Still locked out of my AWS account - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Qmlae337GXZdXnlHcQV2oMd0Yoj0ytQQiK02TghPUHc/edit?usp=sharing <comment><USER3> I've been locked out of my AWS account for almost 3 years now. I have 2FA enabled, tied to a phone number I no longer have access to.

I receive two emails per month. One invoice, for $0.80 (I cannot remember what is running on there, but I guess it must be something). One threatening, "Your AWS Account is about to be suspended". I've been "about to be suspended" for the entire 3 years.

I want to pay the bill, I can't log in.

I emailed, I phoned. Eventually I spoke to somebody, who told me the only way I could access my account was to fill in "some paperwork"[1]. They emailed that to me. It has to be notarized. I called again, they absolutely will not accept this if it is not notarized.

I've explained to them that all I want to do is pay the ~$30 in bills I've accrued for 3 years. I don't mind if I never get access to the account - <USER2> me pay the bill and shut the account down, they won't have it. I don't have any free notary access, and I'm not willing to pay more than the AWS bill amount just to be able to pay the bill. I've explained that to them, and they don't seem to care about that either, they'd rather not have the bill payed and continue piling it up.

[1] [https://s3.amazonaws.com/AWSCS_CustomerForms/IdentityVerific...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/AWSCS_CustomerForms/IdentityVerificationFormAffidavit.doc)

<comment><USER4> I was locked out of my AWS account for about 2 years due to loosing my 2FA authenticator on my phone. But had no open bills and didn't really care about it, so I did not try to gain back access.

Until last week, when I decided that I need to use the account again. I simply clicked the recovery link on their 2FA login form. Had to enter my account details and my phone number. Within 15 minutes (as stated on the website) a member of their service team called me. I explained the situation (lost 2FA app). Not a problem, the service agent told me. He then sent me an e-mail (to my AWS-associated mail address) with some random characters, which I had to read back to him. After that he simply removed 2FA, and I was able to log in with my username/password. For me the experience was quite pleasant, but had someone else have access to my e-mail account and knew my AWS username/password, he might have been able to take over my account, bypassing 2FA. I don't quite know how to feel about that.

EDIT: Ok, this probably only works if your phone number is also already associated with your account. So an attacker additionally would need access to my phone number, making things quite a bit more secure in my view.

<comment><USER5> Could the number be spoofed?

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately, yes - by going through the customer services of most mobile phone companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> 8 days ago I tried to log in to my Amazon retail account, and received a password invalid error. As it turned out my account had been closed, as it appeared to Amazon that it had received a suspicious log in. This is the same account that I use for AWS - hosting websites critical to my business.

Today it appears I am no closer to gaining access back to my AWS account than I was on day 1, even though I have been billed as normal for my services during this time.

This should serve as a warning to anybody else who has an Amazon account that is shared between retail and AWS.

Linked is a list of every event and interaction I have had during the last 8 days with Amazon, via Twitter, email, phone and chat.

<comment><USER7> This happened to me with instagram.

I reset a password, then they detected "suspicious activity." I clicked "send pin via email" and the email never shows up. I've done it 3 or 4 times over the course of a week + it never works. It's a documented error + FB/Instagram refuse to addres it.

[https://medium.com/@joelrunyon/instagrams-security- features-...](https://medium.com/@joelrunyon/instagrams-security-features-are- broken-and-they-won-t-do-anything-about-it-16233f0935b0)

<comment><USER8> And a similar thing has happened to me with Microsoft. I needed to get to my OneDrive. I go to log in, and it says invalid password. I go to reset the password, and it never sends me an email. I go through the alternate-email update process, answer the security questions, and it doesn't believe I am who I am.

When I try to get access to real support (a person), it makes me login. Back to problem #1.

Also, I should note that the email on record is real and works. The only thing I can think of is I named it microsoft@mydomain, and they don't like the word microsoft in it?

<comment><USER9> Same here (email never arrived) with my Apple Developer Account.

<comment><USER10> I got into a similar situation when Apple prompted me to turn on 2-factor auth, and then after I accepted it wouldn't send 2-factor codes.

Thankfully the "we turned on 2-factor" email gives you a link to turn it back off within 30 days or I would have been in some trouble.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Also having problem with AWS - can't access it and they keep billing me for something there I want to shut it down (EC2?) but I can't.

I recently moved from Brazil to UK (new address) and changed phone + sim card (Authenticator after restore from backup lost all 2 factor auth entries).

This is the moment when you realise that you're outside of predefined use cases of The Machine and you're fucked. Nobody is here to help you. I've tried, nobody gives a shit at Amazon. They have procedures, you know.

I blame 2FA and I think it's great if you don't have problems but it's shit if you have, ie. you move places, change phones etc. in your life. Something there in the process is missing like "next of kin" recovery that should be mandatory when enabling 2FAs.

<comment><USER12> This is why, when creating a new 2FA login, you MUST write down the one time use backup codes, and store them in a safe and secure place.

<comment><USER13> I learned this the hard way when google authenticator failed to restore my keys after a phone upgrade. Now I make sure I copy the data from those QR codes and store them in a GPG encrypted file (I store the data and the QR code itself as utf-8 art in the file).

<comment><USER14> The way that first sentence is phrased makes it sound like it was the app's fault.

<comment><USER13> I blame the app entirely. Not marking the private keys as something to backup is a really really sucky thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> UPDATE: The hold has been removed from my account, and I have access again. Even though I had previously been told my account had been closed, it seems like this wasn't final. This resolution was down to an escalation of my case at Amazon, after a team member contacted me through Twitter and promised to personally look into it.

<comment><USER15> Did they mention this article when they contacted you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some great advice in here about creating multiple accounts with a + sign in the email address. One thing I didn't see mentioned that is a standard best practice for AWS is to create a separate IAM account for your day to day usage and NEVER log into your root account (unless you need to open a billing support ticket) after creating the IAM account.

You will get a new login page and username to log in with and not need an email address specific account.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/best- practic...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/best- practices.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> The moral of the story is that your AWS account and your personal amazon buying account should be separate.

As well, if you use Kindle Direct Publishing, are an Amazon Seller, work for Amazon Flex, or use the Amazon Affiliates program, each of these should also be on an independent Amazon account.

This way, problems on one won't affect problems on the other.

<comment><USER18> I am not convinced such a separation would be effective. Accounts identified as being associated with a "problem" account (shared CC, addresses, etc) could also justifiably be closed. The idea being to keep "abusive" individuals from just opening a new account and resuming their abusive behavior.

The only long term solution is to get a person with enough power to make their own decisions to look at your claims, but that takes quite some time and is not guaranteed to be successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Stories like this are frustrating and a symptom of the impact very large companies can have on multiple facets of our lives.

One possible approach is to keep accounts separate for personal and each business that you are involved with. For example, you probably have at least a separate personal checking account and business checking account. Likewise, it would make sense to have all accounts used for a given business to only be used for that business.

In addition to providing some safety against automated action, division of accounts provides a nice legal line, wherein if a court order requires you to disclose information, you can simply dump everything on the account without touching any of the other businesses or personal documents.

Stymieing this, of course, is companies (Facebook?) that have a policy of prohibiting a single real person from having distinct accounts.

</comment><comment><USER20> Send an email to email@example.com

Jeff Bezos himself said if you are having problems you should mail him directly. Behind this address there is a full team investigating the issue and if it's something they want to handle will actually lead to improvements for all customers.

<comment><USER21> I think if Jeff actually cared he would have put some personnel in place to back up "Your feedback is helping us build Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company".

It's odd though, in my experience customer support on Amazon is amazingly good.

<comment><USER22> Mine hasn't been. I've had all sorts of petty issues with their customer support. Basically any time something falls outside of the norm or if anything is genuinely wrong with site functionality, their remedial processes are poor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I spent a month and a half locked out of my AWS account due to 2FA issues and being caught in a Mobius strip with AWS support.

IMHO 2 problems with how AWS handles customer support (vs. other co's):

1\. Different support rep every time = following the same script with every phone call. I'm sure assigning first available rep speeds up response times but for you, if the problem can't be resolved in 1 phone call it's like talking to someone with Alzheimer's, you're constantly re-answering the same 15 questions to a new person every time.

2\. Customers are not allowed to directly interface with level 2+ support, only the nontechnical level 1 support can do that. Good luck getting them to communicate your technical issue correctly.

For example, every single support rep asked me if I had 2FA disabled for my Amazon retail account (I did). After re-answering this question with every single rep, they'd file tickets with the next level of support...only to be rejected later because level 2+ said it was most likely because I had 2FA on on my Amazon retail account (I did not). It was nearly impossible to bridge this disconnect.

Customer support is not easy to do well so I hesitate to widely impugn Amazon's efforts, but if you're an AWS customer and you have an issue that's an edge case outside of the scripts these support reps are using prepare to waste weeks or months of your life trying to resolve it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Whilst this is more about AWS accounts, the ability of Amazon (and other cloud providers) to lock you out of an account with very limited recourse does present some other problems.

I've got quite a few ebooks I've bought via Amazon Kindle. If amazon one day decided to delete/lock my account, I would lose access to all that content which I had "bought".

The more data people store in various cloud providers systems, the more the need for some kind of recovery mechanism / dispute resolution process becomes apparent.

Whilst its relatively easy, in many cases, for more technical users to ensure they have backups of data that they control, less technical users could have a lot of their information tied up in these systems, and loss of it could be quite bad for them.

<comment><USER25> You don't really buy eBooks. You can't resell them after all. You're just renting them.

I'd look up some of the free tools out there and backup/un-DRM your Amazon/Nook/Google e-books. There are some guides out there for extracting your books notes as well.

<comment><USER26> Thus my quotes around "bought" . Again whilst technical people likely know the consequences of buying DRM protected content, I think that a non-technical person who suddenly found their paid for content removed from them due to an automated process locking/deleting their account would be quite upset.

People are, for better or worse, entrusting more and more of their content to cloud services, things like photographs, documents they've created, music etc etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have yet to receive a human response from Coinbase after contacting them 59 days ago... time to nag them again.

<comment><USER28> Write to Fred Wilson firstname.lastname@example.com (investor in coinbase)

Guaranteed that you will see the escalation that you need. You may want to provide links to others complaints about the same that you can find but make it short and simple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Who are you?" is the most expensive question in technology. No matter how you get it wrong, you're fucked.

Letting the wrong person in to an account? You're fucked.

Locking the right person out of an account? You're fucked.

Given that data can't be reversed as charges can, arresting an account may be slightly preferable, but it remains highly disrupting.

I've been through the experience a few times myself, largely with Google. Out of a fit of pique, the temporary account I created for myself (and through which I negotiated for recovery) was "The Real Slim Shady". Several of my G+ contacts noted that they could be pretty certain that this was in fact me, though I'm a little frightened _whichever_ way that works out.

(I _did_ have other profiles through which I could announce my plight.)

I still think that the matter of idientification, or rather, the _more primary_ matters of authentication, authorisation, integrity, validation, payment authorisation, ownership, receipts rights, and similar associations, need to be worked out.

I'm also strongly in favour of a system in which a physical token -- and I think a signet ring with a very-near-field chip and accompanying sensors on mobile, laptop, and desktop devices would be just about perfect -- should be part of that systme.

 _Not_ an insertable device (as with Yubikey), or something requiring keying in a value (as with RSA fobs). But something which is worn (so: on you at all times), _replaceable_ , _destroyable_ , _discardable_ , but also exceedingly difficult to duplicate or appropriate, or to read without intention on the part of the owner.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2w618r/how_to_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2w618r/how_to_kill_your_google_account_access_it_via_tor/)

</comment><comment><USER30> We had exactly the same issue. We solved it by creating a new AWS account and using that to call support.

Once through, being persistent eventually (it took a week or so) saw us regain access to the account.

<comment><USER31> He did just that though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Might sound obvious in hindsight, but _always_ create separate AWS accounts for your different projects.

<comment><USER33> Doesn't this require separate gmail addresses? If so, then that's an _extremely_ bad idea. I already had one gmail account completely banned with no notice. I wasn't doing anything abusive -- I used it for some npm projects and a github account.

Actually, is there a reasonable free gmail alternative for situations like this? I'd like to migrate. FastMail is worth paying for, but it's too expensive for one-off side projects. And while I don't trust gmail, I think I trust most services even less.

EDIT: My point was, if you use a single account, it's far less likely to get banned. I think my account was caught in some sort of automated purge, since I certainly wasn't abusing anything. Some proof: [http://i.imgur.com/H5RRkyP.png](http://i.imgur.com/H5RRkyP.png) I'm not sure which policy violation they're referring to, but all appeals failed. I lost all emails in that account, which thankfully wasn't very serious because the account was still young.

eropple and drbawb pointed out that you can use plus addresses with AWS, e.g. firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER34> Sometimes I feel like I'm last person on the planet who has their own domain and hosts their own email.

<comment><USER35> I don't host my own email (I've had terrible experiences trying to send), I do have my own domain and let someone else host my email (In this case Google :( but since it's my domain I can change it and it doesn't matter to anyone).

Aside: It always frustrates me when I see a business with their own domain and then an @gmail.com or @aol.com address. What registrars don't offer basic email forwarding (often for free?) or cheap (~$10 email) service you can buy from them if you can't figure out Google for your Domain)?

I feel like there is a small, but profitable space here, I just can't figure out what to do to harness it.

<comment><USER36> Zoho is pretty much free for personal uses. They charge per user per month, but under 25 users is free, and if you're not a business you don't have that many users.

I have numerous personal projects that are web sites/web apps and I use Zoho to get emails at all those domains.

I don't know if this is frowned upon by Zoho, but if you don't want to use their UI, you can set up your regular personal Gmail account to act as a POP3 client and just retrieves emails from Zoho that way. (now that I wrote it out, it makes me think it can't be frowned upon, simply because POP3 is even offered as a feature there)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've had the same issue with buying and selling accounts - my buying account got locked out, which prevented me from logging in to my selling account, with 50 pending orders at the time. Luckily I emailed firstname.lastname@example.com and got my main account unlocked within 2 days and my buying eventually got back a week or two later.

Seems like they still haven't fixed the underlying issue of bots locking accounts across services.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm one account flag change or one password reset from being in this exact situation, and it's terrifying. I have been an Audible customer since before Amazon bought them. Somewhere in their account aggregation process, I've ended up with at least four distinct logins for amazon that all use the same email address.

One email address... And i use one password for audble, one for amazon, one for aws, and one for amazon affiliate. If I password reset on _any one_ of those services, my accounts are all bricks. I've made that mistake once and had to frantically call audible support & climb through the support chains until someone could basically undo my password change.

During the process, they offered to try and deduplicate my accounts, but I think we're going to need a team of senior-level DBAs to sort this shit out.

</comment><comment><USER39> My recommendation would be to email jbarr[at]amazon.com directly.

He will probably naturally see this thread over the course of the day though if it get's popular anyway....

</comment><comment><USER40> Exact same issue. Have tried to resolve it for six months now. I've cancelled the credit card and they can f* themselves.

</comment><comment><USER41> I love AWS - but why, oh why, is a retail account linked to it? These need to be entirely separate.

<comment><USER42> This. This is the worst design flaw I am aware of in AWS. It makes no sense that Amazon's two totally different businesses, use the same account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Email email@example.com. This same thing happened to me a few months ago. I tried everything and was banging my head against the wall. After emailing email@example.com the issue was resolved in less than 24 hours.

</comment><comment><USER44> Expected from the earths most customer centric company. Here in India, my first order at Amazon was a fraud done by Amazon with its JV firm CloudTail. tl dr: Amazon Fulfilled product sold at fake discount and MRP mentioned on site was higher than printed MRP.

[https://medium.com/@snaushads/my-first-order-at-amazon- in-5c...](https://medium.com/@snaushads/my-first-order-at-amazon- in-5cba59ac932)

</comment><comment> Paul-ish They tell him to create a new account because they think the old one was compromised? I would be furious. I have bought a number of books on Kindle. If this happened to me, I would essentially lose all of the books I purchased. I'm not sure I would ever use Amazon again.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm actually glad its this way. Its difficult to take over an account.

If you can't keep your passwords in check and use 2FA you ought to lose the account & make a new one. Some kind of consistency, e.g 2FA or password is needed to keep it secure.

</comment><comment><USER46> >This should serve as a warning to anybody else who has an Amazon account that is shared between retail and AWS.

Wouldn't Amazon have locked your AWS account for unauthorized login as well? I don't see how the retail activity matters here.

</comment><comment><USER47> Since we're on this topic: Is a Google Apps account considered "seperate"? Eg I have firstname.lastname@example.com and firstname.lastname@example.com.

So I'm thinking of centralizing all non-business to gmail.com and the rest to gordon.com.

</comment><comment><USER48> Before bitcoin caught up with general public, I became interested in what it is to mine. To try it, I set up mining software in heroku. I knew even then that it is not a very nice thing to do, but it was free for me. I wasn't looking for money or something. In a day, my account was banned permanently, without prompting me of anything. While it deserved to be banned, but maxing out the CPU might even be caused by simple mistake in a legitimate way. I have a big suspicion that they can read the application code if there is a problem like this.

</comment><comment><USER43> This happened to me as well. Email email@example.com. No joke, within 24 hours I was good to go. It worked for me a few months ago.

</comment><comment><USER49> Any references to how one should go about separating an Amazon retail account and an AWS account, if they are presently the same?

<comment><USER50> The best option I know is rebuilding your services in a new AWS account. That will let you can keep using the same Amazon retail account as before, and transfer your assets in AWS to an account tied to your production organization.

CloudFormer[0] might be able to automate some of the process - it analyzes your existing VPC and generates a CloudFormation[1] template. You could then take this template and deploy the stack in your new account, and you'd only have to rebuild the remaining few items.

Then you could redeploy all your applications, test, and migrate production services to your freshly-tested instance. Finally, you must be aggressive in shutting down the old services. It would be agonizing to have your entire site down because one server remains in the old account, and the account had some issue. Feel free to contact me for more specific advice.

[0] [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-why-use-aws- cloudformer-a...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-why-use-aws-cloudformer- ashish-kucheria-1)

[1] [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGui...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/Welcome.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I was locked out and charged from October till May being charged. Finally got a full refund. It's a nice savings plan lol

</comment><comment><USER52> This is such an unfathomable problem to me. When I need someone at my DC, I just call them and they pick up the phone.

<comment><USER53> You can pay Amazon for that level of support.

<comment><USER52> The level of support where they won't ignore my emails after locking me out of my account and compromising my production servers for a week without my consent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Always use MFA.

</comment><comment><USER55> This story reminds me of a friend of mine who has a second Amazon account just for his Kindle. He does that because he read a story where someone lost access to their Kindle books after Amazon closed their account.

Guess this idea applies to AWS as well.

</comment><comment><USER56> Time to contact your solicitor chap.

</comment><comment><USER57> [Deleted]

<comment><USER58> Please delete your comment.

I am incredibly happy that Digital Ocean made you go to those lengths to get your account back. The last thing we need is web services companies requiring less security. Social engineering attacks are typically the method of entry to hosting providers such as Digital Ocean.

Frankly I would be totally fine if they required another form of ID (such as a passport) or another form of address/name verification (such as a utility bill). Or perhaps even a picture of the card on file.

What is NOT okay is a lack of response, which this article is describing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I had two experiences getting locked out of accounts.

First was an old pre-Atlassian BitBucket one that just broke due to shenanigans with Atliassian accounts integration or SOMETHING. But big props to them. I complain and I get it fixed super quick. Just how it should be. Solid 4 out of 5 (5 is for guys who managed to not lock my account due to weird mergers, I'm even OK with the weird "don't use FRex, form now on login with your email: firstname.lastname@example.com" I get on attempting 'FRex' \+ password).

Second is Twitter. FUCK THEM so hard. Excuse my French but I have no other words for how idiotic this situation is, it'd make a saint mad.

I make an Twitter account using my secondary/side gmail account that has been phone verified and 2FA using Google Auth for Andoird, verified my Twitter account by clicking link in the email they sent there, connect it to my YouTube account that has been phone verified, send out the welcoming tweet they propose (something like "Hello Twitter!", I think it was just a button press or a combo box to pick from but I might be wrong now) and I get banned for (exact wording may vary) 'suspicious/possibly automated activity' (mhmm... these huge botnets of phone verified 2FA gmail and YT accounts operating out of EU ips... good job catching me Twitter).

I could of course act like a good peon and provide them a phone number and be graciously allowed by the Twitter Heavenly Emperors to use my 10 minutes old account. I write to their support via some super idiotically hidden panel of theirs on twitter while still in my 'locked' account and.. I get an automated (!) email to my gmail (!!) telling me in steps how to just fuck off and enter my phone number (!!!) and to ask for help if I don't have it unlocked after providing a phone number and waiting a few minutes ('fucktastic' was the word of the day that day, seriously, that made my day). I wrote another one, telling them to shove it (in kinder words and with zero profanity but firmly making it clear I'd not provide my number on account I did literally nothing on and want to use for YouTube connectivity to a verified channel and created on a 2FA and phone verified gmail account I verified by clicking the link in the email) and got another bot email and no reply since then (about a month ago). Total human replies: 0. Bot replies: 3+ (see below). And I'm the one running an automated operation in here.

And the cherry on top: I still get trending political BS tweets (because that's what trending where I live every week) sent to my social tab in gmail and can't disable it since my account is locked and throws me to 'provide a number' screen that only has 'help' (blabbering about how I must be the one in the wrong here but if I provide a phone number..) and 'log out' available. Good fucking riddance. I truly dodged a bullet by using my alternate gmail!

And all this on a service that has users that are outright bots, Nazis, terrorists (ISIS itself), hacktivists (you can argue some of it is a positive force for change or securing up but it's still highly illegal and often done just for lulz) and the like.

Of course I'm not going to give in to this BS. I can sort of understand Google/YouTube with their stuff and it actually helped me once by requiring SMS verification when my kinda weak old password got cracked/guessed but what Twitter did is downright dumb extortion ("gib phon number! gib, gib, don't write support requests! 1st gib!") or them being idiots (what did I do that's suspicious exactly.. make a Twitter account in 2017?) and grossly neglecting their users (0 human reply, ever). Twitter fortunately would just be a nice- to-have for my side hobby of YTing and I have the privilege of saying "fuck no" to them for this and shitting on them on every occasion but if this was my mail gmail it'd do me in for weeks before I recovered all of my stuff.

There are horror stories on YT too, see Millbee (let's plays) or I Hate Everything a.k.a. IHE(critique/shitposting), banned overnight (Millbee for a nip snip in an anime game despite all the nudity, GONE SEXUAL and borderline CP on YT going unpunished and IHE for 'community guidelines' for a video of smashing a film DVD that was later hand judged as not in violation), both returned after a social shitstorm but with no apology, explanation, nothing. I bet if I was a high up in some company and had a company account tweet what BS I went through it'd all suddenly be fixed in a jiffy with no need for my phone number. But what are internet and real life rank and file tech nobodies supposed to do..?

</comment><comment><USER60> Protip for everyone on this site.

Look at a companys stock price. If it's in the triple digits, avoid it, because they can and will screw you over.

<comment><USER61> Lol so Microsoft, Comcast and Sony are safe?

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> This should be a good warning about what you can expect when relying on other companies for service.

<comment><USER63> This is such a meaningless statement. What exactly are you trying to convey?

<comment><USER64> Don't ever use services provided by a third party. That's why I cut my own hair, make my own toothpaste, and create my own electricity from coal I mine myself!

<comment><USER62> Your comparison, and the toaster one by the responder, are nonsensical. There's a difference between a product and a service. Toothpaste is a product, not a service. AWS is a service, not a product. You can buy toothpaste anywhere; if you want to compare with AWS, AWS is like hiring a dental hygienist to come to your house twice a day and brush your teeth for you instead of doing it yourself. The hair-cutting bit is valid, but lots of people cut their own hair, especially men. The electricity bit is only partially valid; coal is a commodity that you can buy, just like toothpaste. You can also buy solar panels and make yourself totally independent of the electric utility. But it falls down because electric utilities are utilities and are regulated as such, whereas AWS is not regulated. The toaster thing is just dumb; toasters are cheap commodities. Again, the AWS comparison is hiring a butler to make your toast for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> If it's critical to your business, why not do your hosting elsewhere? Is it because you are locked in already? I am building a product that will help people migrate across cloud providers, so that's the context...

<comment><USER66> Presumably he built it with AWS in mind, using their proprietary services and APIs. I'm certain if it was easy to have transitioned away from AWS, he would've already done so.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you currently monitor cron jobs? - <AUTHOR> Sometimes a cron job fails and you won't even notice for weeks or months that it is failing unless you manually check things (e.g, check data on the db, check the logs, run the cron job manually and check if it will finish running successfully, etc...).
I'm curious on how do you currently monitor cron jobs?
Like how do you know immediately that your cron jobs are failing (e.g, it fails to run or it fails to finish running successfully because of an unexpected error)?
Currently, we are using CronMonit ( https://cronmonit.app/ ) which is a simple tool that we built that notifies us via email when our cron jobs fail. I'm curious what tool are you using or if you even use a cron monitoring tool at all? <comment><USER2> I use jenkins, they are not cron jobs at the system level, but jobs that can either be executed periodically (defined with cron syntax) executed manually or with a webhook (mainly for executing builds after a git push)

You can see the log of every execution, see what builds succeeded and failed, etc. It works for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> related: [https://google.com/search?q=monitor+cron+jobs](https://google.com/search?q=monitor+cron+jobs)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. But I'm curious what other people does.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Companies friendly to side projects? - <AUTHOR> Is there a list of companies that don't restrict their employees from working on side projects like amazon does? Bonus points if the company is remote.<p>Note : I'm not in california. <comment><USER2> Companies don't inherently restrict you. They will however, make you sign a non-compete and intellectual property ownership thing.

What matters is the legal documents you sign.

In Amazon's case, they do SO MANY THINGS that even what would be a very lenient non-compete for a small company is basically "no side projects for you." (Don't know the specific language, it's just the nature of what they are.)

In practice, a reasonable non-compete in a company that doesn't do more than one thing can be very unrestricted. E.g. you work for biotech company, non- compete/IP is about "related to company's business": you can do whatever you want in your free time, so long as it's unrelated to biotech area you're in, or maybe biotech in general.

Sometimes the legal document is not reasonable, e.g. they claim ownership of anything related to customers' and vendors' business, and they use GMail so it's anything related to google's business! But you can negotiate the legal agreements, especially with small companies (hiring a lawyer for a couple of hours makes this easier.)

</comment><comment><USER3> The best policy is don't task, don't tell.</comment>


Fast Service Payments with ΜRaiden - <AUTHOR> https://recruit.gmo.jp/engineer/jisedai/blog/fast-service-payments-with-µraiden/ <comment><USER2> Can't wait to see big crypto-payment aggregator (bitpay, coinpayments) to implement this. Bitcoin is unusable due to fees, Ethereum fees raising quickly - simple contract interaction costs $5-$10.</comment>


Show HN: Journali.sm, a Newsfeed for News - <AUTHOR> https://journali.sm <comment><USER2> A chronological feed without ads, how refreshing!

I have a related idea. There could be an open, machine-readable format websites could publish updates in; and clients that could consume these "feeds" in the way the user chooses. We could call it really simple syndication, or RSS for short. Site owners could even include ads if they want, embed podcasts or videos, and offer different feeds for different topics.

<comment><USER3> RSS, it's catchy. I like it.

<comment><USER4> "Where has this been all my life?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I really appreciate the clean news, it does seem a bit weird to me, because most news stories originate on _actual_ need feeds, like AP Wire, or Reuters. Having done work with those wires, you can see how diverse they are, to the point that you spend more time glossing for your interests than not.

HN is a great example of _not_ that model: it's a curated list for targeted readership/ engagement.

Edit: and then there's the issue of what feeds to use, so based on some target demographic, some feeds will not be shown (eg some small local community News from outback Australia), this means that it's already semi- filtered/ curated, but in a way that's minimally effective, imho.

 _If_ they were to take on the news wires head to head directly, and to allow a tiny publication to publish to the news wire: then they'd be onto something!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This was a little weekend project, essentially to be like your social media newsfeed, but actually for news. Let me know what you think

<comment><USER6> Looks great, and the only thing I could ask for is a way to request that more sources be added.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed! Is there anyone specific?

<comment><USER6> As far as bringing in some UK sources that were traditionally print, I'd probably go with The Guardian and the Telegraph - caveat, they do have a left- and right- leaning bent, respectively. There might be an AP feed you can get in addition to Reuters so people have more newswire options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How is this any different than Dave Winer's River of News which has been around for over five years?

[https://github.com/scripting/river5](https://github.com/scripting/river5)

<comment><USER8> It's a hosted service with multiple categories rather than FOSS you can self- host (with public examples).

I don't think it doesn't deserve to exist just because something else is already doing something similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is pretty cool, and it suits how I consume news. The feed only seems to include NYTimes and Reuters. Can I add my own publications or only choose from your list?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

Of the publishers in the top stories group, those two seem to push out the most. There are other sections if you click the hamburger. Otherwise you can sign up and choose the sources you want. I'm also open to adding new sources with consumable RSS feeds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A site in this space that's been indispensable to me for more than a decade now is Memeorandum ([https://www.memeorandum.com/](https://www.memeorandum.com/)). (And they have a tech-news focused version as well, Techmeme: [https://www.techmeme.com/](https://www.techmeme.com/))

Which isn't to say that a new entrant couldn't do this stuff better, of course! The more the merrier. I just mean that if your aim is to be the first thing I read every morning, here is who you will be trying to knock off the Iron Throne :-D

</comment><comment><USER11> Looks like something where you can take free [https://newsapi.org](https://newsapi.org) json data and put it into a vue.js single view web app in about 2 hours. Good idea. If you add login, signup, saved articles, and paid / ads you would have something.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is login and signup on the top bar -- you can choose what sources you want to see.

More features to come if people like this

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you're looking for more news sources, happy to hook you up with some extra API credit ([https://developers.civicfeed.com/](https://developers.civicfeed.com/))

<comment><AUTHOR> very cool. can you email me? jwiener at gmail dot com

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Doesn't escape HTML chars properly, at least in titles. I'm seeing one story now with the title "Things we'd change in existing college football playoff".

<comment><AUTHOR> Oof, that needs to be fixed -- thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> On a page that is meant to have the user scroll down to the next news article, and then to the next, and then to the next, it doesn't make much sense to me, to only have the menu and hamburger available on scroll up. I didn't even know it existed until I was reading the HN comments. Is this an actual standard thing, apologies if I'm going off for no reason.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is this purely in chronological order of publication or is there some algorithm selecting relevant stories and shuffling them to the top?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now its chronological-ish. Some publishers post stories with publication dates in the future (I guess its when it will be in the print edition?) so in that case the system goes with when it first saw it. So you'll see in some cases timestamps out of order, because its sorting by a slightly different timestamp.

At some point I would like to sort in a better way -- this was total MVP. Theres a few things I'd like to try to ultimately differentiate this from other aggregators or even RSS readers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I had a similar idea, but a feed for posts/comments related to those posts from various places on the web like reddit, forums, imageboards, etc.

What would really be great is a integrated night/darkmode for your night readers like me.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hope they've got their geoblocking in place for if/when the EU decides to axe (non-google) news aggregation via article 11... :|

</comment><comment><USER18> Also [https://www.hvper.com](https://www.hvper.com) [From the maker of Popurls fame]

</comment><comment><USER19> Very cool, I've recently been thinking of building something like this. Any thoughts on adding support for Pocket or Wallabag?

<comment><AUTHOR> to add to pocket, or to read what was already saved?

<comment><USER19> To add to pocket, specifically for reading on kindle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd be curious what the consequences of the new EU copyright law would be for a site like this?

</comment><comment><USER21> Very US centric! But a lovely interface.

</comment><comment><USER22> Good to see it's not full of "5 BERRIES DOCTORS HATE".

Good job! Gonna use.

</comment><comment><USER23> Like it! Could you let us know the tech stack used to build this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Front end is NextJS on now.sh -- including server side rendering. Backend is AWS. Whole thing is serverless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've been working on something similar to this for awhile now, not near completion though. It allows you to subscribe to some websites that include a paywall, for free, including adding your subscription accounts. It's made with Headless chrome and TypeScript.

<comment><USER25> Sounds illegal/like a violation of TOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> telescope.surf been doing this, for a while now (I'm pretty much a daily user of that site when I'm on my phone).

The no-bot and old uncle is a cliche by now.</comment>


Algorithm Design (2006) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.sjtu.edu.cn/~jiangli/teaching/CS222/files/materials/Algorithm%20Design.pdf <comment><USER2> Is this book meant to be free or is this a pirated copy?

<comment><USER3> Posted by a Chinese university, I am kinda guessing the latter. Pearson isn't known for giving stuff away out of the goodness of their hearts, and it's not super uncommon for university professors to just _post course materials_ without a lot of concern for where it came from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A textbook covering complexity analysis, the standard types of algorithms and most common algorithms in each category, with implementation notes. Could have been the textbook I had in 1992.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is not it piracy ?</comment>


Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe' - <AUTHOR> http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23779561 <comment><USER2> Previously submitted and discussed extensively.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6256384](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6256384)</comment>


Show HN: launch your features - request for free - <AUTHOR> https://whatfeatures.io/climbersclub/climbersclub <comment><AUTHOR> I built this using entirely no code - mainly bubble. My key learnings:

Bubble is incredibly easy to learn and great to make simple common processes More difficult when it comes to more complex calculations Most time consuming part is making pages responsive and well laid out for different screen sizes

Happy to answer any questions about my experience learning bubble</comment>


Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec?source=linkShare-134efade5062-1523216649 <comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774293](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774293)

</comment><comment><USER4> I generally agree with most of the article, but sorry, this big quote here (that the author apparently thinks of being a good punchline) is just plain wrong:

> There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to > solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to > solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.

Anyone who was trying to buy drugs/penis-pills/whatever-other-illegal- substance online and wanted to pay in an anonymous form would disagree. Anyone who had a bit of money in a country with restrictive international money transfer laws and who wanted to get that money out of said country would disagree.

For both of these groups, available blockchains provided a good solution to a real problem. And especially in the first group, which is generally underestimated in size I think, a lot of people genuinely got enthusiastic about blockchains and jumped on the cryptocurrency train relatively early - first to buy some weed or whatever, and later also to make more money out of less money. But the problem-seeking-a-solution situation was first!

<comment><USER5> The article is exaggerating, there must be someone who has problems that are solved by Bitcoin.

However, one of Bitcoin's features is that it has a completely public permanent ledger showing all transactions assigned to everyone. It is a wildly inappropriate technology for doing illegal things or skirting the law (which cross-country transfers outside the system could well be). It has more downsides than cash in a duffle bag.

<comment><USER6> That's exactly the issue privacy currencies like Monero and to an extent Zcash solve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Blockchain tech and the whole "trustless economy" freak me out _precisely_ because _I think they can work_... The things that emerge out of this and scale long-term can have some really scary consequences:

(1) a working "trustless economy" makes trust and peace no longer be requirements for a functional global economy... this opens the door to all sorts of fucked up scenarios like financing (or betting on) wars, no longer working for peace because it's not always required to make your economic schemes work, no longer caring about keeping your countries economy at least somewhat functional because you can always "pull _your_ money out" etc.

(2) a "human-less economy" enabled by smart contracts - long before autonomous "un-owned" corporations run by AIs take over the world, they will be used for all sorts of shady things, money laundering, toxic waste disposal by buying it but never paying to store it etc. I can't even imagine the creativity of the conmen and criminals that will start to play with these possibilities.

"Trustless" can work... just that it doesn't seem to lead to scenarios that increase the mid term survival changes of the human race :|

<comment><USER8> I think your concerns are very reasonable. However, I think that thinking them all the way through is cause for more optimism than you're applying. For example,

> no longer working for peace because it's not always required to make your > economic schemes work

Is this really a possibility? Peace is always good for bounty. Everybody everywhere wants peace. Along with justice, freedom, and love, it is one of the most unifying characteristics of the human condition.

It is precisely those middlemen whom blockchain tech might undermine that have seized upon these soft parts of human kind and turned perverted them.

In a world without fiat currency, I am quite confident that there will be less money for bombs and cheap plastic nonsense. This has been a critique of fiat currency for thousands of years, and only now does humanity have a tool to visualize it.

And it's not hard to imagine blockchain technology replacing currency and consumerism altogether. Of course this will take a massive social movement - advances in the technology alone are perhaps necessary, but certainly not sufficient.

> a "human-less economy" enabled by smart contracts - long before autonomous > "un-owned" corporations run by AIs take over the world, they will be used > for all sorts of shady things, money laundering, toxic waste disposal by > buying it but never paying to store it etc.

But again, humanity has a deep desire for the verdant. The deprecation of "easy" money, global theft, and warfare-as-the-norm - these are continuing imperatives and are good prayers for our earth. And on long time scales, it seems that blockchain tech tends toward, rather than away from, these things.

<comment><USER9> > And it's not hard to imagine blockchain technology replacing currency and > consumerism altogether.

It is for me. How exactly would blockchain replace consumerism? And replace it with what?

> The deprecation of "easy" money, global theft, and warfare-as-the-norm - > these are continuing imperatives and are good prayers for our earth. And on > long time scales, it seems that blockchain tech tends toward, rather than > away from, these things.

Do you have any evidence for such a bold claim? Or at least a rational argument for why blockchain tech would lead to such outcomes?

<comment><USER8> > It is for me. How exactly would blockchain replace consumerism? And replace > it with what?

Painting with broad strokes: easy money / inflationary currency policy promotes spending over saving, right?

So, with a less inflationary currency (or ecosystem of currencies), people will be less incentivized to spend in such a frenzied manner.

I'm not really introducing anything new here; this is the basic Austrian critique re: price signals in the environment.

> What evidence do you have for such bold claims?

Well, I hope we can take the former as read: obviously a cryptocurrency with a less inflationary policy will promote deprecation of each money.

As for global theft: the main infrastructure for nation-state level economic predation is monetary policy, and then trade policy as a secondary matter.

Monetary policy may (again, in this admittedly utopian world I'm describing) be wrested from the state by virtue of cryptocurrencies. And trade policy with smart contracts.

As for deprecation of warfare-as-the-norm: This, at least to me, is the logical consequence of the first two. If there is less rampant easy-money- consumerism, and no state-level monetary or trade policies, then warfare will increasingly be viewed as a sink of power rather than a fount.

Am I being very hopeful here? Yes, I am. But I _am_ very hopeful. I think that in these troubled times it is a great visionary exercise to ask yourself: what are some of the best things you can imagine happening for humanity in the next 50 years?

<comment><USER9> Thank you for ellaborating.

It seems like your argument is centered around inflation, which is a relatively new phenomenon.

Regarding consumerism, perhaps you're right that lack of inflation will reduce it. But what if, after a certain point, consumerism is the main driver of economic growth, the thing that enables all the really good stuff to develop, such as scientific development?

Regarding warfare, before fiat currency, you could argue that some wars were waged in order to get access to gold and silver mines. But I hope you'll agree that those were only a small minority.

I'm excluding violence for the purpose of simply stealing gold and silver outright, because the equivalent can still happen in a blockchain world - <USER2> point a gun to someone's head and tell them to transfer all their coins to your account.

<comment><USER8> Well, not only inflation, but a disarming of the international corporate state's sole franchise in trade. Smart contracts cross borders in a nearly frictionless manner; the same cannot be said of Coca Cola or the World Bank.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > To understand why this is the case, let's work from the practical to the > theoretical. For example, let's consider a widely-proposed use case for > blockchain: buying an e-book with a "smart" contract. The goal of the > blockchain is, you don't trust an e-book vendor and they don't trust you > (because you're just two individuals on the internet), but, because it's on > blockchain, you'll be able to trust the transaction.

No. Nobody trusts an exchange because it's on the blockchain. The idea of a smart contract is to decentralize high-friction transactions such as insurance (which is essentially what Amazon or PayPal is providing). The whole point is to not have to trust anybody to ensure a transaction is carried out, which it does accomplish to a reasonable extent.

The author also confuses peer-to-peer trustworthiness such as making a purchase, with trustworthiness that data or transaction executions will not be tampered with. The blockchain backs up the latter with mining, whereas it does not back up the former.

<comment><USER11> Smart contracts don't even work for insurance. Smart contracts require the insuring party to tie up capital to make sure they can satisfy the claim in the event that a claim is made. The problem is that each insurance smart contract may pay out large amounts but only rarely. Typical insurance policies often have maximum payouts north of $1 million. If every insurance company had to hold $1 million in smart coins for every insurance smart contract they produce, they'd quickly run out of capital. And if you allow capital to be pooled together where claims are payed out from one large pool for multiple insurance contracts (as is used in insurance today) then you have to trust that the insurer will have enough capital available when you want to make a claim. In this case the smart contract element is pretty useless because it doesn't guarantee you anything.

<comment><USER12> That's not insurance, that's just ridiculous.

An insurance smart contract should require the insuring party hold some fraction of the payout based on the expected number of claims.

<comment><USER11> That allows an unscrupulous insurer to use a sybil attack to create insurance contracts with itself that it then pays out against emptying the smart contract pot.

<comment><USER12> It's probably not possible to implement trustless insurance using smart contracts then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1\. Your bank account balance is a number in a database. There are multiple organizations much more powerful than you that have the ability to alter that database. Your protection against them is the legal system which is adversarial between you and these giant organizations, and run by government employees. If you're fine with that, great. If you aren't and you want to take responsibility into your own hands, try Bitcoin.

2\. Blockchain doesn't make it easier to distribute and process information. Blockchain makes it harder and a lot harder. Blockchain makes it possible to verify a set of rules going back to the genesis block. It makes it possible for you to prove that you own the book, if someone wants to create a book ownership registry smartcontract. I don't disagree with this element of the article, a lot of people are trying to use blockchain tech to "solve" problems where it offers nothing.

But that fact that shock therapy is worse than useless doesn't mean electricity is a bad vision for the future. To paraphrase Drake: the real will live forever, the fake will be destroyed.

<comment><USER14> You've (accidentally) pointed out why cryptocurrencies will never achieve mass adoption: 99.9% of people are perfectly happy to trust that banks and the government will do the right thing most of the time.

<comment><USER15> 99.9% of people where?

If you look at the world outside of your little bubble, there are over 3 billion people with little or no access to banking services that the west takes for granted.

And do you think people in Venezuela, India, Greece, Zimbabwe, etc trust that their governments will do the right thing?

<comment><USER16> The unbanked are not going to be using cryptocurrency, which requires secure access to secure computers, a whole mass of precautions, technical knowledge etc etc. They're not going to be putting what little they have into a wildly fluctuating asset class with poorly enumerated tax liabilities.

It's a pipedream of western cryptocurrency enthusiasts, not actually something that's going to be useful on the ground.

<comment><USER15> I mentioned Venezuela because people there are using Bitcoin, despite it being illegal, despite it being volatile. Because it's objectively better than what their government is offering.

You're really thinking short term if you think that Bitcoin can't spread to the masses of people worldwide. A couple of decades ago, people in rural India for example, didn't even have permanent access to a telephone in their home. Technical advancement has now meant that masses of them have phones, and many of them smartphones. They have completely skipped over the home telephone thing.

They certainly are going to use cryptocurrencies if it's the simplest way to transfer money to people, without going through the bank (which they have limited access to). In particular, you have large numbers of people working abroad who send money back home to their families. In the old financial system they usually end up paying big taxes on these transfers (fees which seem small to westerners, but which could feed entire families for a day). Just as these people haven't rushed to get a landline to get a telephone in their home, they're also not going to rush to get a bank account where they're restricted on how and when they can use their money, when a better technology is now available to them.

Volatility is and obvious side-effect when demand is changing at such staggering volumes. Some days Bitcoin might get a million new users if it's put out in mainstream media. These fluctuations will probably increase in the near term, as more people become aware and being to adopt cryptocurrencies, but long term, they will die down as adoption rate slows too. It's not going to happen overnight, which is probably where most of the dismissive attitude comes from. People's expectations are too high in what they want to be able to do tomorrow with crypto, but in reality it's going to take several decades to work its way into society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A lot of valid points here, but ultimately very short sighted. Firstly, the author does not mention many of the highly plausible use cases for trustless and permissionless services such as replacing rent seeking P2P marketplaces like eBay (where the advantage is cost reduction) or online Poker sites (where the advantage is manipulation resistance). He does not mention DAOS, where strangers can trustlessly enter into contractual obligation to create e.g. a crowdsourced Venture fund. He does not mention the potential to provide financial services to the 2 billion unbanked people in the world. He does not see the potential for innovative and completely new financial products coming out because of the permissionless nature of public blockchains.

The use cases that he sites include buying an e-book using a smart contract or its use in the supply chain or voting. The e-book example is slightly misguided, because this is not an use case where decentralization provides much value. So the entire discussion about auditing smart contracts is rather unnecessary. But it is nonetheless an important objection that may become important in DAOs. But it's short sighted to think that this problem won't be solved. Some companies are already starting to tackle the smart contract to natural language translations (e.g. Iolite).

Supply chain is yet another use case where it is unclear whether blockchains will add value. Perhaps cost saving. But note that the blockchains used in supply chains will most likely be private, therefore permissioned. It's unfair to put private and public blockchains in the same basket, because they are very different beasts.

Finally the use case of voting. The author thinks that whoever is in power might distribute a few additional addresses to their cronies to manipulate the system. He is missing the point that all data is public in public blockchains. So anyone can audit the voting results later if they want and discover that those addresses do not belong to any real people (assuming there is a KYC type identification system built-in). Voting is an use case where blockchains are sorely required. All we need is for the knowledge to reach public consciousness and for the people to tell their governments that they want it.

<comment><USER18> > the author does not mention many of the highly plausible use cases for > trustless and permissionless services such as replacing rent seeking P2P > marketplaces like eBay (where the advantage is cost reduction) or online > Poker sites (where the advantage is manipulation resistance).

Both of those claims are severely in need of support before you can attack the author for not mentioning them. eBay doesn't cost what it does because there's no other way to send money online – it's things like discovery, fraud protection, etc. which are necessary either way. It's similarly non-obvious how magic blockchain pixie dust could address the challenges which online gambling actually has.

<comment><USER17> You are right. Discovery, fraud protection and many other functions need to be there either way. When I say cost reduction, I mean getting rid of any additional premiums which eBay (or any corporation for that matter) levies because of their strong position in the market.

As for the problems of online poker, the Virtue Poker whitepaper is a good starting point about why blockchain is indeed that magic pixie dust[0]

[0][https://virtue.poker/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Virtue- Poker...](https://virtue.poker/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Virtue-Poker-White- Paper-0.9.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's a great list of blockchain uses from Disney - most of these are NOT a bad vision for the future [https://dragonchain.github.io/blockchain-use- cases](https://dragonchain.github.io/blockchain-use-cases)

</comment><comment><USER20> As someone born and lived in a 3rd world country for a better part of my life, I believe Blockchain solves a very real problem. That's equal participation in internet economy irrespective of someone's geographic location.

It was thanks to the internet I realized I can also contribute to the world (by creating something people want & writing about something others want to learn). However, when it came to making a living out of that there weren't many options. One of the prime motives for me to move out of Sri Lanka was it will be way easier for me to accept payments online.

PayPal is still not available in Sri Lanka, even after repeated attempts to convince Central Banks and governments [1]. Also, recently Stripe blocked a payment from one of my customers due to high risk profile. Reason? He used a US issued debit card from Nigeria. I reached out to the person, turns out he was a passionate young entrepreneur who was trying to build a really interesting business. But his geographic location becomes a resistance in a medium it shouldn't.

For me, Blockchain( and Cryptocurrencies) is a reframing of the trust model from heuristics such as geographic location to verifiable algorithms. The Internet protocols enabled us to exchange code, art & virtual goods without geographic boundaries. Then why not money?

[1] [https://www.change.org/p/enable-receiving-money-to-sri- lanka...](https://www.change.org/p/enable-receiving-money-to-sri-lanka- through-paypal)

</comment><comment><USER21> Smart contracts rely on Block chain but Block chain is not smart contracts

<comment><USER22> Smart contracts rely on a trusted ledger. The original smart-contract discussions in the 90s were in the context of a contract between various users in virtual open-world games, enforced by the trusted game server. This setting also meant that many of the lame parts of EVM, like the inability to represent capabilities or to protect cryptographic secrets, were supplanted by the game server's encapsulated backend logic and database.

Blockchains and smart contracts don't have to be related at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The whole Blockchain debacle feels like MLM/pyramid-like to me. The interested parties are in too deep.

</comment><comment><USER24> > If someone comes to you with "the mango-pickers don't like doing data entry" > then "let's create a very long sequence of small files, each one containing > a hash of the previous file", _is a nonsense answer_

> "What if everyone keeps their records in a tamper-proof repository not owned > by anyone?"

Exactly, "What if everyone keeps their records in a tamper-proof repository not owned by anyone?" is a re-framing of what blockchain does in use-case terms, (as opposed to technical terms) which makes it clear if you try to apply it to real use cases, that doesn't really solve anyone's problems

</comment><comment><USER25> A fully public, fully transparent, immutable ledger is "useless?"

Only if you don't believe in accountability and transparency.

What with modern voice and face morphing technology, I'd expect major news organizations to start signing their releases onto a block chain to allow us to spot mutations.

Currency is just one potential use case of block chains; there are many others.

</comment><comment><USER26> There are opportunities to be had but there is a fair amount of hype as well. [https://semiengineering.com/blockchain-hype-reality-and- oppo...](https://semiengineering.com/blockchain-hype-reality-and- opportunities/)

</comment><comment><USER27> The impossible problem of digital scarcity is finally solved, but it will have no practical uses.

</comment><comment><USER28> What a load of crap. Normally I feel more inclined to give thoughtful dialogue in response to critique, but this article was so ill-conceived in argument that the author had to narrowly define blockchain and it's uses to make his point, and then went as far as to claim nobody has a real use case that only blockchain can solve. How incredibly naive, and so willing to discard any potential idea (despite actual, proven use cases). His privilege shows too — to argue that a war torn region can't use technology. Has he seen how cellphones have become the de facto credit card in parts of Africa which are too remote for banking infrastructure? Articles like these read like NoSQL naysayers when it first broke out into the developer ecosystem. It's easy to be a critic.

<comment><USER29> Engineers are trained to look critically at proposed solutions. It's much harder to imagine where the future lays. I personally see crypto as just another extension of software eating the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> there is so much hate towards this I am getting very positive.

<comment><USER31> That's a non sequitur if I ever heard one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is a good example of why you should not start your research into a nascent space with a conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER32> Weak old arguments that are easily refutable:

> Venmo is a free service to transfer dollars, and bitcoin transfers are not > free.

Credit cards, payment gateways et al, are not free, they just obfuscate costs that are eventually passed back to consumers - when you include fraud it is estimated that society pays a hidden 5% tax on all goods and services just for payment processing.

> no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve

Illicit purchases at minimum? Silk Road, etc.? Whether this is good or not, no need to think of other examples, the statement is simply not true.

> but once the vendor has your money they don't have any incentive to deliver

There are many interesting solutions to this like automatic escrow, reputation, mutual burn, etc. Additionally using a trust-based system for small meaningless purchases while storing and transacting your actual wealth in crypto is not incompatible with the goals and vision of the space.

> Auditing software is hard! The most-heavily scrutinized smart contract in > history had a small bug that nobody noticed

Sure is, yet the world runs on software now, it's doable. Additionally of course the contract was the most heavily scrutinized, it was one of the first ever.

> yet is your Afghan villager going to download the blockchain from a > broadcast node and decrypt the Merkle root from his Linux command line to > independently verify that his vote has been counted

An afghan villager (or even a sophisticated engineer in the valley) isn't going to read and check every line of code of all software ever written, and will end up trusting to some degree - but that's very different than having to trust every transaction, every build, and having to ask for permission for every use of the system. I didn't check the linux code, but I still trust it much more than a closed source alternative. There are degrees of trust, nothing is absolute, and here it is minimized. And if you somehow don't trust, then you are free to verify, you have the choice. This is valuable.

> These sound like stupid examples

Agreed

> in less than a decade, three successive top bitcoin exchanges have been > hacked, another is accused of insider trading, the demonstration-project DAO > smart contract got drained, crypto price swings are ten times

What does insider trading have to do with blockchain technology? What do hacked exchanges have to do with blockchain? What do price swings have to do with blockchain? Bitcoin itself has never been hacked. This is fud nonsense.

> A person who sprayed pesticides on a mango can still enter onto a blockchain > system that the mangoes were organic.

Yes and we can trace it with certainty and punish the infringer who had to sign their name - rather than have the organization invent confusion and doubt until everyone forgets and moves on.

> Projects based on the elimination of trust have failed to capture customers' > interest because trust is actually so damn valuable

Trust is fine to grease the wheels, maybe the last mile will be trust-related, but having the underlying final infrastructure not reliant on the good graces of others when push comes to shove is valuable.

</comment><comment><USER8> The criticisms of blockchain tech have become so incoherent that there may be cause for confidence again. Full circle!

> There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to > solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to > solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.

It's amazing to me that this person finished this sentence and didn't, in the time it took to type it, realize how flatly wrong it is. Every corner of the USA, online and otherwise, has satisfied customers who were able to purchase psychoactive compounds online despite the prohibition against them. This is a wonderful application of blockchain tech and, as a solution, has produced many enthusiasts.

Moreover, society benefits generally from drug prohibition being undermined, and this too has produced more indirect enthusiasts.

However, this phenomenon serves to show the blockchain's fitness, not the limits of its reach.

Many of us spend our days working on blockchain tech that is far more mundane and unlikely to grab headlines, but also fits more cleanly into current legal and political structures. What has the author to say of that?

> The number of retailers accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment is > declining, and its biggest corporate boosters like IBM, NASDAQ, Fidelity, > Swift and Walmart have gone long on press but short on actual rollout.

Borrowing from the previous confused critique: are any blockchain enthusiasts (regardless of their original fount of enthusiasm) also enthusiasts for these giant, largely outdated companies? The fact that these companies have tried and failed to integrate blockchain tech is, in the minds of most enthusiasts, a positive sign, not a negative one.

> Hm. Perhaps you are very skilled at writing software. When the novelist > proposes the smart contract, you take an hour or two to make sure that the > contract will withdraw only an amount of money equal to the agreed-upon > price, and that the book — rather than some other file, or nothing at all — > will actually arrive.

Not a critique of blockchain tech, but of open source software generally. And a bad one.

> "Keep your voting records in a tamper-proof repository not owned by anyone" > sounds right — yet is your Afghan villager going to download the blockchain > from a broadcast node and decrypt the Merkle root from his Linux command > line to independently verify that his vote has been counted?

I'll note the racist overtones here without further comment.

I will, however, point out that no blockchain voting system has ever been proposed with such a UI.

> These sound like stupid examples — novelists and villagers hiring > e-bodyguard hackers to protect them from malicious customers and nonprofits > whose clever smart-contracts might steal their money and votes??

Yes, they sound like stupid examples. They are stupid examples, designed precisely for use as a strawmen in this stupid essay.

> A person who sprayed pesticides on a mango can still enter onto a blockchain > system that the mangoes were organic. A corrupt government can create a > blockchain system to count the votes and just allocate an extra million > addresses to their cronies. An investment fund whose charter is written in > software can still misallocate funds.

I have no idea what point the author is making now. Can anyone clarify?

> The contract still works, but the fact that the promise is written in > auditable software rather than government-enforced English makes it less > transparent, not more transparent.

This has not been history's experience with government-enforced English. By ignoring this fact, the author allows himself to indulge in arguments that don't make sense in order to make points that don't matter. Such as...

> Eight hundred years ago in Europe — with weak governments unable to enforce > laws and trusted counterparties few, fragile and far between — theft was > rampant, safe banking was a fantasy, and personal security was at the point > of the sword. This is what Somalia looks like now, and also, what it looks > like to transact on the blockchain in the ideal scenario.

...and...

> Silk Road, a cryptocurrency-driven online drug bazaar. The key to Silk Road > wasn't the bitcoins (that was just to evade government detection), it was > the reputation scores that allowed people to trust criminals.

But I think the author's most dangerous fallacy is actually his apparent fear that systems of "alternate" trust or consensus somehow threaten to push out systems in which trust is currently serving well. For example:

> Projects based on the elimination of trust have failed to capture customers' > interest because trust is actually so damn valuable. A lawless and > mistrustful world where self-interest is the only principle and paranoia is > the only source of safety is a not a paradise but a crypto-medieval > hellhole.

I have met and worked with dozens of movers-and-shakers in blockchain tech, and I have never, ever met anyone who's politics are fairly characterized as advocating "A lawless and mistrustful world where self-interest is the only principle and paranoia is the only source of safety."

Quite the contrary: I think that there's a realization that small batches of community cooperation work quite well, and that trustless technology has the capacity to out-compete the violent regimes that threaten it, such as drug prohibition, fiat currency, and environmental recklessness.

The author concludes with the only paragraph in his essay which is sensible and sober:

> As a society, and as technologists and entrepreneurs in particular, we're > going to have to get good at cooperating — at building trust, and, at being > trustworthy. Instead of directing resources to the elimination of trust, we > should direct our resources to the creation of trust—whether we use a long > series of sequentially hashed files as our storage medium or not.

On these points, we agree. However, these points are not supported by the rest of the author's essay.

Clear thinking and reasonableness need to be the orders of the day. Cooperation and compassion need to be the acts of our daily drive. And, so far as I can tell - the many scams and holdovers from yesterday's economy not withstanding - blockchain tech is full of these things.

We all want peace. We all want freedom. And yes, we all want trust and strong communities. The idea that blockchain tech is a threat to these things is confusion at best, fear-mongering at worst.</comment>


HN: Share an unused idea - <AUTHOR>

I'm always seeing people with tons of skills, but don't have any ideas to execute! But then I see a lot of people with a lot of ideas! So I thought that the people with plenty of left over ideas should share them, get critique on them, and let others build them if they like 'em! <comment><USER2> UserVoice for congressional districts as an alternative to lobbyists.

The idea is to use technology to disrupt traditional lobbying to the point that it is more difficult for the bad lobbyists to have a negative impact.

With the science of reputation and filtering systems getting better by the day, one solution might be a service that makes everyone a potential lobbyist. There are about 118,000 citizens per pair of ears in Washington according to Clay Johnson, author of the blog InfoVegan. The website I am suggesting would allow all 118,000 people an equal chance to voice their opinion. Those 118,000 opinions are then voted one by those same 118,000 people. The most upvoted items "float" to the top and get past the filter to the Congressman or Congresswoman's ears.

If you also make it so that people can't link and vote for opinions directly, you remove the one major avenue used to game the system: one person with too much time or influence spreads the link to their idea to those likely to upvote it.

Instead the system can be designed like a double-blind experiment. Ideas are stripped of names of people and organizations. The system randomly assigns ideas already submitted to be upvoted or downvoted to all participants. A participants ideas does not get submitted for voting by others until they have "bought" that right by voting on the ideas of others. Participants get a limited number of upvotes and downvotes to use, thus preventing them from giving out too many of one or the other and being forced to make a judgment call.

Those are a few ideas, but there is no reason the mechanics of voting and reputation systems can't be used for this end.

As I said above, this is a bit like UserVoice for government in that it allows users (citizens) to "lobby" the product managers (congressmen and congresswomen) for product feature requests and improvements.

<comment><USER3> This would be really, really great. The biggest challenge would be to get people really using it, but if it was as widely used as UserVoice is today, it would definitely get attention. And webapps that would change society for the better would be really exciting to work on.

<comment><USER2> To be honest, I don't think that would be all that hard if you use the bowling pin strategy (naming credit goes to Chris Dixon.

Open up the system for only one congressional district at a time. Opening it up countrywide could kill it due to perceived inactivity. Instead you start with the congressional district where Silicon Valley is located. There's a lot of very smart people there, who typically have strong political views and are active about them. Those are prime early adopters.

Those early adopters will also include many of the best and brightest tech and product minds who will give the best feedback early in the life of the product (just like with Quora, Forrst and Dribbble).

Once it has a high level of adoption there, it should be making national news already. You then roll it out slowly over the most politically active congressional districts one by one until it's used all over the country. I would also choose strategic "trend setting" cities with high levels of political activism such as NYC, Boston, Chicago, etc. shortly after the congressional district where Silicon Valley is located.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like a great strategy, and trying to target the early adopter crowd would definitely be the best way to get buzz going early. With it being 2 years before the next presidential election now, it'd be a great time to start getting it going. When are you releasing it? :)

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately I'm not working on this idea. I gave it and the others in this thread away to community because I'm currently working to make one of my ideas a reality and I already have a second one planned for when I'm done with this one.

On top of that I'm not living in the United States right now. I plan to return one day, but at the moment I live in São Paulo, Brazil.

By all means feel free to work on it, share it with others or whatever. I'd be more than happy to advise anyone who wants to work on it.

I have way more time than ideas. New ideas appear daily. I wish I had as many skills as ideas.

<comment><USER3> Very funny ... I'm in Thailand right now myself. So hey :)

And I actually have more ideas than time myself. The hard thing is picking the things that will payoff the most over time, knowing what's most important to tackle first. The best step, I guess, is just to get started and see how it pans out :)

<comment><USER2> Getting started is the hardest part. After that you just need to pick up momentum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Social Babysitting.

A social network where parents fill out a profile of themselves and their child and the site tries to match up parents with children of similar ages and interests. The parents then can meet one another, check out each others homes and introduce the kids to each other to confirm compatibility. Once that is done, these mutually compatible parents can rely on each other to babysit each others kids when necessary.

The site would keep track of karma points between parents.

This would permit couples to have more alone time together without having to spend lots on babysitters.

<comment><USER4> Very cool idea. Like couch surfing.

<comment><USER2> To be honest, I think one of the hottest spaces today is social sharing in the real world. There are so many possibilities it's mind-boggling. In this case and the dog one I posted below, you are sharing personal responsibilities. However, I think most of the potential is in sharing personal capital expenditures that are almost always at a low-level of utilization for most of the population. For example:

\-- Sharing cars/bikes

\-- Sharing toolboxes (in an apartment building for example)

In fact, I think the apartment building is the perfect size unit of sharing for a lot of goods. The key challenge is developing the interfaces and mechanism that prevent the tragedy of the commons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> An online reputation/credibility aggregator. Do the same for credibility that TransUnion, Experian and Equifax have done for financial credit. Aggregate the reputation of one user across many sites. Here are some examples of sites and reputation metrics to use:

\-- Hacker News upvotes/downvotes

\-- Quora upvotes/downvotes/followers/Endorsements

\-- Twitter followers/retweets

\-- Disqus Likes

\-- Facebook Likes

\-- LinkedIn Connections and Endorsements

\-- GitHub Followers

\-- Forrst Followers/Likes

\-- Dribbble Likes

\-- Etc.

All the pieces are falling into place to establish an online credibility rating. Possibly even multiple credit ratings for difference dimensions like coding, graphic design, business advice, life advice, career advice, etc.

Here's a possible use case of such data:

Imagine a debate erupts between two users who claim to be authority. Maybe they are arguing on climate change. Each argues his side of the issue and makes claims. One has a high credibility rating of 720 and the other has a low credibility rating of 590. Others watching the debate can then take the credibility rating into account when considering which side to trust/support.

That may not be the best example, but I honestly think such a credibility rating would have value and that we really won't understand the value of such a system until you put it out there and start seeing what others do with it.

<comment><USER2> Can the person who downvoted this please explain why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Skills - a site, where you split up and clearly define your skills, offering them to the public for sale or trade, if order for people to find what ever skills they need in the vicinity.

max. three skills registered pr. person. Professionals need to register as such, but log in on equal terms with every one else.

Everyone is judged by those helped, on their assistance, from a decimal valuesystem. Friends inside the system can recommend skilled people.

Suggestet intro: SKILL - a skill can be anything, you do very, very well. You don't have to be a chef with a restaurant in order to be a good cook, but quite possibly you don't know as much about hygiene as the professional chef, and should restrict your skill to specifics. Like "Couisine of XX country". Or "The best kitchen utensils at any given price".

"Will aid for \- cash contribution to me, a charity, my church etc. \- DVDs, LPs, Comics, whatever collectable" \- assistance with my car (a xx model yy 19zz) \- food in the fridge \- minimum wage for max. xx days \- a homecooked meal \- a friendly/intelligent chat \- and so on

If you use it, credit me, or mail me krabat a menneske dot dk with willingness to jam more on topic. If it already exists, please let me know.

</comment><comment><USER6> Learning Paths: compile a database where you specify a goal, possibly a fairly vague one, and users contribute the bits of knowledge that would be useful to accomplish it, all the way down to the very basics.

So if the goal were "Write a 3D graphics engine", users would collaboratively add items going all the way back to, say, basic geometry or trig.

I was thinking that llvm sounds pretty interesting, but I don't know anything much about compilers or interpreters, so not only do I not know how I could use llvm, but I'm not clear on what it could do. Another 'learning path' could lay out what knowledge and/or experience I'd need to build to get to the point of being able to understand and use llvm for an interesting project.

This could also be useful for teachers. A kid interested in video games could see the things they ought to learn and master, and would see how they build on each other. That would help answer the "when am I ever going to use this" question.

<comment><USER7> I've been working on a simple graph based UI called ConceptsMap that creates a map of all the topics involved in a concept, and how they're connected. Users then submit materials that are related to each node on the graph, and vote on existing submissions. So if you want to learn about LLVM, it'll show you all the branching topics, and you can pick the 5-6 best resources for that concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Social dog kenneling and dog walking. Basically AirBnB for dogs.

Basically when you go out of town you can leave your dog with other users on the site who have dogs and vice versa. Every time you take in a dog of another user you earn karma points. When you kennel a dog with another user you spend karma points. Users get a certain number of karma points for free upon signing up, but once they've used them, they much take in the dogs of others to get more back.

This site could also be used for dog walking as well. Maybe even bathing dogs could be included.

The site would need a Terms of Use that limits the liability of those that participate and those running the site.

</comment><comment><USER8> I started coding this idea a while back, but had to abandon it for lack of time: A site for civic associations that allows them to post announcements, coordinate events, and collect dues via a credit card.

Because civic associations in my area are voluntary but handle essential services such as snow plowing, I came up with a novel way to guilt residents into paying their dues: A Google Map showing which households were up to date on their dues -- a way to subtly pressure neighbors to pay their fair share.

Site could also include a neighborhood marketplace -- sort of a hyper-local version of Craigslist -- and other tools useful to civic associations.

<comment><USER9> Great idea! You could probably do the collecting dues stuff with the WePay API. I'm using it for a project right now and it's pretty awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A mobile app that allows users to create ad-hoc points-of-interest maps, both public and private, based around events.

My inspiration came from spending time at the Brimfield Antique Show this year. My lady wanted an easy way to note specific vendors with items she liked and wanted to revisit, but the iPhone Maps app only let me drop one pin at a time, for some unknown reason. This lead me to imagining a map of the area with dozens of pins dropped by all sorts of people, with tips ("this lady is willing to haggle", "don't get your hopes up, this guy wants twice what his stuff is worth") and recommendations ("avoid the seafood place. trust me."). It's a little Foursquare-y, but less about, "I'm here" and more about, "let me tell you what I've discovered."

I imagine something like this could be used for all sorts of things, from large concerts like Coachella or Lollapalooza to keeping track of where one parked in a parking garage. The idea scales from personal location tracking to a sort of event-focused hive mind of wisdom.

Of course, it is entirely possible this already exists, and I just didn't check the App Store throughly enough. But if it doesn't, it should. I'd use it. We were at the Topsfield Fair last night; it would have been wonderful to know exactly where the maple cotton candy vendor was, or to expect an unbelievable wait before riding the ferris wheel.

</comment><comment><USER11> groups.

create a group by setting it´s name.

join a group by knowing its name.

send messages to everybody in the group.

get contact info of everybody in the group.

create/accept/reject dates/deadlines.

share comments/links/files

this is for people who where at camps, workshops, classes, university, play in bands, work on any type of project together,...

sounds interesting?

<comment><USER4> Yes. I've been infatuated with this idea for 3 years now. Specifically, having the groups centered around threaded forum-like discussion. So many times I've wanted to throw up a temporary forum online, and I just could never find an easy enough way to do it that didn't require lengthy registration and administration.

It would be nice if I could just tell someone, go to "foobar.com/<some word>" and we'll discuss it there.

I have a killer domain for the idea, but sadly have always been too busy working on other projects. To tell the truth, I'm a bit intimidated by working on forum software. Last time I tried, I feature-creeped myself to burn-out.

<comment><USER12> Check out <http://MicroMobs.com>. They do almost exactly what you're talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Outsourced giveaways. Basically a blogger/podcaster/company pays me a fee to give something away for them (a book, an iPad etc) and I handle all the backend stuff like contest rules, entries, selecting a winner, contacting and shipping the prize. Eventually the site could match up companies who want to give stuff away for free with people who want to run a contest/giveaway (for a fee of course) I gave up on this idea because you'd need massive lawyer involvement as game/contest rules are different everywhere and not well understood. You would probably need a lawyer co-founder to make this work.

</comment><comment><USER14> A graphic design assistance app : summary of colors and fonts used, automatic detection of design blunders, misalignments, blurred / reduced previews, masked symbols etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like it, a lot. Could do something similar with coding (PSD to HTML)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Exchanging contact information with new people you have just met is still not as easy as one thinks. I'm not going to convince someone I've just met to install some contact mobile app that I have that the other person does not have.

[http://times.jayliew.com/2010/10/05/half-baked-idea-of- the-d...](http://times.jayliew.com/2010/10/05/half-baked-idea-of-the-day/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> So if anyones interested, I'll kick it off:

A tab candy-esque site to share tabs, or specific sites with friends, instead of bookmarking, you can share a site with a friend, or a group of friends. Your friends could also allow you the option of automatically opening tabs that come from you. Would also be an interesting social experiment!

<comment><USER16> I actually brainstormed a similiar idea about 6 months ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A site for parents/grandparents who live away from their kids to read stories to their children.

It should be really easy for the parent to record a story in their voice - ideally a mobile app. The kids go to a website or even just run a desktop app, say iTunes, which receives the recorded stories as a podcast.

<comment><USER3> A Story before bed (<http://www.astorybeforebed.com/>) already does this. It's a webapp but also has an iOS app for mobile reading and playback. They don't offer receiving the stories as a podcast, though, but you can play them back online or on your app forever.

<comment><USER17> Awesome! I'm really happy someone made it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A product that aids you when you browse the web: the moment you land on a page, it warns you if it thinks the article you are about to read might be a waste of your time:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1776409>

</comment><comment><USER18> I am looking for feedback on my own ideas - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1773435></comment>


Persona Password Reset Phishing Flaw - <AUTHOR>

I just tried to reset my Persona password and was surprised by the flow:
1. Persona asked me to choose a new password and confirm it, right then and there.
2. I received an email with this text "Forgot your password for Persona? It happens to the best of us. Click here to reset your password."
3. Clicking that link provided no further confirmation before changing my password.
Usually, a password reset link is sent by email, and the user then chooses a new password. This means that it's always the user who chooses the password. Users are conditioned to this. Even if somebody else generates a password reset email, the user can just ignore it, or even if they then decide they want to reset their password, they can follow the link and reset their password.
With Persona, however, someone else gets to choose the password. The user gets sent an email that looks no different from the usual password reset email. But if they just so much as click that link then someone else has changed their password. I can imagine some users might be surprised, trust Persona, and close the tab. <comment><USER2> Indeed, you're not the only one confused by this flow, which is why there's an open bug for it: <https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/issues/1232>

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback!

> 3\. Clicking that link provided no further confirmation before changing my > password.

Try doing that from another browser :) Persona only skips confirmation if you hit the reset link from the same browser that requested the reset.

Edit: More info at [https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/issues/2499#issuecommen...](https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/issues/2499#issuecomment-8662390)

Which is really interesting, because Persona is doing the right thing, but giving the impression of _not_ doing the right thing. Hm.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Dan.</comment></comment>


My friend patented an Acoustic Drum Expansion and is trying to mass produce it - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1487319013/tripstick-pro-instrument-expansion <comment><USER2> I can't imagine what a good death metal drummer can do with this Drum Expansion. Looks fun to play :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I got to play with a few different versions of it.

It's super fun to play. Was able to get some fairly complex rhythms going and I'm pretty terrible at the drums.</comment></comment>