I have will also increase.

So I don't think it's feasible (with the current trajectory of technology) to have Dropbox serve as the ultimate storage medium, unless we develop a different way of syncing files.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not trolling - but this is hardly a 'weird idea' as the article states ... I thought of this and did it last weekend :)

My flatmates harddisk broke down the other day in his laptop, so I put Ubuntu live CD in, a USB stick and hooked up dropbox. A script later, and he's using dropbox for permanent storage online, and considering not buying another hard disk.

Of course he will :P .. but my point is that this seems a pretty obvious progression :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Apple already made the first step by releasing an OS that is geared around the idea of cloud-based computing (Lion). It's just a matter of time before this happens, and when it does; Dropbox might have a hard(er) time competing.

[http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2011/02/apple- in...](http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2011/02/apple-in-the-sky- with-diamonds-a-cloud-based-safe-deposit-box.html#more)

<comment><USER13> Apple's market share is still relatively low, a bigger risk is if MS tries build something like this into Windows too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How will this work out in a world where the telcos seem to be bent on increasing costs and introducing data caps?

I live in South Africa, where the normal ADSL account gives you 3 Gb of traffic a month (10USD/gig for each gig after that) at a maximum of 4 Mbit/s (10 in a few areas). I know we are probably an outlier, but judging by what happened in Canada recently, and a few cases in the US, its seems possible a reverse case of Moore's law will come into play.

Also, most people (speaking globally), wont have the network capacity to support this kind of system for many years. There would likely have to be a truly massive increase in network capacity before we ever see this really take off.

For fun, try running your computer off an NFS - even with a 100Mbit connection, it gets annoying quickly.

</comment><comment><USER15> Dropbox sits in that transition period from local to cloud storage. I said earlier in my comments that cloud will be an OS feature and Apple will lead that.

However it will not start with pure storage(their approach of experience rather than specs). It will start with your music,video, pictures. Than your ios+local apps (with preferences and save files). And then Computer setup (remember your OS setup). Thats why Apple is easy with offering SSD harddisks in their top tier products.

<comment><USER6> There's nothing transitional about it. This is what cloud storage looks like at its finest.

Any model where you don't keep your files in local storage and sync is going to be slow, error-prone and annoying, just like all the solutions we've had before. There's certainly a case for more OS integration, and more powerful syncing, but this is the right model.

I don't expect Apple to make such a big dent. They'll be in their Apple-only tunnel vision and would not be able to compete with a solution that can sync across Windows, Linux, Android, etc.

<comment><USER15> By transition i mean being more than storage solutions. Its computational network power, location independance,security etc. all the things related to cloud. You remember SETI project? Wouldn't be great if something is already integrated within.

I don't see any bad in company-only tunnel visions as long as it drives innovation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I believe this would mean giving up the main advantage DropBox has over all competitors: It's the first cloud storage provider that sucessfully mixes local storage and cloud storage by providing transparent synchonization. After all, the DropBox folder is just a plain folder, but it is sync'ed whenever something changes. Without the local storage part there would be no reason to use DropBox as one could simply use for example a WebDAV share or SFTP.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sounds like the Chrome OS vision to me.

Dropbox is a great place to store media and created content but doesn't easily accommodate your registry hive or myriad support directories that you need to make programs actually run.

If you re-architect to achieve all of those goals and still have sync, you get ChromeOS. Barring that you have a nice replicated USB key (which Drew describes as the original original vision)

</comment><comment><USER18> As long as there's no 3G or other (affordable) wireless internet access on the London Underground or anywhere else where I would need my files, I'm simply not interested in purchasing a product that doesn't have local storage. I mean, imagine an iPhone that would stream everything, I couldn't even listen to music during my daily commute.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is how I use Google. My docs, calendar, and email are everywhere at once - no syncing necessary.

</comment><comment><USER20> The thing I don't like about cloud services is this: They can be served a search warrant to let government go through what belongs to me without my ever being notified.

<comment><USER2> I think Dropbox claim they can't see the files you stored unless you share it with someone else or copy it into the public folder.

I think the rest is encrypted using a key generated against your password and they only store the hashed version of your password, which couldn't be used to generate the key.

<comment><USER21> I'd call shenanigans. Typical password gives entropy that is way too low for any reasonable security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I in a way agree with the OP however I think we are decades away from the proposed future. The problem is multi-tiered

\- If you are outside of a major city, chances are you don't have internet wireless coverage everywhere. In fact many places in the city face this issue. This is more of a physics issue than anything. Inside my office building I get fairly bad coverage. Don't forget tunnels and such. My apartment has ZERO coverage. Only my wifi. And not all apartments I visit have wifi or coverage.

\- Price and transfer rate. Sending my hard drive to dropbox is about $50 a month (or more) and not to mention taking about a month to actually upload.

\- I don't want to rely on a company like Dropbox to exist. If they fail (see delicious) I don't want to be stuck with nothing. In fact single points of failure are bad. And I don't mean Dropbox can have a hard drive failure, I mean what if DB decides to triple their price.

\- America's internet infrastructure kinda sucks with current insanity pushed by isps regarding data caps/etc. Just wait till people REALLY put our infrastructure to the test.</comment>


Type 'beam me up' into Bing.... - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Nothing happens...?

<comment><USER3> All I get is a results page (as I would expect). What should happen?

<comment><AUTHOR> You get beaming effects, a moving Enterprise, and screens with Star Trek links.

It still works....</comment></comment></comment>


Does Aging Have a Reset Button? (2018) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/57/communities/does-aging-have-a-reset-button <comment><USER2> This link should be edited to use https instead of http</comment>


Australia's Home Affairs department proposes making telcos retain MAC addresses - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/home-affairs-floats-making-telcos-retain-mac-addresses-and-port-numbers/ <comment><AUTHOR> The fact that most MAC addresses are not visible to the ISP behind NAT anyway is not the point, given the Department is not renowned for doing its homework.

The real concern here is the insight provided by this submission into the sort of thinking that is clearly going on at the most powerful ministerial department in the country. These people don't understand the technology, and fundamentally do not care.

</comment><comment><USER2> We should be cycling MAC addresses regularly anyway since they leak information: [https://www.crc.id.au/tracking-people-via-wifi-even-when- not...](https://www.crc.id.au/tracking-people-via-wifi-even-when-not- connected/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thats why i'm using my own router (x86 miniPC with OPNsense) on NBN instead of ISP provided one. ISP provided routers are under their full control, you don't have super user password. That and VPN enabled all time on all my devices.</comment>


Ask HN: Are you familiar with this new "Expert Chat" in StackOverflow? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is one I just had

<http://adviza.stackexchange.com/transcript/MbSE6J4TEqiO>

<comment><USER2> Hilarious.

I guess since Jeff left, there's no limit to the stupidity that can be accomplished by over-eager investors.</comment></comment>


Jony Ive shakes up Apple's software design group - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2014/04/09/jony-ive-shakes-up-apples-software-design-group-iphone-interface-creator-greg-christie-departing/ <comment><USER2> The problem I'm seeing with this whole unification of design across a whole system including hardware and software is that designing a proper UI for software is orders of magnitude more complex than designing UI for hardware. Not only is software far more complex than typical end-user hardware from a functionality standpoint, it's far more malleable, indefinitely extensible and has to work with third-party components over which it has little control. Also, because it takes far longer to learn how to use software, simply being good isn't enough - it has to work within the constraints of people's expectations, far more than a piece of hardware has to.

Now, there's certainly commonality between the two but if you were to exaggerate the difference, hardware UI design is like writing a sonnet. The medium is constraining but the compromises you have to make with other people are minimal - if you write a great sonnet, the chance is that people will like it. Software UI design is more like writing a constitution - it's about compromises. You have to weigh the needs of present users against those of future users, usability of old applications against new applications, properly balance the opinions and ideas of a whole bunch of people involved in design and implementation of various features, not to mention third-party developers. No matter what you do, there will be a huge number of inconsistencies, a lot of people will hate it and many others will worship and faithfully copy your mistakes, in a way that makes correcting your mistakes difficult.

Edit: Btw, when I say hardware UI, I actually mean the hardware as seen and directly manipulated by the user without software as the intermediary. If by hardware, we mean software interface to the hardware, the above points also apply to hardware, though hardware is still considerably simpler and the work is done almost entirely at the component level that has nothing to do with Jony Ive. At the whole system level, which is where Jony Ive comes in, hardware UI design is inherently simple. Simple doesn't mean easy - it just means you're judged by different standards.

<comment><USER3> I'd argue all your points regarding software are true for hardware but with the added difficulty of needing to get it right the first time.

<comment><USER3> Edit: Re your edit, I still think that designing the actual hardware that the user interacts with directly is equally difficult to design as the software at any level.

The fact that the iPhone has 4 buttons and a switch is a huge design decision. The size, shape, texture, reflectiveness, responsiveness, and tactile feedback are parts of the design that need to be considered and are not malleable once released.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is starting to be a pattern. Although Jony is obviously talented, he sure has driven a lot of talent from the company.

At some point, that leaving talent points to a problem with Jony.

And then it will be Jony's turn.

<comment><USER5> What talent has Ive driven from the company apart from Scott Forstall and this guy?

<comment><USER6> Jon Rubenstein had plenty of conflict with him (via the Jobs and Ive biographies), and Tony Fadell as well [1].

[1] [http://www.cultofmac.com/262334/feud-jony-ive-keep-tony- fade...](http://www.cultofmac.com/262334/feud-jony-ive-keep-tony-fadell- returning-apple/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Jobs and Ive run Apple like a cult of personality. And it seems to have resulted in awesome products. Let's see if that can continue to happen.

Because in the last 2 years, Apple's design took a nosedive. I hate to say it but Google's interfaces are now way more pleasant than Apple's. And there is one reason for it:

FLAT INTERFACES

If it comes to the MacOS, I will probably abandon ship. I liked my iPhone and its familiar look and feel. Jobs got it, Ive didn't. It was all thrown out the window with the word "skeumorphism".

Let me be clear: iOS 7 was a leap forward DESPITE the interface, not because of it. It was all the other things, like the drawer on the bottom (whoopee) that made up for the horrible clown-like icons and complete lack of textures. My videos with white backgrounds now are indistinguishable from the controls. At least they fixed the neon-green color of the bar on top when you have a phonecall. The white text was almost impossible to read on it. How did it ever pass design QA at Apple? Probably while Jony Ive was desigining his much- touted icon grid.

Apple, your design was so good -- why'd you have to go copy Google and Microsoft after decades of leading design-wise? Why'd you have to break your browser only to fix it in 7.1? Argh.

<comment><USER8> > Jobs and Ive run Apple like a cult of personality

Hello? Earth speaking to whoever is out there.

I realize information takes time to reach the end of our solar system and beyond, but Steve Jobs died long ago. He also ceded control to Tim Cook months before doing so.

<comment><USER7> OK I omitted a word assuming most people would know what I meant.

Steve Jobs HAS run Apple like a cult of personality.

Steve Jobs appointed Ive head of everything hardware-design-related and made him untouchable on purpose. He groomed him to lead design at Apple, which is the major department.

Steve Jobs would have vehemently disagreed with Ive about skeumorphism and probably wouldn't let him create iOS 7 this way, or if it happened, would chew him out the way he did Forstall, even though he liked him.

That said, the reason Ive is now telling everyone it's his way or the highway is a direct extension of how Steve Jobs ran the company. Get it?

<comment><USER9> But that was not Steve Jobs..your over-simplifying things as there were times where standing up to Steve was not only encouraged but respected

<comment><USER7> Although I don't think that your point disproves mine, I'd love to learn about the times that standing up to Jobs was respected and rewarded. Genuinely want to have more examples of this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why not link to the source article? [http://9to5mac.com/2014/04/09/jony-ive- shakes-up-apples-soft...](http://9to5mac.com/2014/04/09/jony-ive-shakes-up- apples-software-design-group-iphone-interface-creator-greg-christie- departing/)

<comment><USER11> Thanks. I changed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Financial Times got confirmation of this from Apple: [http://blogs.ft.com/tech-blog/2014/04/apple-confirms- departu...](http://blogs.ft.com/tech-blog/2014/04/apple-confirms-departure-of- prominent-designer-greg-christie/) (registration required)

Apple's statement: "Greg has been planning to retire later this year after nearly 20 years at Apple. He has made vital contributions to Apple products across the board, and built a world-class Human Interface team which has worked closely with Jony for many years."

Clearly downplaying a clash.

<comment><USER13> How is it clear that it's a clash? It's just as likely that the reporting of a clash is drama added by the media.

(Edit: see: [http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/04/09/christie-ive- wsj](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/04/09/christie-ive-wsj) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I didn't like those inconsistent style-over-substance design decisions in iOS7. Maybe Forstall and Christie just wanted to be a voice of reason and got sacked for it?

<comment><USER15> Are you kidding? iOS 7 strips down graphical elements so that the substance is the style.

iOS 6 and earlier was stuffed to the gills with stylization.

<comment><USER16> I own mac, pc, android, ios. With each revision, ios has become harder to use because they keep adding new things without considering holistic experience.

Take a look at the Settings in ios7. It's nothing but a list of identical looking settings that go on for pages. Everything is nothing but text and thin lines.

A simple color-coded organization, categorization, and minor variation in fonts would've gone a long way.

Android's settings isn't much better, but at least things are better marked with text labels and clearer icons.

Apple has long crossed that line of less-is-more. They are firmly in the less- is-less territory. Both companies are leaving a lot on the table by being too boxed-in in their thinking, but Android is at least taking more humble approach.

<comment><USER17> "Take a look at the Settings in ios7. It's nothing but a list of identical looking settings that go on for pages. Everything is nothing but text and thin lines."

Err, it's pretty much always been like this.

<comment><USER16> The basic layout has stayed the same, but the left-side list has grown quite a bit over the years, as has the number of settings on the right side.

The original layout may have been serviceable years ago, but now it leaves a lot to be desired.

The current split-pane interface works fine if you go in there to change multiple items on a regular basis, but that's not exactly how most people use the settings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why? I thought he was in charge of all UX to begin with. The fact that iOS7 came out with such inconsistent design, weird colors, and almost invisible fonts is his fault as much as anyone's, if not more so. He approved everything, and now he's taking it out on the designers because of the bad feedback from the market?

<comment><USER7> Ive approved it. This was a fiasco second only to the Maps fiasco. Jobs berated those guys.

SAD BUT THIS IS HOW THINGS HAPPEN:

1\. Apple Maps is headed by Forstall, doesn't get enough resources, comes out sucking.

2\. Scott Forstall is forced out the stall... I mean the door. And Steve Jobs passes away. The two biggest advocates of skeumorphism gone. [http://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-why-i-fired-scott- fo...](http://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-why-i-fired-scott- forstall-2012-12)

3\. Jony Ive, a hardware guy, takes over the UI. The microsoft-envy kills Apple's mojo. We just have to accept this new crap.

OR FOR EXAMPLE:

1\. Some people in Florida can't vote properly on a poorly designed butterfly ballot

2\. George W Bush comes to power

3\. After 9-11, we go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and do nation building ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9SOVzMV2bc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9SOVzMV2bc))

4\. US economy falls, many countries start to resent the USA, meanwhile we get Patriot Act and a lot of domestic surveillance

5\. All kinds of spy programs and warrantless searches and detaining of citizens is authorized because of "terrorism"

And it all started from a butterfly ballot...

<comment><USER19> While that is a wildly crazy comparison... and the conspiracy theorist in me likes it, it is completely naive to think that the war on terror was an emergent event after the butterfly ballot...

Cheney, Bush Sr, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz had been decades long been building up to their coup of the US.

<comment><USER7> But if they hadn't been elected, how would they have succeeded if Al Gore's admin was running the show?

I'm saying that the flutter of a butterfly's wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world. Chaos theory :-P

<comment><USER19> Elected. I dont think that word means what you think it means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> They mean "falling out", right?

<comment><USER21> Funny looking word, but it's not wrong. Fallout is the noun: [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fallout](http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/fallout)

<comment><USER22> No, "fallout" is not a noun form of "falling out." For one, "falling out" is already a noun phrase. Secondly, "fallout" refers to the lingering effects of some larger event. It doesn't apply here.

<comment><USER23> Not entirely true, as indicated by the link to Webster's Dictionary provided.

<comment><USER24> Read the definition again, it agrees with nardi's comment.

<comment><USER23> I did read it. The usage is correct and the dictionary entry shows that "fallout" is indeed a noun showing "a bad effect or result of something".

Sorry - I think you need to read it again because you've clearly downvoted my response in error.

<comment><USER24> _" a secondary and often lingering effect"_

The "falling out" described in the original comment is not a secondary effect - it is the primary driver of the action. The _fallout_ from the _falling out_ is that Christie left the organisation.

A falling out can be the fallout from another action, but that's not the context used here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> He probably sent him a link to one of those much better iOS flat GUI redesigns from independent artists.

<comment><USER19> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZp7BvQJnU8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZp7BvQJnU8)

<comment><USER26> Awesome video and complete validation of my theory that Ive is trying to eliminate design from user interfaces and make it so that anyone can do it even with MS Word.

Lowering the barrier to app creation is all this flat, modern crap is about. The end user's experience is of no consideration at all because they can be easily convinced _anything_ is cool. I can't wait for the backlash.

Everyone at apple with taste is either being forced out or quitting so when that backlash comes apple will be left holding an empty bag.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Jony, please stick to hardware.

<comment><USER28> It doesn't make any sense to have the hardware and software have opposing designs... that's why they put Jony in charge of both.

<comment><USER29> Huh, how can hardware and software have "opposing designs"? I'm just an engineer who doesn't understand design so please explain.

<comment><USER30> This my semi-outsider opinion.

Metal. Minimal. Futurism. Refined. Ive.

Kitchy. Cozy. Gaudy. Forstall and most things not iOS7 (and iOS7 has compromises) If this includes Christie now, yeah, him too.

So much of the UX has seemed to betray the industrial design. It's like Window's old "Hot Dog" color theme. I'm going to guess that Ive pushed to get people in line and the same old flat vs. skeumorphic arguments simmered since that is one specific instance of a larger aesthetic argument.

Certain aspects of the OSX are well done, but many parts are dated, klunky, and even garish.

Apple hardware looks beautiful sitting somewhere turned OFF or with someone else's app/lication loaded up. The native stuff feels like cheap plastic body kits on refined European sports cars (not the Italian ones).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Funny, he was just on the stand in their patent trial last week.

</comment><comment><USER32> Complete conjecture.

</comment><comment><USER33> Ive will be the next CEO of Apple. Anyone who doesn't bow at the alter of Ive like they bow at the altar of Steve, will be gone.

</comment><comment><USER34> Google should hire this dude, just to give Sir Jony the middle finger.

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if he's still unemployed.

</comment><comment><USER36> A quick google search indicates that Greg Christie came up with the "Slide to Unlock" idea: [http://www.macrumors.com/2014/04/09/greg-christie-jony- ive-f...](http://www.macrumors.com/2014/04/09/greg-christie-jony-ive-fallout/)

Hopefully the person that invented the picker wheel control will be next. What a horrible interface.</comment>


If mutations occur at random over the entire genome, how can a complex organ such as an eye evolve? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=experts-random-mutations

<comment><USER2> Dawkins gives another viewpoint in his book, _"Climbing Mount Improbable"_ with his explanation of the evolution of the eye. You can read an extract here ~ [http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/writings/climbingmountim...](http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/writings/climbingmountimprobable.shtml)

For the Dr Who fans out there Lala Ward did the Illustrations ~ <http://www.richardwho.com/collections/collection15.asp></comment>


Detecting licenses in code with go and ml - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sourced.tech/post/gld/ <comment><USER2> Nice to see lc included in the tests. It was my first Go program. I will have to see if I can improve both the accuracy and performance now.</comment>


How a Technical Co-Founder Spends His Time: Minute-By-minute Data for a Year - <AUTHOR> http://jdlm.info/articles/2016/07/04/cto-time-minute-by-minute.html?r=1 <comment><USER2> Previously submitted 5 times, but never gained traction.

Maybe the sixth time will be the one?

Discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12067636](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12067636)

Other submissions of the same article:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12108271](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12108271)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12108271](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12108271)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12042016](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12042016)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12033353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12033353)

I'm a little curious why the writelatex guys keep submitting this article over and over every few days? What are they hoping will happen?

Also, in case one of writelatex folks reads this- HN now automatically gives many articles a "second chance" by surfacing articles again on /newest, so there shouldn't be a need to keep resubmitting the same article with a slightly adjusted URL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there, thanks for the info about resubmissions. I didn't know it was discouraged. My karma keeps increasing when I resubmit this, so I took that to mean that I should keep doing it.

My last submission was with a new title based on feedback in that discussion thread (that CTO was misleading).

Also, can you clarify how you got to 6? Two of those links are the same, and one of them does not seem to work.

Also, it seems from the comments that github pages (where this is hosted) was down while this was on newest, which seems like pretty bad luck. At least now I know that it may get a second chance without me having to do anything, thanks!</comment></comment>


Chrome quietly broke all self-signed SSL sites - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=119252 <comment><USER2> That report is for the Dev and Beta channels of Chrome. It works as expected in the release channel. The Dev channel is equivalent to alpha quality. The Beta channel has changed recently and is now rebuilt nightly with features being enabled and disabled, so I'd wager more issues like this will get through.

<comment><AUTHOR> The original ticket may have been filed for the beta, but if you read the reports, you will see that multiple people (myself included) are having the issue in 17.0.963.83, which is as far as I know supposed to be stable and was released on 3/22.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Chrome 17 added a "feature" that blocks http resources from loading on an https connection unless the user manually approves it every time. Sounds like a good idea, but it broke all sorts of Google sites and widgets because Google violates that rule everywhere.

This is probably just another "feature".

<comment><USER4> If you follow the link to the report, you can clearly see that it is considered a bug and is being worked on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've never been entirely sold on how awesome Chrome's invisible updates are and this is exactly why. It's great as long as they don't push any bugs through. But once they do (and it will happen), there's no way of using a known good version. So if I'm IT in charge of 10,000 users at MegaCorp, I cannot make any promises about reliability of internal web apps with Chrome, because at any point Google could break something.

(Obviously you can work around this by providing snapshots of Chromium, or Chrome binaries patched to not update or whatever)

<comment><USER6> First google result: [http://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-disable-google-chrome- update...](http://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-disable-google-chrome-updates/)

Does this not work anymore? Are you privy to something I don't know?

<comment><USER5> I didn't know about this, but I don't think it solves the issue. Disabling updates allows you to stay at the current version (or, by enabling updates, go to the most recent version). But you can't get any particular version. Suppose I know that version 18.104.22.168 works perfectly for my internal application but that the current doesn't for some reason. How do I get that version? With versioned software this isn't so much of an issue, but with Chrome's continuous versions, it's a little harder. And how would one roll that out to 10,000 users? I'm sure it's not terribly difficult, but not as obvious as giving everyone Firefox 8. And what happens when the CEO decides to enable updates and it breaks your web app?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The way Chrome handles SSL certs on Linux has always driven me crazy. My company's firewall uses a man in the middle SSL certificate so on most SSL sites I have to "proceed anyway" everytime I restart my browser. Chrome on Linux can't seem to permanently store the exceptions, even with every certutil command known to man.

This in itself wouldn't be all that bad, the real problem is most sites (Facebook for example) use multiple SSL domains for things like images and other resources. So I'll get a page that half loads until I go an "proceed anyway" on each of the problem domains.

<comment><USER8> Is it the cert trust or other aspect of the validation? Your IT guys should have the CA cert for the appliance that is signing these available to add to your local cert store. The CA cert may be attached to the server cert you are presented too. Just extract that and add it to wherever linux keeps its certs.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm surprised that got through QA, seems like a rather critical bug.

<comment><USER9> well, it didn't. this is not a bug filed against the stable version, as far as i understand. This is in the dev/beta channel.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am able to reproduce in 17.0.963.83, which is not beta afaik.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They should really tack on a few more warnings, anyway. Three or four clicks isn't enough of a penalty. People who start websites without paying tax to the SSL mafia need to be punished!

<comment><USER11> Three or four clicks really isn't good enough, since the behavior users are clicking to get is "site that claims to need security but doesn't actually have it".

<comment><USER12> Isn't the behavior "site that just wants an encrypted channel to transfer, say, your login details, without making any claims about its authenticity"?

<comment><USER13> Which is semantically equivalent to "site doesn't understand security."

<comment><USER14> Yea, BTW RDP originally used "encryption" based on RSA using a _hardcoded_ private key. They finally moved to TLS with Server 2003 SP1.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Open source Chameleon project aims to ease porting iOS apps to Mac - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/03/open-source-chameleon-project-aims-to-ease-porting-ios-apps-to-mac.ars <comment><USER2> Why did they name it Chameleon, there's already a Chameleon Bootloader for OSx86 (<http://chameleon.osx86.hu/>)?</comment>


Alexa Flash Briefings – No Coding Required - <AUTHOR> https://www.getspeakeasy.co/ <comment><USER2> Signing up fails with a generic Rails(?) template page. Not a real site?</comment>


Democracy in Crisis - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/books/review/larry-diamond-ill-winds.html <comment><AUTHOR> American democracy is being destroyed from within, yes with a little help from Russia and China. But the undoing of American democracy is lead by an ignorant and apathetic citizenry. Who will show us the light?</comment>


'Stop the WeWork deal' – Cramer says embattled IPO could wreck the market rally - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/13/stop-the-wework-deal-cramer-says-embattled-ipo-could-wreck-rally.html <comment><USER2> While Cramer is known for his braggadocio, he's not wrong here. WeWork IPO doesn't pass the smell test. It's possible that WeWork ipo could trigger a huge correction across all of tech, and have rippling effects for many private companies looking to go public.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a sarcastic comment by `Marcus` in this related article: [https://wolfstreet.com/2019/09/13/wework-ipo-the-straw- that-...](https://wolfstreet.com/2019/09/13/wework-ipo-the-straw-that-breaks- the-stock-markets-back-valuation-plunged-by-up-to-79/):

I've been driving past the nice looking WeWork building in northern San Diego and laughing at the fact that the lighted sign has some blown bulbs and reads as a massive "WeWo" when it's dark outside. Fortunately they've remedied the issue. By turning the entire sign off. Seems like a big time operation when they have the same building maintenance urgency as a roadside "otel".</comment></comment>


Opt Out From Online Behavioral Advertising By Participating Companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.aboutads.info/choices/ <comment><USER2> Gives me some confidence in uBlock & Privacy Badger... The first time I ran it there was 1 site tracking me (adbrain).. I adjusted my PB settings accordingly and got 0. It's a useful site for calibrating those tools!

[http://i.imgur.com/hdReODM.png](http://i.imgur.com/hdReODM.png)

<comment><USER3> you may also consider to switch on: Settings -> Show advanced settings -> Privacy -> Content settings -> Block third-party cookies and site data.

<comment><USER4> any downsides to this?

<comment><USER5> Google+ Notifications don't work on any Google sites except for plus.google.com (so you can't view your notifications on other sites).

But that's it.

<comment><USER4> Thanks guys. Enabled!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there any legitimate use for third-party cookies (which is all this seems to analyze)? I disabled third-party cookies years ago and I have never noticed any negative side effects at all.

<comment><USER7> I thought I disabled ads in Safari by selecting, under cookies and website data, "allow from current website only". But new cookies from domains I've never visited keep spawning. What am I doing wrong?

<comment><USER8> It's because unbeknownst to you, the sites you visit are requesting javascript or a tracking pixel from these other domains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> People don't care. It is funny that smart people don't care about tech and ad companies violating their privacy by collecting data and profiting from it. But they have an issue with the government doing it to protect them. Perhaps has something to do with the fact that silicon valley's success is based on the advertising business model and violation of people's privacy.

<comment><USER10> Someone's going to try to sell me something I'm susceptible to buying? So what.

Authorities don't collect data on you to protect you, they are ostensibly doing it to protect other citizens from you.

One of the reasons that "smart" people object to this, is that it could also limit their ability to play a leadership role in civic life, if there are people in positions of authority with different political philosophies or, even worse, who are outright corrupt or dishonest.

Besides the obvious examples of abuse like the Nixon administration, I suspect there are very few counties in the country that don't have at least one case of someone in a sheriff department, school board, city council, etc that has been caught using their rather limited access to information about local citizens for the purpose of staying in power or for some form of personal gain.

<comment><USER9> This data should ideally be protected and owned by the individuals themselves - not the government, not the ad companies, not Google, not Facebook. As an individual who owns my data, I should have a right to decide who/when/how accesses my data.

More than a question of privacy, this is a question of next-generation user experience. If as an individual, my data from uber, google, facebook, visa, amazon is all in one place I can give selective anonymized access to it to different services that can leverage the collective data to provide better user experiences to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Facebook just broke their site if you have Facebook's social media plugins blocked. Unclear if this is an anti-Ghostery measure or they just screwed up. Their code uses "require", which is not standard JavaScript, and whatever loads "require" needs a social media plugin.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just finished scanning - seems like 126 ad companies where tracking me for targetted ads! When I tried opting out, only 76 acknowledged. Just very very troubling..

<comment><USER12> I think the 126 is all companies participating in the program, not necessarily the ones that are actively tracking your browser. The second tab contains the companies tracking you. Luckily I only had 9 and was able to opt-out of all of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> technically yeah - but a lot of amongst the 126 were showing a status of "No status available" (or something along those lines). 126 seems like quite a low number for it to be the TOTAL number of participating companies - I could be wrong though..

<comment><USER13> Are you running an ad blocker? It seems to interfere with the status checks, since it blocks all traffic to the networks in question.

Try temporarily disabling your ad blocker and trying again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Between Privacy Badger, Self-Destructing Cookies, and AdBlock Pro (and a browser cache which wipes itself on close), a grand total of zero trackers. Woo woo!

<comment><USER15> The page won't even load for me, that's good, right? Paranoid mode FTW!

Turning off NoScript and Random Agent Spoofer doesn't help. Still running: uBlock, HTTPS Everywhere, Disconnect, and BetterPrivacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> HTTPS Everywhere (Firefox) is blocking this. I get the "third party cookies blocked" message. When I disabled HTTPS Everywhere, it worked.

<comment><AUTHOR> and how many did you get?

<comment><USER16> I had nine. On another computer, I had eight (less Yahoo).

Both computers have uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and the built-in Firefox tracking protection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Also fun -- see what Yahoo thinks your interest are: [https://aim.yahoo.com/aim/us/en/optout/](https://aim.yahoo.com/aim/us/en/optout/)

<comment><USER18> 'Travel > Destinations > Middle East'

So I can assume Yahoo isn't the one watching this particular bit of my internet traffic...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> 0 sites with [http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/) (it blocks requests at OS level with /etc/hosts)

</comment><comment><USER20> Privoxy raised a warning, not letting me go there without clicking through. So I did.

uBlock origin prevented the site from loading anything interesting, and Self- Destructing Cookies means it isn't leaving anything behind.

I think I'm fine, but how can I know for sure?

<comment><AUTHOR> Based on other comments, seems like uBlock does the trick somewhat. But to be sure - just uninstall both and then try again?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Note that the opt-out option provided only opts out of tracking-based advertising, not of browser tracking.

To avoid tracking by ad companies use uBlock, Ghostery, Privacy Badger, etc.

</comment><comment><USER22> Our project can help out here too... With Metiix Blockade (free as in beer) we can see every request that is blocked, what url caused the blocked request as well as protect each device in the network from tracking, ads, and malware related websites.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think you can estimate how many companies are tracking you by noticing how many things that you had to disable to get this page to work.

</comment><comment><USER24> Three sites were tracking me apparently, and that's with uBlock Origin active. But I opted out of them regardless.

</comment><comment><USER25> Kind of a misleading headline. Look through the list of third-party cookies in your browser if you want to see who is tracking you. This is a list of ad companies who have agreed to offer an option not to track you.

<comment><USER26> And how do I know that they actually don't?

<comment><USER27> They have to abide to this policy otherwise they probably get kicked out of the advertising organisations. [http://www.aboutads.info/enforcement](http://www.aboutads.info/enforcement) \- You can report any misbehaviour here.

This does not mean that you will not see ads from them it means that they should delete all profiling information that they have about you and serve you just shitty regular ads.</comment></comment></comment>


Parsing Excel Spreadsheets with Swift's Codable Protocols - <AUTHOR> https://desiatov.com/swift-codable-xlsx/#title <comment><USER2> First off: awesome work!

Correctly reading the data from XLSX is a lot more complex than described or implemented here, mostly because Excel is so robust in reading files and there are many sloppy writers. If you're interested, there's a many-thousand page ECMA-376 specification: [https://www.ecma- international.org/publications/standards/Ec...](https://www.ecma- international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm)

\- to correctly get the first worksheet, you actually need to parse the workbook.xml file and look into the sheets array to find the corresponding relationship IDs. This is explained in section 18.2.20 (page 1579 in the part 1 PDF). iOS Numbers used to write worksheets in the opposite order, which messes up the naive attempt to read the relationships file in order.

\- the attribute "s" in a cell is an index into the styles table, while the cell type "s" corresponds to the shared string table. If you're curious, its in section 126.96.36.199 (page 1604 in the part 1 PDF)

PS: We build and maintain parsers and writers for spreadsheets in JavaScript ([https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx/](https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx/) is our most popular project), including a CLI script to convert files to CSV. Some of our users use JSC in the context of Swift applications, ingesting data in JS and returning a CSV for further processing in Swift.

<comment><USER3> > there's a many-thousand page ECMA-376

Honestly, I'd love to see if there are organizational tips on managing (and using!) a document that large.

I feel like technical writing is the closest to coding we get in plain languages, but there are still critical differences. (technical writing is trying to give instruction to a human, while coding is giving instructions to code while giving a lot more context and description to a human). Specs cross this line a bit more - it's giving descriptions to a human with the intention of giving instructions)

Unfortunately, while I can find good code and bad code, I tend to find bad specs and WORSE specs. I can see progress (the various HTML5 and related specs are vastly better than previous versions, for example), but anytime I go in with a question (which is admittedly rare) I spend a lot of time finding the salient part compared to related-but-missing-the-vital-piece part, which is actually the exact same problem that I think the most common problem in maintainable code: making it easy to not only know how, but WHERE.

Are there lessons from specs we can learn? Do the good ones have some sort of "concept" section that makes the reading of it easier? Does each subsection do that?

<comment><USER4> The advice is that it should only exist in machine-readable form and the reason why Microsoft does it this way is to ensure lock-in. See also MSSQL, for which there exists no complete machine-readable spec ANYWHERE (as far as I could tell when I spent 2 days looking a few years ago).

<comment><USER5> >lock-in

A company that spends millions of dollars employing technical writers to publicly document a format probably isn't conspiring to keep that format secret. Maybe the macaronis aren't the shape you wanted but you got the macaronis.

<comment><USER6> IIRC it was in response to many government sources requiring open formats (a good instinct) so just because they did it doesn't mean they wanted to. They may have been forced to, and done the minimum as a result.

<comment><USER7> I believe it was the antitrust lawsuits that forced them too, and it shows; if you look at all the MS protocol/format documents and compare them to something like RFCs and ITU/IEEE/ANSI standards, the MS docs are noticeably harder to read with their verbosity, weird syntax notations and conventions, and almost look as if they were deliberately obfuscated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The one thing I don't love about Swift's Codable is the lack of customizability in the "magic" part: the part where the compiler generates the Encodable/Decodable implementations. Most notably, the compiler can't generate implementations for enums. The only thing that Swift supports customizing without fully implementing the methods for Encodable and Decodable is the name of the keys, using a custom CodingKeys type.

Serde, an equivalent third-party crate in Rust, supports a lot of customization which I find invaluable. It can (de)serialize values like this with ease:

        {"type": "location", "value": {"latitude": 0, "longitude": 0}}

in a very small amount of code:

        #[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)]
        #[serde(tag = "type", content = "value")]
        #[serde(rename_all = "lowercase")]
        enum Value {
            Location { latitude: f64, longitude: f64 },
            String(String),
            ...
        }

Serde also supports customizing serialization on a per-field basis without having to implement the entire protocol, which is nice:

        #[derive(Deserialize, Serialize)]
        struct Record {
            #[serde(with = "chrono::serde::ts_seconds")]
            updated: DateTime<Utc>
        }

I really hope that Swift has better ways (like the above) to customize Codable in the future. I find myself implementing the protocol myself in 90% of cases, whereas I very rarely have to do that for Serde.

<comment><AUTHOR> The main reason for that is lack of hygienic macros in Swift. Currently you can use code generation tools like Sourcery and SwiftGen, but I expect 1st- class meta-programming support to come after Swift 5.0 release. After ABI stability I imagine macros are pretty high on the priority list of the core team.

<comment><USER9> I have a hard time envisioning full-fledged macros coming to Swift, but moving Equatable/Hashable/Codable synthesis to a library should be possible with more restricted meta-programming capabilites. See Joe Groff's talk for details: [https://www.skilled.io/u/swiftsummit/swift-s-reflective- unde...](https://www.skilled.io/u/swiftsummit/swift-s-reflective- underpinnings-joe-groff)

<comment><USER10> > I have a hard time envisioning full-fledged macros coming to Swift, but > moving Equatable/Hashable/Codable synthesis to a library should be possible > with more restricted meta-programming capabilites.

I've heard many people on the mailing lists talk about wanting to add hygienic macros–so when you're talking about "full-fledged macros", are you talking about unhygienic or hygienic ones?

> See Joe Groff's talk for details

I'm actually curious how much is possible, in terms of reflection capability, both currently and in the future. How close can I get to the dynamism of say the Objective-C runtime? Can I grab a function pointer knowing its mangled name? Can I list every class in a binary by consulting the runtime metadata? Can I "swizzle"?

<comment><USER9> > How close can I get to the dynamism of say the Objective-C runtime?

Well, right now the compiler emits a lot of metadata that is mostly used for runtime generics, dynamic casting, and the (somewhat limited) Mirror type. But these features have enough generality that a surprising amount of stuff has to be encoded. However there's no nice API for looking at it yet.

> Can I grab a function pointer knowing its mangled name?

That's just dlsym().

> Can I list every class in a binary by consulting the runtime metadata?

The metadata is there, but there's no exposed API for doing this.

> Can I "swizzle"?

There's an experimental thing for this now: [https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/20333](https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/20333)

<comment><USER10> > > Can I grab a function pointer knowing its mangled name?

> That's just dlsym().

Sorry, I should have been more clear: can I grab a function pointer to an _unexported_ function?

> > Can I "swizzle"?

> There's an experimental thing for this now: > [https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/20333](https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/20333)

This is interesting; I haven't been really been following the lists recently but I took the time to read the linked thread and the pull request. While the functionality contained in the pull request is interesting, it's not quite the same as swizzling since it's done unconditionally at load time rather than runtime (so it's much more similar to DYLD_INTERPOSE in that sense). While this covers many of the cases when swizzling is necessary, it leaves out a rather important one where the correct method override is selected at runtime, generally conditionally.

Also, as a sidenote, it seems that there is some sort of motivation to have compiler type checks for the replacement, i.e. @_dynamicReplacement(for: bar())–how will this actually work in practice? If I compile a bundle without access to the source of the application I'm going to be loaded into, how would bar() be accessible to the compiler at all?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Codable protocol in Swift is game-changing. Max Howell (homebrew author) recently started a series of articles[1] in which he used Codable structs as the shared data model in both the backend and frontend of his new app Canopy. Even though communication is through HTTP and JSON, he never even has to touch it.

[1] - [https://medium.com/@mxcl/server-side-swift-making- canopy-2ed...](https://medium.com/@mxcl/server-side-swift-making- canopy-2ed586b7f5a9)

<comment><USER12> > Codable protocol in Swift is game-changing

Which is really weird, considering Objective-C had automatic "activation/passivation" from the beginning (early 80s), and it was pretty trivial to adapt similar mechanisms later.

<comment><AUTHOR> Except that in Objective-C it's a runtime feature, which is by definition slower. Swift's Codable implementation is generated by the compiler or is hand-written with an obvious benefit of a stronger type system.

<comment><USER12> Have you measured this? (I have)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mac dating site Cupidtino opens beta to the public - <AUTHOR> http://www.tuaw.com/2010/06/08/mac-dating-site-cupidtino-opens-beta-to-the-public/

<comment><USER2> While it's not that I wouldn't date someone who uses a mac, I probably wouldn't date someone who would only date someone who uses a mac, and I certainly wouldn't date someone who would only date someone who would only date someone who uses a mac. And certainly none of the higher-order terms.

<comment><USER3> Do Mac owners find they get along better with other Mac owners?

I ask this because I suspect the reason for using (and creating) this site isn't necessarily that the user feels more likely to meet someone he/she will get along with. I suspect that the reason may be that the user feels they are more likely to meet someone who appreciates them for certain qualities, in particular the qualities associated with owning Apple products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've often thought "If only I could meet a nice girl who defines herself entirely by the operating system she uses".

Finally someone has solved this problem for me.

<comment><USER5> How is this fundamentally different from, e.g., the bodybuilders-seeking- bodybuilders site FitnessSingles?

<comment><USER3> The most obvious one I can think of is that bodybuilding alters your physical appearance, and that is an important component of attraction for almost everyone. If you go to a site called FitnessSingles you expect the people you meet there to look a certain way (ie not fat).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I found this to be a brilliant idea! Pushing the "I'm a Mac", I'm different and cool thing to its logical conclusion. Tells a lot about how Apple has created a subculture. Think about coming up with a Windows only or, god forbid, Linux only dating site.

<comment><USER4> I'm going to strike gold with my Plan 9 only dating site.

<comment><USER7> Dating for people older than dirt with both beards and ponytails past their navels?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> mac users must be chronic daters....they are always going for the shiny new thing on the market.

</comment><comment><USER9> Alternate title: "Hipster Dating Site". Seriously, I use Apple products (not exclusively) and this makes me cringe.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> An Apple device required for login! If anything, the existance of this site tells a lot about Mac users. Too bad I'm not a single myself.

<comment><USER10> >If anything, the existance of this site tells a lot about Mac users.

Dating sites are notorious for fragmenting the daylights out of the total dating pool. There's dating sites for "geeks", for "gamers", for "sugar daddies", for "golddiggers", for "just messing around", for "goths", for "insert word here" etc. A fair number of companies actually take a basic site engine, re-skin it so it doesn't look anything like sister sites, re-brand it towards their target audience, buy the appropriate domain and search keywords and launch a new site.

Honestly it's not much of a different model for porn sites that aren't simply licensing their media assets to thousands of sites. Same girl, similar media assets, 8 different sites.

Dating sites aren't that far removed from porn sites. Many dating sites have poor or only rudimentary search functionality, so you end up with a similar experience to a porn site -- browsing a bunch of media and clicking on what you fancy for a better look.

<comment><USER11> >There's dating sites for "geeks", for "gamers", for "sugar daddies", for "golddiggers", for "just messing around", for "goths",

I love that you see being a Mac user as on the same level as those other, ahem, subcultures.

<comment><USER10> >I love that you see being a Mac user as on the same level as those other, ahem, subcultures.

I don't. I've been using OS X as my primary OS since 2005. The point is, there's a "dating site" for everything as evidenced at the ads I saw the last time I poked at one. Christians. Cheating moms. Busty Russians. I wouldn't be surprised if some sites simply register all sorts of keyword combinations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, I think there was a time when Macs stood for being different and appealed to those with an open mind and brave enough to try new things.

Looking at this it seems like they now stand for closed-mindedness and eliteness.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's a step in the right direction, but not enough. Too many losers out there are still using OS X 10.5. I wouldn't want to date them.

</comment><comment><USER14> Exceptionally bizarre.

</comment><comment><USER15> Everyone knows women love rebels and bad boys!

What better way to show your rebellious side than sign up and declare to the ladies, "Windows 7 was MY idea..."

Or, if you're the dark, mysterious type: "I'm OSX by day, Ubuntu by night..."

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't know. there's a part of me that thinks this is the lamest thing I've ever seen and there's another part of me that thinks there's almost endless opportunities for dating site verticals.

</comment><comment><USER17> niche to win</comment>


ThresholdTest - <AUTHOR> http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ThresholdTest.html <comment><USER2> My experience with setting thresholds for e.g. performance measurements is that it goes like this:

1\. Works fine.

2\. Fails once every 25th time. You're very close to the threshold, but it is not clear what broke it. Any of the previous N commits are suspicious. Or have their been any change in the environment (overall network traffic, security updates, etc.) that could have performance implications?

3\. Now you must take immediate action in figuring out what decreased performance. Too often, no one thinks their changes could possibly have decreased performance. If it is environment changes that cause the ThresholdTest to fail on occasion, it is very easy to blame it too often, and not spend the time necessary to really understand what changed.

4\. Dev team doesn't have the time right now => bump ThresholdTest in the wrong direction temporarily, often turning into permanent.

Because of this, I think it is very important to keep ThresholdTests very repeatable and not let them depend on anything that could fluctuate over time. And you should of course log every test result to some database and graph it, interesting finds in both directions are to be found!</comment>


Five reasons why the Windows desktop isn't going away - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/five-reasons-why-the-windows-desktop-isnt-going-away-7000013185/ <comment><USER2> It would be great if the subject line could mention when Ed Bott is the author of the linked page, to minimize wasted time.</comment>


15 Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started My First Blog - <AUTHOR> http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/02/15/15-things-i-wish-i-had-known-when-i-started-my-first-blog/

<comment><AUTHOR> I like Neils bio. A real example of perseverance paying off, even without formal education at the early stages...

<http://www.quicksprout.com/about/>

</comment><comment><USER2> Wow, $5000 for a blog design. I have the wrong clients.

<comment><USER3> Also he points to BoingBoing as having a substandard design, but really it has one of the best blog designs out there. Whoever designed it has an excellent understanding of typography and spacing.

<comment><USER4> Right, he says, "If you look at some of the most popular blogs on the web, such as Boing Boing, there isn't anything special when it comes to their design."

It's important not to mistake simplicity for "nothing special". FYI, the latest iteration was designed by a very fairly well-known and influential designer, Jemma Hostetler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This sounds more like, "How to become Jeff Atwood."

</comment><comment><USER6> I've just started a blog in the last couple of weeks (www.creativitykilledtherecession.com) and I found this post rather helpful and timely. At a time when lazy media (and wishful thinking) has fabricated the idea that online business is quick and easy, Neil's story is evidence that perseverance and hard work still separate the true contenders from the pretenders.

</comment><comment><USER7> > If you are in a position where you don't need money, that's great. If you > aren't, you better figure out a way to make money off of your blog.

I don't know what to say about this. There are very few professional bloggers. There are many bloggers who use their blog to indirectly generate revenue (business leads, networking).

<comment><USER8> I think he would include that indirect revenue as "a way to make money off of your blog."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hmmm.. he missed "always put a number at the beginning of post titles when trying to get links from news sites".

<comment><USER10> My first thought as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you're going to spend money on your blog's design eventually, you should do it sooner rather than later.

<comment><USER12> Not necessarily. I think it's better to start blogging first and see if you actually enjoy doing it. If you're not having fun with it and you don't find it beneficial, you'll probably stop and have saved yourself some money.

<comment><USER8> I agree. People will read good content on a poorly designed blog. And if they like your content but hate your design, they--in my sad experience--make it very clear that they'd like you to improve your design. A great design for a blog is kind of like great office space for a startup, it's nice to have but is a misuse of resources if done prematurely.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, and _after_ they make it clear to you that they hate your design, you should spend the money then, not wait another year. That's what I'm sayin' I learned here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some of this applies to StartUps in general. And he's got a lot of experience to share.</comment>


Why Japanese leaders attacked Pearl Harbor - log-fire https://www.timeline.com/stories/pearl-harbor-was-attacked-because-it-would-have-been-rude-not-to <comment><AUTHOR> The headline doesn't square with everything I've ever read about the attack. Embarrassment was _at best_ a minor factor in the Japanese thinking. The major factor, IIRC, was that certain military officers -- many of them belonging to (or fearful of) a murderous ultranationalist faction -- had come to dominate the Japanese government [1]. These military men:

\+ wanted to strike south to secure desperately-needed sources of oil, rubber, and other resources for their war machine (an alternative they debated was to invade Siberia);

\+ felt that for a strike south to succeed, they had to neutralize both the U.S. Pacific Fleet and the American bases in the Philippines, from which the U.S. surface fleet, submarines, and air forces could have caused serious problems for Japan's maritime supply lines from Southeast Asia; and

\+ perhaps most importantly, were out of their depth when it came to assessing a _political_ risk, namely the extent to which a surprise attack would bring down on them the implacable fury of an enraged and industrially-powerful United States.

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

<comment><USER2> The article and the commenters here vastly underestimate the weakness of the US strategic position and the initial advantage that the IJN had. They institutionally understood and embraced the new reality of carrier and air warfare.

The reality is that the Philippines were incredibly vulnerable and run by a General who was not so effective. Ditto the fossils living in WW1 dreadnought world on the Navy side.

Had fate turned ever so slightly at Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, or Midway, the great gamble made by the Japanese would have been genius.

The embarrassment and face saving nonsense killed them not in 1941, but in 1943, when they followed through on a fools errand instead of settling for peace. Once the US industrial power was mobilized, the result was pretty certain.

<comment><USER3> _Had fate turned ever so slightly at Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, or Midway, the great gamble made by the Japanese would have been genius.

The embarrassment and face saving nonsense killed them not in 1941, but in 1943, when they followed through on a fools errand instead of settling for peace. Once the US industrial power was mobilized, the result was pretty certain._

Disagree strongly. The way those battles turned just sped up the destruction of Imperial Japan---and if you expect every battle to go your way, you're a damned fool.

The surprise attack, their brutality in war, plus our memory of how WWI did not end in a lasting peace, made sure settling for a peace was not an option by 1943. By the time we were focusing on the home islands with Operations Starvation and Downfall, plus the fruits of the Manhattan Project, the details of the Bataan Death March unquestionably revealed by the liberation of the Philippines ... well, it _really_ sucked to be Japanese by then. But not hardly so bad as the subject people in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, which they were killing at a rate of 400,000 per month by then.

I'm finishing reading _Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947_ [http://www.amazon.com/Hell-Pay-Operation- Downfall-1945-1947/...](http://www.amazon.com/Hell-Pay-Operation- Downfall-1945-1947/dp/1591143160/) and it's really sobering. Olympic as planned, the invasion of southern Kyuushu, wasn't going to work, and with Marshall pushing for all nuclear weapons after Nagasaki to be earmarked for it, and liberal use of poison gas, it would have made Okinawa look like a walk in the park. And there's no way Coronet, the planned March invasion of the Kanto plane in Honshu that includes Tokyo would have happened on schedule before the weather made it impractical. Yet we were absolutely determined to see it through, one way or another, with as many as a million of our men dying the process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Instead of being tried for war crimes, the researchers involved in Unit 731 were given immunity by the U.S. in exchange for their data on human experimentation."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731)

A bit off topic but perhaps interesting to some.

<comment><USER5> An absolute disgrace that so many monstrously evil war criminals were let off after the war.

But the US is currently shipping weapons and money to brutal dictators in several countries in a horrible display of RealPolitik, so not much has changed.

<comment><USER6> I'm genuinely curious: Which brutal dictators are currently receiving U.S. arms? With Mubarak gone I can't come up with any. The Saudis? Hard to describe what they're running (or at least barely managing) as a dictatorship.

<comment><USER7> Pakistan? Their democracy is a joke. The military holds all the power as evidenced by the multiple military coups in their past

<comment><USER8> Knowing nothing about Pakistan, don't the coups demonstrate the lack of power military holds? If I was a military chief, I'd rather prefer to steer policy from the background assuming I had any real influence. Not saying you're wrong. I'm trying to understand...

<comment><USER5> They depose a leader then to retain US support they allow elections then depose him when they no longer approve. Might as well be a Itanian style theocracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting read, but there is something a little odd about an article that describes Emperor Hirohito as "merely a figurehead" but later casually mentions that Hirohito had the power to surprise General Tojo by naming him prime minister and spends a good deal of time talking about how Hirohito could have potentially prevented the war due to how much influence he had.

<comment><USER10> The article appears to be of the belief that literally nothing the Japanese government could have said or done was a sign they wanted war.

<comment><USER11> The article appears to be of the belief that no one in the Japanese government wanted war but they were all bumbling fools who couldn't say they didn't want war.

<comment><USER12> The anti-war faction weren't bumbling fools, but the decision was made and that was that. Konoye killed himself rather than lie to exonerate the emperor in the post-war kangaroo court.

<comment><USER3> The members of the anti-war faction knew bloody well that if they made too much of a fuss about it they would be assassinated. Perhaps _the_ object lesson to learn from the Pacific War is that it's beyond insane to allow a culture of acceptable political assassination to develop in your system. See also how the Nazis were tacitly supported in their street battles etc. with the Communists et. al.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Pundits have long puzzled over why Japan, embroiled in an unwinnable war in China, attacked a country that supplied most of its oil and had an economy 70 times its own."

That's off by like an order of magnitude. Numbers like this are never exact, but no way was the difference 70x. Wikipedia's numbers have it at ~5.5x: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#Reference_data_for_summary_tables)

<comment><USER5> By the end of the war, the US was producing as many light aircraft carriers per month as Japan had produced over the entire war. Whatever the exact numbers were, it was silly lopsided.

<comment><USER14> Or the speed at which the US was producing ships. It was beyond lopsided.

Also, I seem to remember reading Canada had a part in the pre-war story (very anti-Japanese PM), but I don't remember the source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This timeline seems to put all the blame on Japan. No doubt they had over- militaristic tendencies. But let's also take the long view on America from Japan's perspective:

* Settlers displace native peoples in the north east of North America and the Caribbean.

* The first Americans kick out the British.

* Americans move west, killing more native peoples.

* Americans take over land from Mexico.

* "Manifest Destiny"

* Americans topple the Hawaiian monarchy and take over Hawaii.

* Americans go to war with the Philippines, killing tens of thousands.

It doesn't seem unreasonable for Japan at this point to feel threatened by America or compelled to take action to protect themselves.

<comment><USER16> I doubt Japan felt threatened by the US because of manifest destiny or the American revolutionary war. I think you're going a bit too far trying to paint the US as appearing unusually hegemonic or aggressive for the time.

<comment><USER17> Japanese culture perceives time differently than western culture. For example, a train in London is considered "on time" as long as it's within 14 minutes. In Japan, a train is considered late if it's not within 1 minute of schedule. Those perceptions of "lateness" permeate throughout the culture.

I don't claim any authority, but it's important not to project our own views of cultural permanence onto other cultures. Japan has businesses that have spanned over a 1000 years contiguously. I would not be surprised if Japan had a view that spanned much further into the past (particularly during the days of the Emperor).

Oh, just another side. Those are only a couple of examples of Western aggression in the previous century. Europe and the U.S. had been _quite_ active in South East Asia. There likely would have been Japanese alive at the time who had a living memory of events like the colonization of Vietnam.

<comment><USER16> I think that's less about perception of time as it is cultural expectations. Plenty of people in Europe would consider a train that's 15 minutes late "late," it just happens often enough that society has to take the slop of inefficiency into account.

But, my point is that even conceding such a long view of history, the US probably didn't look more menacing than Europe. The US was a minor political and economic power, whereas Europe was much more powerful and had its own much longer history of imperialism and territorial expansion by divine right.

The implication seems like a bit of historical revisionism in hindsight, based on how threatening the US seems to a lot of people now.

<comment><USER18> >The US was a minor political and economic power

I agree with you that the US was under-powered militarily at the time, but by the 40s the US had been the world's largest economy and industrial power for decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The tone here is _incredibly_ biased towards "nobody in Japan wanted war". Apparently nobody in Japan wanted war, but they somehow kept invading countries?

And the claim that "Japan had planned to declare war shortly before its planes bombed the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, but a series of errors by typists and translators prevented the Japanese embassy from giving Washington the declaration in time." is beyond absurd.

<comment><USER19> > And the claim that "Japan had planned to declare war shortly before its > planes bombed the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, but a series of errors by > typists and translators prevented the Japanese embassy from giving > Washington the declaration in time." is beyond absurd.

It appears to be the truth, or pretty close to it: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor#Japanes...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor#Japanese_declaration_of_war)

<comment><USER10> I think it's _far far far_ more likely that they intended for the declaration to arrive after the attacks, but with some amount of plausible deniability.

<comment><USER20> Why is that? What advantage would that provide? It seems like they would have been a lot better off if the declaration had arrived before, but maybe I'm missing something.

<comment><USER21> My understanding is that the Japanese' Bushido code specifically looked down on sneak attacks. I.e., a lower-class Ninja* might kill you in your sleep, whereas a noble Samurai would wake you up and give you a chance to draw.

If you've ever noticed the Americans' official reaction to Pearl Harbor often made a curious point about calling it a "despicable sneak attack". While a sneak attack seems like a rather obvious way to start a war for Westerners, the emphasis may have been a propaganda point towards the Japanese.

[*] No offense is intended to any actual Ninjas.

<comment><USER16> "Bushido" and the culture of the samurai as most people understand it was more or less invented whole cloth as a romanticized, retroactive mythology[0], well after the cultural relevance of the samurai had passed on. It was embraced by the wartime Imperial government for its propaganda value, but that doesn't mean the government necessarily bought into it.

[0][http://www.tofugu.com/2014/12/08/bushido-way-total- bullshit/](http://www.tofugu.com/2014/12/08/bushido-way-total-bullshit/)

<comment><USER21> That was a really interesting read and I think it supports the concept that "Bushido" was in full swing by the 1940's:

 _Bushido would find its ultimate embodiment in kamikaze pilots and foot- soldiers who "honorably" sacrificed themselves for their country. "Although some Japanese were taken prisoner," David Powers of BBC writes, "most fought until they were killed or committed suicide._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> And untold millions died because of Japanese leaders' cautious stupidity. It seems like there are lessons to be learned here? Let's start with, whenever there are positions that are culturally unspeakable, you have a problem. Perhaps another is, whatever idiocy a foreign nation's leaders are spouting, it's a good bet nobody actually wants war ( _cough cough Putin_ )

<comment><USER23> One thing we could learn is that the pre-war Japanese Constitution had a serious problem. The Constitution gave all powers to the Emperor and let him govern the country through the parliament, cabinet, courts, army and navy. That was interpreted to mean the army and navy did not have to obey the cabinet as long as they obey the Emperor. The Emperor didn't actually govern just like UK, so there was no head of the country. Japanese leaders had variety of opinions, but once the atmosphere that a war was inevitable was made, no one had authority to stop that.

<comment><USER24> This is a pretty interesting point because Germany had the exact same problem - with Hitler able to have the Enabling Act passed. It's a more extreme example because it allowed the Reichstag to vote themselves out of power in favour of Hitler, but it's interesting that Japan similarly had a constitutional power balancing problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> WW II was probably the last big colonial war - where the objective of the warring parties/world powers was to gain or defend direct control over territories and natural resources. I find it is such a pity that the world did not figure out a couple of decades earlier that it is cheaper to buy raw materials rather than to kill dozens of millions in a war over those damned resources; so many lives would have been saved;

What have the Americans ever done for us? Post WWII American leadership brought us decolonization; i think that this was a really significant change; one of the biggest changes of the twentieth century...

</comment><comment><USER26> Prescient New York Times article about Japan and oil, 1935: [http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9F02E1D6123DE53...](http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9F02E1D6123DE53ABC4B53DFB466838E629EDE)

And the US military was busier in China that you might think: [http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9803E1D6163BE43...](http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9803E1D6163BE433A25751C0A9649C946094D6CF)

[http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9D0DE2DF1E38E43...](http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9D0DE2DF1E38E433A2575BC2A9669D946194D6CF)

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm wondering to what extent the same social and linguistic issues might be behind Japan's political and economic policy paralysis over the last 20+ years.

<comment><USER20> I'm more wondering what sort of similar things are happening in my (USA) government that I can't perceive because I'm too immersed in it all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Will the election of Donald trump allow the cultivation of such nationalist behavior here in the U.S. ?</comment>


iPhone Nano - <AUTHOR> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19682602/

<comment><USER2> Also known as the iPhone shuffle: this will revolutionize social networking and singlehandedly eliminate some of the worlds biggest problems: loneliness won't exist anymore - the innovative random call mechanism of the iPhone will make sure everybody gets a call regularly. The pain of complex organizer applications also goes away, as there simply will be no need to organize your contacts anymore.</comment>


Some really uninteresting sounding kitchen gadgets - <AUTHOR> https://www.eater.com/2019/1/8/18173843/ces-2019-kitchen-tech-ge-samsung-whirlpool <comment><AUTHOR> The things my wife (the cook in our family; I clean the dishes afterwards) would want basically: \- an easier way to add items to the shopping list while in the midst of cooking (i.e. not having to find or touch her smartphone when her hands are wet or flour-covered) \- an easier way to watch Dr. Who (or whatever) while cooking \- a refrigerator with lazy-susan style rotating shelves so that nothing gets lost in the back

None of these are unaddressed here. I guess I won't be getting the kitchen of the future any time soon.</comment>


Bitcoin for Gold – Major Gold Dealer Now Accepting Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://blockchaincourier.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin-for-gold-major-gold-dealer-now-accepting-bitcoin/ <comment><USER2> If the cost in Bitcoin changes when the value of Bitcoin in USD changes, you aren't paying in Bitcoin - you are paying in USD, you just happen to be converting your Bitcoin over first.

<comment><USER3> That's like saying if the cost in USD of chocolate from Switzerland changes with USDCHF then you're not actually paying in USD.

All international transactions are affected by exchange rate, it's just a question of to what degree the importer is willing to eat the cost of minor fluctuations. This is more likely to occur with high-margin consumer items (e.g., Nintendo games tend to stay priced at round numbers) than with low- margin items.

Gold and BTC both approximate pure financial instruments and are notionally almost zero margin. Thus we would expect their prices to be quoted very precisely.</comment></comment>


Gephi 0.9 announced, coming this December - <AUTHOR> https://gephi.wordpress.com/2015/11/02/announcing-gephi-0-9-release-date/ <comment><USER2> This is exciting! Fixes to Java and Mac OS X compatibility will probably let me drop Java 6 from my machine. And the new Gephi core comes with timestamp support, new GEXF, multi-graphs, and (eventually) a new Toolkit!

It's been a long wait, but December 20th will be an early Christmas.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you want in a knowledge base/bookmarking service? - <AUTHOR> Think Pocket, Instapaper, Evernote, Pinboard -- what is the biggest hurdle to reaching your perfect digital knowledge base?<p>On another note, what is the best way to make such a service more social, as to foster the diffusion and evolution of different ideas? <comment><USER2> The biggest hurdle is that all of my data is already in too many different places. That's not entirely avoidable because my involvement with various employers, projects, etc. makes it so.

I think for everybody who wants to use a SaaS there are 10 people who want to make another one. If you want to make a product that sticks out, maybe it should be a desktop app, something that lives in the user's own cloud, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Please don't add a "social" section to the service, pocket, for instance is very useful as bookmarking service but their recommended is just a BIG distraction but this is only my opinion :(

And of course an API to GET and PUT metadata from the bookmarked links.</comment>


Why You Should Bootstrap in Montreal or Join Startup Chile - <AUTHOR> http://nextmontreal.com/naysawn-naderi-art-sumo-start-up-chile/

<comment><USER2> There are several reasons why you generally have a huge disadvantage when doing a startup in Canada, and it's not just about taxes and laws.

Want to use that cool new service (e.g., Stripe)? Sorry, not available in Canada.

Want to start a service that ships anything in the mail? Prohibitively expensive.

Want funds? Banks won't lend you anything and investors are very few and risk averse. $20-50K investments in web startups are rare and big news when they happen.

I love Canada and I'm not moving from it. But Canadian entrepreneurs have much lower chances of succeeding than American ones.

Can you make millions in Canada? Sure, but it's a much less likely occurrence. And if you do, it will generally be still less than what American startups can make.

This is why it makes no sense to start a company like Twitter in Canada. You can't sustain it. The best approach for Canadian startups is to bootstrap by charging money from day one.

So you can get a lot of nice "Italian restaurants on the web" doing SaaS and making good money, but don't expect groundbreaking innovation a la Google from Canada.

With that said, those who are already in Canada, like me, have no free pass. If you don't succeed, you can only blame yourself.

"In Silicon Valley they hand out money like candy" is not a good excuse for never achieving your dreams in Canada.

<comment><USER3> I sorta agree with you about the hurdles but there has a been a bunch of very sucessful startups in Canada. I can't name you a google but Softimage, Ubisoft, Bioware, RIM, ATI, Desire2Learn... and on the non tech side Cirque Du Soleil(Founder just went to space last year) All pretty big successes. For 1/10 the population as the US you can't expect the same level of output.

On the talent side, Montreal and the Toronto area are pretty big recruiting grounds for Microsoft Google and other tech companies. Tons of Game companies have established themselves in Montreal to draw on that pool. There is a lot of talent here and a lot of people would want to stay here instead of working in the US.Montreal's 2 english universities and a lot of French ones around help keep replenishing the supplies. Toronto has some very good schools too (Waterloo being one of the best Comp Sci program in the world).

There are a bunch of ways to get government money but it does involve some major red tape. It be cool to find someone who's gone through it and could make a writeup on it.

EDIT: I should also mention that there are other good cities in Cananda ;p I did not mention Vancouver

<comment><USER4> For the record, though, Ubisoft is a French company, not a Canadian start-up.

<comment><USER3> Ah man you are right, sorry for the error (they've had offices here forever but I should have know that).

<comment><USER4> No problem - a lot of Montrealers have this impression, probably because the Montreal offices are by far the largest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretty cool, but Chile is hardly in the tropics. South America isn't automatically warm just because it's "south" :).

That said, it looks like a killer opportunity. I've looked at this before and it's really going to be interesting to see the different experiences that these startups have come through over the coming months.

<comment><USER6> The weather in Santiago and Central Chile is Mediterranean (wine, fruit), arid in the north and temperate in the south, plus mountainous regions (and polar climate if you count their claimed Antarctica territories) so basically they have all the climates _except_ for tropical.

<comment><USER7> Easter Island has tropical climate. So yeah, we got 'em all.

<comment><USER6> I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Other recent HN posts and discussions about Start-Up Chile:

154 Startups Selected in Start-Up Chile's 2nd Round of 2011 <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3031349>

Start-Up Chile is a Great Experience But Be Careful Too <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3055534>

</comment><comment><USER9> As someone who lived in Montreal for 4 years, it gets old pretty quick. I now live in Brooklyn for comparable prices to what I paid in Montreal (rent is a bit more, but food is dirt cheap in NY) and like it much more.

<comment><USER10> I can't see how doing a startup in Canada in general is a good idea. Policies there are a lot more restrictive than the states. It's a great place to visit, though.

<comment><USER11> Health coverage.

<comment><USER3> I have to say this is a big one for me. It gives a lot more freedom and it's one less thing to stress about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This sounds like a fantastic opportunity. I like the Startup Chile project because they offer a great combination of non-equity funds, lots of government support for networking and an opportunity to explore a new place in the world. Congratulations and best of luck with this.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not much information about other requirements for Startup Chile in the article.

Through Startup Chile's website: Teams must also give workshops, attend events etc., which hopefully won't be too big of a hassle. Not sure if you have to keep your business in Chile for a certain amount of time afterwards.

Government support and involvement: Possibly good or bad.

<comment><USER14> I've been talking with a number of directors at length about the program, and we've been promoting it at Hackers & Founders.

There is no requirement after the 6 months. And, the government support is all about walking you through the legal loop holes, and then generally getting out of the way.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the additional information. It sounds like really interesting opportunity, particularly for those wanting to learn about a new culture.

And on second thought, the workshops and events are probably a good thing in that you're forced to step outside your intense startup focus to meet new people and maybe find prospective friends/users/employees/investors.

I really liked Santiago when there for study abroad - nice people and very modern city. Only complaint would be the air pollution because of the "containment" effect of the surrounding Andes mountains.

<comment><USER14> My pleasure. As far as I'm concerned, Startup Chile is one of the best sources of early money around for startups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone have any more info on these government grants available in Canada that are mentioned ?

</comment><comment><USER16> Actually, won't it be summer in both?

<comment><USER17> Yes it would and if you know anything about winter in Canada you'll know that it would be awesome to be in Chile instead of the cold north.

<comment><USER18> Depending on where you live and work in Montréal, though, venturing outdoors in winter can be almost completely optional. That can be both a blessing and a curse. I lived a workaholic life there for a while and I hear the city's very nice -- but since both my apartment and my office (and the grocery store, restaurants, etc.) were connected to the Metro, I've never actually seen it.

<comment><USER3> Yeah the underground city is pretty awesome and useful. There are days when you might have to carry a shovel with you(don't think I'm kidding it's not an uncommon sight) when walking outside in the winter but last few winters have been pretty mild (ok last year had a good amount of snow). Global warming's helping ;p

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> wow - 40k of free money to go enjoy Santiago and build a company. Sounds like a dream!

<comment><USER20> Probably is

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I pretty much agree with the "location, location, location" idea.

I am sure there are advantages to doing a startup in Chile and in Montreal. But I still think that to make it big, you have to do it in Silicon Valley.

The concentration of talented and smart people is greater in Silicon Valley than in any other place.

</comment><comment><USER22> This sounds pretty cool. I'd go to Chile if not for a little travel and to escape the Bay Area bubble in lieu of a broader life experience. Wonder once you finish the 'program' what the terms are. I suspect they'd want you to stay wherever they're funding you. I also suspect developing countries (PIGS) are going to be a hot bed of innovative startups. Tangible problems beget real solutions, e.g. - successful companies?</comment>


Show HN: RocketSendIt - <AUTHOR> http://rocketsendit.com

<comment><AUTHOR> My first software as a service project, this is the MVP launch of it.

Basically it is an abstraction that sits on top of Amazon's Simple Email Service that allows programmers to quickly leverage cloud email without having to worry about daily send limits, sends/sec, or an other details of the Amazon API.

Thanks for the feedback in advance. :)

</comment><comment><USER2> Slightly confusing: you state that you get 2,000 emails free per person because it's hosted on EC2, but isn't that per EC2 account?

Or are you making an EC2 account for everyone who signs up for RocketSentIt?

Great stuff though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh, good point I should be more clear on this.

Since RocketSendIt itself is hosted on Amazon's EC2 servers you get 2,000 emails per month using your own Amazon AWS account. If you were to implement your own solution using your own (non EC2) servers you wouldn't get the free 2,000 emails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> clicky <https://rocketsendit.com/></comment>