Ask HN: What currently impossible things would cheap fusion energy enable? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The return of an upwardly mobile middle class?

I do wonder if the collapse of middle class growth isn't thermodynamic. The countries that have enlarged their middle classes have done so by saying "fuck the environment, we're poor" and burning cheap coal with no scrubbers. It makes the air filthy and fuels climate change, but it is high energy return on energy invested (EROEI).

</comment><comment><USER3> It's impossible to imagine all the things that would become possible if energy was unlimited, and cheap. We could build a fixed link to the moon, and mine the moon for minerals. The skies are the limit.

<comment><USER4> The Moon and Earth don't maintain a fixed distance apart, so this wouldn't be possible. The distance varies by as much as ~50 km.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Heating roads to melt snow. Weather control. Desalination for farming use opening up farmland in deserts. Flood deserts with desalinated water and create new rainforests. Increase the spin of earth?

<comment><USER4> I lived in Winnipeg for twenty-five years and often wished we were at a point where heated roads and sidewalks could be a thing.

For the unaware, you _can_ get heated driveway systems, but they're somewhat expensive upfront compared to paying a neighborhood kid with a shovel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fusion energy is very inefficient and I don't see it ever being very cheap. Fission energy could be a good choice for many areas, but the way the energy market works means that stuff like wind will always bid the lowest price to the market.

</comment><comment><USER7> Faster global warming.

</comment><comment><USER8> Flying cars</comment>


Guerilla Gardening (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ <comment><USER2> Another good resource that you guys might enjoy is "Tony Santoro's Guide to Illegal Tree-Planting"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvtqKMxZ95s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvtqKMxZ95s)

<comment><USER3> Hey, you, the person reading this comment thread who just skimmed over the above comment without giving the video link a second thought.

I'm telling you, go back and watch the video, or any other video on Tony Santoro's channel. The man is a legend who deserves more press. He absolutely embodies the hacker ethos, if in his own unique way. Autodidactic, anti- authoritarian, fiercely intelligent, sharply witty and indefatigably individualistic.

<comment><USER4> Seconded, and his series in the Atacama is incredible.

Seriously, he's incredible.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUOejqhaeZI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUOejqhaeZI)

<comment><USER5> Well. You guys sold me. I am not aware of Mr Santoro, but now I am very interested ! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is essential that the people doing this, either knows what is seeding, with name and surname, or stop doing it. Right now. Invasive species are not a joke.

Naive people could end doing a lot of damage after seeing a video from a project in the other coin of the planet. I can spot at least one invasive species in the images that must not be used in some parts of US, for example.

<comment><USER5> Hey, fair enough, spreading invasive species is bad. But how exactly do you imagine something like that happening?

In general, folks are going to buy plants @ Lowe's/ Home Depot or their local nurseries. It's not that easy to gain access to plants that are not compatible with your native biome.

I don't think the chances are very high of someone buying seeds from a foreign seed company, germinating them at home, and planting a large scale public project like this.

<comment><USER7> That's true for the case of someone introducing an invasive species that is new to the region. But what about someone further spreading an invasive species that is already there?

My yard, for example, contains a mix of native plants and invasive plants. Some of the invasive plants produce pretty flowers, and if I hadn't looked them up it would not have even occurred to me that they were not native.

I could easily imagine someone with such an invasive but pretty plant in their own garden purposefully spreading it, not realizing that it is not native and the place they spread it had until then only native plants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've seed bombed all over LA, getting things growing in nearly unreachable spots that seem to be ignored by civic workers .. there is no greater feeling than coming back a few months later and seeing a thriving collection of plants where once there was a dusty patch of ignored dirt. Key thing though, is to use native plants and not get too invasive with the seed mix. For this, I suggest folks who want to do the same sort of thing, find a local seed business that deals with the native species.

<comment><USER9> And/or check with your local extension service.

<comment><USER8> Whats an extension service?

<comment><USER10> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_State_Research,_Ed...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_State_Research,_Education,_and_Extension_Service#Cooperative_Extension_System)

In rural areas, they do a lot of farmer education. In suburban and urban areas, they typically run hotlines where you can ask gardening questions and may run classes.

<comment><USER8> Ah, that is a very cool idea. Yeah, I imagine that there is a lot of great advice to come from such a resource.

One thing I wanted to do but never got around to, was research the butterfly- friendly native species of California, and then seed-bomb the living crap out of all the sterile gardens in the Hollywood Hills .. definitely a guerrilla action, but if successful one of immense value to say nothing of the beauty of it. Never got around to it though, and the country I currently live in is already quite a friend eco-sphere for native butterfly and insect species i.e. they kicked out Monsanto and already promote the propagation of native weeds and other non-agri species which the butterflies love..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Consider instead / also the Guerrilla Grafters of San Francisco: [http://www.guerrillagrafters.org](http://www.guerrillagrafters.org)

News articles:

* [https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/04/07/150142001/gu...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/04/07/150142001/guerrilla-grafters-bring-forbidden-fruit-back-to-city-trees)

* [https://hoodline.com/2015/12/guerrilla-grafters-quietly-grow...](https://hoodline.com/2015/12/guerrilla-grafters-quietly-grow-fruit-on-city-trees-using-latest-tech)

* [http://www.guerrillagrafters.org/in-the-news/](http://www.guerrillagrafters.org/in-the-news/)

<comment><USER12> No offense to this group, I'm sure they have the best intentions, but how many people would want to eat fruit from a street tree in a major city? For that matter, how much of that fruit will actually survive to the point where it is fully ripe and not be eaten first by rats and squirrels? My experience from downtown San Jose is that with the exception of citrus, very little.

<comment><USER13> Im not sure that it qualifies as a real city due to its low density, but plenty around me in Auckland do. I've seen Apples, Fijoas, olives mandarins and snap peas in the recent past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't like gardening, but I'd love to donate to people, who would enjoy doing it in my city. Almost wish there would be a per-patch donation box.

<comment><USER15> I do, through local taxes. The county in turn makes sure my nature-rich neighbourhood is well maintained, they leave strips of foresty area to grow fairly wild whilst mowing the lawn areas monthly, dredging up the ponds and canals (? very narrow natural looking ones) at the end of the year (outside of bird breeding seasons), etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been meaning to plant a tree in Manhattan for a while [http://joshuaspodek.com/how-to-plant-a-tree-in-new-york- city](http://joshuaspodek.com/how-to-plant-a-tree-in-new-york-city).

If anyone here wants to do it with me, email me and let's do it. I have zero experience in it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Adorable. I'm going to join.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know if any regulations may limit these actions in the US?

<comment><USER19> Buddy, it's called "Guerilla Gardening"....

I'm not from the U.S but the answer is of course yes, and they would vary wildly per council/municipality

<comment><USER6> There are many species able to create damages by several millions of dollars (Not, I'm not joking).

Genetic contamination of endangered native plants with hybrids that are almost identical (or had being genetically modified), would be also a huge mistake

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> welcome to a website of the 90's :D</comment>


Launch HN: Upsolve (YC Nonprofit W19) – TurboTax for Bankruptcy - <AUTHOR> Hi HN! I'm Rohan Pavuluri, co-founder of Upsolve (https://upsolve.org/), a nonprofit in YC's W19 batch. We provide software for low-income people in America that makes filing for bankruptcy less painful and expensive, just like what TurboTax did for filing taxes. Bankruptcy is a lifeline for low-income people in the United States who fall into debt from job loss, medical emergencies, and payday lenders. It allows them to get a fresh start. Unfortunately, it's impossible for most people to file for bankruptcy because they cannot afford $2,000 for a bankruptcy lawyer. Our average user erases ~$40,000 in debt.
I started Upsolve when I was a law school research assistant in college. We were testing out the effectiveness of legal self-help packets for people who could not afford attorneys. I set out to turn these paper packets into a digital product. My co-founder Jonathan Petts spent ten years doing pro bono bankruptcies in his spare time as a corporate attorney. This is where he saw people turned down by brick and mortar legal nonprofits because demand for attorneys far exceeded supply. A judge introduced us in 2016 when she saw we were working on the same idea.
Here's how it works. A user comes to our website and takes a screener to see if they're a good fit for our service. If they are, they answer a series of questions about their personal finances, upload their tax returns/pay stubs, and take a pre-bankruptcy education course. Our software then generates their forms, and one of our in-house attorneys reviews their forms for accuracy and completeness. If there are any issues, we follow up. When the forms are ready to file, we send them to the user. We track the user's court notices so that we can fix any issues that may arise after filing. In 2018, we erased over $16,000,000 in debt for 400+ users.
We believe that 20M Americans would benefit from filing for bankruptcy. We currently allow our users to donate what they think is fair to us after they complete the process. While we're mostly funded by foundations and the federal government now, we hope to be sustainable through donations that we receive from our users in the future. Regulations around bankruptcy only permit attorneys providing full-representation to charge clients.
We're looking for any feedback you have on our product or how to reach new users.
User stories: https://upsolve.org/fresh-starts/
TC: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/16/upsolve-bankruptcy/
If interested in donating: https://upsolve.org/donate/ or email firstname.lastname@example.com. <comment><USER2> The catch-22 in the bankruptcy business is how your clients pay you if you help them prove they're broke. So this is a huge need.

You need to put FREE in big red letters at the top of your webpage. It's on there a few times but buried so it doesn't stand out. The word "non-profit" also needs to be more prominently mentioned.

Whether it's sneaky medical billing or identity fraud, the about-to-be- bankrupt are _really_ gun-shy about being scammed and this additional marketing effort would pay huge dividends.

Most people don't realize how crooked the whole "education course" thing is. Congress in its infinite ignorance decided that bankruptcies were due to lack of education (easily debunked) but that doesn't stop them from making every single chapter 7 applicant take hours of compulsory courses. Do you offer the courses as a free standalone product (one that's accredited)? That'd be a huge selling point by itself.

"Turbotax for Bankruptcy" carries a lot of negative connotations, because you're not rent-seeking regulatory captors. Should make it "free turbotax for bankruptcy".

Just as a small percentage of turbotax filers have to deal with audits, hearings, and the occasional fraud trial, would be interesting to hear how you all deal with the bankruptcy court analogs.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is all great advice. We try to stress "free" and "nonprofit" but should definitely do more.

As you likely know, all of our users have to attend a "341 hearing" at the court, where the trustee who oversees their case verifies the information in the user's forms. We have a video of a mock 341 hearing that prepares our users for this meeting, which they've found very helpful.

<comment><USER3> I helped my brother-in-law file without an attorney a number of years ago and I found that even though he is very intelligent, his case was simple, and I walked him through it he had tremendous difficulty representing himself in court and understanding the process to the level of detail needed to answer even simple questions put to him by the judge. Perhaps your videos could help people who have trouble thinking abstractly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome idea. We have several videos up on Youtube now and hope to expand in the coming months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would strongly urge you to create a white label version of this and sell it to consumer BK lawyers. I used to practice in this area and the biggest pain- point by far was handling the documents from the clients and turning that into PDFs of the petition and schedules to upload to ECF.

Sounds like your tech stack is already worked out on that, so why not white label it to debtors firms? The typical SaaS billing levels (Starter / Pro / Enterprise) would work, and you could offer a paid-by-the-filing level, too. Roll in the pre-filing counseling and the electronic filing and you've got a really good and attractive solution.

Especially as this is built for self-service. If a lawyer could have an in- person counseling session with a prospective client, then point him/her at a webpage to fill out the details and upload docs, that would save an enormous amount of time.

It's been a couple of years since I look at the filing software, but the industry was dominated by a couple of big players and the client-facing solutions were minimal and sketchy. The big advantage was being able to file electronically. But it still needed a couple of dedicated paralegals / clerks to track down all the papers and enter all the details.

Good luck to you!

<comment><USER5> @rpavuluri: If at any point you were to move forward with white labeling and selling that, I would recommend you consult a lawyer about whether the IRS would consider this unrelated business taxable income (UBTI). Too much UBTI can put your 501c3 status at risk. IANAL / IANYL / YMMV / etc.

<comment><USER6> I think generally UBTI refers to income that is actually unrelated to the good the nonprofit purports to do.

For example, Princeton a nonprofit can totally charge tuition and use it as a base of funding, and not pay taxes on that. They can even sell their students food in cafeteria and not pay income tax. [1] But they can't start a food franchise and not pay tax.

This software seems clearly within their registration statement. Now if they started selling software consulting as their major source of funding...

In any case, I agree checking with your accountant is the best.

[1] [https://fms.iu.edu/tax/ubit/](https://fms.iu.edu/tax/ubit/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tips. We will definitely consult professionals for their advice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wonderful work, Rohan! I love it when tech and charity come together like this.

My questions:

1) Is there any assistance that your service can provide to students who have student loan debt, particularly those from predatory private institutions?

2) Have you had any conversations with the group, RIP Medical Debt? They have a similar goal of helping those in need, they've abolished $120 million in medical debt for about 60,000 Americans([https://www.ripmedicaldebt.org/about/](https://www.ripmedicaldebt.org/about/)). I think it would be great for you to connect, even if it's just to be on each other's radar.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :)

(1) Sadly, we're not able to assist people who want to discharge their student debt through bankruptcy. If that's the case, we suggest our users seek full- representation.

(2) I've spoken to the co-founder of RIP Medical Debt! They're doing awesome work I admire. Thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> An awesome service for helping people navigate bankruptcy! congrats on a great idea. clearing debt is an important function of capital markets and is one thing that makes the US economic system so robust.

congrats and:

1\. I hope you guys find some good revenue streams to keep it going.

2\. I hope you can prevent people from scamming the system and hiding assets, etc. Otherwise you can be the farmer that killed the golden egg laying goose.

</comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps I am in the minority here, but I think Turbotax for Bankruptcy is a helpful analogy. You should also look at the Free File Program Turbotax runs - while it's gotten some heat for not being 'Free For All' it is a free (and useful) service for lower income individuals who do bring in an income. They partner heavily with libraries to ensure that people who may not have internet/computer access at home, are aware of this offering. Probably some overlap in demographics here.

As for the funding model: are there any businesses that stand to benefit from people being able to file for bankruptcy more easily? Collection agencies? Hospitals? There is a certain cost associated with tracking down a non-payer. Who could stand from this cost being eliminated? Non-profit is well and good, but it's even better if a business will stand up a foundation to specifically fund your product because it supports their revenue generating business.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. We've been in search for the last two years for a business that seriously benefits from our work. Have found people who see our work as "nice to haves" but have not found any businesses that view our work as mission critical to what they do.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps it's an acquisition play - as the other comments on the thread point out: if it helps offload work from attorneys (who could be making money from clients with resources) and/or can somehow serve as a philanthropic endeavor for a profitable company (or organization) in desperate need of some good PR (big law firms doing work for questionable foreign nationals, pay day lenders, etc.), there is some intangible value to be had. A nice diversion from people calling on lawmakers to regulate a company out of business can be motivation enough to look in to opening up a more charitable, less profitable, line of business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> To find new clients I think that by introducing yourselves and your product to those "brick and mortar non profits" you said turned people away, you should be able to convince them to send your way some of the people that they can't handle.

But I have to say that the idea you had about the money source sounds a bit strange to me. Your whole idea is helping people that don't have any money, so it just seems weird that you would then ask for or even want their money, because that somewhat defies the point of helping them save money (I'm sure that you probably take only small amounts, but still...). I think that working from outside donations and federal grants just makes more sense. Or maybe even excepting some money from some of the people you help after a while if they manage to get back on their feet.

<comment><AUTHOR> When we started, we never thought we'd ask our users for donations after they filed. We got the idea when our users started asking us whether they could donate to us even when we didn't ask for anything. The vast, vast majority of our operating budget is covered at the moment by foundation philanthropy and federal grants, but the hard thing about outside fundraising to stay alive is that it requires a lot of time we'd rather use to focus on making our product better and reaching more people. That's why we'd love to be sustainable if we can make it work. We found inspiration in business models of EarnIn and GoFundMe.

We also let our users know that they can donate well after their discharge when they're back on their feet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is work worth doing. Wishing your team much success.

To find new users, I'd start partnering with non-profit financial counseling groups that are most likely providing this service with human effort, but are stretched thin.

<comment><AUTHOR> We agree with trying to partner with other financial nonprofits, and we're continuing to work with several, such as Single Stop in NYC. One challenge we've found is that many nonprofits do not know much about bankruptcy or are afraid to make referrals due to the negative stigma. Part of our job, we've realized, is to educate them and the general public to solve this knowledge gap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Neat idea, thanks for sharing!

Are attorneys licensed in all the states they're reviewing documents to?

Playing devils advocate here. Do you have a vetting policy for whether filing for bankruptcy is a good idea, or encourage other steps to be taken by someone considering bankruptcy? Someone who is $2,000 behind on bills may be hurt more by the bad mark on their credit in the upcoming ~7 years. If they had some counseling on budgeting, debt payback could be realistic by digging in, taking on some marginal work, and reducing spending.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much! We agree that bankruptcy should be the last resort for everyone. That's why we only let people through who have over $10,000 in debt. We also have 100+ other substantive checks to stop people from using Upsolve if we're not the right service for them or if we don't think their bankruptcy will be successful. For example, we don't help homeowners because our system is not yet ready for more complex assets (like homes), and we think those users would be better served via full representation. Bankruptcy is a federal law with minimal state-by-state differences. Our in-house attorneys are NY- based and never provide legal advice. Whenever legal advice is required, we connect our users with someone in our network in the state where the user is filing.

<comment><USER13> > Bankruptcy is a federal law with minimal state-by-state differences.

Unfortunately you're mistaken. The Code itself is federal but the underlying debts and assets are always matters of state law. Exemptions: It depends. Moreover, various provisions of the Code are construed quite differently across the federal circuits. For example you're not getting your repo'd car back in the 11th circuit once the creditor takes possession peaceably, period.

Perhaps the substantive checks take care of these state-by-state differences?

<comment><USER4> The fact that they're not handling people who own real estate simplifies things considerably and they have Attorney reviews to screen out the complicated cases (from what I gather). But yeah the basics of a no-asset Chapter 7 where the only secured debt is a car loan, I'd agree that state law variations are minimal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How do you handle security with such sensitive information being uploaded?

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed that security is super important to us because information is so sensitive and we serve a vulnerable population. We have an unusual benefit with security because the bankruptcy process only requires a short-term snapshot of financial information and the process can only happen every 8 years. We delete their sensitive information if a person finishes the process or is inactive for 3 weeks since it will be out-of-date for the forms. We soon aim to do filing on behalf of our debtors so they won't have to be concerned with personal-information filled PDFs on their devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just love how so many startups coming from YC are becoming force of disruption! The impact of this extends far beyond entrepreneurship and making few people rich. I hope more YC companies goes after monopolies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much! We wish there were even more nonprofits going through YC!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Really cool idea. I hope you manage to get into a sustainable cycle of people you've helped with bankruptcy getting back on their feet and donating to help others in the same position.

</comment><comment><USER17> Cool idea. There's a little error on the where you agree to terms. The 3rd bullet point is not broken out into it's own line item.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will fix! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Most libraries run free legal help programs, that should be a great way to find and help more people in need.

</comment><comment><USER19> do you have/could you share population data for your users?

like median earnings, median debt, nature of debt and such?

I am just curious and have no particular reason for asking, but it would be interesting

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! We have demographic data. Here are some bits I know off the top of my head: \- Vast majority of our users earn under $32,000 \- Average unsecured debt level is ~$40,000 \- Most debt is from medical bills, credit cards, and payday loans \- 20% of our users are from NY and CA</comment></comment>


Rich text labels for iOs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pothibo/CMFramework

<comment><USER2> Man I really hate those antiblogspam people now.

Nothing is worse then seeing a link to a git repo with no explanation of what it does, what it looks like, where sample code is, etc.

Thanks for sticking it out there mind you, just I wish people would give context, explanation and demonstration with new stuff like this.</comment>


Apple: Chinese firm to operate China iCloud accounts - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42631386 <comment><USER2> I guess Apple can then operate in China and wash its hands of any domestic spying done on user data on behalf of the Chinese government.</comment>


What Do Feminist Hackers Do? - <AUTHOR> http://bookmaniac.org/feminist-hacker-news/

<comment><USER2> I don't think efforts to create "the X for women" (e.g. X=reddit, anonymous, etc.) would be effective or productive: as such they will always be wanna-be or follower type efforts. What is _much_ better is to build on unique strengths/problems/concerns that women have, e.g. I really liked the nameyourrapist.com mentioned (although, of course, with a better name), e.g. women can tell stories of harassment, inequality they faced in companies (naming the company or not) and how they dealt with it. There were many examples of such blog posts on HN recently, collecting them in a central, searchable location would be very useful, I think.

On a different note, the hacker society is very meritocratic (as it should be, since it is based on _doing_ stuff, as opposed to talking about it), so all the ideas in the OP has to be prefaced with the effort to create more hacker women with killer creds and skills. The Etsy-Hacker School effort is a great step in this direction.

On still another tangent, read the story _Houston, Houston, Do You Read_ by James Tiptree Jr. ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston,_Houston,_Do_You_Read%3...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston,_Houston,_Do_You_Read%3F)) if you have the time, to see a provocative take on what technical and social developments a world of women will produce (you should buy the collected stories book, if you want to be cheap, you can read it here: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/20608868/Houston-Houston-Do-You- Re...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/20608868/Houston-Houston-Do-You-Read-Tiptree- James)).

      "Thank you." He takes the small, pink bulb. "Just tell me," he says to Lady Blue,who is looking at the bullet gashes, "what do you call yourselves? Women's World? Liberation? Amazonia?"

      "Why, we call ourselves human beings." Her eyes twinkle absently at him, go backto the bullet marks. "Humanity, mankind." She shrugs. "The human race."

<comment><USER3> The name your rapist idea is terrible in the form the author lays out as there's no requirement for evidence. It would be relatively easy to game such a site to discredit people, which in turn would discredit the site. To be fair, an anonymous at both ends site could be a force for good. The author of an article highlighting harassment could verify the story to a mod team, but by not having the naming and shaming we can focus on the problems existence (which seemed to be the problem the article author faced with 28c3) rather than the inevitable backlash in the naming and shaming. I think this is much more constructive, less high risk and overall has a better chance to influence in a positive manner than naming and shaming alone.

<comment><USER4> Right, because 4chan and the like care so much about evidence and proof before they start sending around rape threats and changing Wikipedia pages to porn.

Part of the point is imagining what the world would look like if women stopped holding themselves to a higher standard than men do. I find it funny that some men seem terrified by the idea: now you know how we feel _all the time_

<comment><USER5> The author, Liz Henry, conflates Hacking with Anonymous.

 _At a couple of conferences lately, Hackmeet and She's Geeky, as well as at the feminist science fiction convention WisCon, I hosted a discussion of feminist hackers and feminist hacking. I wanted to put the idea out into the world and see what other women had to say about it. Though women are involved with Anonymous and other instances of hacker activism, they aren't part of the story, of the myth of the hacker. If there were a particularly feminist or womanist Anonymous, women working together, what would they be doing? What or who would their targets be? What social justice or mischief making aims would they have? What would our griefing and trolling look like or what does it currently look like? What do hacker feminists do for lulz?_

But to many people Hacking and Anonymous have only the barest of intersections. The article mainly seems to focus on how to get back at the man, and the author expresses surprise and anger that in a different nation and a different cultural context others were not sympathetic to her message.

The answers the author relays are mainly focused at getting back at the man, a series of mostly negative societal inputs and few positive society building inputs.

Few of the answers are about what most people at Hacker News would consider to be Hacking, even as the author's post is titled "Feminist Hacker News" and is supposedly about Feminist Hacking.

A better title for Mz. Henry's post might be Feminist MonkeyWrenching or Feminist Anonymous.

What might feminist _hackers_ do?

        - create code
        - teach coding
        - support STEM education through code, outreach, ....
        - websites that discuss issues of discrimination similar to "name your rapist" but that adhere to fair/just rules of law
        - create APIs into gov't databases / sources of gender/wage information
        - create websites that discuss negotiation of salaries
        -    how to ensure your salary is competitive
        -    how to ensure your rights are protected
        -    how to hire and behired
        - create awesome websites regarding feminist issues: sexuality, rights, domestic violence, changing roles of marriage, etc.
        - create websites that create dialogue around these issues and are inclusive, not exclusive

<comment><USER3> That bullet pointed list for some reason doesn't render properly in the comments, but is brilliant and far more insightful than the article itself. This is precisely the sort of positive constructive feminism that we need in the hacker community, instead of destructive anger-fuelled negativity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm fairly appalled by the bulk of this article and frankly surprised to see it on the front page of HN. There are some potentially good ideas that with some smoothing out could fly, but there's a lot of stuff that's scummy, if not illegal.

The biggest problem I have with this is that this post's intent seems not to be to advance equality, or even the role of women through the hacker community but to drive a wedge and almost treat the gender gap as some sort of war. In her post, men only seem to be referred to in negative terms (as with the 28c3 panel and references to naming and shaming men who may or may not have done bad things, as no burden of evidence appears to be needed), something that I find deeply unsettling. When someone puts something like this forward as an example of feminism, I see it not as feminism but as a form of misandry. If we want to do good things for women that's fine as long as we can do good things for men and accept our differences. But really, as hackers whenever we can we should be doing good things for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER6> Love it. Where's Fem Anon?</comment>


Ask HN: What's the last thing that blew your mind? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Spy On Your Partner To Test Their Sincerity, contact email@example.com he his the best at what he does. he can help you hack into any social network, devices, also he can help you track any device. he can help you if you need his assistance also as he helped me. be safe.

</comment><comment><USER3> My `tron` bot reaching top 300 ;-) [https://www.codingame.com](https://www.codingame.com)

And seriously - to find out I can (sort of) do NoSQL with Postgres.

<comment><USER4> Postgres' JSON capabilities are pretty awesome. I'm using it for a side project and am very pleased!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Learning about ground propagating radio waves (2009) and THF waves used for signal broadcasting applications (this year).

</comment><comment><USER6> Acid

</comment><comment><USER7> Quantum computers. I don't really understand them at all.</comment>


Wall Street: Profiles in Panic - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2009/01/wall_street200901?printable=true&currentPage=all <comment><USER2> Wow.

Some choice quotes:

\--

 _One former Lehman executive in her 40s stood in her vast clothes closet not long ago, talking to her personal stylist. On shelves around her were at least 10 designer handbags that had cost her anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 each.

"I don't know what to do," she said. "I guess I'll have to get rid of the maid."_

\--

 _"Why should I pay $250,000 for a private plane," he said to a friend, "When I can pay $20,000 to fly commercial first class?_

\--

I don't know what to say to or about these people. This article certainly doesn't inspire any confidence that we are bailing out the right people/industry.

It reminds me of an important lesson taught by an old economics professor of mine about companies within any industry. I suppose it probably even applies to industries themselves or even countries, although I'm no economist.

This lesson was that excess profits are always removed in the long run. If a company is demonstrating excessive profits, then that might be a good sign that the ride has peaked and that the only way from here is down.

Apply this to American culture in general, and it paints a pretty bad picture for the future. We are returning to the average...and it's going to be painful ride down.

The good news is that I dont get the impression that the averaqe HackerNews reader is in the situation of being at the whims of the idiots like mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER3> Great article.

"The good news is that I dont get the impression that the averaqe HackerNews reader is in the situation of being at the whims of the idiots like mentioned in the article."

Have you seen my gold plated Macbook Air?

All kidding aside, it's amazing the sort of crap people think they need to buy when they reach a certain level of income.</comment></comment>


Bonobo – A data processing toolkit for Python 3.5+ - <AUTHOR> https://www.bonobo-project.org/ <comment><USER2> I'm annoyed that I bothered to read the tutorial to this. The TLDR: "Write some generators or functions, put them in a list, and Bonobo will call them all for you in order. Look at the example files for more." The example files are all basic string transformations. The docs are mostly blank pages and missing sections. What little is written has more jokes and conversational tics than information.

What does this even do? There's mention of DAGs and different execution strategies if you really dig through the docs, but is that it? If so, why would you use this instead of joblib or some other established parallelism lib?

<comment><AUTHOR> Bonobo runs each functions in the pipeline in parallel and make the fifo queues plumbing and thread pool management completely transparent.

The TLDR would then be "Write some generators or functions, link them in a graph, and call them in order on each line of data as soon as the previous transformation node output is ready.". For example if you have a database cursor that yields each line of a query as its output, it starts to run the next step(s) in the graph as soon as the first result is ready (yet not stop yielding from database until the graph is done for the current row). I did not find it easy to do with the libraries I tried.

The docs clearly lacks completion to say the least, and would need an example with a big dataset, one with long individual operations and one with a non linear graph, so it's more obvious that, of course, it's not made to process strings to uppercase twice in a row.

Stay tuned, I'm very happy HN brought it to homepage, did not really think it could happen at this stage though and I understand you. But that's a good thing for the project to move forward.

<comment><USER3> This is really cool!

Python is my usual language of choice, but recently I picked up Go for some data processing because there was a lot of benefits to parallelising the task - which Go made easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't tried this yet, but am praying that it delivers even half of what it promises. For whatever reason I _just can 't get my head around pandas_, despite multiple attempts.

If this also turns out to be inscrutable I may be forced to conclude that I'm stupid...

<comment><USER5> You're not alone! I think pandas made some design decisions around their transformation functions that make it a lot more cumbersome to use than R's dplyr. It's not obvious from the documentation, though.

As an example from the pandas docs [1], in dplyr you can do

> gdf <\- group_by(df, col1)

> summarise(gdf, avg=mean(col1))

In pandas this is similar to

> df.groupby('col1').agg({'col1': 'mean'})

But dplyr's summarize it's much more flexible than agg, as you can do all kinds of things to any number of columns. E.g.

> summarise(gdf, some_name = f1(col1) + f2(col2))

But in pandas you can apply 1 function to 1 column with agg.

[1] [http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas- docs/stable/comparison_with_...](http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas- docs/stable/comparison_with_r.html#grouping-and-summarizing)

<comment><USER6> you can supply a map, ie:

gdf = df.groupby('col1').agg({'col2': np.mean, 'col3':np.std,'col4': lamba x: np.mean((x) / np.std(x))})

once you've got your grouped dataframe, go nuts

gdf['some_name'] = gdf['col1'].apply(f1) + gdf['col2'].apply(f2)

<comment><USER5> The summarise example I gave creates a single new column (some_col), that is a function of two columns from the grouped data frame. Passing a map to agg is just creating multiple columns, each a function of at most a single column in the dataframe.

(I should have used a better example, like summarise(gdf, some_col = f(cola / colb))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm trying to figure out if this is "all hat, no cattle". There seems to be a lot of "framework" here, without much core functionality.

Stated more precisely: if I'm stitching together things that process data and 'yield' results, why can't I just do that in pure Python? What does this framework add?

<comment><AUTHOR> Short answer : parralel execution.

<comment><USER8> Multiprocessing or muilthreading? Why don't you market it as parallel coroutines processing? That gets me interested. Because there are dozens of frameworks with overgeneral descriptions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Today, as a default, multithreading. But that's an implementation detail. Actually, Bonobo does not support coroutines (as in asyncio coroutines) so it would be a lie to market it this way. The plan though is to allow to use coroutines/futures in the future, for specific reasons (like long running/blocking operations where keeping output order tied to input order is of no importance). Still, there is a lot on the roadmap before this becomes a priority.

I note that I still have a lot of work explaining in simple terms what is actually bonobo, without falling in the trap of "overgeneral description".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It'd be good to see some comparisons, why this and not one of the other currently available systems? Why should I use this over, for example, Luigi?

What scale is this intended for?

Is it intended to nearly solve a simple problem over my 20TB of data on S3? Big complex graphs? Or more for transitioning a small local report system that's currently in three excel files into a tested python script?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's indeed intended for «small data», by opposition to «big data». I know, that does not say much, but I basically wanted to handle small flux of data without having to install the "big weapons".

I'm preparing explanation pages for a lot of the questions I got, including comparisons, volumes of data, where it is good and where it is not ...

All that will be well ready before 1.0, but for now, we're at 0.2 ...

Thanks for all the hackerlove, though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> All those references to monkeys hurt my head. Bonobos are not monkeys. If they wanted to name it after monkeys, they should've called it Capuchin or something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Noted, sorry for that. I'll get more infos about bonobos.

<comment><USER11> The picture looks more like a Gorilla than a Bonobo too

<comment><USER12> Came here to post just that. It's called 'Bonobo', there's a picture of a gorilla, and the page keeps saying 'monkey'\- as petty as it sounds, you're probably losing potential users to zoological nerdrage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, hackernews and twitter brutally told me I should take animal reign culture classes asap ...

This being said, if any of you have a good picture of bonobos that I can use instead of the current one, I'd be really glad to replace it! It needs to be released under a free license, though.

Thanks HN

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting, right now we are using PETL[1] that we used to do with SSIS, bonobo for some reason reminds me of Bubbles library.

[1]: [https://petl.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://petl.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

<comment><USER14> +1 for petl, I'm using it right now on a project that deals with a lot of tabular data and it's been a huge time saver.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ah, interesting. The example on the 'on-boarding' page reminds me of what we used to do at work.

We used itertools chains to write producers and consumer to create 'Chain' objects that process data exactly as the bonobo.Graph.

Can't wait to try this.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sweet! generator based utilities for ETL. I think this really a good use of generators and coroutines. Reminds me of stackless based [https://bitbucket.org/diji/pypes/src](https://bitbucket.org/diji/pypes/src) (backing video [http://pyvideo.org/pycon-us-2011/pycon-2011--large-scale- dat...](http://pyvideo.org/pycon-us-2011/pycon-2011--large-scale-data- conditioning--amp--p.html) )

</comment><comment><USER17> Before there was Pandas I wrote a website (using Django) to transform grid data into a denormalized CSV file. In other words, a reverse pivot. Basically it converts multiple header rows and header columns as separate fields for each intersecting value.

I've written this basic routine several times over in my career (once in Access VBA!) for different reasons. The current version of it is used to convert a store/item/quantity grid into per-store pick/pack slips.

Pandas has a built-in function that can de-pivot a table. I'm not sure it can handle my use case, however, with multiple header rows. Mine also has extra goodies like populating blank row or column values with the previous value in the row-column, among other bizarre features written to grapple with the inconsistent ways our clients make their distro spreadsheets. Trying to break them of their reliance on Excel for this type of planning has proven futile.

I'll have to spend some time with Bonobo and Pandas before I take on refactoring our grid tool. It needs a refactor mostly because I'm the only one who understands it. The new data munging libraries would surely simplify some very gnarly logic, and make it accessible to other developers should I get hit by a bus or leave the company.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hmm. So what would be the advantage over Dask, which lets me scale out over a cluster?

</comment><comment><USER19> This name is already taken.

[https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/Bonobo](https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/Bonobo)

</comment><comment><USER20> There's a syntax error in mutate_my_dict_like_crazy at [http://docs.bonobo- project.org/en/0.2/guide/purity.html](http://docs.bonobo- project.org/en/0.2/guide/purity.html).

Seems the documentation is still quite WIP.

</comment><comment><USER21> So how is this different from Airflow, other than Windows compatibility and a lack of dashboard?

<comment><USER22> That's my question too. I've come to heavily rely on Airflow. As an Apache project now it's becoming mature.

From what I can tell browsing the site, Bonobo looks like it's designed to do data processing within the framework. Airflow insists that it's really a task coordinator/scheduler...however, tasks can be Python function calls. So it seems like Bonobo is a specific use case, where Airflow is the more general case (tasks can be SQL queries, bash commands, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So, what is the advantage of using this over existing workflow management systems, such as Airflow, Azkaban and Luigi?

</comment><comment><USER6> Seems like sklearn pipelines with a more generalized use case + additional helpful features for ETL. Very interested

</comment><comment><USER24> Who is behind this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Me (as an individual), and a few great people that helped me along the way. Not commercially endorsed, or supported.

<comment><USER25> How does this compare to Dask, Luigi or Airflow?

<comment><AUTHOR> As soon as I can, I'll include comparison pages to the documentation, trying to keep it as objective as possible. I can't seriously answer this question in depth here, but it is planned, so at least experts from other systems can also jump in and complement/correct my understanding of each systems. I used a bunch of them, but I'm in no mean expert user of each so making it collaborative sound like a better idea than just giving my point of view.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the happiest moment in your life? - <AUTHOR> In times like this when everything is so depressing, I wanted to ask what is the happiest moment in your life. <comment><USER2> Mountains, climbing, spouse, family, friends

</comment><comment><USER3> great post. need a while to think about this. will return back later.</comment>


Benchmarking Cloud Provider Performance - <AUTHOR> http://www.acmebenchmarking.com/2015/11/benchmarking-cloud-provider-performance.html <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote a VoltDB blog post with additional thoughts here: [https://voltdb.com/blog/cloud-benchmark](https://voltdb.com/blog/cloud- benchmark)

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting Results, nice write up.</comment>


No, Palantir. Your internships are not worth 5 months, 8 interviews,... - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/5ncqti/no_palantir_your_internships_are_not_worth_5/ <comment><USER2> Someone in a related thread (I followed a few links to get there) commented that

> _Every time this comes up we say give them a contract quote for the time. I > vividly recall one guy that did, this year or last, and the company said > "sure" without hesitation. He made like $400 interviewing to work there, > because he asked one question._

> _It 's simple, you just say "8 hours seems a little excessive to do for > free, but I'm happy to do it at a billable rate of say $75/hr. If that's > okay with you I can start within a day." That's it. If they still want the > work but won't pay for it, that will tell you a whole lot about them._

I'd be interested in hearing peoples thoughts about this!

<comment><USER3> Laws of supply and demand apply.

If the person is in demand, and the supply of identical applicants is low (or, zero, if they really want this one person), then the applicant can command way more than most people expect.

If you are a college student applying for an intership, I would tend to believe the opposite applies. Supply is massive. I think asking for any compensation for time will be met with a quick end to the process.

<comment><USER4> If the supply is so massive why are all these companies paying so much for tech interns?

<comment><USER5> Supply of potential candidates is high, supply of highly qualified candidates is low.

<comment><USER6> If only there was a way to convert potential candidate into highly qualified candidates without relying on universities or bootcamps.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, let me elaborate what I mean by "potential." I don't mean candidates that have potential to do the job extremely well, but candidates that apply for positions with adequate signals but without the capabilities to do the job well.

Bootcamps and Universities don't convert potential candidates into highly qualified ones in this model, they convert non-candidates to potential candidates.

The highly qualified component comes from more than just education, I knew a lot of people that got excellent GPAs through diligent hard work but didn't comprehend what they were learning in a way that would allow them to leverage the knowledge. I've met C students that were so fascinated with the topics they studied that they screwed off on school work to cover more breadth (building cars, satellites, etc.)

A bootcamp/university wont take someone that is diligent and transform them into someone that's passionate. It can take someone that's passionate and give them the qualifications to get to interviews though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Weird. Palantir isn't just wasting the student's time (which is shitty, but par for course), but the time of its own engineers and recruiters. How many engineers' hours have gone into interviewing and reviewing this candidate?

And all for an FDE role. I take this as another countersignal to the quality of Palantir and its trajectory.

</comment><comment><USER8> This problem extends beyond Palantir and internships. Every job interview I have been through, you have to go through a recruiter screen, a hiring manager phone interview, another phone interview with a senior person, first day onsite with 5-6 people, second day onsite with a homework presentation. ARE YOU KIDDINg ME ?? I have another job, and I have to constantly lie to find time to interview with ONE company. Then these guys all complain about talent shortage and unable to fill up their vacancies. May be, you don't need 20 interviews to determine if a person is a good fit for your role.

<comment><USER9> Meanwhile, family and friends that are traveling nurses (ie a job that ACTUALLY effects life and death) have 1 phone interview with a hiring manager that can last 20 minutes to an hour. That's it.

Then they receive a decision within a week (though often within a day or two).

<comment><USER8> That is amazing. Would kill for an interview experience like that

<comment><USER9> Right? A family member was out with me at a wine tasting a year ago, stepped outside for 30 minutes to take a phone interview, and came back. She received an offer two days later.

I think it all boils down to being in a profession that's in very high demand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like an escalation-of-commitment filter. It's like: Hey they made it through the interview gauntlet. Now we can _really_ haze them!

The sort of person who wants to work at Palantir deserves this anyway, so score one for karma.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Forward deployed enginnering role" \- I so much laugh at this sales bullshine used these days in US by all marvelous super star human capital development managers (ie HR people).

P.s. Its dreaded ordinary support, for anyone curious.

</comment><comment><USER12> The rumor is that Palantir kind of sucks and the only reason most people are sticking it out is the hope of an IPO soon-ish.

<comment><USER13> [https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Palantir-Technologies- Revi...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Palantir-Technologies- Reviews-E236375.htm)

Wow yeah. These Glassdoor reviews look terrible.

"Cons Very immature staff, no work life balance if you're a bit older than a recent college grad."

"The company also suffers from systemic poor leadership, which creates a political, distrusting environment that said leadership refuses to believe exists. This isn't necessarily a dealbreaker though, just something to be aware of. I ranked culture & values low, because while Palantir has a great cultural manifesto, it's almost 100% not reflective of conditions inside the company."

"Cons \- Low pay + illiquid equity = Don't plan to stay here if want fair wage at silicon valley \- Expectation for work-life imbalance \- Great place if you are a fresh grad, not so if you are progressing in your career"

Looks like they're another company that thrives off of soul-sucking fresh college grads. Disgusting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Palantir tried to recruit me a while back before Peter Thiel came out as a Trump supporter. Their pitch is basically "work more for less pay!" hidden behind buzz-speak.

</comment><comment><USER14> In this day and age, why is it that companies drag candidates that far along? For all the talk of a lack of engineers, you'd think companies would be a bit quicker about it.

When the startup I was working at went belly-up in July, I had to scramble for a position. There was one local I applied at, I had a handful of contacts at lean on the HR to fast-track me, etc. By the time they got back to me for a phone screen several months had passed and I found a good job with another company.

Having little understanding of HR practices, why is this?

<comment><USER15> I would say in cases like that it's probably other people who also have little understanding of HR practices. I think the smartest thing my company did was hire a professional recruiter to supplement the HR team - she brought me on, as well as maybe 25% of this office, solo. She contacted me within about a day of me responding to a reasonably well written linkedin JD, stayed on top of me almost daily, and had sold me on the company, with an offer in hand, within 2 weeks of initial contact.

Just having someone who's job it is to recruit, and who's good at that job, can make a world of difference. I know a lot of startups just have the engineering manager or CEO themselves do it, which is a shame, because you can easily contract it out for something like a 10-20% finder's fee to a good recruiter/agency. Say what you want, there _are_ good ones out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I know a few folks who work at Palantir, and when they do talk about work (not often) it sounds like every other company that does IT consulting. I also don't recall those folks complaining or even mentioning an overly arduous process for hiring, but I guess that doesn't mean there wasn't one.

Someone else mentions this, but it meshes well with what (little) I know about Palantir, and it sounds like this person interviewed with a bunch of different teams, because the recruiter thought they'd be a great fit for the company, but none of the teams were willing to pull the trigger. This is also a massive waste of time for the recruiter and the company, so they wouldn't do it unless they were convinced the candidate would (eventually) find a home.

Maybe the recruiter could have been more transparent about what was going on with the candidate, but those kinds of things happen everywhere, right? Again, nothing specific to Palantir, except maybe the fact that the candidate was willing to go even as far as they did.

</comment><comment><USER17> IMHO they have a process problem. To my certain knowledge they haven't followed up and asked why when very very talented people have gotten so sick of the recruitment process that they have opted out. But if you don't take the trouble to figure out what is putting off such candidates your HR is messed up. It's a huge fail.

</comment><comment><USER18> Economically speaking, for whatever pool of applicants that they treat this way, they will only get candidates who really want to work for them, and they will have their pick of those candidates.

I'm glad to read that the poster had already moved on.

</comment><comment><USER19> What's the appeal of interning at a company like Palantir, especially merely as a "FDE"? It seems like if you're at that level there are way better opportunities out there for you.

Big dreams of being a government contractor?

</comment><comment><USER20> It seems to me that they waste a lot of time (and money!) on these lengthy recruitment procedures. They could at least let the candidate have a roadmap so that he could decide right away if it's worth his bother.

</comment><comment><USER21> Sure sounds like the recruiter is trying to find a team that wants the candidate.</comment>


The most useful sites you visit every day? - <AUTHOR> Mine are:
http://c.gg/yc/
http://c.gg/regex/
http://c.gg/code
http://c.gg/cs
http://c.gg/bs
http://c.gg/ip
<comment></comment><comment>=
Let me know yours - I want to plug the best ones into http://C.GG/ shortener </comment><comment><AUTHOR> PS: One stop live Olympics broadcasts, webcasts and schedules (if you're in Canada):

[http://c.gg/o](http://c.gg/o)</comment>


Show HN:A web app to manage your Dropbox, GDrive and box - <AUTHOR> https://www.addfs.com/

<comment><USER2> Good app but throws me an SSL certificate error in Chrome. You may want to correct that or else people may not access the app due to security concerns

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing that we would fix it

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> addfs.com is inspired by the mount command in Unix OS. Just as mount command enables the ability of accessing multiple external devices using the same API i.e. Unix File System, addfs.com enables users to access multiple cloud storage (Box, Dropbox and Google Drive) through the same interface (HTML and Rest).</comment>


Promising lab-grown skin sprouts hair and grows glands in mice - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35946611 <comment><USER2> My mother was severely burned over a large portion of her body in 1988. The amount of effort (and knowledge) to save her back then at MGH was tremendous, even with out the access to information we have today. Materials, grafting techniques, processes, equipment, medications, rehab, etc. [1]

I have to say medical progress is incredible (to me) now and yet still feels slow to reach patients. Most progress seems to be slowed by regulatory and financial systems. Coordination between research, government, commercialization and patients is complex. I know I'm stating what is obvious to many, but I still hold on to the fantasy that a single medical researcher can discover a breakthrough, apply it, save many, and integrate into mainstream medicine in a course of year. With science advancing more quickly, (and perhaps when machines can accelerate it orders of magnitude), the future bottlenecks will _only_ be regulation, coordination and distribution.

What startups focusing on improving the aforementioned?

[1] - related - in 2008,2011 there was this spray on skin gun but it used stem cells. [http://gizmodo.com/5019710/spray-on-skin-gun-shoots-stem- cel...](http://gizmodo.com/5019710/spray-on-skin-gun-shoots-stem-cells-to- heal-your-open-wounds) [http://gizmodo.com/5749968/the-skin-gun-that-sprays- new-skin...](http://gizmodo.com/5749968/the-skin-gun-that-sprays-new-skin-on- burn-victims-is-real)

</comment><comment><USER3> Will this help balding men? If so, I could see it getting regulatory approval much faster...</comment>


Hacker News: Our Tiny Charity Desperately Needs Your Help - <AUTHOR> http://adsbycoffee.tumblr.com/post/15938460759/hackernewshelp

<comment><USER2> Can you give a little more information regarding ad space donations, for example:

\- What countries do you need traffic from?

\- Do you require "a spot" on a site, or could donors just give X impressions where X is whatever number can fit in around commercial banners?

\- I don't think I've ever come across 250x100 adverts before, why this size? And more importantly, why only this size, would you not be interested if people could offer you MPU, Leaderboard or Tower impressions?

edit:

Regarding how you serve adverts, I wouldn't recommend creating your own platform. We've got an in-house system that works well for us, but if we hadn't put such a huge amount of time/money into it, it really wouldn't.

Google offer a free solution for small business with less than 90m pageviews (<http://www.google.com/dfp/info/sb/index.html>) and might well offer it for higher numbers for non-profits, I'm not sure. Alternatively there are open source off-the-shelf solutions such as OpenX (<http://www.openx.com/publisher/open-source-ad-server>).

edit 2:

You should also publish who your clients are, to give an idea of what charities you will actually be supporting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your interest!

-While we will gladly accept traffic from almost anywhere at the moment, we are restricted to English-speaking audiences.

-That isn't an issue at all: we don't require a continuos 'spot' per se, a segment of your monthly traffic would be perfect.

-While the size itself is flexible to an extent, we do try to ensure our ads are subtle and non-intrusive, and the 250x100 rectangle is a perfect medium for that. Furthermore, the Leaderboard and Tower formats really aren't suited to the static (no distracting animations) design we utilize.

<comment><USER3> You should really re-think your stance on the size. As a website publisher, anyone wanting to run a non-standard size is going to have to A: pay me for an exclusive spot, because I can't run any other ads in that slot and B: pay for my time to write custom code for your ad. Doesn't happen often.

That's all assuming that's a size I can even fit into my design without making the site look bad. The 250px width is awkward. For us, our right rail is sized around a 300px wide big box ad, 250 is enough off of that that it's going to ruin the solid right-side margin we've designed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the details Tyler! The size is of course flexible, by suggesting 250x100 I was just trying to give a general idea of the small, non-intrusive style we're requesting. I've updated the post to make this clearer.

<comment><USER3> Look into the IAB (Internet Advertising Board) standard sizes. You want to pick one (or more) of those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For your third requirement, rather than get a developer to develop an ad serving system (which can get pretty complex), you can simply use the years of experience built into this: <http://www.openx.com/publisher/open-source-ad- server> \-- it's open source and free (AFAIK) for you to use on your own servers.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like this; if you do it right, it could do an enormous amount of good. That said, I think you should be choosy about which charities you promote; rather than let charities seek you out, you should seek out the very best charities and promote them exclusively. The amount of good-per-dollar varies by multiple orders of magnitude, so the difference in impact between promoting only the best charities and promoting average charities can be enormous. I would suggest directing people to GiveWell's (<http://givewell.org>) top charities list, or to one of the specific charities on it.

<comment><USER6> Seconded. GiveWell needn't be the only source for estimates, but a mission that strongly promoted cost-effective charities could make a huge difference...

It's sometimes hard to convince donors of this case. For many (most?) the goal is not really making a difference, but more like a signaling thing. If your company can turn making a difference into a successful social signal, more power to you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can you clarify non-profit, non-profit nowadays means very little, ICANN is non-profit and is about to fuck up top-top level domains so their CEO can buy a helicopter. Do you draw a salary and how much?

<comment><USER2> You're not wrong that this is sometimes the case, but definitely worth noting that plenty of the best charities in the world are non-profits with some salaried employees, it doesn't automatically make them evil.

<comment><USER7> For sure, I hope you dont object I've just registered adsbycappuccino, my idea is to make it a non-profit ad agency that does work for benefit of charities, in my business plan Ive decided to pay myself $120k pa (is yours the same? we can share a coffee and talk) presuming we get that via donations and running some commercial ads in the roration. It should take off as those stupid HN readers will see non-profit and put some rockets behind my startup. Sweet.. :D

<comment><USER2> Yeah, that's an example of it being bad, what I'm saying is that a charitee with paid staff isn't automatically evil, it's not so black and white.

For example, let's say this charity has a range of options for getting free advert spots on sites for charities. Option A is to have people who care but don't have the experience, and they get X monthly impressions. Option B is to pay someone a low full-time wage, say $30k, and they get Y monthly impressions. Option C is to pay a fantastic salesman $120k/year and he can pull in Z monthly impressions. Until you know the numbers, is option C guaranteed to be bad for the charity?

And of course that's just an example of a high salary - my first comment, that you replied to, was talking more about charities like Oxfam, where without any paid staff they just couldn't operate, they're far too big to be run on a 100% volunteer basis. But people they do employ are paid lower-than-typical salaries for their positions, and a large number of their work force are indeed volunteers.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. But with no transparency it pays to be cynical. In addition, bootstrapping it by asking HN to commit their time and web space whilst drawing a salary is a bit of a slap in the face from day 1. Im sure a consortium of true HN readers could get this off the ground without salary employees, maybe in six months then it would make sense to appoint salary positions such as a treasurer and top-notch biz dev person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You really should add some information about who your team is in an "About Us" page.

By conspicuously leaving that information out, I don't trust anything about the website. Unfortunately, in this day and age of scams, you need to legitimize yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Steve,

Absolutely - thanks for your advice, it's something we'll definitely add!

<comment><USER9> The private domain registration is not a good sign for a not for profit.

It makes it hard for someone to look up your 990. How about posting a link?

<comment><USER10> Given the fantastic response levels to this I'd hope to see more information about the group, the charities, and more extensive financial disclosure. It's all too easy to claim great utilization rates and great recipients. That said, it seems a very worthy cause and you seem to have picked a good place to promote it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like the idea of advertising on coffee cups in general, and I think the coffee house crowd is a good target demographic for charities. I'm curious, however, why you chose to operate as a non-profit catering to a niche charity market rather than operate as a for profit that caters to everyone.

As a for-profit, I would think you could have a greater impact with an expanded customer base (= greater awareness) and could subsidize your charitable endeavor with the for profit business. You could perhaps even organize it as an L3C (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3C>).

I'm not trolling. I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><USER2> Not quite curious enough, they are coffee by name, not by nature.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do love the coffee cup advertising paradigm as an idea though - maybe it's something we'll look into!

<comment><USER11> Yeah, it's great. It is already being done, but that doesn't mean there's not room for more competition. You could probably outsource the printing and I still think the coffee house crowd is the right demographic for charitable advertisements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Would you guys be open to trying weekly sponsored posts on a Tumblr blog? (We're over at <http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/>) We'd have to talk about it some more to figure out the right way to handle it, but I see it as a way to unobtrusively play with a sponsored posts style (which would work well with Tumblr, where everything is dashboard-oriented) while doing something good with it. I have 20k followers there, so it might be worth trying. Let me know.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd be willing to donate my only ad spot on Snipt: <http://snipt.net> \-- the new site is at <http://beta.snipt.net> (still wrapping some stuff up). I don't get a ton of traffic, but somewhere around 1,500 - 2,000 uniques daily.

I've never made much money with ads, anyways, and this seems like an awesome cause.

Email me to discuss size requirements, etc. firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER14> I would encourage you to try to do the _most_ good that you possibly can by working with the very most effective charities in the world. Millions of charities do good, but very very few do as _much_ good as these: <http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities>. If you're looking to do as much good as you can, then this is where you'd look.

</comment><comment><USER15> "We help the tiny groups, the niche organizations which often make the biggest practical difference"

Why do you think this?</comment>


e-texteditor.com domain expired, much like the text editor - <AUTHOR> http://e-texteditor.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I always thought this Windows text editor (which use to be one of my favourites) was very much akin to TextMate on the Mac, which started out strong with a great feature set, gained a cult following, and then languished over the years with a lack of updates and community support by the author.

It's not surprising though to find Sublime Text taking the spotlight from both e-texteditor and TextMate, with a developer who is happy to engage with the community, and consistently releasing updates.

I do hope though, this doesn't mean the end of e-texteditor, as much as I hate having inactive projects, I hate even more having a product with no competitors at all.

</comment><comment><USER2> Aw, that's a shame. I was one of the people that paid for the beta version, while Alexander was still actively engaging the growing community behind the editor. I remember when I first moved back to Linux the only thing I really missed about my Windows setup was E. Luckily that move to Linux forced me to re-learn Vim, finally making it over 'the bump' and making it my main editor, so I watched the slow, painful death of E as just a curious spectator.

Still, a shame. It was a great editor.

</comment><comment><USER3> The domain seems to be back up now. I still use e quite a bit, but your right they haven't updated nearly enough.</comment>


Datadog potentially compromised - <AUTHOR> Hi, you are receiving this email as an administrator of your Datadog account.
We are currently investigating an incident involving potential unauthorized access today to some of our systems. As a precaution, we recommend that you take the following actions:
- Reset your Datadog password: All users will receive separate instructions to that end. Google Auth and SAML users won't need to change their password. (Note that passwords are stored using bcrypt with a unique salt)
- Reset your Datadog App Keys: These are the keys allowing access to Datadog APIs. You can find-out more about the reset process in this KB article https://help.datadoghq.com/hc/en-us/articles/210270566
- Rotate other credentials and tokens in use: You are storing credentials or access tokens in Datadog for the following integrations: RSS Feed. We recommend that you change these credentials or revoke these tokens.
We apologize for the disruption and the extra work this requires from you as we choose to err on the side of caution.
We take your security extremely seriously and will do our best to assist you through this process at email@example.com .
Andrew Becherer Chief Security Officer, Datadog <comment><USER2> Hello,

Ilan from Datadog here. Thanks for posting this and for your patience as we conduct our investigation. We emailed all users and administrators early this morning that we were resetting their passwords, and to encourage they rotate credentials as appropriate.

We have posted a notice ([https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/2016-07-08-security- notice/](https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/2016-07-08-security-notice/)) on our website as well. As is our practice, you can expect a post-mortem with additional details once our investigation is complete. In the mean time if we can help address any questions or concerns please do reach out via firstname.lastname@example.com. I can also personally be reached at email@example.com.

Regards, Ilan</comment>


Should you ignore the n00bs? - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/should-you-igno.html

<comment><USER2> I think Google said it best - "engage beginners and attract experts".

Full quote:

"Designing for many people doesn't mean designing for the lowest common denominator. The best Google designs appear quite simple on the surface but include powerful features that are easily accessible to those users who want them. Our intent is to invite beginners with a great initial experience while also attracting power users whose excitement and expertise will draw others to the product.

A well-designed Google product lets new users jump in, offers help when necessary, and ensures that users can make simple and intuitive use of the product's most valuable features. Progressive disclosure of advanced features encourages people to expand their usage of the product. Whenever appropriate, Google offers smart features that entice people with complex online lives – for instance, people who share data across several devices and computers, work online and off, and crave storage space."

</comment><comment><USER3> From Seth's post:

 _Why not consider making it easy for the confused to ask for help? And treat them with respect when they do. If you don't create a little confusion, it's unlikely you've built something remarkable._

I think it's an interesting way to look at things, but ultimately flawed. When confusion exists, there are many ways to alleviate it. Facebook takes the "blank slate" as an opportunity to actively educate the user. So does 37Signals (<http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch09_The_Blank_Slate.php>).

These things may not turn "n00bs" into power users, but they'll at least reach a level of proficiency where they feel comfortable. That's the crucial first step. It only takes a few of them to advance to the next level (harnessing their understanding of your design to think of new ways of applying it) to make things really interesting.

</comment><comment><USER4> Short answer: no. Long answer: don't ignore any users you potentially want to have. It's just bad business.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone know the stylate.com folks? - <AUTHOR>

Stylate.com has been posted on HN a couple of times. It looks like they launched a few years ago. I recently stumbled upon their site and as I'm in the market for a new domain/logo I looked at their site and found one that I liked. I used their site to purchase a domain almost 3 weeks ago and have heard nothing at all. The payment is still pending in Google Checkout. I've sent emails, left a voicemail on the Google Voice number they have, even managed to find one of the founder's personal e-mail addresses from a Google Groups archive. Nothing.<p>Does anyone happen to know them? Did the company die? Anything else I should try? <comment><USER2> I had a similar issue. I tried to buy a domain that was on their website and after a few weeks they finally emailed me and told me that it wasn't for sale. It pisses me off even more that it's still up on their site.

When I finally was able to reach someone I heard back from - William Simmons <firstname.lastname@example.com>

Good Luck - it's too bad that they don't do a great service as the $250 seems right for domain + logo and should be a start for any project!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the information. William's email address is the one that shows up if I try to cancel the payment in Google Checkout. I've sent an email to that address and haven't heard back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We bought a domain off of them a few months ago. Domain was transferred over and everything went smoothly.

Said domain is still for sale on their website.</comment>


Git from the Bottom-Up by John Wiegley [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ftp.newartisans.com/pub/git.from.bottom.up.pdf

<comment><USER2> FYI the Scribd version requires a subscription for one to download the document.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is what made me grok Git. I show it to people who are new to Git instead of a standard reference manual, because I believe this material makes you much more self-reliant.

</comment><comment><USER4> Short, easy to follow, well designed and very "precise" tutorial. Thanks for sharing !!

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks real good on the kindle; thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER6> wow! this will be the first thing that I am going to read on 'my' "new" kindle :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> maybe anyone has epub version?

<comment><USER8> <http://ftp.newartisans.com/pub/git.from.bottom.up.pdf>

<comment><USER9> I hope the rest of the year goes like this. I was just looking at git clients for the Mac and how to use git from th command line. w00t!</comment></comment></comment>


Boeing 747s Still Use Floppy Disks to Get Critical Software Updates - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/boeing-747s-still-use-floppy-disks-to-get-critical-soft-1844683811 <comment><USER2> I guess aviation is a very conservative industry and probably for a good reason. If something works and passed tests and FAA approved there are no reasons replacing that? :)</comment>


Usability of Programming Languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1011/R201/

<comment><USER2> The section on experts is fascinating!</comment>


Overstock and Coinbase Briefly Mixed Up Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/10/overstock-and-coinbase-briefly-mixed-up-bitcoin-and-bitcoin-cash/ <comment><USER2> That's nothing. I mixed up Bitcoin and mining and "Minecraft economics" having first heard about both on the same day. Needless to say, I'm still poor.</comment>


When you are born, you know nothing - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/hawkins.html?pg=1&topic=hawkins&topic_set=

<comment><USER2> What I find amazing are problems like this:

What is the probability of a chopper crashing or someone shooting a rocket at it? I don't know, but I can say that when I see a chopper on TV, the probability is around 80%. Still, when I see a real life chopper, I know that it's probably not going to crash or getting shot at.

Do I know that because of any experience I have? No, I haven't seen many choppers in real life and not once have I seen one take off or land. But I know about the workings of the media. I know about why people use choppers and that they wouldn't use them if they always ended up crashing and burning.

Even if a program is very artificially intelligent, it's still very hard to get training data that matches that mixture of sensual experience and logical reasoning.

It's a hard problem. I still believe it can be done, but we're not nearly there yet. I hope Hawkins makes some progress without a big disppointment that discourages further research.

</comment><comment><USER3> _The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned._ \-- Bruce Ediger

(pedantry: [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.editors/msg/882fd4ef853e...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.editors/msg/882fd4ef853ee770) )

It's definitely intuitive for marsupials. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pouch_%28marsupial%29>

</comment><comment><USER4> I highly recommend his book, "On Intelligence".

It's also very interesting the way recent research into the way our vision systems do object recognition match recent advancements in object recognition software. It's all about feature extraction to find invariant information matched against a corpus of extracted features.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. Awesome book. The author also started a company that uses the theories espoused in the book. numenta.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Knowing how to learn is "something". And if you include non-conscious activities apart from those that involve systems normally considered conscious (bodily functions), then we "know" almost everything just in our brain stems.

</comment><comment><USER7> "I was born brilliant. See what education did!" :)

</comment><comment><USER8> So instincts don't exist?

<comment><USER9> The article's content diverges from the headline quickly. It's worth reading, especially if you're interested in AI.</comment></comment>


Should Creative Commons Drop Its NonCommercial & NoDerivatives License Options? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120828/00585920175/should-creative-commons-drop-its-noncommercial-noderivatives-license-options.shtml <comment><USER2> I put up virtually all of my Flickr photos under the No Commercial clause. This is mostly because I'm afraid of other people using the images for purposes that they do not have the rights to...i.e. using a person's likeness to sell a product. If that person sues, I want to be as far away from the litigation as possible:

<http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7680>

[http://www.switched.com/2007/09/21/virgin-mobile-steals- teen...](http://www.switched.com/2007/09/21/virgin-mobile-steals-teens-flickr- photo-for-ad/)

The no-commercial clause obviously encompasses more than that, so to answer the OP, yes, the Non-commercial clause is a symptom of poor education on rights.</comment>


The Size of the Mobile Market - <AUTHOR> http://www.blissmfoster.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/comprehensive-mobile-infographic1.png

<comment><USER2> You keep using that chart type. I do not think it means what you think it means.</comment>


Evad3rs dev team releases "evasi0n" untethered jailbreak for all iOS 6 devices - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2013/02/04/evad3rs-dev-team-releases-evasi0n-untethered-jailbreak-for-all-ios-6-devices/

<comment><USER2> dud3, h5v1ng numb3rz in ur n4m3 is v3rry imp0rt4nt for g3tt1ng resp3ct in teh t3ch sp4ce</comment>


Show HN: SVG colorizer, match your branding colors to any given vector pack - <AUTHOR> https://www.iconshock.com/svg-color/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello community, main developer here, it was kind of hard to define how to arrange the color palette but in most cases the results are neat. It organizes colors to keep lights and shadows and get the most accurated results. Btw, You can create your own color palettes, if you add less colors than the original palette, the algorithm will create more colors to fill.</comment>


Founders share the challenges of running a tech business - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/post/the-biggest-challenges-of-running-a-tech-business-ea87797f6d <comment><USER3> enjoy how there's perspective given from the responders with their current MRR as well. as a founder of a bootstrapped tech-enabled service startup with $135k+ MRR is cash flow. Accounts Receivable is a PITA and it still hasn't been solved (even with the likes of bill.com, harvest, stripe, paypal, qbo, etc...) - i'd almost pay for a company to outsource our AR to completely to represent us on initial AR, 30-90 day AR, collections, demand letters, and ultimately lawsuits if needed. bleh.

<comment><USER4> at that size, would it be better to just hire an in-house accounting/book- keeping person?

<comment><USER5> I was going to recommend the same thing, but I also know there are plenty of AR companies out there. YC even funded one called YayPay. I know my accountant will chase down invoices for me if I asked him (for a fee of course), thankfully QuickBooks Online handles this reporting, and has a one click solution to resend Invoices. I don't do $135k/mo, and only send a handful or two of invoices each month, so I cannot comment on how well it scales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> wow, love the honesty of some of these, killer compilation

really liked this --> "From the start, I was aware that I was taking on a huge project that other companies have devoted entire teams to, but I chose to look at it as more of a mental challenge than a technical one. I knew I had the skillset to pull it off, I just had to keep myself motivated and on track."

<comment> c-smile Heh, that's mine and about my Sciter project.

Sciter is pretty full implementation of HTML5 and CSS, has scripting engine on board, etc. So, indeed, I am personally competing with teams behind WebKit, Trident, Gecko, V8 (JS Engine), Chakra (MS JS Engine) and bunch of others.

And recently with ReactJS (Sciter got Reactor - native implementation of ReactJs), Angular and others.

And that is really a fun project to work on - many different paradigms on the same code base.

<comment><USER7> that's the one project in the list that caught my eye - looks pretty neat. shame it doesn't gain the attention of the electron hating mob on HN - <USER2> all want people to work for free and give them stuff for no money but in the name of foss. keep up the good work, your project is an example of going against what the mob wants and building a successful product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The biggest challenge was a very naive understanding of how the modern > internet economy works. The idea that good software is easy to promote is > just as silly as the "good software sells itself" myth. I would definitely > spend more time learning marketing.

This resonates for me as a bootstrapped founder in the early stages with my company. Cutting through the noise and getting the attention of my leads is hard work. Way harder than coding.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm running into these challenges right now. After my last job, I'm finally trying to turn a 10yr+ project into a product.

I'm currently serving a bit over 2 million requests per day for the free service I've run for years.

Now that I'm focusing on turning it into something more I'm realizing how slow it is to build a product by yourself.

For example, I've been working on transitioning to a much more scalable k8s architecture for the last few weeks. While I've had some experience over last few years as a developer, I've never had to set the whole thing up from scratch. It's been tedious and draining but I am making progress.

The biggest issue is not having anyone to talk to on a peer basis.

In January I completely revamped the product website from being a crap page running on Launchrock to a self-hosted site with a new design and incorporating Mailgun to handle email.

The issue with that is I get people every day submitting their email addresses to sign up, but to date no one has clicked the confirmation link in the emails being sent to them to confirm the signup.

I researched this heavily before writing code and the consensus is that double opt-in is the correct way to go. So I did that, but no one is following up with the confirmation part.

Last week I found a minor bug that was preventing confirmation signups and I fixed it asap and manually sent emails to the 3 people that I would manually add them to the confirm list and remove them if they wanted. But I've had more signups after that who also did not complete the signup process. I've tested the flow heavily and it works.

But since I don't really have a coworker environment anymore, I don't have anyone to do peer review right now. Very frustrating.

I guess overall I'm used to building services very rapidly but being responsible for the entire thing is someone time consuming. I'm still adjusting to the process.

<comment><USER10> I would encourage you to try to find a low-cost developer in the developing world (perhaps via Fiverr) who could serve a QA function for you. It might take you 4 or 5 tries, but you might be able to find someone very low cost who would be able to work with you on QA and debugging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> With respect to each company, what do the numbers in the parentheses mean? Is that profit, revenue or something else per month?

<comment><USER12> This is almost always (and frustratingly!) Monthly Recurring Revenue.

<comment><USER13> Frustrating how?

<comment><USER14> Revenue is close to useless if you're selling dollars for quarters. Hard to gauge the efficacy of businesses without the full picture.

<comment><USER15> IndieHackers are usually self-bootstrappers, they wouldn't sustain long by selling dollars for quarters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is IndieHackers completely fucked for anyone else right now in Chrome 80.0.3987.106 on MacOS? The js and CSS static assets are getting blocked for some reason, even after disabling all my extensions and refreshing the page in incognito and without cached assets.

edit: Works fine in Safari, but the same thing is happening in Firefox.

<comment><USER17> I had the same issue with the link on both safari & firefox, I used the readerview on firefox as a workaround.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd add the struggle / time it took to really deeply comprehend what 'build, measure, learn' means in practice. And realizing that there is a more scientific approach to building good products. For example by using Hypothesis-Driven Development [1]. We wasted lots of time (and money) at the beginning with our own stupid assumptions.

[1] Hypothesis-driven development (HDD) [https://teamsuccess.io/hdd](https://teamsuccess.io/hdd)

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow, a coffee company is now a tech company. I didn't bother with the rest of the list.

<comment><USER7> well the 9 to 5 you work in js probably selling some non tech products as well, yet it may be called a tech company.

<comment><USER20> A tech company's product is tech. A plumber that accepts payments using square isn't a tech company.

<comment><USER7> so your company sells apis, software frameworks or hardware? or does it leverage these to sells some other non tech product?

<comment><USER20> Yes, the company I work for in particular sells software that runs on hardware for datacenter traffic management.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> All of those could be applied to non-tech businesses with very minor modifications.

</comment><comment><USER22> The site is not working/rendering properly in both Chrome and Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER23> love the honesty

</comment><comment><USER24> This site is top notch, thumbs up

<comment><USER25> It weighs several megabytes and downloads and runs scripts from multiple domains. All to serve a text page.

God's sake it even has its own reimplemented loading bar...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Never trust anything that comes from indiehackers, this is a community of professional indie astroturfers and manipulators of everything from renaming the same product and launching it every couple months on ProductHunt and buying upvotes, to baiting HNers with "How I made $X by doing Y". It's a pump and dump scheme on sub-million dollar levels.

<comment><USER27> Not sure why a coffee company is a "tech startup".

(Though TBF Amazon didn't feel like a tech company in the 1990s)

<comment><USER28> It has a live chat and five different tracking solutions implemented. What about this doesn't look like a tech business?

<comment><USER27> That's just table stakes for a generic retail store Just because I drive a car wouldn't make me a car business.

I think of tech businesses primarily as those that develop novel technology and secondarily as those who use technology in a novel and unexpected way. In both cases technology is the differentiation.

The only novelty of this business is its message and while that might make a perfectly respectable business (I am not part of the target market so I can not judge) there's no "tech" in their business plan. Think of it more like Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein: the clothes are made in the same factories by the same workers; the only differentiation is market positioning. Nobody would criticize them as not being "business" or even "clothes business" but their differentiator is marketing.

<comment><USER29> I'm pretty sure Wordball's response was meant as sarcasm.

<comment><USER27> Hah, whooshed over my head! Everybody wants the pixie dust these days.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>