Facebook Messenger XMPP is going away - <AUTHOR> https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat <comment><USER3> Also it is worth mentioning that Google Talk !== Google Hangouts

Everyone who uses XMPP/iMessage/Adium to connect to Google Talk is:

1) Apparently missing some messages from Hangouts users. Haven't been able to track it down but it's gotten me in trouble with my girlfriend a few times for "ignoring her"

2) Your friends see you as "Online" on hangouts and send you messages, which often seem to relate to #1 (you never see them).

This has been a nightmare for me over the last 2 years and I can't stand how something as simple and SOLVED as chat protocol has been nuked and replaced with proprietary crap that thinks it's impressive to announce a semantic MAJOR release update that touts "Group Messaging" as a major new innovation (I'm looking at you, Apple).

Ok, rant over. Take care my friends and let's just switch everyone to IRC and be done with it.

<comment><USER4> This may not be unique to XMPP...I use regular Google Hangouts with my fiancee (also on stock Google Hangouts) and have found that occasionally messages to my fiancee get to her hours later or not at all. Apparently the Hangouts team doesn't consider "reliable message delivery" to be a key feature.

I think people don't realize just how unreliable the major messaging networks are. There was a Reddit thread a year or so ago where some folks who worked in the telecom industry said that they shoot for a 98% delivery rate with SMS, i.e. one in every 50 SMS messages will just get lost. I've personally experienced arriving at a friends' house, sending them a text to let them know I'm there, waiting 10 minutes, knocking on the door, and then 20 minutes later, while I'm in the car with them, my own text message finally arrives.

<comment><USER5> What is worse is that all Internet banking and debit card transactions online(in India at least) depends on SMS for OTP as mandated by RBI guidelines. I have had OTP messages arrive 6 hours late while trying (and failing) to initiate banking transactions (which have a timeout period of 1 - 2 minutes).

<comment><USER6> Your bank is using a bad SMS service provider. With a SS7 uplink (versus a cheap SMPP connection), it should arrive within seconds, with a delivery report for the sender, if desired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A quick comment on why I submitted this ...

This will substantially change the way I interact with Facebook Messenger, and irritatingly so. For the past as long as I remember, all of my IM services have shown up in one client (naim; then Pidgin; then Adium). I'll now be forced to either use the Facebook web client (and, in doing so, feed the mis- tuned reward system in my brain that stimulates itself from seeing the notifications icon light up ...) or use a poor approximation of a keyboard on my cell phone.

It's irritating when a service that I use gets shut down. But, the thing that's truly irritating to me is that I don't even have the option of not using it: I'm locked in still by network effects, and Facebook know it.

<comment><USER7> I'm still not over the death of Facebook Messenger for Windows. I've tried to use Pidgin for a while, but Facebook would often stop working and only come back to life a few days later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Sigh_ , yet another nail in the XMPP coffin, at least as far as the general public is concerned.

Remember when we had ICQ, and AIM, and MSN Messenger, and Gadu-Gadu, and we were dreaming of a unified messaging system?

<comment><USER9> So, I don't do web or software development, let me tell you^W^Wrant about how chat in 2015 feels to use. I'm 27, I grew up on IRC, I know my ICQ UIN by heart. Chat has always replaced SMS for me, and most groupware as well. I was happy when Facebook came along, and suddenly even the non-nerdy friends were compatible with my preferred way of having an endless conversation about random things. Chatting feels natural to me, allowing to keep in touch with good friends but not capturing my attention the way a phone call does. It also interleaves very nicely with menial work.

I don't care much about cloud or private cloud or local app. I've used irssi on a server that everybody connected to via ssh. But I switched over to cloud services as soon as I had more than one device that could send and receive messages. Everything else was way too tedious, as I never knew which device was connected, where messages went, where unread notifications went or whatever. Nothing to do with closed vs open, json vs xml or whatever social pattern. XMPP was lacking features, simple as that! From a user perspective! XMPP didn't _work_!

Give me persistent group chat, shared chat history with a search function, synchronized unread/read statusses, and I'll be leaving the cloud with flying colors. My current best bet for a text messenger is Skype, but the app is way too clumsy on Android and Windows. Close second is WhatsApp with a few groups, running on a large phone with a well-trained SwiftKey2. Both feel about as great as ICQ6 with its banner ad, and none feel as great as Adium or Trillian did comparatively back in the day.

<comment><USER10> > ... persistent group chat, shared chat history with a search function, > synchronized unread/read statuses....

Across all my devices - Web, Linux, Android and FirefoxOS. No advertising.

Telegram - [http://telegram.org](http://telegram.org)

I've been using it for several months now and am very happy. Would love integrated voice calling, especially to landlines/mobiles, and hope someone develops a plugin for this soon (perhaps the guys at Jaconda[0] will do it).

I have just one regular contact still using Facebook messenger, and our conversations are now very disjointed, as sometimes I don't login to that service for several days at a time. I don't use Skype as a messenger service, but do still have about four or five contacts who are wedded to it for free voice calls. I use WebCallDirect[1] for cheap calls to landlines/mobiles.

[0] [https://jaconda.im](https://jaconda.im) [1] [http://webcalldirect.com](http://webcalldirect.com)

<comment><USER11> Telegram looks really interesting. It has an open protocol and API so it should be easy to integrate with other systems; there is a libpurple port for it[1]. Maybe Telegram could be a replacement for XMPP?

[1] [https://github.com/majn/telegram- purple](https://github.com/majn/telegram-purple)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Zuckerberg sure has been interesting this week:

> Developers please use our platform!

> Developers we are now going to obsolete any work you've done with the XMPP > front-end.

Demonstrating a clear moving target is not how you attract developers, Facebook.

<comment><USER13> It all reminds me of this post: [http://daltoncaldwell.com/dear-mark- zuckerberg](http://daltoncaldwell.com/dear-mark-zuckerberg)

Facebook is trying to make the platform too good for startups to resist building on. By the time something built on the platform emerges as a success, Facebook can either heavy-hand them into an acquisition, or lock them out and take away their momentum.

<comment><USER12> It's as though they are trying to get everyone else to do their RND. You float the risk and if it works they implement it. Genius, really.

<comment><USER14> The latter seemed obvious to many people though. I think a lot of people ran with that risk anyway in hopes of becoming an acquisition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We need two things. The first is a piece of software or robot that can just keep browser tabs open along with iMessage/wechat clients whatever and then reads it and transfers any message that comes thru one of these locked down services to the second thing which is an open federated universal communication service/app.

This app would have a slider at the top and if the slider is all the way on the left you get 1-1 messages/mail from the most important people in your social network and all the way on the right you get 1 to many things of people you don't even know but you follow on Twitter/twitch/youtube/RSS/tv shows you watch. This app makes money because people/advertisers can pay to increase how close they are to you for one message and the money is split with the user who also sets the cost. So for a million dollars you could call Jay Z who might be sleeping but he's making 500k so what the hell, sure he'll listen to your demo.

<comment><USER16> ...and fast forward few years and you have the Black-Mirror episode "Fifteen Million Merits" happening world-wide.

How long do you think it will take for advertisers to realise that people will watch "stuff" even if you don't pay them as long as they have nothing better to do. Add to this the fact that major media outlets (movie productions, tv- channels) will jump at the chance to broadcast ads as entertainment.

A very dark future awaits us...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a 11-month old announcement:

       On April 30, 2014, we announced the deprecation of the XMPP Chat API
       as part of the release of Platform API v2.0.

</comment><comment><USER18> Everybody loves open standards until they are large enough to dictate their own.

</comment><comment><USER19> Alternative to your desktop client.

[http://www.goofyapp.com/](http://www.goofyapp.com/)

<comment><USER20> I found out about Goofy a couple of months ago and when I'm at my desk, I don't have to use my phone at all for messaging (except for whatsapp).

Now I'd wish someone would do the same for Gmail chat / Hangouts, or maybe a way to combine all the webviews into one ;)

<comment><USER21> Hangouts new chrome extension, the one with float circles, it's pretty good, and works on Linux.

<comment><USER22> Unfortunately it doesn't work well on OS X and still requires me to run Chrome in background next to the Firefox leading to alot of annoying horrible window switching issues (for some reason chrome apps tend to get stuck in background when alt-tabbing, sometimes it just hangs, burns alot of memory for a really simple interface....)

<comment><USER23> All those "web apps" that were meant to be coming to the desktop and the flurry of excitement when browsers started adding the ability to add shortcuts on the desktop to a "web app" seems to have died down, and with good reason I think! Some people don't want to be sat with a browser open all day. Given that browsers are turning into mini-OSes themselves, it's irritating as they don't fit into the OS window management system easily (like awkward popups/alerts).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can anybody tell me, why the SIP chat protocol is so under used?

[https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3428.txt](https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3428.txt)

-based on open standards (SIP)

-supported by most VoIP servers (so we have full interoperability between vendors such as Cisco, Huawei, Siemens, Voipswitch, Mizutech, Jitsi and others)

-simple and extendable

-lots of free services, free/open source software. You can also host your own or integrate into your company PBX

In the previous years, we always see the same path for messaging applications:

1\. Startup company add messaging based on open standards (SIP/IRC/XMPP/other?)

2\. One the company has significant user base, switches to a non-standard / proprietary protocol

Already happened for Skype, Yahoo, Google, Facebook

<comment><USER25> >-simple and extendable

It's the first time I hear anyone describe SIP as "simple". If you printed out all the SIP specs, you'd probably have a pile close to a meter high. Among the protocol crowd (including IETFers) SIP is often regarded as an example of protocol design having gone off the rails in a spectacular fashion. It has been repeatedly beat in the market by proprietary protocols that do things better (e.g., see the mess SIP NAT traversal ended up as compared to Skype).

<comment><USER24> Yes, the SIP protocol is not so simple. However a lot of well working implementations already exists (source code, libraries, ready to use software). The core messaging in SIP (RFC 3428) is extremely simple to add as it is just a single method (MESSAGE).

Adding presence and other funny things with the SIMPLE protocol family is another subject. (However the basic presence is also very simple ...the complications comes when you wish to add file transfer and other fancy things).

But these can be used as an extra so at least the for chat you are fully interoperable with all other vendors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> quick, deprecate all the things that are open.

the wave of openneness that started with the web is being extinguished everywhere. mind you, one could improve XMPP, or come up with an open alternative. But this is no longer the focus. Short term money and numbers is/are the focus, as per pre-web companies.

This model always end up being bad for the masses of course, and only good for a few.

</comment><comment><USER27> I only realized XMPP support was ending a month ago, I am not sure how I missed the notification but this just introduces a new way for me to miss messages. I think the writing is on the wall for XMPP, even Cisco is now working on Project Squared/ Spark and I expect will be killing off their Jabber software (The tone from their collaboration SMEs has become quite negative). Personally I believe WebRTC based technology can provide a much better user experience and more powerful capabilities than XMPP. Further, as a front end to SIP, it could be a great thing for interoperability, especially with PSTN. However, it really looks like it is being used as an excuse to create new walled gardens. Fortunately some carriers are migrating to IMS and provide softclients for computers, tablets and smart phones (Rogers One Number, and Telus Extend). This is the lowest common denominator, but I can chat with everyone with SMS as well as make phone calls from whatever device I choose. However, although technically possible, multiuser chat and presence is still not available. So here we are 20 years later, and chat is more fragmented than ever, but at least unlimited SMS is now common. AT&T and Verizon are finally beginning migration to IP peering which opens the way for video calling over the PSTN. I think there is an opportunity for carriers here if they would get their act together. 6+ platforms (Skype, Hangouts, FB Messenger, iMessage, BBM, SMS) really doesn't work for me.

</comment><comment><USER28> That sucks, I really liked using Pidgin/Adium with Facebook chat.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm curious why this article seems to have gotten flag-bombed off the front page:

[http://hnrankings.info/9266769/](http://hnrankings.info/9266769/)

Is there something particularly un-newsworthy about this change?

<comment><USER30> Probably the fact that it was announced last April

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> IRC was essentially created 25 years ago. In all that time we have still to make anything significantly better.

Why does a system with the following features not exist:

1\. Requires all implementing servers and clients to support the full protocol

2\. Allows users to communicate to users on other servers ( not just users within a server )

3\. Has free client open source reference implementations for native use ( C or the like ) and some web language ( Python & Dynamic JS )

3b. Has a free open source server reference implementation

4\. Logging on the server indefinitely

5\. Is always encrypted ( end to end via public keys, so that clear data never reaches the servers )

6\. Offline messaging

7\. Large file transfer with clean re-connection and continuation ( if neither party has a publicly accessible port, payment/membership to the server would be required to facilitate the transfer... )

8\. Random chat

9\. Group chat

10\. Utf8 for full multi-lingual use

11\. Index of users for finding other users

If someone would just create such a thing it would put an end to all the stupid shifting from one system to another from year to year. I'm getting tired of switching systems and reverse engineering shitty protocols in order to continue doing the same thing with less features.

<comment><USER32> Did you just describe email? There are a couple of things that make email unattractive for chatting: 1) latency (seconds or minutes instead of sub- seconds), and 2) user habits of treating emails as something that can be responded later instead of NOW.

I grew up with IRC, but I now prefer emails to chat. It makes you think a bit more before hitting "send", and so the signal/noise ratio is higher with emails.

<comment><USER31> Email fails in the following ways:

1\. Email client have vastly different feature sets and capabilities. Most notably, the HTML support is very different from one browser to another.

5\. The vast majority of email systems do not even support encryption of the message itself

7\. Large file transfer via email is horrible and extremely limited

8\. No random chat support

9\. No group chat ( cc doesn't count as it lacks history of the group chat )

10\. Have you ever received emails seemingly full of gibberish? Utf8 not supported properly in majority of implementations. ( which imo requires getting and using a font that supports the codepoints )

11\. No user index ( saying that you could have an address book also doesn't count; and that is a seperate thing which also there is no one spec that is used by all people using email )

12\. No real time messaging support. Inherent in the discussion is that chat software is insant, not based on server polling.

<comment><USER33> > Email client have vastly different feature sets and capabilities. Most > notably, the HTML support is very different from one browser to another.

That's hardly an email issue, that's a client issue. The mail protocol doesn't care much about the content.

Also, you will find some people averse to using HTML email.

> The vast majority of email systems do not even support encryption of the > message itself

Again, that's not part of the email protocol itself, and as far as email encryption goes PGP is pretty much the standard. The real issue here is whether to use the sucky PGP/inline or the proper PGP/mime

> No random chat support

You mean randomly send an email to someone, without being invited ? That's pretty much what spam is.

> No group chat ( cc doesn't count as it lacks history of the group chat )

I don't see why cc wouldn't count, when combined with the various In-Reply-To: and Refenrences: headers, you can build a very solid group chat history.

> Have you ever received emails seemingly full of gibberish? Utf8 not > supported properly in majority of implementations. ( which imo requires > getting and using a font that supports the codepoints )

Again, a client problem, but I'll agree that clients can lie on the actual encoding that is used in emails. Mandating UTF-8 would be such a heaven.

> No user index ( saying that you could have an address book also doesn't > count; and that is a seperate thing which also there is no one spec that is > used by all people using email )

I don't understand. Why couldn't a server index your emails and extract your contacts ?

> No real time messaging support.

Theoretically, you can (and should) run an MTA on your machine; you'd then receive messages in real time

> server polling

Polling sucks, don't do it. If you don't have an MTA on your machine, at least use IMAP IDLE. Disclaimer: I wrote this ([https://github.com/rakoo/idlewatch](https://github.com/rakoo/idlewatch)) to automatically sync all my mails when there's something new.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A long time ago I worked on the modified ejabberd servers that provide this service. A shame indeed.

<comment><USER9> Do you see a realistical future for the protocol? How large would the motifications have to be to reflect a "decent" feature set for the current device landscape and user's expectations?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wish the entire Messenger went away - nothing but an extra FB annoyance forced onto me.

<comment><USER36> Turn off chat. Nothing is forced onto you.

<comment><USER35> I never even turned it on. Since they split messenger off I can no longer read read messages on my cellphone...without installing a separate app. Functionality that worked perfectly fine previously until they decided to disable to force messenger onto people.

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/28/facebook-moving- messages/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/28/facebook-moving-messages/)

<comment><USER37> Can't you just open facebook.com in your phone's browser? I've been doing that for a couple of years since noticing that it's both faster and more reliable than the Facebook iOS app.

<comment><USER35> Yeah its tedious though. So mostly I just decide it can wait till I get home and have access to a computer.

<comment><USER38> If you're on Android, you should check out Tinfoil for Facebook. It's a wrapper for facebook's mobile page. I find it more useful than the regular facebook app. You can also get notifications back using IFTTT.

<comment><USER35> Thank you for the suggestion. I'll check out Tinfoil.

On the whole my FB interaction is fairly minimal and I expect social companies to push the limits so to speak. Such is life. This particular case was just so blatant that I can't help but react with "go shove it a place the sun don't shine" (colloquially speaking).

If they added new functionality & put that into a new app...cool. But to strip existing functionality, block it from existing users and add it to a new app with extended privacy intruding permission...that is simply unforgivable in my books. (FB employees reading this - and I know you are - see sun reference above for exact instructions).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I just wanted to comment on how evil facebook is, but I've decided not to. I think there are enough people here who think the same. What facebook is doing is probably just an example of "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" [0], though, I understand that their decision is not the same what microsoft did back then.

So to my point: Do you really think facebook is doing this only out of pure 'evilness'. They were probably facing various of problems with XMPP, and already switched with their infrastructure from XMPP to their own 'inventions'. If their own development is already proven to be working, they don't have a reason to stay at the expensive XMPP protocol.

[1] & [2]: I understand why XMPP can be nice to build into your applications (there's even a social network based on XMPP), especially in the early stage, but when you go big - or mobile, I guess the 'flaws' in the protocol are just becoming annoying (Disclaimer I've no clue what I'm writing about) I wonder why there is no better open protocol or standard for text chat, and if - <USER2> can we encourage facebook & other giants to use it. I'm curious how tox [3] is going to do in near future. At the moment, it feels like XMPP is the only open chat solution, which no-one can touch since Pidgin, Adium & Gajim are all broken (I'm still thankful for this tools!).

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish)

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810)

[2]: [http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber](http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber)

[3]: [https://wiki.tox.im/Main_Page](https://wiki.tox.im/Main_Page)

<comment><USER40> I read through some github discussions in the tox github page, and I can't really shake the feeling that they don't know much security. Someone had a question about the protocol design and about how secure it was, and the dev just linked to NaCl and said "read the source here and you will see that tox is secure".

It didn't really boost my confidence in their protocol design...

<comment><USER41> Can you link to the offending conversation?

<comment><USER40> [https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/121#issuecommen...](https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/121#issuecomment-35750212)

Not as bad as I remembered, but still... meh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> To play devil's advocate, what part of the XMPP protocol is dated, that doesn't allow Facebook and Google to continue using it? Maybe if there's a way to update XMPP to include features that shared amongst these services, they can fall back to using it?

<comment><USER43> The part where when you're using XMPP you're not on their website looking at their ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> So this is how they make it a platform? :)

</comment><comment><USER45> Is there any other way to work with Facebook Chat, now that XMPP is gone?

<comment><USER46> Directly via the graph api. Simpler than xmpp.

Someone recently posted a graph api chat example.

<comment><USER47> Do we know if Adium/pidgin are likely to update to use that API, or is it too early to say?

<comment><USER48> Someone will build it. But it still just adds another proprietary API to the arsenal. Ugh.

I echo other sentiments here: what exactly is broken about XMPP that companies keep moving away?

<comment><USER49> Somebody already said it: while using the chat through a different client than their web chat, you're not looking at their ads, you're not installing their proprietary mobile app, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Another stab between the shoulder blades for those of us who like to live in the command line.

</comment><comment><USER51> Is there an alternative to Pidgin in this regard? I only use Facebook to chat with my friends (over Pidgin) and I don't want to touch their website if possible.

<comment><USER52> I would be also interested in Messenger integration in Adium (It uses same library as Pidgin.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Considering that they never opened it to federation, does it even matter?

<comment><USER54> Desktop XMPP clients can no longer be used to chat on FB. That matters to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Is there any alternative API? That is, if I'm interested in creating something that interacts with Facebook chat, am I now out of luck?

Thanks.

<comment><USER56> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9264722](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9264722)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Note to those setting up new XMPP accounts: DuckDuckGo has a solid XMPP server[7] available for public use. They do their damnedest to protect privacy also, from what I understand.

That'll be all.

\--

[7] [https://duck.co/blog/using-pidgin-with-xmpp- jabber](https://duck.co/blog/using-pidgin-with-xmpp-jabber)

</comment><comment><USER58> If you "follow the money," then this move makes sense. This is simply a move to display ads to every person using Facebook chat. (Facebook's not happy that they couldn't show ads to those of us using pidgin et al)

</comment><comment><USER59> Let's hope for an official desktop client of Messenger...

<comment><USER23> Will it need the endless list of permissions like it does on Android? It seems to want access to my entire phone, life, brain patterns and toilet usage patterns.

In all seriousness, there is no indication as to what a desktop app is accessing or doing, and given the extensive "fingers in all pies" access that the Android one has, I wouldn't be quick to install a Facebook native app on my desktop!

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Another one turns sour. But FB server was never federated anyway, so good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER61> Welp, time to register an account on jabber.org

I don't really understand why they took the XMPP API to such lengths (it even displayed OTR messages as [encrypted message], that's not really the kind of thing that comes to mind instantly when I think about an XMPP API) to finally deprecate it. Pidgin will probably see a sudden surge of bug reports.

<comment><USER62> In my experience (as of about a year ago) the jabber.org servers are -I guess- seriously overloaded. Frequent disconnection or failures to login were the norm for my @jabber.org account. If I had to guess, I would bet that they're under frequent "attack", but I really have no idea.

Does anyone have any more recent information on the health of jabber.org's XMPP service?

<comment><USER63> I think jabber.org is indeed overloaded and they don't accept new registrations since 2013.

See my answer to the GP about available servers.</comment></comment></comment>


Details of Formlabs new 3D printer leak. The first low cost SLA machine - <AUTHOR> http://articles.boston.com/2012-09-23/business/34002041_1_3-d-printer-laser-printers-designers

<comment><AUTHOR> From what is said about the use of a laser and liquid resin you can infer that they are building an SLA (Stereolithography) machine and are aiming it at sub $3000. This could be far more exciting than all the low cost FDM (fused deposition modeling) 3D printers like the rep-rap. It could achieve a far higher resolution than similar priced machines.

The only potential drawback of SLA at this price point is the cost of the resin. The FDM machines use very low cost ABS plastic wire, the resin for an SLA machine could be quite expensive. It will be interesting to see what resin they have gone with and if they have found a relay cheap one to use.

Very exciting!

Formlabs website: <http://www.formlabs.com/></comment>


Startup Quote: Chris Hughes, co-founder, Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/3939057342

<comment><AUTHOR> People are not good at expressing their frustration. The best way to listen to the customer is through metrics.

\- Chris Hughes (@chrishughes)

<http://startupquote.com/post/3939057342></comment>


People Are Turning Their Instagram Accounts into Bots - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/people-are-turning-their-accounts-into-bots-on-instagram?ref=hvper.com <comment><USER2> This is why algorithmic based curation/display of content is a bad thing, it can be gamed. Show me the accounts I follow in chronological order and the only way it can be gamed is if those accounts continually post over and over again to push their content to be the most recent - and that's easy to fix: limit the number of posts to one per hour.

As a photographer Instagram is pretty much over as a platform for me, there is very little content on there now I would call "photographic" other than a few accounts I follow, but those are shown out of order and with ads mixed in- between. The explore page has become a mass of memes, "viral" videos, half naked women, spam, reposts from reddit, reposts of other reposts, and so on. I can see the same content multiple times on the explore page, reposted over and over. I recently unfollowed most of the accounts to put an end to the "such and such liked this so we will show it to you" as well.

And of course, as per the article, you have a massive amount of accounts that are liking and following to try to get followers in return. Some of these are more obvious than others. If you use Tinder you'll have seen an increasing trend of matches wanting you to follow them on Instagram, because they want to up their follower count.

All that said, I'm guilty of this too. I have a personal Instagram account that I do very little with[1], but also an account for the gallery I volunteer at[2] to try to spread the word to people in the area - I have a script that will like + follow anyone that posts to Instagram with tags and/or a location in the village. This script has been running once a day for about 6 months, and I believe it _has_ brought some people into the gallery.

I also run an events page on Instagram[3] with a script that will like + follow any content tagged with various programming related keywords. Looking at some of the accounts it's followed (or have followed us back) it's bizarre - you can see accounts in which the content is just someone posting images of their laptop once a day and they have follower counts in the tens of thousands.

Anyway, it feels as if Instagram is at a tipping point. It's no longer a platform for photography but now a platform for driving traffic to other businesses. I'd give it another year or two before it collapses in on itself or they do a root and branch purge of all the spam, which probably won't happen as long as it is driving revenue to Instagram/Facebook itself.

[1] [https://www.instagram.com/leejebay/](https://www.instagram.com/leejebay/) [2] [https://www.instagram.com/galeriealpine/](https://www.instagram.com/galeriealpine/) [3] [https://www.instagram.com/perl_events/](https://www.instagram.com/perl_events/)

<comment><USER3> I wonder if future archeologists will think "like" and "follow" and "subscribe" are some kind of (useless) currency.

21st century Tulip Mania.

<comment><USER4> Why wait? I already feel they're useless...

<comment><USER5> But not currency, is it? Maybe social currency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I realize that activity and content are what media sites need, but the publish / subscribe model that celebrity accounts reinforce is the antithesis of anything social. I shutdown my Twitter because there is near zero interaction on there. In the same sense, Facebook is very much a media sharing platform, rather than a social platform to connect with people.

I would like to see a paid social network with zero tolerance for programmatic interaction. Maybe tied to a (non voip) phone to make the cost of shill accounts high. I do feel there is a chance to unseat the major sites right now, it just requires a site that provides meaningful interaction instead of ads and corporate interest.

<comment><USER7> Where do you get this idea that Twitter has near zero interaction? There is tons of interaction on Twitter. Obviously if you follow a bunch of celebrity accounts you will personally not see a lot of interaction. I mostly follow friends and/or people who post about hobbies I enjoy and interact with them frequently.

<comment><USER6> I specifically did not follow celebs. My tweets would generally get 1 or 2 likes, maybe about 60 impressions, and the occasional reply from one of a few friends. I would still end up seeing celeb accounts through the your friend follows and your friend liked feature.

<comment><USER7> It's definitely a matter of who you're following/who follows you, that's true of any site.

IG/FB very much actively encourages (with their newsfeed algorithms, and to an extent also the UI) 'influencer'-type accounts over individual communication. Twitter imo is significantly less bad about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Devil's advocate after 10 seconds of thought. Is this _really_ a bad thing for the users? I mean, you don't have to follow accounts you don't enjoy following. Just black and yellow squares? Don't follow it. If you enjoy the content, does it matter if the account is run by bots? Even on the explore page, Instagram seems to do fairly well with showing you pictures of things you like - I see a ton of cats, burgers and watches. I don't really care if the accounts are run by bots... They're just pretty pictures. As for my feed, it's my friends or people I've chosen to follow. Whether they're posting themselves or via a cron job on a raspberry pi, I don't really care. If I did, I'd unfollow.

<comment><USER9> The problem is also around people artificially liking and commenting on your own posts (if they are public). I had encountered this last year when I was running a photography project and I would have to deal with fake accounts posting on every image. Each would post one of the following messages: 'Nice! Check out my page!', 'Wow! Cool pic. Want to increase your followers, click the link in my profile.", "Very nice. Follow back".

I don't want that spam in my image comments (considering there would only be 1 or 2 comments from real people and 10+ of these). I had to go through and manually delete them, block the users (achieving nothing because there are so many of these spammers).

This is a serious UX problem that has turned me away from Instagram (which was the "best social media" platform before they destroyed the chronologic timeline). I don't care if people are using an API to post legitimate content (I would have loved the ability to post content to multiple sites at once (twitter, IG, ...)). I care when the API enables annoying spammers.

<comment><USER10> This is not so much a ux problem as an "marketeers gonna marketeer" problem. It happened before with blog comments, it happens now with "social" media, it'll happen with whatever comes next. If it's remotely exploitable for personal gain, there's going to be people exploiting it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> temp-dude-87844 Algorithm gaming and non-organic engagement go hand in hand. A cheeky reading is that juicing sites like Fuelgram are providing a valuable service for their customers. If this is problematic, consider what will happen when Instagram bans them: the demand won't go away, instead the same people will be paying Instagram more, to place their ads wider. For the user, the end result is largely the same.

This is all a numbers game: there's a finite amount of attention-slots in people's minds that everyone wants their content to fit in. Any engine that surfaces unsolicited content will have this issue, from paid ads to algorithmic recommendations.

</comment><comment><USER11> My wife has about 20,000 followers on Instagram, most of them fake because she was tricked into buying them through "free" Instagram filters apps.

It's so interesting watching the activity generated every time she makes a post, the number of push notifications that come through within minutes is incredible. As well, the comments are often absurd on her posts.

It's so obvious to a non-Instagram user (ie. me) that there is a tremendous number of bots going around, the fact that Facebook doesn't do something to eradicate the bots indicates to me that they're afraid to reveal the true numbers to their investors and advertisers, otherwise it would drastically affect their income.

</comment><comment><USER12> > 22-year-old kids

Kids are getting older every year it seems.

</comment><comment><USER13> Man, this article makes me feel old and out of touch. I don't understand so many things about it. Why would someone pay to have a bot click "like" on them, and why would someone invest $X000 in a list of usernames and passwords rather than create their own free accounts? Why are "followers" worth money? Can someone ELI5 me the chain of money that makes any of this activity make any sense at all?

<comment><USER14> One would pay $100k for an account with the username "fitness" because it's artificially scarce, like a domain name. There's plenty of people searching for "fitness" on IG.

A list of usernames and passwords it's useful if you use a program to manage them - automatically. Spam detection is super good nowadays, so it's super hard to create many accounts and keep them alive. Actually, keeping them alive it's the harder segment of it.

Fake followers = fake accounts. They're worthless. But some people don't care and just like to inflate their followers number because people think its cool to have many followers. Aslong as they can't tell they're fake tho.

Real followers = real persons following you because they like you. They're valuable. Why? Like any other advertising model where you're the publisher, you get paid per impression/post/sale/click/whatever. E.g you can share a photo where you're holding a certain brand of whisky and you get paid by said brand (to get brand to pay you, they either contact you directly or you partner with some agency) or you can promote your own company as well obviously. . You can also share a link in the bio.

<comment><USER15> > Fake followers = fake accounts. They're worthless.

Pardon my ignorance but I thought the more followers and engagement you have on Instagram the more you can charge for a sponsored post or product placement?

<comment><USER16> Thats my understanding as well and fake followers can also be exchanged for a perceived social importance not just monetary value.

Example: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/aug/26/how- many-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/aug/26/how-many-twitter- followers-do-they-really-have)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> At times I joke on irc that I could write a bot that makes more interesting conversation than the people there.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is that guy running the bot farm not afraid of legal action from Instagram? I'm not well versed but it seems like something they could go after him for. I wouldn't be spouting off about it to buzzfeed, that's for sure.

<comment><USER19> From what I can tell they "deprecated immediately" (on April 4, 2018) a whole bunch of API endpoints that (probably) make this sort of thing impossible.

...which is unfortunate since I went and signed up on Instagram so I could play with their API to see how hard it would be to detect bots with a little python-fu.

It now looks like you have to have a facebook business account to be able to "game" instagram -- maybe?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't want to _like_ viral hippo, but I certainly do like the smarts behind it.

It reminded me of a "mad cow disease" word document we shared around the place back in the 90s, which had a picture of a cow with VB rolling eyes..

</comment><comment><USER21> This reminds me a lot of doping in sports. With seemingly normal people justifying it with "everyone is doing it so you have to do it to level the field" with a complete disregard for the ethical side of it.

<comment><USER22> The problem is that Instagram incentivizes this sort of behaviour by greatly- diminishing the reach of those companies/users that have legitimately built their followers. I mean we see 10% reach of our followers (if we're lucky) with any of our posts. That means 90% of our real followers don't get to see our posts that they have asked to see (by following our account).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This should be quite easy to detect, given that it is a closed group of accounts liking each other.

The main problem is what to do then. Instagram may not want to ban influential bloggers.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have an Instagram account and I have noticed that most of the likes I get are from the accounts of real people but that most of the likes I get are obviously automated and insincere.

Personally I find it infuriating that people do this.

Abusing the "like" mechanism is neither clever nor acceptable. It is a nuisance and it devalues the platform a lot.

Some of the photos and videos I post are mainly for myself and a few of my friends.

Some of the other videos I post because I want people from the whole world to see them.

The ones that are targeted at my friends I post with a short description and only one or two hashtags at most.

The ones that I want people from the whole world to see I add a handful of relevant hashtags to, so that people browsing those tags have a chance to see those things.

The pattern I have seen is that random accounts will randomly like previous posts of mine. Sometimes they like the sort of post that is discoverable via a popular hashtag but just as often I get likes on the images that you only find by coming to my profile -- the sort of images that is obviously of very little actual interest to anyone but myself and a few of my friends. In particular, I should say; most often these are accounts whose description state the profession of the person, and whose photos and videos tend to either revolve around that thing as well, or they post memes. Typically the profession of the person falls into one of three categories;

1\. Musician. I post some music stuff and I follow some musicians. Almost certainly the people organizing the like-spamming have set it up so that if you are a musician and you ask them to like-spam for you, they have a list of other musicians with lots of followers and they use the lists of the followers of those people to find people interested in music that they can like-spam.

2\. Personal Trainer.

3\. Marketing person.

I report fake accounts when I see them but when it comes to the accounts of real people you only know that the majority of them are spamming but you can't know whether a single individual is like-spamming or actually leaving sincere likes.

Hence whenever I get likes from people that I don't know, I must assume that they are just spam-likes but at the same time I have no recourse.

The fact that I must assume they are all spam-likes is what devalues the likes for me.

The spam-likers have literally driven the value of a like to zero. When someone likes something I posted it _should_ have been positive for me, but unless I know the person it's not because I know that there is an overwhelming probability that it's just another insincere fake like.

I hope that anyone and everyone partaking in the fake liking gets their account banned eventually. But if that even ever happened, which it won't, that would be so far into the future that in all likelihood I've already left Instagram for some other platform because I don't know how much longer I am going to bother maintaining a presence on Instagram.

Oh and another equally, or perhaps even more annoying thing that is being done is accounts that follow you and then some hours or days later they unfollow you. Because they never intended to follow you in the first place; they intentionally do this so that you will follow them back, hoping you will either not notice that they unfollow you or that you'll still keep following them even if you do notice. Rude!

As for what Instagram could do about this, it's _not_ trivial but I think they could be doing _more_ about it than they are currently. At the very least, the latter pattern of those I mentioned (frequently following and then unfollowing heaps of people) should be quite obvious to the people at Instagram if they cared.

<comment><USER21> I feel the same. I just had a bot liking my 5 most recent posts in a row although they are very different from each other.

The follow-unfollow pattern is done by bots controlling accounts as well I think.

Making the likes anonymous, as on reddit or HN, would be a big step forward.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: ODBC driver using websockets? - <AUTHOR>

Does a javascript ODBC driver exist that works over websockets? If not, is it feasible?<p>I'd like to be able to send queries to an SQL database directly from the browser, with no proxy. <comment><USER2> OK - perhaps dumb question - but what is the problem with AJAX and a web service to return the SQL query results in (say) JSON format? It is pretty simple and works very well.

The concept of an ODBC driver being run directly from Javascript if not to something like a "sandboxed" instance of SQLight is a bit worrying on security grounds.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's possible to do it that way, but it adds some annoying constraints. If you're accessing data locally, it would have to go through a remote server, which causes latency and privacy concerns.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I am still not getting this - if the data is local then why not run the app on a server running on the local machine.

Alternately you are trying to access local personal data using a remote app - so you need Google's or HTML5's support for a local database (SQLight I think but in a wrapper).

<comment><USER3> One instance where it would be nice is if you have your own "browser" written to use XULRunner and want some custom local database for something (say your use of XULRunner is to provide a test harness for automated testing and you want to store the test sequences and value transformations in the database). You have javascript to work with in a sandboxed environment, but isn't hosted on a webpage anywhere. Being able to directly access a database dramatically increases your capabilities and doesn't sound unreasonable. It only sounds unreasonable if you're talking about javascript that gets pushed out to a user's web browser.

NOTE: I wouldn't use this approach, and there's probably better ways, but I can see the potential benefits of it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazing invention: using a water bottle to provide sunlight into slum housing - <AUTHOR> http://reut.rs/neJVT3

<comment><USER3> This is a great low-tech idea.

An ingenious update of the 19th century ship deck prism: <http://www.scientificsonline.com/deck-prism.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> I remember coming across this a few months ago. It's a great way to get some affordable solar light into a space, and seems like it would be great for poorer communities and places where electricity isn't readily available - <USER2> long as there's an available supply of bleach (though I suppose you could just regularly change the water).

My grandfather used to do this for lighting in a couple of storage sheds and part of the barn on his farm.</comment>


What three women learned launching on a college campus - <AUTHOR> http://www.ansa.com/lessons.html

<comment><USER2> What a laugh I got when I read their description of what their business is compared to what their brand name is.

[http://translate.google.com/#fi/en/ansa](http://translate.google.com/#fi/en/ansa)

<comment><USER3> Ha. But it does mean "loop" or handle in Latin, and a bridge in chemistry. Now I know a new word in Finnish. :)

[http://translate.google.com/#la/en/ansa](http://translate.google.com/#la/en/ansa)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A shame they don't say what the app is anywhere in the article. Sounds like snap chat?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ansa is a secure messaging app that lets you communicate without leaving a record behind. We let you decide how long your conversations exist by giving you options to chat off the record, send self-destructing media, and take back the messages you change your mind about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really like this sentence: "Let your users point you in the right direction". They are the ones who can help to improve our products, feedback is the clue! :)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is really positive. It's nice to see a real-world example of women in tech without having Sheryl Sandberg leaning all over it.

</comment><comment><USER7> thanks for sharing, we all go through similar things when starting up and learning from others help a lot.</comment>


The U.S. China Trade War May Cause Multipolarity Instead of Deglobalisation - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/discourse/the-u-s-china-trade-war-may-cause-multipolarity-instead-of-deglobalisation-b8e108a47965 <comment><USER2> I've wondered if MAGA was about to "Help Make China At Least As Great As America" instead. This article suggests a few ways it potentially could.</comment>


Propel ORM for php5 - <AUTHOR> http://propel.phpdb.org/

<comment><USER2> Those XML configuration files and bloated criteria actions make Propel look pretty ugly and inelegant. Several Python-based ORM systems such as SQLAlchemy do a much better job.</comment>


Lizard Kids: A Long Trail of Fail - <AUTHOR> http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/12/lizard-kids-a-long-trail-of-fail/

<comment><USER2> the security scene now is all about one's fame and gossip?

<comment><USER3> How did you come to this conclusion?

<comment><USER2> article has zero tech details. just talk about name calling and who is clever</comment></comment></comment>


Mozilla's Raskin Says Product Placement is Coming Soon to Facebook Photos - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_product_placement.php <comment><USER2> > Mozilla's Raskin says product placement is coming soon to Facebook photos

No he doesn't. He says that _if_ product placement starts appearing in people's Facebook photos _then_ it may mess with people's memories.

"What I think is going to start happening is ..."

ReadWriteWeb is up to its usual standards here. Bah.</comment>


Ask HN: Google keep app for iphone - <AUTHOR>

I've been trying some google keep apps for iphone but they all suck. Has anyone been able to find a decent app? <comment><USER2> Side note: the Android app is great. I am now using this for all general note taking, and even some reminders. Really a big fan of Keep. Also interested to see if anyone knows of a good iPhone app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I've googled the android app and it seems great. On the other hand the iphone apps available....some of them even ask for your username and password instead of google auth. Please, c'mon !</comment></comment>


Rubyists, Please Stop Abusing NotImplementedError - <AUTHOR> http://chrisstump.online/2016/03/23/stop-abusing-notimplementederror/ <comment><USER2> Python uses NotImplementedError exactly for the purpose of signaling the method should be overriden by the subclass.

And code with almost complete, but not really, interface (i.e. with several methods lacking) looks awful. I would say it's an error on the Ruby language developers' side not to provide means to signal the method needs to be overriden.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> NotImplementedError is often misused. In the article I discuss when it should be used and why you probably don't need it.</comment>


Show HN: Neverbleed – privilege separation engine for OpenSSL and LibreSSL - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/h2o/neverbleed <comment><USER2> I applaud the effort but it does not address the elephant in the room: openssl engines are synchronous. If you use openssl in an event-loop style server (coincidentally, OP's own web server h2o appears to be event-loop based), this means that the whole server blocks if the RSA operation blocks.

For a hardware accelerator that may not be so bad but if you are trying to separate the HSM via the network, to minimize what an attacker can do after compromising the httpd, then every packet loss or an outage or network delay (or, more generally, any latency) would block the whole httpd.

Cloudflare proclaimed a while ago that they had a way to do essentially this (with nginx+openssl) and they said their solution was non-blocking, but they did not publish the code as far as I can tell.

I think if one wanted to solve this problem properly, larger architectural changes to openssl would be necessary. Please correct me if I'm wrong!

EDIT: Also, if you move out the RSA operation, ideally you'd want to distribute the work over more than one CPU core. If the operation is synchronous, you can't really do that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I assume you are referring to Keyless SSL. [https://blog.cloudflare.com/keyless-ssl-the-nitty-gritty- tec...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/keyless-ssl-the-nitty-gritty-technical- details/)

For Keyless SSL, it is necessary to make RSA operations asynchronous, since the operations are requested over the TCP network (which may have big delays).

OTOH Neverbleed degelates the operations within the same server using Unix sockets. So there is no fear of such delays. And the server spawn a dedicated thread to each client thread. In other words, the delay is practically _no worse_ than what it is without Neverbleed.

And discussing _how worse_ it is, calculations related to TLS handshakes may block the server for a few milliseconds. It may sound bad, but generally speaking it is negligible comparing to the latency over a public network.

<comment><USER3> The point is that it requires TLS handshakes to be done in a multi-threaded system for a server handling high concurrency.

Many servers are multi-threaded, but many are not. Using the proposed technique in a Node.js process, or nginx, is going to severely limit the number of new connections per second.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wrong.

You seem to have confusion between TLS handshakes and RSA operations.

In OpenSSL (which is used by many servers including node.js, nginx), RSA operation is always synchronous. Therefore, using Neverbleed does not impose new limits regarding concurrency.

<comment><USER3> Inter-process IPC is going to block the event loop for longer than a inline RSA operation.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is true that RSA operation over IPC is slower than doing it internally. But the latter is by magnitudes faster than the former, therefore the slowdown is negligible in practice.

You can find the numbers in the FAQ section of the linked website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like a good idea, but it also seems like a lot of IPC. The author suggests that crypto costs more than IPC, so it doesn't matter much, which also seems reasonable, and I suppose most related DOS attacks are mitigated by disallowing client-initiated renegotiation anyway.

        > Q. How much is the overhead?
        > Virtually none.
        > On my Linux VM running on Core i7 @ 2.4GHz (MacBook Pro 15" Late 2013)...

Would love to see it on a high-end system that's primarily doing termination.

<comment><USER5> Why would it matter? He already has an uphill battle with virtualization and seems a minimal amount of overhead. I expect running this on big iron should show similar or less overhead. If you're just looking for benchmarks of OpenSSL termination there are already a ton of them out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As an implementor using OpenSSL, I like this. It has a simple API, and is clearly documented.

I wish all security improvements were as simple and easy.

</comment><comment> ryan-c Someone should make an LD_PRELOAD hack for this. I might try throwing one together this weekend if someone doesn't beat me to it.

</comment><comment><USER7> How is it different than using a SoftHSM?

<comment><USER8> probably lower overhead. PKCS#11 is a lot bigger than this.</comment></comment>


Equifax Data Breach Settlement Eligibility Check - <AUTHOR> https://eligibility.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/en/eligibility <comment><USER2> How could one know if this was a phishing site or not?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right? Their whois data are veiled by a proxy registrant.</comment></comment>


Startup work-life balance - <AUTHOR> http://hippoland.tumblr.com/post/33235630505/youre-thinking-about-startup-work-life-balance-all <comment><USER2> I used to program _all the time_ in high school. I thought I was happy.

Then I went to college, met all sorts of people, had lots of experiences, and realized how narrow my life, and concept of happiness was.

So when I hear people talk about how much they love their work, that's their own balance... I can't help but wonder if they just haven't learned how great the other parts of life are. And how much a wider range of experiences can make their work part better as well.

<comment><USER3> Absoutely. I was similar to the author all the through college. Then I got a job, which was a brutal entry level programmer job. It killed what little social life I had at that point. But the upside was that I was pretty good at it and started making some decent money. Over time I was able to use my professional capital to switch to a company with much healthier expectations. I was able to go out and explore the world after being caught up in the daily grind for years. I was able to associate with a much wider set of people. I got 'real' hobbies to replace my 'geek' hobbies. I got a girlfriend. One day I realized that I cared more about being a good person, a good partner, a good lover, a good friend, etc. than being a good programmer/scientist/etc. I realized that the chance of any 1 person making a breakthrough contribution to a company, science, or the arts is vanishingly small. The chance to be a good person and positively impact the people in your life and community is 100%.

I'm very thankful that my experiences have allowed me to put my professional life in perspective.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like you had a bad job, not a bad time programming/sciencing.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I did.

The point I was trying to make is that the lifestyle I led through college in some ways fed in to my willingness to do the same thing professionally. I never knew any better.

If things had gone differently, I could still be killing myself on a daily basis. And for what? The possibility of making a few more bucks?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wait, why is Elon Musk being used as example of someone who doesn't need vacations? We don't know what his personal life is like, in comparison to all we know about his professional life. There is no data.

Digging into his personal life is widely considered off limits. Reporting is not done on it. If I were, for example, to assert that Musk has had two divorces in 2.5 years and that this may in fact reflect that his personal life is a mess, I'd probably get voted down. And maybe that would be fair, because who knows, maybe in that scenario both he and his ex wives are happy to end the lifetime marriage vows early. My point isn't that Elon Musk's life is a mess, my point is we don't know, so we shouldn't be using him as evidence of not needing to "balance" work life, unless we're ready to have an in-depth conversation about what most people consider (rightly or wrongly) to be off limits private matters.

<comment><USER6> Two divorces in 2.5 years. And since divorces arent "same day service" type things I'm pretty sure the dude is "unhappy" with his private life.

<comment><USER7> Let the ones who never took a bad decision in an area they are not very familiar with (like personal life when you're all about work) cast him the first stones

<comment><USER6> I'm not judging dude. But it is what it is...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> People don't exist in a vacuum, though. Unlike when he was a teenager, his workaholic attitude affects others in a workplace environment. It affects the company culture and puts pressure on people to work more to keep up. It makes otherwise good workers feel guilty that they don't work more.

<comment><USER9> Thank you for this. I have a life and other priorities, and I find it difficult to work in an environment where everyone sticks around the office until 8pm. It's difficult to see how our behavior affects others, and how important it is to be a model of balance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In my opinion startups are about speed. That doesn't mean you have to work 14 hour days 7 days a week. It does mean that if some obstacle clears at 5:05 pm on a Friday, then you do the work to get to the next obstacle, even if it means you miss dinner with the family.

But if you're ahead of the game on a Monday morning at 9am, then sleep in, or go to a movie, or whatever. Because the best way to go fast is to be enthusiastic about what you're doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> This may be true of YOUR startup. There are plenty of startups out there who have different thoughts about speed. And, so long as expectations are properly set with everyone on the team: co-founders, investors, et al, then whatever you need to do is the right thing regardless of what other startup founders around you are doing.

<comment><USER11> This is why his startup beats your startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I didn't see the life part of her work life balance.

I always imagined that work life balance meant you had things that you wanted to do in your personal time, and you had the time to do them.

Not 'I love working so much that my balance is all work and little / no life'.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. Working on becoming a better blogger...

My situation these days is that I have a spouse, no kids. I didn't realize it at the time, but choosing a spouse to share a lot of the work-life with you is really important. We probably don't spend as much time together as other couples, but it works well, because we share the same kind of life. He works at a startup, and I have LaunchBit. So on a given weekend, we might spend time "together" by working on our respective work at his office. And our hours are roughly the same, which makes it easy to work a 10-12 hour day, because no one is sitting around waiting for the other to come home. I think most people would say that this isn't very balanced at all -- we're mostly working. But, it is balanced because expectations are set and met on both sides.

Now, to your question about wishing that you had more time to pursue other hobbies and whatnot. If that's what you need, then I think that's perfectly fine too as long as everyone else on your startup team is onboard with that: co-founders, employees, investors.

<comment><USER13> Not everyone will agree but I do feel that getting together for a work session like this can be a social thing, even though it is still work. You are likely a little more relaxed about the work at this time too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It feels like the author picked the 8 hour work day. I don't see that as part of the overall discussion on balance.

The main point of balance is that you are a more complete human being when you participate in a wider range of activities. Even if that just means you're a better developer because you stepped away for an hour or a week and got a new perspective. Just because you're not miserable only doing primarily one thing doesn't mean you wouldn't be happier if you forced yourself to learn or see or try new things at regular intervals. You'd most likely be much more interesting to those around you too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Balance is what YOU as an individual need to be balanced. You are projecting your opinion on everyone else that you need to do other things to be happier. That is what makes YOU happy. So go do it! But, it doesn't mean that everyone will be happier doing that. The point of this post is that everyone needs balance and needs to do what they think will make them feel balanced. And rather than adhering to dogma of others, we should each individually do what's best so long as expectations are set with those in our company.

<comment><USER15> Nope. Balance has a reasonably well defined meaning.

You can argue that balance isn't necessary for everyone or that the "balanced life" dogma is wrong. That's an interesting conversation. Better than trying to redefine balanced to mean "either balanced or the opposite, whatever you feel like", that seems rather silly.

<comment><AUTHOR> What you need to make your life feel balanced is different from your peers. If you need to take more time off, then do it. But if you only need 1 week of vacation like Elon Musk, then that's his balance. That's the point -- let's not create one standard set of rules for what balance is because people operate differently.

<comment><USER15> What? No.

A balanced life means you split your life among all different areas of life. That's what that phrase means.

Elon Musk has rejected the idea that work/life balance is necessary and _that's just fine_. That's how he feels happiest. It seems to be working pretty damn well for him.

I'm not saying there's any kind of standard set of rules, I'm saying that if you reject the dogma of balance then say so, don't try and redefine what it means because people are dogmatic about "balance = good, not balanced = bad"

<comment><USER16> If the goal is to be happy and if some people find greater happiness doing 'work' while others find greater happiness devoting time to 'life', then surely there will be some people who will split their time accordingly.

Maybe it's not technically 'balance', but do you really think when someone says 'work-life balance' that they mean 50-50 split between work and life? When I hear it used it usually means 'spend less time on work and more on life', and I think hippo33's is correct: not everyone needs to (or should) spend less time doing work because that's where they may find the most happiness.

<comment><USER15> I absolutely agree.

We both (along with hippo33) agree that everyone does not need to lead a balanced life. There are other valid choices like a life of dedication to a specific cause or pursuit. Or anywhere in between that makes you happy.

We disagree on whether you should use the word balance when you "technically" mean the exact opposite. That's poor communication in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find it odd that we call it "work-life" balance. So work comes first and life second? I've started calling it "life-work" balance. Not to imply that I work less but that things are well integrated and stuff that feels like work comes second :-)

</comment><comment><USER18> I agree that we shouldn't be looking at it in terms of hours, but I don't know if it can be measured in terms of happiness (as the author seems to be indicating) either.

What are your goals? What is it going to take for you to achieve those goals? Will you be happy working towards those goals? Is the misery that you're going to have to endure to achieve those goals worth it? Can you sustain that level of misery and still accomplish your goals?

 _But, it could also mean that you're just a lot dumber and less efficient than your peers who could do the same thing without pulling an all-nighter._

You may well be dumber than someone who doesn't need an all-nighter to do what you're doing, but you may want the prize you're working towards more than the person getting 8 hours of sleep - so go for it.

<comment><USER19> I have a kind of rule that has seen me from one place to another: _you can always do it without an all-nighter_. It might not have the best software engineering properties, it might suddenly do something completely different from all the rest of the code and drag in half a dozen libraries, it might barely fit the API you're calling.... but there is always some _cleverer_ way of doing it than just coding all through the day and night.

Of course, many jobs actually want brute-force code versus library-laden, clever hacks. This is why I struggled to become a researcher again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Confucius said, "Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."

If you don't work, you don't have to worry about work-life balance.

<comment><USER21> I don't think that's a fair argument. There's always a point in projects where you need to do something you don't want to do. At that point your work has become an obligation, which makes it something you don't love. You're forced to undergo the stress that we're discussing balancing. The key IMO is to find the right balance of working through that stress.

<comment><USER20> If you loath to do something then it induces stress. However, if you love your project then you're more likely to ensure that ship moves forward, even if it means doing tasks that you did not want to do originally.

<comment><USER22> I think that stress is a relative thing. You could have all the power and resources in the world, but you'll be stressed about something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not sure if I agree with the author here. Yes it is true that if u love what u do, it doesn't feel like a burden and might have a feeling of balance there. But even then, I want my _personal_ life which means being able to spend time doing _other_ things and not just work.

The author talks about his teenage days when he would rather do math and not watch x files. That's fine. But what about ppl who have kids and want to go home and spend time with them instead of working which btw they love.

And that's my point. Just because u love your work, doesn't mean u have a balance. I will rather call it obsession.

<comment><USER24> I think you're missing the point of work life balance.

People do not want a good "work life balance" because it's the "right thing to do." They're seeking to optimize their productivity and happiness. They don't want to wake up one day and have no friends, but they also don't want to wake up and have done too little.

The author's point is that there is no canonical answer. If your friend works 12 hour days (as I'm sure many of our friends do) you shouldn't just say, "Oh, well, you should work less." Everyone has their own happy zone.

Sometimes all people want to do is work 14 hours a day, and they love it. We shouldn't say that they're wrong for loving it. We should instead understand that what is balanced for us is not what will be balanced for someone else.

<comment><USER23> "there is no canonical answer"

Agreed. But I got the feeling that the author was also advocating a zero sum game here for work life balance

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> You can be happy doing what you're doing at the time, but that doesn't mean your life is in balance. It just means you're happy _right now_. Well, a heroin addict that shoots up is happy while he's high.

Think ahead a little.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think that this framework isn't applicable to most because people who sincerely enjoy working are anomalous and in the minority. Even people who "love" their jobs do so not because the job is "lovable" in and of itself but because it is the lesser of all evils and affords them more freedom/time/benefits/money/other happiness-promoting factor, not because the actual labor is enjoyable in and of itself.

If most people were given a chance, they wouldn't elect to work. For most people, work is an obligation that they except reluctantly. Given this, "work- life balance" then becomes a unidirectional effort to drive down the amount of work and the number of hours down to zero, not to achieve any kind of real equilibrium.

Additionally, because hours worked is the most common and widely used method used to determine the amount of work one has done, any attempt to reduce that amount of work is most likely going to be done by reducing hours works. Hours are the quintessential "work measurement": if you want more "balance," you're going to try to work less hours.

I'm sorry, but most people don't like working, and they expend effort attempting to work less. Because of the widely accepted idea that hours worked equates to amount worked, the way that they do so is by trying to reduce their hours.

In the words of Micael Scott, "I would rather live jobless, on a beach somewhere, off the money from a large inheritance, than have to work in any one of these crapholes."

That's the mentality that most people have, and that's why they want to work fewer hours.

</comment><comment><USER27> Her high school life sounds sad. If she really had a fulfilling social life in high school she wouldn't feel the need to tell us all how great it was that she didn't go to parties. It reminds me of people who are constantly broadcasting to everyone how happy they are. Chances are, they're not.

<comment><USER4> Poe'd?

If you had a fulfilling life, you wouldn't feel the need to accuse other people of being secretly unhappy.

<comment><USER28> The person simply sounds defensive, trying to convince themselves that not having fun was fun. So the reply made a good point.

<comment><USER29> Defensive, yes, but defensive to whom — herself or "most people" who think her high school years were terrible?

Imagine: You have a different notion of happiness than most others, so people constantly tell you that you're not happy — even though you are. Naturally, you'll get defensive over time, but then those same people will see that as a sign that you're in fact not happy. Catch 22.

In other words: stop being condescending.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> How can I take this posting seriously with a significant grammar error in the title.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the same way you take Apple seriously for using the slogan "Think different." :)

<comment><USER30> I don't. But the error is significantly different. English is changing and adverbs are disappearing. "Your" and the contraction "You're" are significantly different grammatically but sound the same when pronounced.

<comment><AUTHOR> The grammatical error is not the contraction. "You're thinking about work-life balance all wrong" can be extended to "You are thinking about work-life balance all wrong" The incorrect part is the "all wrong." It should be "You're thinking about work-life balance incorrectly."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> There's no such thing as an optimal work-life balance, life is an infinite buffet and you can only nibble at a few dishes. No matter what you do, you're going to miss out on nearly everything.

Somewhat less pretentiously, I wonder about contrasting life and work, because it's not unusual to have a pretty active social life at work. The absence of any social stimulation there would at least make me unhappy.

</comment><comment><USER32> Would it not be simpler to say 'some things you do adds energy to you' and 'some things you do drains energy from you' avoid deficit energy days if possible.

I can spend a couple of hours programming and be hugely energized by it, and I can spend a couple of hours watching TV and be drained by it. The reverse is also true.

Be aware of your energy flow and balance it.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm glad someone has addressed this work-life balance canard. I would go further: getting hard things accomplished tends to take over one's life, and I don't think there's any way around it. Unless, of course, you live in Norway...

I also think humans on an individual basis are inherently unbalanced; that's why we're social creatures.

</comment><comment><USER34> Balance is very important for entrepreneurs. However, I do believe in going the extra mile to make your company succeed. Which means not partying on a weekend when you could be doing something for your business. Me personally, I party as a reward for my hard work.

</comment><comment><USER35> # there is no 'balance', only this algorithm running my life while(True): task=getNextTask() if priority(task)>priority(current_task): backBurner.add(current_task) current_task=task startWorkOn(current_task) else: backBurner.add(task)

</comment><comment><USER36> I like to work hard for a few years, then take a year off. I'm doing that right now. I find it a lot more effective than trying to jam too many different activities into an ordinary week.

</comment><comment><USER37> My personal observation is that when I got married, I became more productive, more selective, and also more effective at solving things quickly. Something about valuing your time.

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't think you can even see what you are missing if you never go on vacation or try other things.

</comment><comment><USER39> "Let me dive into something concrete."

That's a seriously mixed metaphor...

</comment><comment><USER40> Refreshing perspective. I agree wholeheartedly.</comment>


Want to Block Common Passwords? Sorry, That is Patented - <AUTHOR> https://xato.net/passwords/want-to-block-common-passwords-sorry-that-is-patented/ <comment><USER2> Re: IBM patents, IBM has an interesting, and quite unique strategy regarding IP. About 20-25% of IBM patents are software patents, and IBM uses this patent portfolio to protect open source projects, especially Linux (<http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/7034/1>). Also, IBM historically abandons a large portion of its issued patents ([http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2012/03/ibms-patent- abandonm...](http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2012/03/ibms-patent-abandonment- strategy.html)), and the abandoned patents become prior art, protecting everybody.

<comment><USER3> That's a valid point. I still don't understand why there is no (afaik) "general public patent" mechanism of some kind : a procedure to make someone claim a patent on behalf of general public.

This would certainly stops patent trolls, and avoid making people suspicious when you claim "protective patents" as you describe.

<comment><USER4> What you're describing is known as "prior art": simply publish your idea anywhere public, and it automatically becomes invalid for patenting. You don't even need to implement anything.

<comment><USER3> Yep, I'm aware of the prior art rule, except :

a) it's about things that should have been actually used, where a patent is about concepts

b) scope of the idea is not clearly defined and so could be argued with, when a real patent definition for general public use would prohibit that.

And that's excatly the point for IBM to issue protective patents, I think.

<comment><USER5> As I understand it, patents apply to applied inventions, not to concepts. In other words, to patent an idea, you need a working model. A patent is a time- limited legal monopoly on making the application, granted in exchange for disclosure of what the application does and how it works.

<comment><USER6> I've seen numerous patents for concepts with no working models and not just software patents. They do explain how such a device would work and many do seem reasonable, but they often will not have a built and working example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not to be melodramatic, but as someone still in a day job this whole patent mess seriously does discourage me from taking the leap and risking everything to try to invent something meaningful only to get hit with a patent troll lawsuit just as we start to find our feet.

<comment><USER8> That's an excuse if I've ever heard one. You would be so lucky to get sued. "I'd be a famous musician, but I'm worried about the publicity."

<comment><USER6> Being famous doesn't cost a musician money.

Sure, he would be "lucky" to be in a position of potentially losing his business and/or idea in the course of defending it. There's potentially a huge cost even if he were to win.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem with blocking common passwords is that quite often you just end up creating a new set of common passwords.

I had to set up a management system a while back, and given the sensitivity of the data, it seemed prudent to block passwords such as "password" and "123456". The result? The most common password was "drowssap", even after an email explaining why they needed to use strong passwords.

I could have gone back and added something for permutations of common passwords, extended my exclusion list or any number of other solutions, but it seems like every time you find a way to stop a user being a security problem, they find another way.

<comment><USER10> I remember a paper, from Microsoft I think, where the proposed method was to keep a list of all passwords and prevent any password to be used more than X times. This way no password becomes common. But it would likely be frustrating for users who try to find a password (like trying to find a username on Hotmail: everything is taken!).

<comment><USER11> Doesn't that mean that you keep the passwords in clear?

They don't have a user => password relation, but having a list of passwords to go through will make any bruteforce attack extremely fast.

<comment><USER12> You could at least bcrypt them all with the same salt, however, it's a long step backwards from individual salting. Also, then you can't check for "[common base password][phone number]" or some variation that's exactly as dangerous as just using a common password - if you kept a plaintext list, you could do substring searches.

The more important lesson here is probably that your users insisting on using crappy passwords isn't really a problem for technology to solve. If you users aren't in the mindset of feeling an obligation towards protecting the data, there are much bigger holes in the network than password complexity enforcement.

<http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20120220.gif>

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/16/password_security/>

<comment><USER13> Is it me or is individual salting rather redundant.

I can see why using one salt forevermore is rubbish but if I salt a different user with a different lt each time, but I need to keep that salt in plaintext next to the hash. Making the whole salting thing a bit redundant if I get a linked in style loss

I certainly see a benefit in padding out user passwords to say 128 bits each time, combined with crypt it will slow down any mass brute force /rainbow attack.

Pre-edit edit: I just answered my own question did I not.

<comment><USER14> If I understand your point correctly, you're asking how critical it is to always give different/random salts to each password?

Even if you know that hash('password', 'salt1') hashes to a a user's hash, you'd need to recompute hash('password', 'salt2') to check if it's the hash for someone else. It slows them down by increasing the amount of work. If they had the same salt it would be the same hash for multiple users.

<comment><USER13> Sort of - I had always thought of a salt as _another_ password - something to keep secret so that if the dbase of hashes was lost, there was an "unknown" component that would take an age of searching to find.

This logic is clearly flawed - if they have the dbase they presumably have everything.

So I now understand more clearly - salts are there to

      1. pad out the plaintext to increase time to compute

      2. convert plaintext from commnly used words (pass1) to
      unique plaintext, reducing the ease of cracking multiple
      passwords.

In short, salts help slow down the attacker when he has all your hashes. Just like bcrypt et al.

And he was enlightened...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> IANAL, but foreknowledge of patent infringement can triple damage liability right? So is just having the headline of this story on the front page of HN enough to cause problems for the entire HN community?

<comment><USER16> IANAL either, but I assume that they would have to somehow prove that you read it, perhaps by showing that you posted in the comments section.

<comment> user-id Also, just because someone on the internet says "X is illegal", it doesn't actually make X illegal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Its not the concept of blocking passwords that is patented, but specific approaches to block common passwords is.

</comment><comment><USER18> These frivolous software patents are actually a blessing in disguise and will ultimately be their own undoing. As more and more "patents" are filed and trolls do their best to sue people into compensation, the media song & dance will get stronger and policy makers will sit up and take note. Then it's just a matter of time until blanket reforms are made.

<comment><USER19> Blanket reforms will never happen in real world, because we're talking about huge quantities of money involved - a blanket reform the way, say, "many people would like it", would cause a sudden big loss to loss to big & powerful entities.

<comment><USER20> Absolutely. That's why we're still firing union workers and working child laborers thirteen hours a day. Once enough money was involved, things just couldn't change and therefore patents never will either. Not in the real world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Could someone clarify something here?

If I'm based outside of the US and my servers are outside of the US, these software patents would not affect me and I could implement them without risk?

I understand the site could be blocked from US browsing but that would seem extreme, especially if I registered a country TLD like .co.uk.

In plain English, I don't these patents apply to my country (UK) and are not enforceable here. But I could be wrong.

<comment><USER20> There are patent treaties.

Edit: Well, who knows? Try it and see. Even in the worst case, you can almost certainly cut a deal.

<comment><USER21> Even when software patents are not allowed by law in the EU?

Edit: A quick Google found this, seems I would be OK. [http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/21560/what- happens-w...](http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/21560/what-happens-when- a-uk-company-infringes-a-us-patent)

<comment> angry-hacker Thinking about it - why big companies don't move then? To avoid software patent cases? I mean they can still have skilled workers working in Silicon Valley, can't they? But the company is registered somewhere where they can't sue them. Or what am I missing here?

<comment><USER6> I would assume having an office in the country means a presence which means they follow the law. Plus just doing any kind of business inside the country, including contractors, makes them subject to local law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How could there not be prior art for this? I know that patents are more specific than the title of the patent, but if the patent isn't general enough to cover prior cases of blocking common passwords, then the patent doesn't even protect anything for the patent's authors. If it is general, then it is surely an invalid patent, even by US patent office standards. Very confusing.

<comment><USER23> Sure - so prove that in a court of law.

That's the problem. The patent system puts _all_ the risk on inventors, none on IP holders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I get why you'd want to check for weak or common passwords, but why not just require passwords to contain numbers/special characters? It may be a pain in the butt, but it takes users' lack of care for security out of the equation.

</comment><comment><USER25> time to reform the patent review process. there is so much energy wasted fighting patent trolls. furthermore, this produces nothing, it just leaches on the wealth creation efforts of others.

</comment><comment><USER26> Passwords are dead. Film at 11.

<comment><USER27> I'm starting to think the same thing.

For _serious_ systems-based access, it's been key-based auth for most of the past decade. Even embedded systems (switches, routers, load balancers, DD-WRT- based WiFi routers) offer SSH key-based auth.

Key management presents its own set of problems, but most are vastly preferably to using poorly-selected passwords on a myriad of sites.

<comment><USER28> I'm always tempted to switch to key-based auth myself, but I travel a lot and the thought of me losing my private key and thus being permanently unable to decrypt my files/log in to my servers scares me to death.

That's the fatal flaw in the key-based system: while the chances are slim, if you lose the key or it gets stolen (stolen laptop?), the consequences far outweigh the benefits. I'd rather just remembering a complex password for personal encryption/ssh, use a simple throwaway password for general web app use, and not have to worry about losing a key.

<comment><USER29> You can simply back up your key (encrypted with a password!) on a cheap USB stick or CD you keep somewhere that you consider safe enough for your purposes.

<comment><USER30> Or on an encrypted server, like the "secure notes" feature of LastPass.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Kickstarter Has Fired Two Union Organizers in 8 Days - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/technology/2019/09/kickstarter-union-organizing.html?via=gdpr-consent <comment><USER2> This is important. Kickstarter has presented itself to the public and employees as an ethical company, a public benefit corporation. It would probably be the best-known tech company to have a union, and we can't set that kind of example, now.

</comment><comment><USER3> That tech sheen is really starting wear off and we are grappling with just how beholden/vulnerable we are. As a society and as individual tech worker we are living with these massive cooperations that pretend they have everyone's interest in mind. If the article is accurate (which I have no reason to doubt) then I truly appreciate these individuals doing the important work of pushing this topic further into our collective understanding. I just wish things had gone differently for them.

</comment><comment><USER4> That awkward phase when you try to build a culture of positive values and then your employees start trying to hold you to that (or "take advantage" by unionizing) and then now you have to walk that back, and tamp down on that culture.

However plenty of other companies successfully did that, so Kickstarter surely can too.

</comment><comment><USER5> In Belgium it's almost impossible to fire elected members of the union. On one hand it makes sense, but on the other it brings all kinds of new problems.

<comment><USER6> Same thing in Sweden. The unions are super strong here, which is one of the reasons there is no legal minimum wage in Sweden. It's not perceived as necessary by the public, political parties or the unions. The unions have more than enough power to negotiate and enforce good, liveable wages anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are the working conditions at Kickstarter so bad that employees felt that they needed to unionize to have their voices heard?

Can any employees chime in

<comment><USER8> That shouldn't even be a question. You shouldn't need to have working conditions be "so bad" before you consider a union.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, it's like a married woman in the 19th century would like to speak with a lawyer about her rights, and her husband forbids it, and people comment "oh, but is he really so bad? Why does she need a lawyer anyway?"

Employees are in a vulnerable position. It makes sense for them to join together and jointly hire lawyers and professional negotiators.

A company that forbids you from joining a union is abusive.

I've been in a union and it was super helpful.

Your start-up team wouldn't sign an agreement with a VC without consulting an attorney. Why should your employees sign an employment contract without getting outside advice and help?

<comment><USER10> > Your start-up team wouldn't sign an agreement with a VC without consulting > an attorney. Why should your employees sign an employment contract without > getting outside advice and help?

This is really good point.

<comment><USER11> So from a lawyer then?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dockerizing an Angular app made easy - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/dockerizing-an-angular-app-made-easy-e0e3bb55a39c <comment><USER2> What's the point of this? Angular App is just a webpage once it's all built, so you bundled it with nginx, a webserver and served it. Not really sure why this article was written or how it pertains to Angular, it's just using docker to serve a webpage - kind of fluffy.</comment>


SpaceX Awarded Two EELV-Class Missions from the United States Air Force - <AUTHOR> http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20121205

<comment><USER2> This is a big win for SpaceX, as USAF was considering signing a deal keeping ULA as their exclusive launch partner through 2018. Musk lobbied against it, and won.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is insanity. The SpaceX launch manifest is just crazy: <http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php>

How on Earth are they going to go from a single launch in 2012 for the Falcon 9 to SEVEN launches in 2013, 10 in 2014 and 14 in 2015? And on the side they have their first Falcon Heavy launch in 2015. Now add more launches into the mix with this new contract...

Elon Musk is really living right on the edge in terms of potential production problems. He already has a track record of delaying, delivering late and overpromising with Tesla. I simply don't see why he doesn't take it just a little more slowly, and actually delivering on his promises.

On the other hand, if he pulls it off, then the utility maximizing strategy for humanity just might be to make money and give all my capital to Elon Musk to put it to more productive use...

<comment><USER4> >How on Earth are they going to go from a single launch in 2012 for the Falcon 9 to SEVEN launches in 2013, 10 in 2014 and 14 in 2015?

Mass production. That was the point of building nine small, identical rocket engines instead of, say, three larger ones. Ideally SpaceX is going to have an assembly line producing over a hundred copies of the same engine every year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not quite EEVL-Class missions in a sense that they don't launch Class 1 payloads - like DSP, AEHF, SBIRS, GPS, spysats... These are in the same class as Minotaur launches, mostly tacsats/targets/experimental/high-risk payloads. They are not trusting SpaceX with $2 billion payloads... yet.

</comment><comment><USER6> Congrats, this is another milestone.</comment>


Ask HN: How to transition from business role to coder - <AUTHOR> I'm in my late 30's and have been in business roles since leaving college. I've done moderately well in that role, founding a YC backed startup, gaining B2b customers, raising seed round and leading two crowdfunding campaigns totaling nearly $1MM. I've always been miserable doing that work, and burned out really badly when my startup eventually failed.
On the side I've coded since college (where I did maths) and always enjoyed that. I'm entirely self taught and have focused on hacking things that work rather than any solid software engineering skills. I've built a few MVP's for startups, including one android app that got 400k downloads (but not great daily active usage). I've built stuff in Java, Javascript, Rails and Python.
I'm considering pivoting my career full-time into a software role and looking for advice on whether to do that and if so how. Questions I have: 1. Will it be frustrating going into entry level jobs in a young industry? 2. How should I find jobs and how will my background look to an employer? 3. Should I do a bootcamp or go back to school or something like 42's program?
Appreciate the communities advice. Thanks! <comment><USER2> Interviewing for large companies should tell you if you're ready or not. Chances are not, if you don't have a formal CS edu, because the typical questions are not to make something that works, but to describe algos and data structs.

I think you'd have better chances entering in a large company in a product, non-eng capacity, and then transition internally. That's always seen very positively, and you can get all the support you need.

The alternative is to found another startup and stay technical from the very beginning, you should have a good network to do so.

</comment><comment><USER3> Please consider that software engineering roles almost universally have little in common with happy hacking at home. They're frustrating, tedious work. They still might be a better fit for you in the end than business roles, but I'd recommend finding some software engs who would be willing to speak to you candidly about the job.</comment>


So Answer: Which "href" value should I use for "JavaScript links"? - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/a/138233/2100126?stw=2 <comment><AUTHOR> I shared the URL directly of the most voted answer (and awarded). I liked that explanation, but I enjoyed too all the thread in there and in some of the other answers as well. Something apparently very simple in web development field but with a lot of details that we can be taking care of.</comment>