Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? - <AUTHOR> This question was asked last year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332072) by gajus, and I'm curious what it looks nowadays.
> How many people on hacker news are running successful online businesses on their own? What is your business and how did you get started?
> Defining successful as a profitable business which provides the majority of the owners income.
> Has recent shutdown of economy affected your business? <comment><USER2> Plugging my brother's one-person business because he'll be too humble to post himself: [https://nanagram.co](https://nanagram.co)

The product allows you to send pictures in the mail to your loved ones via SMS. It works great for getting fresh photos to your grandparents who might not be super savvy with a computer.

My brother started it a few years ago and makes enough now to keep it going. Probably is the classic definition of a lifestyle business, but I think that's a success even if it's unlikely to be a unicorn.

Also and more importantly, the product helps to bring hundreds of families closer together, which is especially important right now given our elders are cut off from contact.

<comment><USER3> Tell your brother he's got a new customer coming up!

<comment><USER4> Right on! Shoot me an email if you have any questions: firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does Gumroad count? We raised VC but most of that was bought back or written off. I run it by myself now.

Gumroad helps creators sell digital products directly to their audiences. We're expanding to Memberships this year.

I wrote about most of the story here: [https://marker.medium.com/reflecting- on-my-failure-to-build-...](https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my- failure-to-build-a-billion-dollar-company-b0c31d7db0e7)

And COVID-19 has been a boon, as we help folks earn a living from home. We'll see if it sticks!

<comment><USER6> Thanks for creating it. I sold the ebook variation of my book through Gumroad and it was a very good experience.

Looking forward to the membership part, might use it for another project of mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been selling a couple of WordPress plugins since 2013, mostly piggy- backing on other popular services that were experiencing crazy growth and taking care of their WordPress integration for them (unofficially, some already had one that sucked).

Yearly (subscription) revenue is at about $500K USD now. It has been growing by less than 10% for the last few years as I haven't been that interested in growing it - I want to work less, not more.

So far I haven't seen any negative effects because of COVID-19 in terms of revenue. If anything there seems to be a slight uptick in new subscriptions and slightly fewer support emails per week.

\- MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress: [https://mc4wp.com/](https://mc4wp.com/)

\- Boxzilla Plugin: [https://boxzillaplugin.com/](https://boxzillaplugin.com/)

\- HTML Forms: [https://htmlforms.io/](https://htmlforms.io/)

<comment><USER8> Nice! Html forms brings in revenue?

<comment><USER7> Not as much as the other two by a long shot, but a tiny bit, yes. I've hidden the purchase flow on the website a while ago so I can retire the paid version sometime soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm still making almost all of my income from Candy Japan, which is a Japanese candy subscription service that I launched many years ago as a HN post.

The shutdown halted international shipping from Japan to over 100 countries, so I've had to pause subscriptions for the time being: [https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/on-pause-due- to...](https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/on-pause-due-to-covid19)

I'm taking this as a much-needed break from running the site!

<comment><USER10> As a resident in Japan, I was thinking about putting online a small website to sell some items (not candies) to Europe and US residents, however a friend warns me it would not be as easy as I think.

Could you give me some info about how you started? Especially about the legal and taxes aspect. More precisely, can I start without a company? If a company is needed, 個人事業主 or 合同会社? Is this even compatible with student visa? The tech aspect in not a problem, but starting the _business_ side seems super tricky.

<comment><USER11> Figuring out that stuff is the business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I write (program, paint, animate, market, and so on) computer games like this one[1]. The recent economic troubles haven't effected me negatively that much, instead it's been a positive thing as more people are home and playing more games. I don't necessarily want to 'profit' from all the hardship around, but I'm glad to provide products that entertain and hopefully make the current situation a bit more bearable - that feels good.

I got started over 10 years ago now, making Flash-based games and licensing them to various web portal and publishers, which was good money for a student back then! A little indie game developer golden age where you'd get a lot of players and also a few thousand dollars per game without too much trouble. I went on from there doing self-published games that anyone can buy on Steam or the Mac Store, both of which provide about 90% of my revenue, and the remaining 10% are from smaller stores and game distributors.

[1] [https://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zooke...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zookeeper/) <\- My current project.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm running Alchemist Camp, where I teach Elixir and the Phoenix Framework, primarily through screencasts. It was a labor of love for the first year but now it (mostly) pays the bills. [https://alchemist.camp](https://alchemist.camp)

In 2 days, I'll be launching a second product for a similar audience. [https://phoenixigniter.com](https://phoenixigniter.com)

Elixir is a _tiny_ market compared to something like Ruby or even Rust, but it's my stack of choice and I love helping grow the ecosystem.

<comment><USER14> Man, I remember thinking that Elixir was going to take the world by storm about 5 years ago. I was so excited for it. I hope it does though, it has a lot of great things going for it, and I'd love to see it adopted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I run Trunk[1][2] which is a SaaS that helps businesses manage and sync their inventory in real-time between everywhere they sell (e.g. Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Etsy, Squarespace, Square, Faire). It's my main source of income.

Starting out, I got my first 10 customers for Trunk by talking to users on e-commerce forums and focusing only on features that would help solve their problem. I didn't have any account management features (forgot password, change password, etc) or even obvious features that would make their lives easier (filtering, proper search, etc) for an embarrassingly long time. I still don't have a lot of these things! And the pricing page still... the horror. Instead, I dedicated all my energy to making sure inventory syncing covered all edge cases and worked reliably.

COVID-19 has actually contributed to an uptick in business, especially with brick & mortar businesses that are now looking to also go online.

1\. [https://trunkinventory.com](https://trunkinventory.com)

2\. [http://apps.shopify.com/trunk](http://apps.shopify.com/trunk)

<comment><USER16> This type of tool is really interesting. I have a couple of questions related to this:

1\. What are the alternatives if they don't use a service like Trunk? 2\. What have you seen as the "source of truth" for inventory? Is it Trunk or one of the services that Trunk connects to?

<comment><USER15> Hey appreciate the interest!

1\. The alternative is manually adjusting stock levels on your other sales channels as things sell. For small shops, this is not too bad. It's usually the owner or some assistant who handles this but it can be a huge timesink. For high volume stores, this is a sisyphean task. Or you can just set stock high enough and not worry about it while emailing customers if you're actually out of stock and can't fulfill. Not a good idea though since you can get banned on marketplaces for overselling + it's a bad customer experience. Sometimes the sales channels themselves have their own integrations (e.g. Shopify integrates with eBay) but they have lots of issues

2\. The "source of truth" _before_ using Trunk is typically either Shopify/Squarespace or Square POS (for brick & mortar). So initially, Trunk can sync your most accurate sales channel to others that are out of sync. Once using Trunk, the inventory within Trunk essentially becomes the source of truth but it doesn't necessarily need to be managed there. For example, you are free to adjust stock levels within Etsy and Trunk will pick up on those changes automatically and sync them to Shopify, just as you'd expect. So it's flexible in that sense and gets out of your way/adapts to your workflow

I hope that info helped :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does DarwinMail[1] count?

I'm a one man[2] team and have been since the beginning. I built it with PHP, LESS, JS, and good old HTML. I love answering all support emails because DM's users are so helpful and often have tremendously kind things to say. I guess it's because I took on the task of replacing Google Inbox.

DarwinMail is not as successful as some other companies run by solo-founders making 10k+ MRR however I feel really happy with what we (the users and I) have accomplished so far.

It's been almost two years since I wrote the first line of code and I very much enjoy working on DarwinMail each and every day of the week (even during dinner sometimes).

[1] [https://www.darwinmail.app](https://www.darwinmail.app) [2] [https://twitter.com/joeytawadrous](https://twitter.com/joeytawadrous)

</comment><comment><USER18> Hoping to start something free today that can add paid features in the future: [https://www.upcount.app/](https://www.upcount.app/)

<comment><USER19> Just a heads up, there appears to be a typo on the front page. I think "Invocing" should be "Invoicing."

<comment><USER18> Thank you very much for the heads up. I have updated the title to fix the spelling mistake.

Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just putting this out there. Indiehackers.com is a community of people building solo-small team profitable businesses.

Check out the top products.

[https://www.indiehackers.com/products?sorting=highest- revenu...](https://www.indiehackers.com/products?sorting=highest-revenue)

There's also a massive longtail of people making no money too.

Making something that people want and will pay for that sustains a business is hard. It takes a lot of time and effort to get the first few paying customers.

</comment><comment><USER21> I run an aftermarket board game accessory business.

[https://burgertokens.com/](https://burgertokens.com/)

Last year, I shipped nearly 4000 packages. My customers love our products, and most of our growth comes from word of mouth.

<comment><USER22> That's an awesome idea, great work! I'm curious, any legal/copyright issues with making replacement products for existing IP?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I found this Twitter thread ([https://mobile.twitter.com/zenorocha/status/1249348452095373...](https://mobile.twitter.com/zenorocha/status/1249348452095373312)) that explains the origin of [https://draculatheme.com/pro](https://draculatheme.com/pro).

It's a single person selling a terminal and IDE color scheme for developers.

<comment><USER24> hmm. is it dracula or is it darcula theme? intellij idea is pretty persistent calling it darcula

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I run Nomad List and Remote OK by myself. Nomad List brings in ~$336,000/y with 972,480/mo pageviews and Remote OK ~$301,000/y with ~628,210/mo pageviews. I do everything myself from coding, designing, front end, back end, marketing, etc. I have one person on emergency call in case the server goes down when I sleep but that hasn't happened in years.

You can see live revenue/traffic here, as I share it all:

[https://nomadlist.com/open](https://nomadlist.com/open)

[https://remoteok.io/open](https://remoteok.io/open)

I have no funding, no debt, no employees, just revenue and profit margins are somewhere in the 80%-90%.

Nomad List got started when I was traveling and working remotely ~2013/2014 and wanted to discover more cities that would fit the criteria of nice weather, affordable and fast internet. Since then I've added hundreds more criteria and it's become a giant database, and also a community. The community is how it makes money as people can pay to join the site and access a chat, a trip planner, a forum and many more features.

Remote OK is a much more simple business as it's just a job board. It got started because after building Nomad List a lot of people around me wanted to start working remotely and traveling but didn't have remote jobs. There was like one remote job specific job board back then and it was quite limited. I thought "why not aggregate remote jobs from traditional non-remote job boards". So I did that, and slowly started selling my own job posts on the site which is how it makes money now.

The Coronavirus has substantially affected my business:

Nomad List especially has been affected losing over 50% of its revenue. The site is made for people working remotely and actively traveling so that is to be expected during this crisis. You can even see the complete disruption the Coronavirus brought to traveling members of my site, scroll down to "Trips Taken by Users" on [https://nomadlist.com/open](https://nomadlist.com/open).

Remote OK is less affected and might even get a positive effect out of this crisis since remote work becomes more popularized and mainstream during and after this. There is in fact a rise in jobs posted, scroll down to "Job Posts Sold" on [https://remoteok.io/open](https://remoteok.io/open).

Personally I'm less affected financially since I don't have employees and I've saved most of my revenue over the last few years, hardly spending anything. Most people have told me to repeatedly over the years to hire and spend more, but I did the opposite. That means I have a very solid cash buffer now so I can weather this storm quite well. I feel sad/scared about other businesses with high costs that might not be so lucky, especially the employees involved.

<comment><USER26> Solid work. Nomad List has really improved over the last few years.

Is most of your NL revenue from user subscriptions or ads or ...?

<comment><USER25> Thanks! Yes, 17% is from ads, and 83% from memberships.

It's mostly non-recurring memberships because I don't really like subscriptions as a customer myself either, and most people go nomad and actively need the site only for the first few months and then go off on their own, and a subset of those stick around. Which is fine with me. I don't like to create a very addictive product. I think I have a healthy balance of new people and long time members right now.

Ad deals are really hard to predict, usually a VC-funded company (ironically) asks to promote their remote work or nomad related product and they'll pay anywhere from $5k-$30k/mo to promote it on my sites. But those deals can last just a month, to 6 months for example. But ads are not stable income like memberships are for me, so I try not to rely too much on them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> a simple business is doing a paid newsletter. i see a lot of these going up... and it can be profitable fairly quickly.

also, doing anything in the education space is worth checking out... in other words, charging people for what you know is a well-worn strategy! an ecourse or online course isn't hard to put together... i did one literally with gumroad and notion docs!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22548620](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22548620)

<comment><USER28> I once worked for a very successful small firm whose primary product was a weekly email / newsletter: subscriptions start at around £20,000 / year.

Their product was analysis (energy markets), their customers were the banks / hedge funds, etc.

The analysis was provided by, um, analysts. These guys (and women) were Phd's, they were extremely well qualified and experienced.

Anyway you don't have to be a phd: the point is that if you have knowledge / expertise there may well be people who are willing to pay for it - the medium doesn't really matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A friend of mine runs a web hosting company. Using Parallels he is able to partition his bare-metal machines and offer them as VPCs all on his own like it's 2006. Apperantly many website builders / small businesses still use those.

<comment><USER30> I did that from 2002 until now, though I'm shutting down. It was a decent source of income, I could've made WAY more and probably made a good living, but I never charged people enough because many of them couldn't afford to go anywhere else. It was a great hobby and it got me my current day job. It was interesting work, but the internet has become too dangerous, it's impossible for one person to keep up with all the attacks.

<comment><USER31> Similar story over here. I started by offering shared hosting with supervision as added value, expanded into reselling VPS'es and eventually leased bare metal servers that I partitioned into VPS'es. I could have made a lot more money if I didn't treat every customer with utmost care and attention. Now I'm stuck with clients that can't afford to go elsewhere and clients with grossly outdated software that would be a nightmare to migrate. I kinda miss the passive income although there wasn't much. On average I had to fix something every few months and would get a major outage/bug once per year. I always hesitated that scaling up would result in more customer support work, more major outages and more everything that would take the "passive" out of passive income.

<comment><USER30> Sounds familiar! I really did enjoy the work and helping people, but I could never find anyone to help me, and it's a 24/7 thing. I have basically never been offline since 2002. There's been a few exceptions, but I'm always on call. It's been a good ride, and I know I'll be sad when I cancel that last server next month. Let me know if you need help, I'm available now :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Define "success"... I make a few bucks a day from [https://unitprice.org](https://unitprice.org) and it doesn't require any effort from me on a day-to-day basis. (I calculate the best price per unit on Amazon for a variety of different products, so the money I make from the affiliate links is typically enough to cover the cost of hosting plus an extra Lego set or two for my son.)

Sadly, I have seen an uptick in revenue as a result of COVID-19, because my website is showing up a lot in search results for toilet paper.

<comment><USER33> I mean, if you're really concerned about people buying more than they need, just so say on your site - obviously a valid concern and don't think any reasonable person would be offended by a reminder that everyone can make a difference by individually making an effort to do what's right for them AND everyone else too.

<comment><USER32> Oh no, sorry if there was a misunderstanding. I said "sadly" because it is so unfortunate that we are all in this current situation -- a pandemic. And it feels "sad" in this specific context because I am seeing an uptick in searches for toilet paper, a result of people being unable to find it anywhere else. It's a sad state of affairs all around. I have no judgement on people buying extra toilet paper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Teaching my girlfriend Japanese inadvertently lead to the creation of a whole new curriculum and style of language teaching which I have been embodying in [https://japanesecomplete.com/](https://japanesecomplete.com/)

Originally the idea was to create a new textbook, but I found it easier to pair lessons with browser-based multiple choice quizzes that would hit the material home. Given the success of the first student, I thought it might be something people would be willing to pay for.

Since then, we have been adding a steady stream of helpful learning tools in addition to the textbook/curriculum that we are rolling out. There are dialogues with audio recordings so you can listen along. The entire curriculum is frequency based, so you are learning the most frequent terms first, which has proven invaluable with our students.

The recent shutdown has definitely affected our subscription rates, and I suspect the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics until 2021 did not do much for the enthusiasm for learning Japanese this year, but you never know. On the brightside, it gives people more time to prepare.

Learning a new language is an investment in yourself and your brain health for life. Language learning is building a bridge where there is a chasm.

</comment><comment><USER35> I've been running a World of Warcraft TCG loot website for over 13 years. I started it because my wife needed me off the game because I played too much (she was right), but I still wanted to do something with the game.

[https://www.wowtcgloot.com](https://www.wowtcgloot.com)

The recent shutdown has increased interest organically.

</comment><comment><USER36> I run a web book publishing company in Washington D.C: [https://bubblin.io](https://bubblin.io)

Covid19 has been a blessing to us since all our books are online and both writers and readers get to chat with each other alongside the story they are on.

</comment><comment><USER37> I run Textbelt, a simple SMS API ([https://textbelt.com/](https://textbelt.com/)) and Quickchart, a chart image and QR rendering API ([https://quickchart.io/](https://quickchart.io/)). Combined they cover my living expenses.

Both started from open source projects of mine. I love building open tools and stumbled upon the fact that I could sell services around these projects after people started reaching out for support and extra features. I improve the products incrementally every week and eventually it adds up.

The virus shutdowns have affected Textbelt a bit because many of my users are small businesses doing appointment reminders and such.

</comment><comment><USER38> Late to this, but this is our son-in-law, Benjamin. Seems he is an effective teacher of 2D game development (godot, gamemaker, pixel art), with good pacing, honest/golden rule type treatment toward customers (and pleasant to be around). Some examples of his work, which supports his wife & children:

[https://www.youtube.com/user/uheartbeast/about](https://www.youtube.com/user/uheartbeast/about)

[https://www.heartgamedev.com/1-bit-godot-course- youtube?r_do...](https://www.heartgamedev.com/1-bit-godot-course- youtube?r_done=1)

</comment><comment><USER39> Not mine but Pinboard and Stratechery are both 1 person shops which are wildly successful.

<comment><USER40> I'm not positive, but I think Stratechery might have an employee now? I vaguely recall Ben mentioning something along those lines in his yearly "how things are going" report.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Running Raccoon as a one one show:

[https://raccoon.onyxbits.de/](https://raccoon.onyxbits.de/)

It's a privacy solution that allows you to download apps from Google Play without having Big G claw into your smartphone.

The tech stack is quite extensive: Java for the application itself (Eclipse toolchain), LAMP for hosting the billing system (build on php, bootstrap and fatfree) and the website (build with Hugo using bootstrap).

COVID-19 hit hard. Even though I see more downloads, people seem to have become cautious with spending money.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm doing around $2k/month with [https://divjoy.com](https://divjoy.com), a tool for a React developers. Not wildly successful, but it pays the bills and I'm optimistic I can grow that to $10k+.

If anything I've seen a slight bump from COVID. Lots of people with time on their hands who want to launch an MVP.

</comment><comment><USER43> I run [https://www.checkbot.io/](https://www.checkbot.io/) myself. It's a Chrome extension that checks websites for SEO, speed and security problems. I wrote it to help with my own contract work then packaged it up for others. Sales are slightly up after the shutdown.

</comment><comment><USER8> Mine's not paying the bills yet, but I'm getting a couple new customers a week which is surprising.

<comment><USER33> As is, unless I am missing something painfully obvious, after looking at you HN profile and HN submissions - my guess is "Mike" is a typo for "Mine" — if so, suggest you edit your comment with a direct link to the one-person business you're referring to with a quick pitch on its intended value/use too.

If I had to guess, the business is the "FastComments" SaaS mentioned a few times in your recent HN submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=winrid](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=winrid)

[https://fastcomments.com/](https://fastcomments.com/)

<comment><USER8> Right! Edited. Thanks for posting the link for me. I didn't since I want to seem more like a person than an ad ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Isn't there a whole community dedicated to this: indiehackers.com

<comment><USER33> IndieHackers was inspired by posts on HN just like this, got a lot of traction marketing it here, and was acquired by a YC startup too; basically, IndieHackers is an unofficial YC spin-off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I think this has been asked before?

<comment><USER46> Yes, multiple times. No harm in asking again though - newer businesses launch all the time, people who didn't want to share before might want to share now etc. Everyone learns and benefits.

<comment><USER33> Agree, not only that, but per the HN FAQs it is official okay to do:

"Are reposts ok? — When a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we bury reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok. — Please don't delete and repost the same story. Deletion is for things that shouldn't have been submitted in the first place."

Basically, even though the topic is being reused, unless the responses are significantly similar, there's no harm and if the community is not curious, it won't get upvotes.</comment></comment></comment>


YC W12 Shoptiques PR Hack - <AUTHOR> http://www.papermag.com/2012/08/free_hugs_courtesy_of_shoptiqu.php Shoptiques offers free hugs from Models to people in New York <comment><USER2> I don't get it. The site is obviously targetted at women, why send out booth bunnies to hug men? In pink t-shirts no less, instead of trendy boutique fashion?</comment>


Facebook's Buchheit: The Future Is Lightweight Conversations - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/04/live-at-web-2-expo-paul-buchheit-not-being-evil/

<comment><USER2> I think there's an 'AND' piece missing from the headline (and maybe Paul's thinking, though from what I've heard about him I doubt it).

Just as "the best companies" have a big vision from the founders down AND are implementing lightweight, rapid iteration, so too people are looking for a number of lightweight conversations AND a depth of meaningful relationships online and offline.

5,000 Facebook friends doesn't replace socialising with your three best mates.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can someone explain what "lightweight" means in this context?

<comment><USER4> Like you don't go to a pub to have a few beers with your friends, but exchange a few tweets and FG status update comments...

<comment><USER3> Well, thanks for the reply, but I still don't know what "lightweight" means.</comment></comment></comment>


Innovation is saying "No" to 1000 things - <AUTHOR> http://zurb.com/article/744/steve-jobs-innovation-is-saying-no-to-1-0 <comment><USER2> Just because Steve Messiah Jobs says something does not mean that it is correct or relevant. Nike sell very different products to Apple and Nike know more about fashion retail than Jobs ever did.

The problem with sports/fashion retail is that it is very subjective. Furthermore, for some products you need customers to have choice.

I have sold a few Nike products in my time (for cycling, yes, think Lance Armstrong...) and I did not feel they were that competitive on grounds of price, sales margin, fit, quality and so on. By any objective measure they were not that good.

However, what did the customers think? They bought it. Not all of the time, but some of the time. Depending on the customer I would steer them towards known best sellers, quality, value or sale items, however, sometimes they would find the Nike branded products suited them better - fit, colour, taste, the brand or whatever it was made them prefer those products.

Had Nike listened to Steve Jobs (or me) and got rid of all those shoddy cycling products then they would have lost all of those sales. Furthermore, those slightly more 'American sized' customers would not have found what it was that suited them.

<comment><USER3> Sports/fashion has its peculiarities, but your anecdote is not convincing.

The big reason that Nike is so successful is that they have maintained their status of a premium brand, in a sweet spot a few notches above where the competition is cutthroat and less profitable. In the short term, crap sells and looks good for this year's sales number. In the long term, crap offers competitors too many openings to convince a consumer that Nike is actually overrated/overpriced.

Saying "yes" to crap worked really well for Izod, up until the moment it failed catastrophically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The genius is in saying no to to the right things. It's in the sort algorithm that puts the right ones in the top 10. The original iPhone was great not because it did not have 3G, and the os did not support copy paste. It was great because it was released early with a pack of "bang". Bang as in the competition is dead, it's already too late for "adapt or die". Cutting features or lineup for the wrong reasons is why some of the space the iphone filled existed: BlackBerry refused to produce a device with wifi because it pandered to the carriers who wanted to sell more gprs packets and sms at 25c a pop.

</comment><comment><USER5> Innovation is an organic process. It takes time and many attempts to get things right.

"If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward". Thomas A. Edison, Encyclopaedia Britannica

</comment><comment><USER6> This isn't just for innovation, it's for getting things done. I struggled to come up with a name for the Useless Extraneous Suggestions, and then I heard someone call it "Advice from the Idea Fairy." Perhaps it comes from the military? Idea fairies are never around to help get things done, but they toss around ideas without thinking them through. The ideas are usually useless, but still take some time to run down.

This isn't to say all ideas are bad, but there is a lot of "No" that needs to be said to make things happen.

<comment><USER7> I'm reminded of the old adage: "You can't prove a negative." While I'm not smart enough to know if this statement is philosophically sound, it occurs to me that when you're working on something, the number of possible suggestions is infinite, and conclusively refuting any suggestion is futile. Thus, endless suggestions of the form: "Why don't you try such-and-so?" are counterproductive -- especially when they come from the person who writes your performance review.

For suggestions, I have a place where I can politely write them down for future use.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> fwiw this really resonated for me because i'm a single founder in a semi- crowded space. my strategy for success is to basically have a much smaller scope and very narrow feature set, but to be crushingly better than the competition in everything that i _DO_ attempt.

or maybe i'm just seeking out articles that make me feel good about myself.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm looking for data on whether Nike trimmed down its product line based on this advice. Has anyone else found anything?

</comment><comment><USER9> Somewhat off-topic, but I'm curious about this:

> _Jobs followed this very advice himself back in 1998 when he shrunk Apple 's > product line from 350 to 10. So instead of creating 350 crappy products, or > 200 mediocre products, or 100 good products Apple focused on creating 10 > incredibly designed products._

I'm having trouble imagining how Apple managed to have 350 active products at any one time, ever. Did this include a bunch of software, printers, weird accessories? Are we counting Apple-branded keyrings and beer coozies, or what? Honestly curious.

<comment><USER10> It's all about the SKUs. Variations of all types, including different configurations for devices, modifications for selling certain items through channels, etc. But for Apple, they had all that stuff, and Jobs pared it down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Google is an interesting parallel to this. The company encourages the development of many different ideas, but it has no issue cancelling (with very short notice) the products that do not take off.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think strategy rather than innovation is saying "No" to things but if you don't have a strategy the or clarity for the product the innovation becomes a lot harder.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to make something simple."

</comment><comment><USER14> Design is saying No. Innovation is bringing two things together.

</comment><comment><USER15> we use zurb and it is appropriate to see this in a zurb blog post: zurb has what you need and not a whole lot else, so they clearly subscribe to this philosophy.

less is more.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is VR/AR such a big deal? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The media (including the news) runs on stories. Not "stories" in the sense of "articles," rather "stories" in the sense of "narratives." When a narrative doesn't appear naturally, the media just manufactures it artificially.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ultimately it probably isn't for the immediate future.

I'd (a) ask you what makes you think people think it's a big deal, and (b) remind you that most "new" technologies, once they trickle down to the masses, are perceived as the next greatest thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems like the tech industry is moving toward it or at least, heavily investing in it: Oculus, Vive, Gear, Daydream, Hololens, AMD, Magic Leap, Sony (Playstation) and on top of that the media is promoting it as _THE_ next big thing. And this is what I don't get, maybe it's just me but I don't see it becoming practical/essential (like a computer for example) for a long time, but again this is what _I_ think.

<comment><USER3> Computers weren't practical once either.

Of course companies are investing in it--it's going to make some money/ _Everything_ is the next best thing. Maybe you're too young to have seen many NBTs. Will it ever be _essential_? Certainly not in the short term; have to keep people from puking first. Until they solve for those types of problems it'll never become mainstream.

The NBT that will have more impact right _now_ is various forms of "AI", and companies are investing heavily in that as well.</comment></comment></comment>


Immigration Lawyer recommendation for O1 visa processing? - <AUTHOR> I qualify for 4 of the 6 O1 visa criteria. Can someone recommend an immigration lawyer/attorney who can prepare and file my O1 visa petition. <comment><USER2> Where are you in the US? If you're near the valley, you might try posting this on blind [https://www.teamblind.com/](https://www.teamblind.com/)</comment>


Police drones with lasers could help find a murder victim in Australia - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2195079-police-drones-with-lasers-could-help-find-a-murder-victim-in-australia/ <comment><USER2> Substitute "LIDAR" for "lasers", and the title makes much more sense, without needing to read any of the article — which is behind a paywall.</comment>


Microsoft case results in prison time for restore CD copier [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaoJErxYLtM <comment><USER2> This happened back in April:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16921634](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16921634)

</comment><comment><USER3> In around 2002, my father and I owned a computer assembly and repair business in a small town about 200 miles away from London, UK.

We were doing just under $1.5m in revenue a year. I was just 22 years old. We had a few large clients that were contributing to the bulk of our revenue. Life was good.

I can't get into the details of exactly how it happened because I dont want to open a new legal case or anything, but Microsoft used similar intimidation tactics to drive my father and I out of business, despite the fact that legally we hadnt done anything wrong. We got really scared. We were a small company and I was very young and we had no financial muscle comparative to Microsoft and as a result of the bad publicity etc, we lost our major clients anyhow.

Microsoft drove us into the ground.

A year before that, we had a major University in the UK as a client that defaulted on a payment for a large volume of inventory and left us to pick up the tab. Thankfully it didn't kill the business, but it certainly brought it to the teetering edge.

This is how many larger institutions destroy the small player and why so many are afraid of going into Entrepreneurship. He has the most financial clout often tends to win.

I have many other stories from other associates I could share too, but we really need people to step forward that have legal experience that can help the small player that doesnt have the financial clout for taking on the big boys, not to mention regulation needs to change but im not so hopeful for that.

Just thought I'd share. I've not mentioned this anywhere public in over 15 years.

<comment><USER4> _In around 2002, my father and I owned a computer assembly and repair business in a small town about 200 miles away from London, UK._

Why would Microsoft run a computer assembly and repair company into the ground, especially in 2002?

That's pretty hard to believe without there being more to the story.

<comment><USER5> This is almost certainly about OEM Windows licenses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is outrageous that private corporate disputes over copyright result in jail time, rather than just financial or corporate sanctions.

Edit: After reading Microsoft's blog post [https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the- issues/2018/04/27/the-fac...](https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the- issues/2018/04/27/the-facts-about-a-recent-counterfeiting-case-brought-by-the- u-s-government/) and the e-mails Mr. Lundgren sent, however, it does seem pretty clear that he was trying to profit from these repair cds and sell them as, basically, genuine cds. US government brought the case through customs and it seems there was willful intent to defraud the government.

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree with the point that having technology illiterate judges allows for abuse from technology companies.

The fight of tech corporations against reuse of hardware it is ecologically sustainable.

And finally, tech companies are negating the ownership of our own hardware. The software is licensed, hardware only works with certain software, so you don't own anymore what you buy. And laws are obsolete when it comes to this fact.

<comment><USER8> You mean unsustainable?

<comment><USER7> Yes. Thank you for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands FYI Microsoft didn't bring the case, ICE did.

The main fact which a lot of people seem to be is he made these copies so he could sell them. The same ones you can get for free from Dell.

 _Clifford Lundgren pled guilty to conspiring to traffic in counterfeit goods, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2320(a)(1), and criminal copyright infringement, in violation of 17 U.S.C. § 506(a)(1)(A) and 18 U.S.C. § 2319(a) and (b)(1). Lundgren's plea related to his role in a scheme in which he created and intended to sell about 28,000 copies of Dell reinstallation discs for Microsoft Windows, without permission from Microsoft._

He was making copies en masse in China then was shipping them back in an effort to resell them. I've read in various places the cost was in the neighborhood of 80K to make the copies. I'm not a business expert, but I don't know many people who put down 80K of their own money to create a product they're going to give away for free.

Customs intercepted the discs when they were shipped and started investigated what was going on.

<comment><USER9> Ouch. This makes more sense to me than Microsoft going after the man. I would hope they (Microsoft) wouldn't hunt down people doing this sort of thing.

<comment><USER10> He wasn't just making and selling the discs (that people could get for free from the OEM), he was also giving instructions about how to make the discs more accurate copies of the original media, and how to evade customs.

[https://blogs.microsoft.com/uploads/prod/sites/5/2018/04/FIN...](https://blogs.microsoft.com/uploads/prod/sites/5/2018/04/FINAL- FILED-BRIEF-11.17.17-004.pdf)

[https://blogs.microsoft.com/uploads/prod/sites/5/2018/04/2LU...](https://blogs.microsoft.com/uploads/prod/sites/5/2018/04/2LUNDGREN6.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Yeah... that guy totally asked for jail time. It sucks because everytime I've read the whole case I missunderstood that it wasn't Microsoft specifically hunting him down and sadly others will make the same mistake as me. I'm someone who respects Microsoft, I cannot imagine people who already distrust Microsoft misunderstanding this completely for years to come.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's depressing is that this man was "selling" the copies for 25 cents in order to recover the cost of the physical CD he was burning -- not to enrich himself.

This is a good guy being screwed over by Microsoft and the legal system.

<comment><USER10> No, he wasn't. He was selling some of the discs for $4, some for $10, and others for $30 to $40. He went out of his way to create discs that would fool customers into thinking they had a genuine microsoft product, and he went out of his way to evade customs. He knew that his product risked being siezed by customs, and he gave advice to his associates about evading customs inspections.

He spent $80,000 creating the discs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In case you don't want to watch the video, here are the citations from the description:

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/25/17279190/microsoft- restor...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/25/17279190/microsoft-restore-disk- eric-lundgren-sentence-right-to-repair)

[http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi- microsoft-r...](http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-microsoft- restore-disc-20180215-story.html)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true- crime/wp/2018/04/24...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true- crime/wp/2018/04/24/recycling-innovator-eric-lundgren-loses-appeal-on- computer-restore-discs-must-serve-15-month-prison-term)

[https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/recycling- innovato...](https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/recycling-innovator- eric-lundgren-loses-appeal-on-computer-restore-discs-must-serve-15-month- prison-term)

</comment><comment><USER13> People's take on this is depressingly cringeworthy. Prison time was for trying to pass CDs as genuine Microsoft media.

Imagine this: You go to one of these shops looking to buy a new computer, you ask to get genuine copy of Windows. The shop can't guarantee genuine copy because they haven't compared hashes of these bootleg CDs with the ones published on Microsoft's website. If they did they would burn them themselves.

Customers were unnecessarily put at risk because data on those disk wasn't assured to be genuine. That's why damages aren't based on manufacturing price but price customers paid for the genuine product.

If you asked me I wouldn't fault them if they added damages for compromising combined purchases because people don't normally buy just software license but packages of hardware with genuine software.

And the sad cringe is in the fact that when EVEN you people don't see why chain of custody is incredibly important then you can't expect all these shop owners to be any better.

</comment><comment><USER14> Apparently there are more facts to this story [https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/8f9lsc/microsoft_se...](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/8f9lsc/microsoft_sends_ewaste_recycler_to_prison_for_a/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Microsoft higher ups should've stepped in earlier on this one. This is clearly a case of a guy trying to do right and help out customers and not understanding how the law treats software and how that's different than hardware. They could've easily cut him a deal where he could hand out genuine Windows licenses with the sale of these devices.

It is legal (mostly) for you to pick up a piece of hardware that somebody threw away and do anything you want with it. You can legally use it yourself, sell it or just give it away.

In the eyes of the law, software doesn't work that way. Could you pick up a software license key that somebody threw away and re-use it? Depending on the license the original person purchased, likely not. It sucks, I don't agree with it but it's how it is.

<comment><USER10> Have you read the emails that this man was sending? He was deliberately trying to fool his customers (who were asking for genuine MS discs, not some copy he'd made) and he was deliberately trying to evade customs.

[https://blogs.microsoft.com/uploads/prod/sites/5/2018/04/2LU...](https://blogs.microsoft.com/uploads/prod/sites/5/2018/04/2LUNDGREN6.pdf)

[https://blogs.microsoft.com/uploads/prod/sites/5/2018/04/FIN...](https://blogs.microsoft.com/uploads/prod/sites/5/2018/04/FINAL- FILED-BRIEF-11.17.17-004.pdf)

<comment><USER15> No I had not...

Yeah, this guy was totally attempting to make a profit off of piracy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The WaPo has a great writeup on this case, relevant quotes below: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true- crime/wp/2018/04/24...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true- crime/wp/2018/04/24/recycling-innovator-eric-lundgren-loses-appeal-on- computer-restore-discs-must-serve-15-month-prison- term/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7758dc6a1885)

"""

The appeals court upheld a federal district judge's ruling that the disks made by Eric Lundgren to restore Microsoft operating systems had a value of $25 apiece, even though they could be downloaded free and could be used only on computers with a valid Microsoft license. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit initially granted Lundgren an emergency stay of his prison sentence, shortly before he was to surrender, but then affirmed his original 15-month sentence and $50,000 fine without hearing oral argument in a ruling issued April 11....

Glenn Weadock, a former expert witness for the government in its antitrust case against Microsoft, was asked, "In your opinion, without a code, either product key or COA [Certificate of Authenticity], what is the value of these reinstallation disks?"

"Zero or near zero," Weadock said. Why would anybody pay for one? Lundgren's lawyer asked. "There is a convenience factor associated with them," Weadock said.

Still, [U.S. District Judge] Hurley decided Lundgren's 28,000 restore disks had a value of $700,000, and that dollar amount qualified Lundgren for a 15-month term and a $50,000 fine. The judge said he disregarded Weadock's testimony. "I don't think anybody in that courtroom understood what a restore disk was," Lundgren said.

A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit deferred to Hurley in his judgment that Weadock was not credible and that "while experts on both sides may have identified differences in functionality in the discs, [Hurley] did not clearly err in finding them substantially equivalent." The ruling was written by Judges William H. Pryor Jr., Beverly B. Martin and R. Lanier Anderson.

"""

<comment><USER10> One of the reasons they put that value on the discs is because Lundgren was trying to sell the discs for that much.

He spent $80,000 creating 16,000 discs. That's not "no value".

\---begin---

COURT: What is your view why somebody is going to China to have 16,000 counterfeit discs produced? What do you think they are doing? Is this a charitable thing? I don't mean to be—what is your take on this? You say it has no value, it might be convenient for the customer. What do you think is going on? They spent $80,000, if I understand one of the exhibits, to produce this. What do you think was happening?

WEADOCK: I can't speak for the Defendant, Your Honor.

COURT: But you need to speak. You came in and told me, in your expert opinion, these have no value at all, which I understand that.

WEADOCK: Right.

COURT: Here is clearly a criminal enterprise, these gentlemen have pled guilty to crimes, and we know from the exhibits—again, I don't have it right in front of me, but looking at the monies from Chase and so on, it is about $80,000. What is your sense as to what was being done?

WEADOCK: My sense is that the discs have value as a convenience to the end user who will be able to install Windows on those computers.

\---end

Note that the customers didn't need these discs. They could have ordered replacements from the OEM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's insane

</comment><comment><USER17> Why is this thread marked as [Flagged] ?

<comment><USER18> That means that users have flagged the story (I'm not sure how many user flags it takes for it to be marked "[flagged]", however).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> [Video]??

</comment><comment><USER20> Please support Open Source Software. It benefits us all.</comment>


Twins get different results when they put 5 ancestry DNA kits to the test - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/dna-ancestry-kits-twins-marketplace-1.4980976 <comment><USER3> None of the differences, either split by company or by twin seem egregious or even particularly unsatisfactory. They cite that AncestryDNA measured each of their DNA to be 99.6% similar, and really, that seems like the error rate you would about expect for the Ancestry results they got. They got the exact same regions and only a percentage point or two off in each region's share.

It's not like they're fully sequencing every DNA sample they get.

> AncestryDNA found the twins have predominantly Eastern European ancestry (38 > per cent for Carly and 39 per cent for Charlsie). But the results from > MyHeritage trace the majority of their ancestry to the Balkans (60.6 per > cent for Carly and 60.7 per cent for Charlsie).

This part of the article especially seems like hair splitting considering the Balkans and Eastern Europe tend to have a lot of overlap. In fact, "Balkans" in particular is an extremely ambiguous linguistic term and can mean so many different things to so many people.

<comment><USER4> > In fact, "Balkans" in particular is an extremely ambiguous linguistic term > and can mean so many different things to so many people.

Not really, Balkan countries are well-defined and have been so for over a century now. It's basically European countries that were under the Ottoman Empire:

Greece, Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia. One could also throw Slovenia in there but historically speaking, they have always been pretty different from other Balkan-folk.

<comment><USER5> "There is not universal agreement on the region's components." [1]

"It can be difficult to define exactly which countries are included in the Balkan States. It is a name that has both geographic and political definitions, with some of the countries crossing what scholars consider the 'boundaries' of the Balkans." [2]

Almost the entire wikipedia article is dedicated to explaining the various definitions of it and how it is a problematic term. [3]

[1] [https://www.britannica.com/place/Balkans](https://www.britannica.com/place/Balkans)

[2] [https://www.thoughtco.com/where-are-the-balkan- states-407024...](https://www.thoughtco.com/where-are-the-balkan- states-4070249)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You don't need twins for this test. A single person can just sign up twice for these services and get different results, even if they make a single sample and split it between the two vials.

I thought it was pretty well known that these services are estimates only to a large degree? These services only take samples, they don't sequence the entire genome. Of course there will be errors when you have to extrapolate from a sample.

Even for me personally, my results changed when my parents did it and linked up to me, because their results were able to flow into mine.

<comment><USER7> I havent looked into getting a DNA test at all. But I would expect it to be accurate and repeatable.

<comment><USER8> Unlike what you might think, this is not a sequencing based method, but something based on dna sticking to small parts of a chip coated with complimentary sequences. This method is super error prone, more importantly the error rate is dependent on who does it and with what level of care. So yes it's not going to be repeatable!

<comment><USER9> It's true that these companies are not offering "sequencing" per se but rather are genotyping commonly polymorphic SNPs using an array or other genotyping method.

These SNP arrays, however, are _exceedingly_ accurate and reproducible in their calls. A common medium-density SNP array used for human genetics is the Illumina CytoSNP-850K [1], which routinely gets >99.5% accuracy on calls. This is at least as good, or better than, whole genome sequencing.

The challenge in ancestry assignment is not determining what is in the sample, but rather in the interpretation and assignment of ancestral haplotypes.

[1] [https://www.illumina.com/content/dam/illumina- marketing/docu...](https://www.illumina.com/content/dam/illumina- marketing/documents/products/datasheets/datasheet_CytoSNP850K_POP.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Since the test results for the twins in the article were 99.6% identical, that seems to match what you say is the usual accuracy of SNP arrays. However, I don't think that can be called exceedingly accurate and reproducible if you consider the intended application.

>99.5% accuracy is great for a scientific measurement device that's only been developed very recently; it's absolutely rubbish if you want to sell the results to consumers.

<comment><USER11> If you feel that way about 99.5% accuracy, I'd advise that there are a number of consumer products you absolutely shouldn't buy, including: kitchen scales (small ones), measuring cups, store brand spirit levels, etc.

You can get considerably better accuracy, you just have to be willing to fork over $1500 rather than $60. How much are you willing to pay to know if your 31% German vs 30%?

<comment><USER8> The difference is that it's not 99.5% accuracy for the entire experiment but for each of the millions of spots, which means there will be hundreds of thousands of spots that are not accurate in each chip. Not an apples to apples comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Lack of oversight

> Despite the popularity of ancestry testing, there is absolutely no > government or professional oversight of the industry to ensure the validity > of the results.

> It's a situation Gravel finds troubling.

What is up with this incessant clamoring for a nanny to supervise every little thing?

This is published on a page where, thanks to "oversight", I have to click a little spam box warning that this page, like every other damn website on the internet, uses cookies. No thank you. I really don't want to pay more taxes for the Central Bureau of Making Sure You Know You Might Be 7% Less Eastern European than Your DNA Test Indicates.

<comment><USER13> That's overly reductive. There are people making lifestyle changes and healthcare decisions in reaction to the results of their DNA test, so the accuracy of these tests may be more important than "woops, we placed you in the wrong European ethnic group".

And I guess we remove all oversight now because of a bad example? Pack it in, FDA. We're done monitoring food safety thanks to cookie banners.

<comment><USER14> You're being equally reductive. Obviously all of this exists on a spectrum. Most reasonable people would agree that the FDA is a net positive. Most reasonable people would agree that the government monitoring every private conversation happening in the country and jailing everyone who tells a lie would be a net negative. The happy medium for government checks on behavior is somewhere in the middle.

Your parent makes the argument, very reasonably imo, that the overhead and cost of regulating these types of company's results are not worth the upside. People make lifestyle choices based on things they hear from palm readers - <USER2> don't use the government to regulate and test the validity of psychics. I think this falls into the same category.

<comment><USER13> > The happy medium for government checks on behavior is somewhere in the > middle.

That was my point.

> Your parent makes the argument, very reasonably imo, that the overhead and > cost of regulating these types of company's results are not worth the > upside.

I think we read different comments; all I got was a snarky condemnation of government oversight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Semi-related: I was thinking about getting one of the newer iWatches, the one with the heart-rate monitoring and all that jazz. To me, those features are really cool and future-y. So, I waltz on down to the store and try one on. It reads my heart-rate and it seems to be fairly accurate. Ok, well, let's test it a bit. I start running in place. The heart rate goes up. I then just stand there, after a bit, the heart-rate goes down. Nice, the thing actually works! Well, they had a few of the iWatches sitting there, without anyone else taking a poke at them. So, I strap all the free ones on the arm.

Well, they all gave different readings. I repeated the running in place test. Some went up and down much more than the others; maybe 10 bpm more. I tried re-arranging them on my arm and doing the running in place test again, you know, maybe it only works on the wrist since the blood is closer to the surface there? Nope, the readings were all over the place still. It was not super scientific of me. I mean, I was some strange person running in place in a store with a bunch of iWatches strapped to my arm.

Maybe the watches have some sort of learning algo in them that was getting messed up with all the folks trying them on. Maybe I was wearing them 'wrong'. Maybe I should have waited 10 minutes between jogging sessions. I don't know.

But, to me, these things have a _long_ way to go. A lot of the bio-tech and bioengineering out there seems to be a bit of snake-oil right now. I really do want it all to work, I think that would be a great boon to us all [0]. If something like the iWatch can't give repeatable readings in nearly any way, then it's all just a gimmick and not useful.

[0] I mean, can you imagine if Theranos' tech actually did work?! That would change medicine for the better in incalculable ways. I can see why that company's plan was so intoxicating.

<comment><USER16> When I tried on an Apple Watch at an Apple Store, I noticed that the heart rate it displayed was definitely different from mine.

I mentioned it to the employee who was manning that table, and she told me the demo watches had some pre-programmed data for demo purposes.

I was puzzled by this since heart rate monitoring is a key feature users care about. It occurred to me that heart rate data of everyone who has tried on the watch might count as the kind of medical information you shouldn't publish on demo watches.

Imagine ridiculous stories like "CEO of X's heart rate was 130bpm when he tried on the new Apple Watch, says journalist who tried it on right after."

<comment><USER15> Well, I'll be damned! Thanks for the explanation, I really appreciate it. I'm still wanting to buy one, but now I don't know what to think. I wonder how I am supposed to try one out before I buy one and to make sure it works.

<comment><USER17> In a study two years ago Apple Watch was the most accurate tested device with a median error of 2%.

[https://www.macrumors.com/2017/05/24/apple-watch-heart- rate-...](https://www.macrumors.com/2017/05/24/apple-watch-heart-rate-most- accurate-fitness-study/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Disclaimer: I currently work for a genetics genealogy company mentioned in this article. My comments are my own. Some relevant previous comment threads of mine about other DNA related articles: [0], [1], [2], [3]

Personally, I would love to help create legislation aimed to protect consumers from perceived and actual problems related to DNA sequencing and analysis. I don't know _how_ though and I fear it'd fall to the back burner in the current US political climate. Our customers are not only US but international though and that presents yet another dimension to the challenges therein.

This article states:

> _Whatever your ancestry results, don 't get too attached to them. They could > change._

That is absolutely correct. I've stated why in a previous comment [1]; _Some DNA analysis software employ stochastic algorithms. That means that the answer they provide can be different if run more than once_.

The article also states:

> _Despite the popularity of ancestry testing, there is absolutely no > government or professional oversight of the industry to ensure the validity > of the results._

That is also correct. I've heard peers state that the industry isn't regulated outside of the field of medicine during product discussions. I think that's something which needs to be addressed: leaving it unaddressed can encourage predatory business behavior.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18196717](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18196717) [1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18196984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18196984) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18564380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18564380) [3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18569659](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18569659)

<comment><USER19> > there is absolutely no government or professional oversight

They are not allowed to sell health-related reports anymore in all of europe and other countries. While i think that some regulation and standards would be good, banning it overall was a dumb measure.

<comment><USER18> Can you quote a specific law for that?

<comment><USER19> [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12687-017-0344-2](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12687-017-0344-2)

[https://int.customercare.23andme.com/hc/en- us/articles/21769...](https://int.customercare.23andme.com/hc/en- us/articles/217696258-Will-I-receive-health-reports-)

<comment><USER18> Excellent, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wouldn't mind paying a fair sum for a service that would:

(1) reasonably guarantee that my data not only won't be distributed - but will be destroyed (on their side) within a short time frame

(2) give me access to all of the raw data and methodologies used in their analysis

Does anyone know of such a service?

<comment><USER21> The only reasonable way of achieving those goals would be to allow totally anonymous submissions. Mail in a sample and simply have a code that you keep to check on results once they are processed.

The fact that none of these services allow for anonymous submission should be a huge tell about their real motivations.

<comment><USER22> Anonymous submissions are in theory somewhat feasible, albeit cumbersome. You can by the 23andme kits with the full fee paid from certain pharmacies (I think Target had them) using cash. This means you don't have to put down a credit card when signing up. I leave the rest to the reader to work out wrt anonymizing themselves while signing up to the website.

<comment><USER23> Err, isn't the first thing they do is link up the new submission with every other submission ever received in the past or future, almost none of which are anonymous?

Sure, you can be anonymous, but you're the son of John and Jane Tompkins, the brother of Emily Tompkins, the cousin of Mary Smith, and the father of Dave and Buster Tompkins.... huh, I wonder who you are.

<comment><USER22> Very good point. Added requirement: Make sure all your ancestors and extended family are dead and did not do 23andme before their passing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Misleading headline in my opinion...

Carly's results have a larger 'Broadly European' percentage, but that is a catchall that includes: Italian, Eastern European, Balkan, French & German, Iberian (Others category), and Broadly Southern European (Others category). Therefore Carly's 'Broadly European' traits could be used to match Charlsie's results.

It is unfair to call the 23andMe results 'different'. They are getting the same results, however one twin is getting more specificity.

<comment><USER25> Why do people assume ancestry results from these DNA tests are "accurate"? Human ethnicity is a continuum, not distinct pools of genes. We are applying labels conceived by modern nationalism to several thousands of years of migration and intermarriage. It would be great if people stopped treating ancestry results from these tests as authoritative reference.

There was a controversy about Korean & Japanese ancestry results from 23andMe where ethnic Koreans are sometimes classified as >30% Japanese. These two groups shared common ancestors since ancient humans migrated via the Korean Peninsula to the Japanese archipelago centuries before the modern nations of Korea and Japan came into existence. Slapping either one of these specific labels on shared ancestry is wildly inaccurate and short sighted.

<comment><USER26> > Why do people assume ancestry results from these DNA tests are "accurate"?

Years of highly visible advertising by these companies which implies they're accurate? All of those "discovery your ancestry" posters they put up around here had specific countries and locations.

<comment><USER27> Agreed. Just a quick look at the 23andme site doesn't show me anything that says they are "estimates" or "not accurate".

The landing page shows me this headline "This new year, commit to a healthier you - inspired by your DNA." I'm sure they have it legally covered somewhere in their TOS but it's still not good if these are inaccurate or estimates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Their results seem well within the margin of error I'd expect out of a $100 DNA sequencing service. It's incredible that this kind of thing is now available at this price point.

</comment><comment><USER19> The great thing is that their dnas were shockingly similar. It means the sequncing is valid. Now the ancestry composition thing is known to be a nonstandard procedure , just look at their research publications.

<comment><USER29> I'm imagining some kind of machine-learning training set based algorithm for determining the ancestry percentages. Even at 99.6% difference (due to mutations over time or sampling error) over 700k samples there's gonna be ~300 sequencing differences between twins. Enough to make their ML system draw different inferences for sure.

<comment><USER19> 23andme has some publication about their method. the thing is , they have a lot more data than what is available in public repositories so they basically established their own system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Not surprised. Some consumer DNA testing companies can't even tell when the DNA submitted isn't human: [https://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/home- dna-kits-4812...](https://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/home-dna- kits-481292431.html)

<comment><USER31> Haha, very interesting. I've always wondered what would happen if I sent in a sample from my dog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> 99.6% is still awfully dissimilar, depending on what that number means. Thinking about single polymorphisms, of ca. 3 billion bases, that is still 120,000,000 SNPs between twins. Of course, they aren't doing full genome sequencing, and they are probably targeting loci that are know to be more divergent. Still... that similarity seems awfully low for twins. I wonder what they typically find for similarity between any two individuals. I also wonder if their lab is a little disorganized....

<comment><USER33> Current estimates are that there's a roughly 1 in 1000 difference between two individuals purely due to random mutations in the germline (or, put differently, the DNA replication error rate in human cells is about 1 in 1000). This would imply 99.9% expected similarity between two identical twins. However, this is in the germline. Somatic cells accumulate mutations over their life time (since they, too, divide and therefore need to replicate their DNA, and are furthermore exposed to environmental stress). In addition, the tests work off saliva samples which are mixed with all kinds of stuff in the mouth, and degrade slightly during transport. Lastly, there's an inherent replication variability in the genotyping process (though this is _very_ small).

This back of the envelope estimate suggests that 99.6% similarity for somatic samples of identical twins is not unexpected.

<comment><USER34> This is not accurate. Coarsely, there are roughly 3 million SNPs (out of 3 billion total haploid bases) per individual. When we talk about individuals "sharing" DNA we mean these variants and not the 99.X% of DNA that we all have in common. When we refer to random mutations in the germline (i.e. de novo variants) current estimates of de novo variants per individual are in the low hundreds.

The other factors you discuss are more likely to cause issues. One major one is the error rate of the microarray because of the high number of genotypes being assayed. If the chip has an error rate of 0.1% and 500k tests are performed you would expect 500 mis-calls. I used to work for Illumina, who makes these chips, but I worked on the DNA sequencing side of things so I don't know the actual error rate off the top of my head.

<comment><USER33> Right, de novo mutation rate is much lower (even lower than what you wrote, just slightly above 1e-8 according to deCODE). The 1/1000 rate is the average difference between two random individuals (not twins), which corresponds to your 3M SNPs per 3B bases.

<comment><USER34> Yes, but you referred to them as random mutations, which is not the case. They are inherited variants. The DNA replication error rate is nowhere near 1 in 1000.

<comment><USER33> Hence my correction. Without looking it up now, the actual replication error rate is probably close to the deCODE rate for de novo mutations (modulo gamete selection, so probably higher than that).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Translating into IT / tech terms, people are VERY used to the concept of two .wav files sampled from the same CDrom being bit identical and useful in a court of law to prove both .wav files came from exactly the same music cd.

However people are really worked up about a new online service that encodes multiple analog music sources into lossy mp3 samples using different analog encoders each time, and the service sells an "identify matches similar to this song" as a service that people think is the same level of exactness as the old fashioned court-of-law .wav file bit by bit comparisons, but its actually more of a lossy best guess pattern matching service instead. Yes they DO use the same general technology, mostly, but its quite different in purpose and outcome.

An even better analogy is we are VERY used to an online service that OCRs a scan of a music CD and outputs the musician name every time based on OCR of the disc itself, and now people familiar with that technology are VERY confused by an app that listens to your cell phone mic and often squirts out the musician name based on that raw analog sound sample.

Its more a miracle the new tech works at all, than a scandal that both business models aren't identical in accuracy.

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder why they didn't mention male microchimerism, a still poorly understand phenomenon, in which male DNA is found in females. Possible sources of gene transfer are " unrecognized spontaneous abortion, vanished male twin, an older brother transferred by the maternal circulation, or sexual intercourse"

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16084184/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16084184/)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3458919/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3458919/)

</comment><comment><USER37> I'd like to get this done for myself and my parents (to distinguish where the different traits actually come from), but I'm a little wary of putting this sort of information out there when we don't know how it will be used in the future. And by whom.

Are there services that you can pay extra that will do a full DNA sequence and have access to 23andMe's comparison data?

Or am I being paranoid?

</comment><comment><USER38> From the article (and the company themselves):

"The company said it approaches the development of its tools and reports with scientific rigour, but admits its results are "statistical estimates."

It is very likely that there's a fine print on their procedure that everything is a Guesstimate and while their algorithms will process things the same for every sample, there's just too much variations that are unaccounted for even in such controlled environments.

What would surprise me for example is if someone sent in their DNA for analysis twice on the same company and get varying results. That would mean that the process itself is not well-established.

</comment><comment><USER39> DNA in Europe is all mixed up. A lot of this is due to the Romans. There were also a lot of other migrations and displacements.

I was watching a BBC documentary about how Rome influenced the history of Scotland. The announcer, who has a very pronounced Scottish accent, took a DNA ancestry test. The results (IIRC) indicated Germany, Italy, and eastern europe. (The announcer interpreted this last one as Dacia) Come to think of it, he doesn't look so different from Metatron.

The twin results not matching is kinda disturbing, though.

</comment><comment><USER40> I can't get past the sub headline: > Twins' DNA 'shockingly similar'

Identical twins are supposed to have identical DNA, right? Or did I really misunderstand a lot of school.

<comment><USER41> No amount of schooling could have truly prepared you for precisely how similar twins' DNA would be. Shockingly similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The twins DNA is "nearly exactly" the same is an oxymoron. Nearly is not an exact. The twins have "virtually identical" ancestry profiles yet, their profiles are "shockingly similar"

They are comparing a low resolution map the genome. The genome is 3+ billion nucleotides, only 700,000 (0.0002%) is being compared to find 0.04% difference! that is shockingly similar!

</comment><comment><USER43> Techniques used to read DNA only read short segments, from which larger segments are inferred.

Not surprisingly, the results are not reliable.

Feed the unreliable result into any classification algorithm, and you still get unreliably results (actually I was expecting worse)

Not only that, but you only read small parts- SNPs. So there is no bijection; just a rough correspondence. On the bright side, it's good for privacy.

<comment><USER32> I think you underestimate the quality and power of short read sequencing. Most well-designed sequence-based genotyping assays take into account the length of the read and are easy to read out. (You are thinking of issues with copy number variation and perhaps assembly of longer genes, which do have issues). The sticky part is the analysis--how realiable are your databases and your algorithm for representing the mix of SNPs and INDELs as %European...that is the question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> They really should have done the obvious quality control test: each of the twins should have done each DNA test several times, at least twice. Most comments seem to assume that the test samples were uncontaminated and that the sequencing was correct. Redundancy will help identify the source of the differences.

</comment><comment><USER45> I don't know if any company provides that, but I would like to have access to my raw data (I guess, several Gbs worth or DNA pairs information) and use a different 3rd party of my choice for the analysis. (This way there would be a lot more competition for various ways to look at data).

</comment><comment><USER46> TFA seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill to be sensationalist.

I don't think anybody's ever claimed this type of mail in test is 100% accurate, and most of the results were within a couple percentage points of each other.

</comment><comment><USER47> What are the chances that these two people are not identical twins? i.e. fraternal. That could explain the differences in results from the same company. But they should also be quite trivially declared siblings in that case.

<comment><USER48> Mistaken zygosity is quite rare, in the single percent range, after doing some tests like blood groups or hair whorls. In this case, the DNA overlap is vastly higher than would be expected for siblings:

> According to the raw data from 23andMe, 99.6 per cent of those parts were > the same, which is why Gerstein and his team were so confused by the > results. They concluded the raw data used by the other four companies was > also statistically identical.

If they were siblings, ~50% of the (several hundred thousand) SNP calls would be the same, not 99.6%. (Which is about what you would expect from identical twins, since that's where either one disagrees with the other, and errors usually don't strike twice, so a 99.6% overlap roughly implies a per-SNP accuracy rate of sqrt(0.996) = 99.8%, which sounds reasonable given the difficulty of sequencing and the inherent noise & randomness.)

On a fun side note, identical twins are not _exactly_ 100% genetically identical, which is how rapist/murderer identical twins are being convicted these days based on DNA evidence; but there are so few unique mutations to each twin, and the new mutations wouldn't be on the common-SNP tests, that you have to do the equivalent of like 4 whole-genome sequences (IIRC, you need coverage of ~120x vs the more usual WGS of 30x) to get enough evidence to override the prior of any difference being just a repeated sequencing error, and it's very expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> > According to the raw data from 23andMe, 99.6 per cent of those parts were > the same

99.6% is hardly an impressive figure. I would expect 99.9999% between twins at least. Chimpanzees and humans already share about 96% of genes.

[https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/chimps- huma...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/chimps- humans-96-percent-the-same-gene-study-finds/)

</comment><comment><USER49> It makes sense, what I was wondering though was about the difference if any of the raw DNA (SNP) data they provide.

</comment><comment><USER50> I would expect this level of variance in tests given the original twin genomes are not identical.

</comment><comment><USER51> This is a great reason why I won't get this test done. The math is bad and (genetically identical) twins getting different results shows how bad the science is right now.

This reminds me of when economics try to predict what the GDP will be next year. It's almost always wrong, so why would ever listen to anyone who is always wrong?

It's mostly a scam, in my opinion.

<comment><USER43> Actually, the results are not so bad. The technique is rough, but even some basic MDS (multi dimensional scaling) on DNA gives things that look like the actual maps, so there is some scientific base.

Also, you should not underestimate how not knowing where you ancestors came from is disturbing for many people.

EDIT: for those who disagree, check what just the 1st two PC can give for European DNA after a simple rotation of the axis to match a map : [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/genmap1.jpg](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/genmap1.jpg)

I think it's fair to say there is a scientific base.

<comment><USER41> Why should that be disturbing to some people? I think the vast majority of people, at least in America, have no idea where their ancestors came from. Is the usual "I'm part Irish part German part Cherokee" meaningfully more satisfying than "I'm west African?"

I don't think it's a good thing for people to attempt to derive any aspect of their identity from their genealogical ancestry, it has no bearing on who you are as a person, and has the potential for great harm. I've seen it used to give people a false sense of culture and belonging to a community that they previously had nothing to do with. If you felt a connection to a particular culture or identity, should we really be telling people that their genome is responsible for determining whether or not they can associate parts of those cultures with themselves?

Racism results from a failure to separate identity from genome. If you listen to the dogma of a white supremacist, it's heavily predicated on associating the accomplishments of their "European" forefathers with themselves. If you listen to the dogma of a black supremacist, it's heavily predicated on assuming the identity of the Egyptians or Israelites and associating their accomplishments with themselves.

I really think that if an individual is truly "disturbed" by not knowing the precise nature of their lineage, that is an individual in search of an identity on a plate, and therefore highly corruptible. The motivation to learn more about one's ancestry should ideally not surpass the level of an intellectual curiosity.

<comment><USER43> I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis on the risks.

I still think it can have a positive role, if only to help the person emotional investment.

> Is the usual "I'm part Irish part German part Cherokee" meaningfully more > satisfying than "I'm west African?"

For that, "I'm west African" is less satisfying than "I did trace my roots to Mali" which can lead the person to study the history of the country, Timbuktu, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> So ancestry companies are a sham?

<comment><USER53> Being off by a few percent from nothing more than a cheek swab doesn't seem like a sham. I'm sure if they got a lot more sample to test from it could be made more accurate.

Have you looked at things like thermometers? They don't offer more than +- 2F accuracy for those under $100. Some meters, etc only offer +- 5% accuracy or worse. Those aren't shams.

<comment><USER54> In the article, one service reports 61% Balkan and another reports 23%. That one algorithm is mostly accurate within itself is hardly notable. That they're not close with one another means that one of them is way off or the industry is very inaccurate. If the latter is correct yet they're purported to be reasonably accurate, it's a sham.

<comment><USER55> My wife's percentages have changed over time w/o a new sample- they've just refined their data and can give better results from the original data.

<comment><USER54> Sure, but does it account for a large percentage change? If their reference data is so limited that adding to it can result in monumental changes, then it is currently inaccurate and a sham. If it isn't a large percentage change then lack of refinement doesn't adequately explain the significant variance across companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Mitochondrial DNA chimeras?

</comment><comment><USER57> I got a question to all of the Americans here. Why do you all care so much where you come from? Why are these services so popular? I honestly am not interested in my origins. Perhaps because I'm from Europe?

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm wondering what would happen if you'd send a GDPR request for deletion of personal data to such a DNA sequencing company. While you might not have sent them any of your DNA, relatives of you might have sent them theirs. Since DNA material can also be used to infer characteristics from close relatives, would DNA material of close relatives be considered personal data falling under the rules of GDPR?

</comment><comment><USER59> OK now you can see the S/N ratio.

</comment><comment><USER60> This is one of those HN threads with a lot of misinformation by people who don't know the subject area well but have a strong opinion anyway.

It would be helpful if folks would state their credentials/experience with respect to the subject area in their comment.

Mine: none whatsoever, but am interested in reading informed discussions with folks with either credentials or experience in subject matter.

<comment><USER61> > This is one of those HN threads with a lot of misinformation by people who > don't know the subject area well but have a strong opinion anyway.

So essentially just like every thread in every online discussion group then?

<comment><USER60> Well, computer-related topics tend to be ok around here... not always, but at least there's a critical mass of folks who work in the area so the probability of coming across an informed opinion is much higher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> The results are crap, but at least the national security apparatus has your DNA to use against you in the future.

<comment><USER63> They swab your cheek if you're detained at a protest on federal property, why would they need this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> It sounds like these companies are running very inefficient machine learning algorithms.

<comment><USER65> Isn't all scientific endeavour "very inefficient machine learning algorithms"?

<comment> shawn-butler "recreational scientific activity"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> These DNA kits are like astrology for people who think they're too smart for astrology.

</comment><comment><USER67> > ...suspects it has to do with the algorithms each company uses...

        switch (rand() % 100) {...}</comment>


Happy birthday Debian - <AUTHOR> http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120816

<comment><USER2> Anecdote (I assume I'll get down-voted since it's HN but I don't give a fuck, please yourself):

In my city, in Montreal, people love to honk all over the place when their favourite sport team wins. It's freakin annoying.. I'm not a hockey fan and I couldn't care less that a team just won a tournament or whatever. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to see people happy about it.. but it's not an excuse to go honk in the streets at 10 PM and yelling non-stop.

Anyway, 2 years ago, a Linux kernel was just released and I decided to have some fun driving the street and honk-ing at 10PM. I did that for a good 15-20 minutes before being arrested by the police. I then explained why I was honking and that since hockey fans could go in the street, _I_ could do it.

Believe it or not, I had no tickets and they told me they understood and would make sure nobody would honk in my neighbour.. and even now, after 2 years, I see police cars in front of my house arresting people who honk when hockey or football/soccer teams win.

Meh.. so when I see these "Happy birthday Debian", I like to think that, maybe somewhere, a little nerd like me is happy and go out honking in their neighbour.

<comment><USER3> I have a feeling you might get quite a few upvotes, that made me chuckle.

I'm trying to imagine a society where this is in reverse and it's all the "jocks" who are into Linux and the nerds who watch sports. That would certainly be interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Debian was my third distribution (after Slackware and a short stint on Redhat). I started using it on the recommendation of some more experienced students in college, around 2001(?).

I've stayed with Debian ever since. In the beginning it was (of course) for the automatic package dependancy resolution and retrieval.

Over a decade+ of use, I've never understood people who made fun of Debian for being deprecated by the time it came out. I always used sid/unstable to get the latest-and-greatest on my desktops and put up with the occasional breakage (maybe 2 or 3 times in over a decade), and used the rock-solid stable on my servers.

I've also always been impressed by the work and dedication of Debian Developers (DDs). From knowing a few, I think having "Debian Developer" on your resume is an excellent badge of quality.

<comment><USER5> In my experience, most of the heat Debian has received has been from its strict adherence to open source guidelines. A lot of people like to make fun of the distro for its lack of pragmatism.

<comment><USER6> I would agree. The Firefox/Iceweasel thing is probably the best example of this.[1] It seems silly on the surface (who cares right?) but Debian is very strict on the idea of freely redistributable software, even to minute levels other distros might not care about. The presence of debian-legal for so long is another testament to this fact (the mailing list archives go back to 1998). [2]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_Debian_project#Origins_of_the_issue_and_of_the_Iceweasel_name)

[2] <http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/>

<comment><USER7> I think it is completely non-silly. Debian was very simply and to the letter of the law in violation of the terms under which a piece of software can be called Firefox, and at any time Mozilla Corporation is entitled to bring civil action, as far as I can tell. My understanding is that at the time they were backpatching security fixes to derivative versions of Firefox -- specifically, older versions for which upstream had dropped support. What if one of those introduced an annoying crash or security problem? Is it fair that Mozilla Corporation's Good Name on the hook for it, if it does not wish to be?

If Mozilla Corporation (or would it be Foundation?) felt that they wanted to enable this kind of derivative distribution of their software, they could have very simply offered provisions like the Linux Trademark Institute: <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/programs/legal/trademark>. Clearly, Debian still has many references -- and modifications -- to Linux.

Problem solved. But, as far as I can tell, this was not to be.

I am not a Debian developer nor someone who was actively following that conversation, but when I heard about the decision I have not heard a single convincing (or even any) argument that it was an incorrect one, but again, I'm not familiar with the matter in great detail. Proprietary software companies can be awfully persnickety about...well, everything regarding their license and trademark, and I don't see why lack of adherence to a contract is acceptable just because there is Free Software (but not free trademark) involved.

The silliest part is the name chosen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have such fond memories of sneaking printouts of The Debian Policy Guide and A Brief History of Debian into my boring high school classes and reading them tucked into my binders labeled "Spanish" and "Pre-Calc".

I still remember how I marveled at the Debian Developers Map (<http://www.debian.org/devel/developers.loc>), which showed in one image a collaboration of hundreds of talented individuals across the globe, working to make computers better and freer.

I remember reading these words in the "Debian Manifesto", which seemed like an ideal for all life, not just software: "The Debian design process is open to ensure that the system is of the highest quality and that it reflects the needs of the user community. By involving others with a wide range of abilities and backgrounds, Debian is able to be developed in a modular fashion. Its components are of high quality because those with expertise in a certain area are given the opportunity to construct or maintain the individual components of Debian involving that area."

Yep, Debian is 19 years old today, but its effect on my philosophy toward software engineering just as strong now as it was over a decade ago. Cheers to a great project: <http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2012/08/16/the-debian-manifesto>

<comment><USER9> I didn't know the Manifesto, but the Debian Social Contract[1] was definitively an important part in my choice to use Debian on all my systems.

[1]: <http://www.debian.org/social_contract>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The killer feature that Debian offered to me, way back in 1.2 or 1.3 days, was that I would never have to reinstall the whole system for a major version upgrade.

Debian kept that promise, and I've been using Debian ever since. The company I work at is now almost entirely Debian for servers, and the non-Mac users also have it as their desktop system.

</comment><comment><USER11> It was 8 years ago when I started using Debian after trying out numerous distributions and it was the first one that just "worked" for me. I have been using it on all my servers, and my desktop (During the Vista years) ever since.

Here's to another 19 years!

</comment><comment><USER12> After getting late to the whole Linux game I've started with Ubuntu. Everytime I upgraded to the next version something broke (I think I started with 8.10 and stayed until 10.04). Everytime I got the death stare from my gf. (She just wants everything to work - why did I change anything ?). Then I didn't bother with it any more and went directly to Debian. Now I'm running nearly exclusively Debian (testing at home, stable at work / servers) and I am happy with it.

The change to gnome3 was a big ordeal (one of my desktops refused to work correctly for 2 month - another time of death - stareing), but now it seems great and stable.

I think I am not the right person for an unstable distribution.

A bit thank you to the people who make Debian possible ! Every distribution I am using and I've been using was based on Debian - Ubuntu / Crunchbang and AvLinux and it was always a good foundation for these distributions.

</comment><comment><USER13> I first installed Debian in 1999. I remember when Potato came out and was all the rage. :)

The installer certainly was intimidating though once I got my head around dselect it made sense. I don't think they even use dselect on the installer anymore by default anymore.

I still run it on a few servers and its a great server distro.

</comment><comment><USER14> I really wish I could use Ubuntu, but I can't bring myself to use any Debian derivative after the OpenSSL debacle.

<comment><USER15> A reasonable, perhaps a tad extreme, approach. May I ask which OS you do use? OpenBSD?

<comment><USER14> Fedora. Yes I know it's bleeding edge and probably has vulnerabilities, but I can't imagine what kind of organization lets a single developer patch OpenSSL without oversight and then ship it. For me, its a matter of principle, not practical security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm an Ubuntu user (though if I keep having to use Unity I don't know for how much longer). Where would Ubuntu be (except the vast Unity mistake crap bs which has nothing to do with Debian), Ubuntu (except for Unity) rocks! That means Debian must also rock, happy birthday Debian!

<comment><USER9> I won't try to convince you not to switch to Debian, but you don't actually need to use Unity on Ubuntu. At work we use Ubuntu, so I just installed a different WM (Awesome, in my case) and logged out and back in.

<comment><USER17> _sudo apt-get install gnome-shell_ also goes a long way to make Ubuntu usable.

<comment><USER16> I tried Gnome Shell. For me Gnome classic is better but since I keep encountering Ubuntu systems that use Unity, I feel like I should keep trying to like it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> (No one does this yet, so I wanna be the first one) Happy birthday debian!</comment>


Bush says 'civil liberties were guaranteed' under his NSA Internet surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/01/bush-says-civil-were-liberties-guaranteed-under-his-nsa-internet-surveillance/

<comment><USER2> I believe Bush in the sense that Cheney et. al. probably told Bush that Americans' rights were not being abused, and Bush believed them.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What's shocking about this...is I actually believe Bush and understand why he approved the surveillance in the first place.

Only problem I have with this article is this statement is misdirected: " _I think he damaged the security of the country_."</comment>


An Unhackable Server is Still Vulnerable - <AUTHOR> http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2009/07/14/an-unhackable-server-is-still-vulnerable.aspx

<comment><USER2> We have recieved panicked phone calls in the past along the lines of "our mission critical servers just got torn apart, help". After a rescue the next sentence out of the CEO's mouth is usually "can you make them unhackable? We'll pay".

The quest for an unhackable server _is_ (obviously) a pipe dream. But people will still do it. Because companys will still pay for them to do so :)

And at the end of the day some good practices/apps/tools have come out of it.</comment>