This Tiny Gadget Creates an Uncensored Mini Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcodesign.com/90170618/this-tiny-gadget-creates-a-mini-uncensored-internet <comment><USER2> I do this often with my MagicShifter:

[http://magicshifter.net/](http://magicshifter.net/)

It allows me to serve up a web page to anyone in WiFi distance - and is quite useful for the purposes of promoting interaction with location participants .. it can be configured to show different light patterns for different visitors, and so on.

As the IoT wave keeps crashing out there against the big-Internet shore, we're going to see more and more sub-sub-sub-Intranets out there, I feel. Its already pretty clear to me that we could set up a mesh of MagicShifters to support a local meatspace community .. imagine when its going to become a normalised phenomenon ..

Its also kind of surprising that more shops and retail businesses don't do this sort of thing - host their own sites locally for visitors on their WiFi to use. I guess we'll get to that point, though, where the site is an appliance ..

</comment><comment><USER3> this reminds me of what was probably the vl of a Sidekick</comment>


The 'secretary problem' is so unrealistic it can't inform our decisions - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@robertwiblin/the-secretary-problem-is-too-bad-a-match-for-real-life-to-usefully-inform-our-decisions-so-1cd29ae01024 <comment><USER2> I've been thinking about an "inverse secretary problem" for choosing contract jobs:

1\. I have a limited time in which to secure the next contract

2\. Potential clients opportunities appear at a fixed rate (eg 1-2/week)

3\. Each client has a different, unknown, maximum daily rate (MDR) they are willing pay. I can discover the MDR only by quoting a higher rate ("sorry the most we can go to is $XXX").

4\. If I quote a lower rate than the client's MDR, I have a new contract and the game stops.

Given my goal is to find the client who will pay the highest daily rate before the deadline, what is the best strategy?

My best guess at the moment is to start at a high rate, and gradually decrease it as the deadline approaches. But how can I use the information I gather about rejected client's MDRs to decide the best daily rate to quote future potential clients?

<comment><USER3> > _Given my goal is to find the client who will pay the highest daily rate > before the deadline..._

Is that _actually_ your goal though? Are you sure you wouldn't prefer a client who will offer repeat business at a decent but not maximal daily rate? How about a client who will offer a more interesting job, or one who will offer you the opportunity to learn something new?

In so many of these optimisation problems, the real difficulty is _specifying exactly what you want to optimise_ (never mind making sure that the specification is tractable). In general the solution you get from your algorithm will depend sensitively on your objective: if you're not completely sure about the objective, you shouldn't be sure about the solution.

<comment><USER4> > Is that actually your goal though?

When it comes to contracting, this is precisely the goal. Your questions refer to freelancing rather than contracting, which is quite different.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure that's the case. I work somewhere that has seen a very high turnover in contractors, paid a decent amount above market averages. It's because project assignments are poorly defined, bureaucratically controlled, and by the time the initial term is up (usually 3 months) the contractor is fed up and has some other work already lined up.

<comment><USER2> Agree!

Changing clients is preferable as there are more opportunities for networking, and there is a novelty factor: Each slow-moving bureaucratically-controlled poorly-defined enterprise IT project is slow-moving, bureaucratically- controlled and poorly-defined in its own way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "For the advice coming out of this model to beat a very practical alternative — following conventional wisdom or your own common-sense — we'll need to deal with many of them all at once."

Conventional wisdom and common sense really means "using an ill defined heuristic", which isn't so obviously better than the discussed algorithm. Common sense, as the saying goes, is neither common nor sense, and using this phrase just hides the actual algorithms people really apply.

There is no reason to think that common sense encompasses more reliable judgement than the simple maths here.

<comment><USER7> Our "common sense" has been shaped by the experiences of thousands of generations before us, and it has worked out so far. I wouldn't dismiss it so quickly.

<comment><USER8> Things started "working out" pretty recently, once we started applying more rigor to our thinking. Life in the thousands of generations before was pretty rough by comparison, to put it very mildly.

<comment><USER9> That's a naive oversimplification -- the kind of modern thinking that considers history some kind of shit-hole and ours the first enlightened era.

People had extremely rich lives, deep thoughts, and interesting problems to solve, throughout the 3-4K years of history.

So Joe Sixpack today, or even a Joe IvyLeagueDegree today is no more sophisticated than e.g. a citizen of ancient Athens or Rome or Bagdad in most everyday matters.

<comment><USER8> Pre-industrial society was a shithole for most people compared to the present. And I'm not basing that on metrics like literacy or access to political franchise. I'm talking about things like "how likely are you to bury half your children?", and "how likely are you to be raped or murdered?" We've made ourselves so comfortable now (which is great) that we've forgotten how unusual our circumstances are and lost interest in how we created them.

It's not a comment on the intelligence of the average historical person, or the richness of their emotional life. It's just an acknowledgement that the tools we used to try to improve our lot for most of human history (including "common sense") were not very successful, at least compared to the ones we're using now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > "Should we spend the first 36.8% of our adult lives dating casually, and > then settle down with the first person we find who's better than anyone > we've dated so far? That would suggest men start seriously looking for a > life partner at 39 — and women at 41."

The problem suggest anything like that. It suggest you should spend 36.8% of dating time (or date count) on exploring, not 36.8% of your life...

Second problem with the blog, that it just produces lot of possible issues, but does not show any example where 36.8 algorithm would fail horribly. Maybe those drawbacks does not matter in practice.

<comment><USER11> Exactly, there are no real takeaways from this article, especially since there are real applications* to the problem so it is worth exploring, even if the original example was flawed.

He spend most of the time debating the exemplification without ever challenging the solution, but the example is just there to entertain the casual reader, the interesting part is the math behind.

*You're on a road trip and want to refuel ok the cheapest pump in range, that satisfied the uncertainties of the original problem plus the given constraints.

<comment><USER3> That's not a real application. You would just google gas prices. Or you would stop and ask someone.

<comment><USER10> Assuming you've got cell coverage (or cheap roaming).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _So. Should we spend the first 36.8% of our adult lives dating casually, and then settle down with the first person we find who's better than anyone we've dated so far? That would suggest men start seriously looking for a life partner at 39 — and women at 41._

Strawman alert! The rate at which people date varies tremendously with age and life circumstance. To treat someone's dating life like a piece of uniform bar stock which can be cut off at the 36.8% mark is so obviously a bad approach, I'm immediately less sure of the article.

EDIT: It turns out the article's entire point is that the model is too simple. It really rubs me the wrong way that he starts out with an implementation which is way too simple.

<comment><AUTHOR> It rubs you the wrong way that I start with an example that clearly illustrates the point I'm trying to make?

<comment><USER12> _It rubs you the wrong way that I start with an example that clearly illustrates the point I 'm trying to make?_

Since it's such a clear strawman, it doesn't clearly illustrate the point you're trying to make for those readers who can see through it. It's common sense to exclude childhood as irrelevant to dating experience. It's common sense, that people will be more active in dating during certain phases in their life.

The whole point of the strawman, is that it appears to support a point by only weakly representing the counterpoint. A fairer analysis has been posted several times in other comments here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=19360311](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=19360311)

<comment><AUTHOR> As I've said to others it highlights one weakness with the model - that it will always say a longer possible search is better because it raises your odds to success and the model features no cost for searching. When you add a cost to delay the appropriate time to spend exploring drops massively.

<comment><USER12> _it highlights one weakness with the model_

By applying the strategy in an unintelligent way which seems designed to make the model fail.

 _it will always say a longer possible search is better because it raises your odds to success and the model features no cost for searching_

That's kind of the whole point of this tradeoff and of the analogies used with it. That there is a cost for searching and not "finding."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm currently looking to buy a house, and although I can't say we've followed the prescribed solution to this problem to the letter (partly because house buying has partially overlapping option availability), I have found it to be a useful way to frame our approach to evaluating options.

Concretely, we've very consciously had a "just looking" phase, where we look at a bunch of houses with the rule that we absolutely will not buy one of them, no matter how appealing: they're only there to give us a benchmark. We've tried to size it in proportion to the number of houses we think we'd plausibly want to look at, given our horizon for buying.

I'm curious if anyone has found other useful methodologies for guiding these sorts of life decisions?

<comment><USER14> I used a similar approach for job hunting at one point. Perform a few interviews in an "exploration phase" where the purpose is less to impress the prospective employer, and moreso to get a pulse on the industry. You won't be able to separate company-specific red flags from industry woes until you compare & contrast a few places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Shocker: Game theory falls apart in the real world.

Shocker: People aren't always rational.

Shocker: Initial conditions do not stay constant.

Shocker: People's priorities wildly vacillate even on short and medium scales.

Shocker: The economic ideal of the perfectly informed and rational consumer is a complete fantasy and violates multiple physical, computational, and biological theories.

<comment><USER16> > Game theory falls apart in the real world.

It explains why people pollute pretty well.

Oversimplified models fall down in the real world. Game theory is useful within a domain.

[http://theconversation.com/game-theory-and-the- environment-y...](http://theconversation.com/game-theory-and-the-environment- youre-on-to-a-winner-999)

<comment><USER17> Incorrect. Game theory predicts pollution. You just need to make sure the game has the correct predicted payoffs for each move, and the set of moves you want to measure, and their interactions...

You'll find Game Theory a lot easier to understand if you mentally replace every instance of "Math" with "AI". (So instead of saying "The Nash Equilibirum is...", just say "I trained an RNN and this is how it would play"). That's really all it is. Usually the games are designed in a simple way because the "AI" that is being run is nothing more complicated than min- cut/max-flow.

"Pollution" specifically is a case of the "Free-Rider Problem", and there are plenty of game theoretic results that explain it.

<comment><USER18> Wait, you're invoking RNNs as a _simpler model_ than game theory?

<comment><USER19> It's not simpler, but it is bound to go over better on Hackernews.

<comment><USER17> Exactly. People here sort of already know RNNs. You could use RNNs in your game theory game (see AlphaGo, etc), but Game Theory is just a set of principals for defining a "Game", and defining incentives, etc.

If the game doesn't properly account for some incentive, it's the problem of the model designer, just like it would be the problem of the RNN designer not gathering the right type of training data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am far more perplexed by the fact that this author believes too many people are using mathematically derived models for making life decisions and that we need a serious discussion of their merits to avoid suboptimal decisions than any of the modeling concerns other people here have pointed out.

</comment><comment><USER21> The secretary problem is the first and simplest problem in optimal stopping. It's not the only one that people have studied, and while it is too simple to describe many realistic scenarios, the insight you get from solving it is valuable.

</comment><comment><USER22> Not so sure about this guys math, and I assume its because he distributed a lifetime of dating equally across an adult life.

I would guess I had done 36.8% of my dating by age 25 - not 39. Suddenly the model starts to fit better.

<comment><USER23> Exactly.

And the reason why this matters is that the dating that matters is the dating from when we can have children to when we're done. So if a woman starts seriously dating at 20, and is done with kids by 35, then somewhere around 25 is indeed the proper cutoff.

Men can have children longer, but at some point don't want to.

<comment><USER24> Presuming that your goal is to have children...

<comment><USER23> Whatever you personally think, you're dealing with a lot of biological wiring which is intended to optimize your life towards the goal of having children successfully raised to adulthood until they also have children.

This wiring does not work with all individuals nor can it always cope with modern life. But it is still a pretty big factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The other problem is that people/choices aren't strictly ordered... they each have various strengths and weaknesses across a multitude of attributes that are not readily comparable. Imagine you are choosing a car, and one is cheaper but the other has higher top speed... how important is each factor? Is a 1mph speed increase worth $1000? Even if you were able to figure out the ratio, it wouldn't be constant, you would get diminishing returns.

</comment><comment><USER26> This article should be renamed "A Pedants Take on a Statistical Model, an Exploration into Why I'm No Fun at Parties."

<comment><USER27> A "Pedant's" take. Don't forget the apostrophe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > So. Should we spend the first 36.8% of our adult lives dating casually, and > then settle down with the first person we find who's better than anyone > we've dated so far?

Do you know exactly how many "applicants" exist? No.

Does the length of the "contract" depend significantly on the length of "exploration"? Yes, but not in the model.

Instantly closing that site. _sigh_

</comment><comment><USER29> I dunno that it can't inform our decisions; because real decisions don't usually have the same constraints (but sometimes lose approximations of those restraints), the optimal solution to the abstract problem isn't necessary real-world optimal to even the best-fit scenarios, but it's often a good solution and better than a naive solution would be.

It's also the case that the problems that best approximate it's constraints, and for which it offers or suggests a good solution, are probably not usually the familiar problems with which it is usually associated. (Though I can see places that are decent fits that could exist upstream from those, like seeking a parallelizable approach to filtering resumes to get M interview candidates from a pool of N resumes while doing holistic comparison of resumes rather than scoring against an abstract rubric.)

<comment><USER30> But surely all but the very best strategy for selection are equally worthless!

<comment><USER29> I see what you did there, but it's worth noting that that's not true even when the related extreme assumption underlying the secretary problem holds: that assumption is that _every selection other than the very best is equally worthless_. But _strategies_ other than the very best will have different probabilities of picking the best selection, and so will have value proportionate to that probability. (Since they will have a value equal to value of the best selection with that probability, and a value of zero otherwise.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This algorithm is useful for picking parking spaces at shopping centers.

<comment><USER32> I spent most of my adult life just parking arbitrarily in large lots. Didn't even realize this until a girlfriend pointed it out to me. In retrospect, I suppose I was optimizing for spending as little time in my car as possible. It never even occurred to me that my goal should be "park as close to the building as possible".

<comment><USER33> My partner gets mad at me for my "park in the easiest spot to park in" strategy too. We're both able-bodied humans, though, so there's no reason we can't walk 40 extra feet to the store entrance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> FYI if you're applying math to your dating approach ... 'you're doing it wrong'.

</comment><comment><USER17> ... Except there are a number of cases where it is used in practice with success, including assigning medical students to to hospitals for their studies.

I mean, I agree that any time you use an algorithm, you want to know under what conditions it holds... but that doesn't mean that it's suddenly a _bad_ idea to use it.

>The secretary problem does effectively demonstrate the general principle that in life we should spend some time exploring

I have no idea what the author is talking about here... There is no "exploring" in the stable marriage problem.

<comment><USER35> The secretary problem and the stable marriage problem are not the same thing.

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

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

<comment><USER17> So, is your point that using a Stable Marriage solution is ok and realistic in the real world, but a Marriage variation is impossible and dumb?

All of the OPs complaints about the Marriage problem apply to the Stable Marriage problem, and yet, the real world doesn't seem to care that the OP thinks it shouldn't work. People use it anyway, and it largely works.</comment></comment></comment>


Sandstorm Oasis hosting open beta and App Market - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-08-31-oasis-beta-launch.html <comment><AUTHOR> One thing we'll do before coming out of beta is make sure we can scale seamlessly to these impromptu HN load tests. :) Sorry it's a bit slow right now! You can, of course, install your own and have all the resources to yourself:

[https://sandstorm.io/install/](https://sandstorm.io/install/)

Edit: Things seem a bit better now. This is our first time getting a load spike on Blackrock (codename for the "enterprise" add-on to Sandstorm which can utilize a whole cluster, which we use to run Oasis); previously, it was always the single-machine demo.

The problem is, ironically, we haven't parallelized our front-end yet. We are seamlessly distributing the apps themselves across way more machines than we actually need, but everyone is connecting to the same instance of the surrounding management UI. Honestly I didn't prioritize this because I thought our reinvented-wheel back-end was going to be the bigger bottleneck -- whoops.

Luckily this shouldn't be too hard to fix as the front-end is _mostly_ stateless. Probably fixed in a week or two.

Nice to know what to focus on, in any case! Thanks for testing!

<comment><AUTHOR> We now have four front-ends (and can add arbitrarily more, of course). Will be fun to see how things perform at the next spike.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Congratulations! I couldn't be more excited about this.

The personal computer revolution won't be complete until users have personal servers. Desktops, laptops, smartphones -- none of them compare in importance to controlling your own server.

Sandstorm is a great step in that direction. There's something very beautiful in how it "rolls with the blow" of how awful the web is. While Mozilla (sorry to pick on you guys) is just trying to force more JS everywhere, Sandstorm makes one small product and wildly improves what a web app means.

<comment><USER2> Severine: you're hellbanned.

<comment><USER3> Ha, I'm in heaven again! (thank you)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been happily using the Sandstorm closed alpha since it was available to Kickstarter users and I have been very happy with the progress. There are still places where the grain paradigm needs to be fleshed out a bit, like I had to explain to my old boss that in Sandstorm Gitlab there is no user, there are only allowed and deleted web keys...

When I explained that we might use this for a project or two, if it turned out to be too much trouble to put our GitLab instance with all its private repos on the public internet, he understood right away.

Up until that point he basically knew what Sandstorm was all about and he was saying "I don't think Sandstorm is for us." I'm still not sure he sees, but the free open beta and the app store will probably work to help convert him. He loves app stores. (Why not add, a shameless plug for Synology DSM OS with its Docker Hub support!)

</comment><comment><USER5> Simple question to the founders, in a world where software is increasingly the sum of not just code, but cloud services and APIs; how does Sandstorm scale to real-world SaaS? Are you going to require your users to configure lots of API keys and services manually and manage these vendor relationships?

How does Sandstorm create an update-model for SaaS when developers are deploying hundreds of changes a day?

I like the idea, but I wonder if this idea would have worked better in an era when software wasn't always continuously evolving to the needs of customers

<comment><AUTHOR> > how does Sandstorm scale to real-world SaaS?

It doesn't! Sandstorm is the anti-SaaS. Sandstorm is all about running fine- grained instances of apps (e.g. a separate Etherpad instance for every document) in a decentralized way rather than huge centralized "scalable" SaaS apps. Supporting SaaS-style apps is explicitly a non-goal for us.

Sandstorm is meant for people hosting personal servers for themselves or for businesses hosting corporate-internal apps for their employees; generally not for external-facing apps.

It turns out that decentralized apps are trivial to scale, without any fancy distributed systems architecture.

> Are you going to require your users to configure lots of API keys and > services manually and manage these vendor relationships?

No. "Managing vendor relationships" is not a thing that one needs to do in Sandstorm's usage model.

Sandstorm apps are generally self-contained; they include all their code dependencies directly in the package, including the full stack of front-end, business logic, database, etc.

The only time a Sandstorm app needs to reach out to other apps and services is when the app logically needs to interact with other objects. For example, imagine a chart app which renders charts based on the contents of a spreadsheet (another app). These apps need to be connected, but this kind of connection makes logical sense to an end user. They know what a chart is, they know what a spreadsheet is, and they know they need to connect them. Sandstorm will provide something we call the "powerbox UI" to allow users to create these connections in a user-friendly way.

[https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/developing/security- prac...](https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/developing/security- practices/#capability-based-usable-security)

> How does Sandstorm create an update-model for SaaS when developers are > deploying hundreds of changes a day?

It's like mobile. You ship an app to the app market, and then users get updates from there.

<comment><USER5> Also, are business style corporate/internal apps going out of existent when they are faced with a fierce SaaS company competing for that business.

It's almost like the SaaS DNA is to move very quickly (break things) and react to customers.

If your developers cannot continuously deploy to their customers and make changes behind the scenes, how will your developers compete with a Slack?

Is your only value proposition data security?

<comment><AUTHOR> Developers on Sandstorm don't have to maintain infrastructure. They don't have to protect and back up user data. They don't have to implement authentication, sharing, document management, search, etc. They don't need to think about consensus algorithms or distributed infrastructure problems. They can relax their security diligence as many common security bugs are mitigated by Sandstorm itself.

A guy in Turkey and a guy in France working in their free time built Wekan, a Sandstorm app that easily replaces Trello. Two people in their spare time vs. a whole funded company. There is no way that they'd be able to build and run a SaaS service competing with Trello -- and no way I personally would use a service run by two random guys in their spare time -- but building a Sandstorm app was no problem for them, and has been incredibly useful to me.

To me the question is: how will SaaS developers be able to compete against Sandstorm developers that can build apps so much more easily?

<comment><USER5> The guy is Turkey or France building an app on sandstorm has bigger challenges than worrying about how to manage infrastructure.

He needs to figure out how to create a viable business, and his first order concern is getting to P/M fit by rapidly iterating and delivering product (often making several changes a day).

If they create a viable business, they have enough leverage and margins (given SaaS has very favorable unit economics) to pay for a infra and a dude to manage it,

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tough question: how do you see the developer getting paid for their work ?

I would love to be able to work on Open-Source apps and might occasionally build some for free but at the end of the day I still need money to pay my rent and all.

The answer to that is probably central to what kind/quality of application that you will get on the market.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be clear, we aren't exclusively for open source apps. We in fact have one proprietary app on the app market today (draw.io).

We want to help developers get paid for their work by making it really easy to get paid. Sandstorm Oasis users will already have a credit card on file; we want to make it easy for them to use that card for in-app purchases. In the case of open source apps, we want to make it easy for app developers to solicit "tips", perhaps by implementing this as part of the Sandstorm UI -- if you use an open source app a lot, the UI could (hopefully not overly intrusively) say "Hey, would you consider giving a weekly tip to this developer?"

I've also thought about a "spotify" model where we automatically pass along some portion of subscription fees to apps that get used a lot.

Of course, things are more complicated for personal servers where the user doesn't necessarily have payment methods on file. We're still thinking about how that will work, but we'll come up with something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there an official Docker image for running Sandstorm? I'd like to play around with it without installing it directly nor standing up a separate VM.

I've also speculated in the past that Sandstorm would be something great to have on NASs of the QNAP, Synology variety... any progress in that direction?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sandstorm actually self-containerizes. The installer unpacks a bundle under /opt/sandstorm which, when executed, runs itself in a container (Linux namespace) and mostly avoids interacting with the rest of the system. It also (with your permission) auto-updates itself within 24 hours of any release with near-zero downtime.

I know that Docker-izing it could be more comfortable for people who are already familiar with launching Docker images, and similarly Debian packages would be more comfortable to long-time Debian users, etc. But, these other distribution mechanisms would have significant technical disadvantages compared to what we have (and what we are building), while adding some significant maintenance cost for us. So we've decided not to pursue them for now. That said, it might make more sense when we have a "stable release".

Regarding Synology, they actually sent us a test unit that we plan to play with at some point... so much to do, so little time.

<comment><USER7> > Sandstorm actually self-containerizes.

Ok, that's interesting... so hopefully it wouldn't conflict with my Docker install and its containers at all (other than port numbers I suppose).

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct. Other than port numbers, Sandstorm should have no interaction with anything else on the system, including Docker. (Please file a bug if you find otherwise. :) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Offtopic from Sandstorm but on the topic of personal servers it would be good if somehow an email server could also respond to requests as a web server in some way. Or maybe respond to particular inbound emails as HTTP requests. Sort of makes sense since the server that your email address lives at is kind of your "home on the web".

You could configure your email then perhaps to respond with things like your personal profile, in response to anonymous inbound requests.

<comment><USER9> That's something that should be possible in a Sandstorm app, if you want to make it do that. (-:

To do it securely in Sandstorm would have to wait for our secure inter-app communication system, similar to Android intents, called the Powerbox. But we're working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh my god, this is magic - it took 10 seconds to install wordpress. I'm buying an account for my mom. It'd be awesome to know the pricing for the managed hosting!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, we spent so much time making the billing prompt a seamless part of the flow of using Sandstorm that we forgot to publish the pricing outside of that. You can see pricing if you sign in, go to your account settings, and click "change plan".

(It's $6/mo for the standard plan, which is probably enough for most people.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, but note that all plans are free during the beta period, which will last at least a few months. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's amazing. No more 70 vendors, just take your apps and host in your server. Cheaper and data under your control. I'm a big fan of this project :) Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER12> Would it be possible to use this to host a Weechat instance with [http://www.glowing-bear.org/](http://www.glowing-bear.org/) ? (I mean, the UI of course, but weechat itself is a bit challenging, since you need to generate an ssl cert, open some ports and whatnot.)

<comment><USER9> Yes -- that would work great! With a caveat -- apps have no network access in Sandstorm by default. The way apps can get network access is that (soon) there will be a way to have one program called an "IRC driver" receive real network access, and then it would export the capability to speak to IRC servers to other apps. An Android intents-like chooser would let the user pick/install an IRC driver, if an app needs one.

The general idea is that if an app needs IRC access, it can bother the user once to get it, and if it doesn't need IRC access, then it shouldn't ever have access to IRC (or the network).

This isn't ready yet, but good golly am I excited for us to finish it up so I can tell all my friends that Sandstorm is the easiest way to run an IRC bouncer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd be very interested in a hackpad demo on sandstorm. It's nice to see Etherpad and Wave though!

<comment><USER14> I know Hackpad has been excitedly discussed on #sandstorm before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do you plan on supporting paid apps in the future, or will Oasis be sticking to free only? I can imagine a one-off payments or subscription models where users pay for continuous updates, funding further development.

<comment><USER14> kentonv answers that mostly here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10150249](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10150249)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Are you guys planning on adding paid/premium apps to your app store?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Probably not in the form of upfront payments, but rather in-app purchases -- including a "pay what you want" system for open source apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Minor gripe.

I can't figure out how to make etherpads public by default.

Which rather kills the primary use-case of etherpads for me (frictionless collaborative documents - non-guessable urls are the only authentication)

<comment><AUTHOR> Use the "share" button in the top bar to create a sharing link. :)

<comment><USER17> OK. I'm an idiot.

I'll tell you why I didn't suss this out (and I think this is a geek blind spot more than a true UX flaw).

1\. I decided all the options FOR the app would be inside the part of the screen owned by the app (i.e. not the top bar). So I only looked there.

2\. I was expecting the url in the browser's address bar to be shareable.

<comment><USER9> Hi andybak, I work on the Sandstorm team and it seems pretty clear that you're not an idiot.

I'll see if there's something we can do to make this essential UI element more discoverable.

To some extent, it's a matter of learning about Sandstorm -- Sandstorm's role in the web app ecosystem is basically to add sharing & access control, so maybe everyone has to learn this. But hopefully we can help people figure it out more easily.

<comment><USER12> Some more UI feedback for you then:

It did take me a while to figure out how to delete "grains" (I would've thought from the list of grains, instead I had to open one and click the delete button).

Also, I don't quite understand why I started out with five wekan grains from the get-go? Maybe a bug.

Also, I think first-time users might need some more hints (like unintrusive first-run popups or something) that the top bar is the Sandstorm stuff, while the rest is the app itself. I don't know what would be the best way, it seems quite challenging to design something like this :-)

What does the key icon do? (No hover text.)

Maybe "Share" should say "Share app"? (So I don't get confused into thinking it means "share this one wekan note" or "share this particular song from groovebasin".)

<comment><USER14> Being able to delete and rename grains and stuff from the list is something I've been nudging them about. :)

Yesterday in particular Oasis was under heavy load from HN, if you clicked on New Wekan a bunch of times before it did it, it might have made a bunch. Usually it's near instant so this sort of thing doesn't happen.

paulproteus will love all your feedback. He likes feedback. :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Congrats, team Sandstorm!

Just played around with the new UI, looks great!

Looking forward to setting up an instance soon (or perhaps paying for hosting) :)

The work you all are doing is awesome - keep it up!

</comment><comment><USER19> Awesome job guys. Any chance that you'll have apps like Dashing on the horizon? Containerised dashboard monitoring....

<comment><USER19> also, Jekyll support pretty please.....

<comment><USER14> The 'Hacker CMS' app is actually based on Jekyll, I believe. It can be a bit kludgy at times, but works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So, how do I manipulate these grains? I created a gitweb repo and I'd like to rename it, etc. But how?

<comment><USER14> If you click on the name of the grain at the top of your screen when it's open, it'll let you rename it!

And Gitweb itself should present you with some basic instructions on setting up a webkey to push code to it.

<comment><USER20> > And Gitweb itself should present you with some basic instructions on setting > up a webkey to push code to it.

Yes, but the name of the repo itself has _RENAME_ME as its suffix and AFAICT there's no way to change it. It seems as if gitlab behaves this way too.

EDIT: ok embarassing mistake on my part, it's all clear now.

<comment><USER9> Hi wyldfire,

I hope you don't stay embarrassed. We could improve parts of the interface, and we need feedback like this to know what people think is going on, so that we can decide how to change the interface to show people what is actually going on.

Thanks for leaving the comment and I hope you enjoy using Sandstorm!

<comment><USER20> I think in general it's related to the conceptual shift Sandstorm is trying to drive. There's a lot of touting "control of your own data" and it took a while for that to sink in for me.

I think it took so long because it's so different from what I'm used to. It seems like a powerful idea but challenging to make sure your customers' expectations are managed.

The sidebar/navbar clearly is part of the strategy, well done there. But the gulf that exists between the specific-app content pane and the sandstorm navbar is the tricky bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is freaking awesome. I love it.

Definitely in for the $6 hosted version, once you guys are out of beta.

Seriously... wonderful work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well all the plans are free during beta so you might as well sign up now. :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is exciting. I would love rstudio here.</comment>


Alzheimer's: newly identified molecular mechanism could lead to treatment - <AUTHOR> http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/303280.php?tw <comment><USER2> This study is ... not very useful. Dr Bredesen already has a treatment and in a small study with 10 patients showed that his treatment reversed Alzheimer in 9 patients. A wonderful achievement. Currently Dr Bredesen is doing a new study with 35 patients.

Dr Bredesen published an article about the first study: [http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v6/n9/full/100690.html](http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v6/n9/full/100690.html) If you look at the treatment, one can understand the cause and why Alzheimer can be reversed.</comment>


How would the media cover Trump's victory if America were a third-world country? - <AUTHOR> http://scroll.in/article/821100/how-would-the-media-cover-donald-trumps-victory-if-america-were-a-third-world-country <comment><USER2> This article was an attempted joke, but I don't see much difference between it and what more serious news articles claim :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Coming from a third world country (Switzerland) i dont think it would be much different to now. Probably not as relevant tho.

<comment><USER4> I guess Switzerland is _technically_ a third world country, but no-one uses the phrase to describe NATO allied status anymore. The OP means a developing country, which Switzerland isn't.

<comment><USER3> I just like to mock people who use third/first world without actually meaning it :)

But yeah my point is the same, Switzerland seems to be mostly shocked, dissapointed and loosing even more trust in the U.S. I doubt it would be much different in any case, just as it is now the U.S. is relevant enough that we _should_ care to some degree.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get a part-time job in order to fund my startup? - <AUTHOR> I have no savings at all as I just graduated university. I dont want to work full time for a bit and then start a company, work experience is overrated, according to Paul Graham and Sam Altman. Also what part-time jobs? All I can see on the job boards are full-time jobs or part-time bartending/odd jobs... <comment><USER2> Ive never heard that said by altman/graham, but i highly (highly) recommend working a few years before starting your own company. Otherwise you won't have the context or the understanding to deal with issues as they come up.

Frankly I'm shocked hearing this sentiment. Would you trust an inexperienced developer to architect a production ready system?

Businesses are infinitely more complex than software. Why would you trust yourself to run a business with no workplace experience at all?</comment>


Ask HN: Have you ever coded using video eyewear? - <AUTHOR>

There are a bunch of video eyewear on the market that provide for a virtual 55 inch display. Have you or anybody you know used this instead of a laptop or flat screens? <comment><USER2> I've never used them, but after a bit of research, it seems that while they're visually big, they seem to provide a resolution that even a netbook outclasses, which would make them pretty bad for programming.

There's also the issue with requiring you to remove your "monitor" whenever you want to sketch something out on paper or draw a quick diagram.</comment>


The weak scientific case for emotional support animals - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/2/23/17012116/emotional-support-animal-airplane-psychology-research-dogs <comment><USER2> While people obviously abuse this and I don't need to bring my dog on the plane:

My dog gives me reason to keep living and not kill myself on my darkest days.

When I wake up sweating and shaking and panicing from anxiety, my dog gives me something soft and comforting to hold and pet. A dog reacts and loves you and distracts you by licking and being playful and in your face.

Having been alone and suffering from this for a decade prior, I can say for sure my dog helps me.

What croc of a psychiatrist can't see this.

Edit:

As for being a crutch, anxiety is not logical. Sometimes there isn't something to confront. Just a fear of impending doom from some unknown source..no matter what you tell yourself, and how much you know there is nothing, you still shake, heart pounding, sweating, physical pain from anxiety.

I could take medicine and be dependent on that, or I could hug my dog

<comment><USER3> As somebody on anxiety meds...they help, man. At least they help me.

You wouldn't begrudge somebody for being dependent on cancer medicine, would you? Or heart medicine? I would rather be dependent on meds than suffer the quality of life issues I used to have. Not sure why your opposition to treating anxiety pharmacologically, but I would encourage you to at least talk to a doctor and explore what medication could do for you.

<comment><USER2> Was not bashing taking medication. Sorry that was not my intent.

SSRIs and such can be helpful, but I would like to stay away from xanax and things like that. I have known many people who became dependent and had their life ruined. I know it depends on the person and their background, but I'd like to avoid it all together personally.

I'd prefer to hug a dog than take potentially addictive medications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do they train emotional support animals to be used to unusual environments? I suppose it must be roughly the same sort of training given to sight assistance dogs. I'm pretty sure if I took either of my dogs on an aircraft, for example, any emotional benefit I derived would be countered by their extreme anxiety and fright.

<comment><USER5> My family had a licensed therapy dog. For about 3-4 years, he did weekly dog therapy at a nearby foster facility for adolescent boys. The particular benefit to those kids was that they had a chance to love a creature, when of course their own family was not present to extend love to them. This was a big deal for some of those kids. They had a rough life - the facility was OK, but there's no avoiding the circumstances: you have no parents.

The licensing that we got (as of ~15 years ago) was nowhere near the level that is given to sight assistance dogs. However, other license authorities (I think it was TDI) were more strenuous, and my dog would not have passed them. For instance, therapy dogs had to be calm if a rabbit or cat was nearby. I'm not sure what regulations are in place now, I assume it must have tightened up since then.

In pre-9/11 days, my dog rode in the airplane cabin twice. He was chill, even calmed another passenger down on the outbound 3-hour flight by sitting in their lap.

<comment><USER6> If you're in the US, any license you got was snake oil. There is no licensure for service or emotional support/therapy animals.

There are no legal requirements or standards for either in terms of training either, the only standard is that if the animal is being disruptive they can ask you to remove it, but must then provide reasonable accommodation to the disabled person in the animal's absence.

<comment><USER7> No, they didn't get "snake oil." The particular foster care facility (or government) required a dog visiting their children to be licensed by ${company} before it was allowed into the facility. The GP had their dog go through the requirements ${company} specified and ${company} gave the dog their seal of approval.

It's exactly like if a company requires you to get a professional certification from, say, Oracle.

It's also pretty reasonable. if they are going to let dogs around their residents that they'd want a third party making sure the dog has a temperament suitable for that and certain amount of training - the facility doesn't know how to tell if a dog would be fit for that purpose.

It's like saying getting your video game rated by the ESRB is "snake oil" because "there's no legal requirements or standards for rating video games." Yet if you want to sell your video game at Walmart or Toys R Us you're going to have to get it rated by the ESRB.

You're also confused about where the "reasonable accommodations" comes in.

<comment><USER6> The difference is that the ADA has standards which do not require licensure. You cannot legally require someone show you a service dog license. Where emotional support animals are protected by law (namely, housing and air transport) you also cannot require a license (though in those cases you can require a letter from a health professional stating the need).

Requiring or claiming to provide licensure for animals outside of what the laws state and require is scummy and just confuses the issue as to what is and isn't allowed by law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They had a support/stress dog at several of the bases I spent time at in Iraq, which I thought was pretty cool. They were part of the combat stress medical units if I recall.

I don't know the true efficacy, but a close friend of mine who was in pretty bad shape said the dog helped cheer him up. If nothing else just having the opportunity to pet a dog and forget about things for a bit must have been nice.

</comment><comment><USER9> Who says that emotional support can even be measured by science?

In other words who cares?

If you are lacking in emotional support, and then start receiving it, you don't need science to validate your experience.

You just know.

<comment><USER10> > In other words who cares?

Landlords, for one, who have to deal with tenants that argue their E.S. animal should be excepted from the "no pets" policy. Also H.R. departments (what if an employee brings a bird to work?), hospitals, and places where food is served ("Waiter! That guy's dog licked my plate!").

It's one of those situations in which the potential for abuse is pretty big, and so there's an actual interest in differentiating "this dog helps me cope with life" from "you have to allow this untrained animal here thanks to poorly defined laws and paperwork with no clear meaning".

<comment><USER11> If it's legal to own a pet, then in my opinion, it cannot be made illegal for a pet to live anywhere. The fact that hotels, businesses, landlords, or whatever can deny entry to a pet is simply ridiculous.

The same rules for humans should apply. If the pet is a nuisance, or destructive, or loud or whatever, then that pet can be removed just like a human would be removed in the same circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _" What exactly is it about our society that makes mental issues so widespread that emotional support animals are so needed?"_ is a question I would like to see answered with more coverage.

<comment><USER13> Not enough animals? We used to be around animals all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The problem is that the alternative to bringing your pet in the cabin is terrible. In cargo they can be lost like luggage, temperature and pressure controls are not as strictly maintained, the animal is subject to extreme noises and gyrations - it is a scary and traumatic experience. Pets are much closer to children than objects for most people - it is like putting your child down there.

The reason for the abuse of the ESA system is that there are no alternatives provided. Your only options are to torture your pet, or abuse the system. There is no amount of money you can pay to avoid it - you can't book an entire row if you wanted.

I think this issue needs to be addressed, and a process formally institutionalized to allow pets to travel with their humans. It is very rare for anyone to be bothered when a pet is on board - most of the time it brings other passengers joy - in the cases where there is a problem, easy arrangements are made that satisfy everyone.

<comment><USER15> This is a huge issue I agree with. I'd never fly with my dog in cargo. However, one thing that I think gets overlooked is that in accommodating people's pet, are we being unaccommodating to others? What about those who have pet allergies? They would expect to be able to fly in peace as well. Or people with life experience that makes them afraid of dogs. You'd think the airline would be easy to work with but is that really on the person with allergies to make themselves comfortable when the argument for ESAs is that we should all be accommodating to these people and their animals/issues? Do we need to have pet friendly/no pet flight options? Or do we need the airlines to be pro-active in accommodating for people with their pets when they could just as easily say "No. Deal with it"? Good luck convincing the airlines that they need to accommodate for society. They won't even make planes someone over 6'5" can sit in comfortably.

Outside of Cats/Dogs, if somebody sits down next to me with their Emotional Support Snake there's gonna be some loud WTFs and GTFOs and just a problem overall. Could the airline talk to individual passengers about this snake being near them on their flight beforehand? Sure. Are they going to? Nope. Better to just say there will be no gosh darn snakes on this gosh darn plane.

<comment><USER14> > What about those who have pet allergies? > Or people with life experience > that makes them afraid of dogs

These are quite rare, but they happen, and the solution has always been easy and amicable: move some people around, with the dog owner making the most compromise.

> Do we need to have pet friendly/no pet flight options?

This would be great. Right now even with ESA's there is a limit on the number of pets that can be on a flight, so you would have to find a different flight if the one you wanted already had some. By no means am I suggesting there should be a free-for-all. Only to have some limited arrangement where everyone can be happy.

> Could the airline talk to individual passengers about this snake being near > them on their flight beforehand?

This kind of messaging is relatively easy nowadays, ranging from a little doggy icon on the website marking a specific flight as being pet-friendly, all the way to personalized sms/emails (which are already in place).

Humans live densely, there are very few actions you can take that affect no- one in no way. We are dealing with this overly brutely in my opinion, there exists a configuration that increases net world happiness that we are not taking advantage of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are essentially two issues with ESAs - poor behavior and lying to avoid fees.

For the first there should be a framework of cerification. If you want to bring an ESA it should pass third party certification with different standards for housing and flights.

For the second we should look at alternatives. If you want to fly with pet you have to pay hundreds, often well excess of your own ticket, for them to fly cargo (unless they can fly under your seat in which case it's $125). Why so high fees / bad experience? If a pet owner labels their pet ESA the pet gets to fly with them for free. Why can't pets fly free in cabin like infants under 2? If the pet is over a certain size, then person has to buy another seat (just like an older child).

I think the certification standards and equalizing experience for pets would dramatically lower potential for abuse.

These are shorter term fixes. In the long term we should keep building evidence on the question of effectiveness.

<comment><USER7> There's actually four issues, add in concerns about animal welfare and concerns about the people who don't want to share a plane with animals due to allergies and phobias. (or personal preference)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> oh, I can assure you there are a great many of us who don't find this lack of evidence surprising!

</comment><comment><USER18> If I get a prescription over the internet that says I need a vacation, does that mean that the airline has to give me free airfare?

</comment><comment><USER19> Surprising? Just to the hacks at Vox.

<comment><USER20> Would you please start commenting substantively, like the guidelines ask?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> To dismiss something because there is a lack of scientific research about it is just as irrational as believing in something despite strong evidence against it.

<comment><USER7> The article and the person interviewed did not "dismiss something because there is a lack of scientific research about it."

<comment><USER21> You are correct, there is nothing wrong with what the people in the article are saying. But I think we'd be lying to ourselves if we deny the fact that the reason this article is in discussion here on HN is in large part not because we're up in arms about the lack of scientific rigour about this niche area of knowledge, but because there is a tendency in our community (sometimes denied when explicitly pointed out) to tag things we suspect or would like to be invalid as false (rather than simply inconclusive) when there is no evidence to support it one way or another.</comment></comment></comment>


John La Grou plugs smart power outlets - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/john_la_grou_plugs_smart_power_outlets_1.html

<comment><USER2> Hmm. They applied for 414 patents to stick an rfid reader on an X10 plug? No small wonder there's such a backlog at the patent office these days.</comment>


How to use tor for your protection - <AUTHOR>

Gazing through my window into the digital world of internet security, here's what I found:<p>- Tor (an acronym for "the onion router") is a free software that enables on-line anonymity. You can hide your identity and surf the internet secretly so your activities can't be discovered by anyone (yeah, including the government).<p>- Tor encrypts and then randomly bounces communications through a network of relays run by volunteers around the globe.<p>- Bad guys can use tor to do evil but good guys (like you and I) can use tor to fight crime.<p>- The more good guys that use tor, the more we can eliminate crime and build a safe digital world.<p>- Join the league of crime fighting developers and help keep the Universe safe by joining Tor volunteers.<p>(https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en)<p>NOTE: I'm not in anyway affiliated to tor, just a fellow hacker out to save the world! <comment><USER2> Tor is not 100% safe, as every system it has breaches. If you want to use it you must know that depending on which router/proxy your data travel the response may be very slow. Safety has a price and even if Tor is not perfect and a fully safe way to use the net it is more safe than any other public protection.</comment>


Longest Lasting Cars That Make It Over 200,000 Miles - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a19560/top-cars-to-make-it-over-200000-miles/ <comment><USER2> The taxi company I drove for usually retires its Priuses around 400,000 miles. The Owner-Op whose cab I drove probably had 450,000 miles on it when it got rear-ended - it was still on the fleet because she took good care of it, and had just paid it off.

State law requires taxis to have less than 500,000 miles. 300-400 miles/day (over 2 shifts) was typical... 110,000 miles a year.</comment>


AT&T hackers warned of vulnerability, now proven right - <AUTHOR> http://www.hou2600.org/2011/11/22/att-hackers-warned-of-vulnerability-now-proven-right/

<comment><USER2> So true. When will they learn? This instantly reminded me of Bruce Sterling's classic book, "The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier". A must-read if you enjoyed this post.</comment>


Car Forums need one home so we created this - <AUTHOR> http://motobabble.com/blog/updates/motobabble-mobile-version-launched-with-updated/213225814711131225289

<comment><USER2> Would love to try but can't supply my email on my android phone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry the site is still in beta and there are a few bugs now and then, we addressed the android issue and it should work on your phone now. Thanks for looking!</comment></comment>


Facebook unfriended - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/21559947?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/workinprogress <comment><USER2> This is why you really need to research a company's growth potential before you buy its stock. Just because something's popular doesn't mean it can grow forever. Had all those investors realized that Facebook was a one trick pony they might not have lost 40% of their money (and counting...).

They had all these visions of grandeur that Facebook could plug various services to their existing users and make endless amounts of money. Maybe add a Facebook classified ads service, document sharing service, auction site, shopping e-store for its members that takes a small commission. Whatever other companies did, just copy it and add it on Facebook and watch users instantly abandon competitors. After all FB has close to a billion users. Little did they know that Facebook users were never that engaged nor will they ever be.

The collective hive mind of bored humans completely ignored Facebook Questions. Zuckerberg's first attempt at trying to cultivate its legion of human potatoes. He quickly pulled FB Questions after no one used it and tried again later by changing it to Ask Questions and shoving it right after the "Add Photo/Video" link above the status update box itself. People are still ignoring it. Its members are there to share photos and talk to friends, not seek knowledge, not sell photos, not start businesses, not buy digital products, not share documents, or anything else productive or profitable for that matter.

In general users follow the "One website per one purpose" rule. Auction site neanderthal, eBay learned that the hard way when it simply tried to tack on classified ads thinking its members would ditch craigslist. Even monopolistic cro-magnon Microsoft has tried and failed numerous times at getting its installed base to use more profitable tacked on services and products. Ironically they only succeeded in spreading the worst internet browser in human history this way. Facebook's still in denial about it's useless network of potatoes. Sorry. Humans.

After all these years Silicon Valley still values massive droves of bored users without problems over clusters of customers with money in hand. In some ways they're right, Facebook still makes massive amounts of ad revenue and is still profitable. But I doubt it'll experience any further population boom or miraculous revenue growth.

The company isn't going anywhere for now, but as Facebook fatigue sets in and members find new and easier ways to share photos with friends (a user's main activity) things might not always be "flowers and sunshine" for FB. And in the future we'll look back in hindsight and say "I can't believe they didn't foresee it, all the signs were there."

<comment><USER3> I just love armchair experts.

Did you ever think that maybe those investors aren't looking for a short term return and don't care about the stock price day to day. You know the type of investors we actually need more of.

And if you actually were a little more creative you would see that Facebook doesn't have to bundle everything into the website. It can have separate brands like Instagram and grow into new markets that way. And with its sheer user base and content it would be able to decimate smaller competitors.

<comment><USER4> > Did you ever think that maybe those investors aren't looking for a short > term return and don't care about the stock price day to day. You know the > type of investors we actually need more of.

That kind of intelligent investor was probably unlikely to buy in on a clearly overhyped IPO, in fairness.

<comment><USER5> Yes agreed and +1. I believe it was Warren Buffet who said: on stock exchange, every long term investment is a missed short term investment.

But obviously you wont find a person in his her sound mind (not to mention financial guy) who would say: hey lets buy now and even if it goes down 40% thats fine we are in it long run... (lol)

Besides Facebook is a special example. It was banksters fraud perfectly executed. Yes Facebook makes money. Yes, it is self sustainable, yes it will pay off all its debts and creditors. Yes it doesnt go anywhere. But the overbloated IPO price with this PE was a freudster move. This stock belongs to single digit wagon. When it gets there, then consider buying for a $1 or $2 pop accordingly to good Q, but until we get there respect your money for God sake!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "So Facebook must make money from the members it has rather than simply by adding new ones."

The test will be if they can charge for membership. People find phone service worth paying for. People find internet service worth paying for. Some people even pay for TV.

Would 50% of current users pay for Fbook?

<comment><USER7> I get a lot of value from Facebook and I would be willing to pay a nominal subscription fee.

However:

• As a customer, my demands are much greater than as a user. I feel more entitled to make demands and get real attention than for a free service. Customer service becomes more important when money is involved.

• I would expect _absolute_ control over my own data. No advertising. No selling aggregate data to advertisers. If I quit the side, my data needs to be gone completely, without a trace.

• If my friends started quitting the service in droves, due to fees, I might no longer consider it worth the money and would probably leave or wind down my involvement as well.

<comment><USER8> As a way to make that visible to Facebook (probably someone there is looking at that thread, but your vote count isn't visible...) - I would totally pay for FB also, at the price that linkedin or others are proposing.

My demand would then be data security, no advertising. Other users could stay on free service, but the apps they use shouldn't have access to my data anymore.

EDIT added mention to invisible votes

<comment><USER7> Yes, I think maintaining a free service would be necessary, much as LinkedIn does. Freemium seems to be working well for LNKD in a way that might be a potential way forward for FB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article presented very little factual info other than FB stock price and the latest Wall street social media drama (anecdotal). FB is the envy of any large media company so it's multi billion valuation is spot on.

</comment><comment><USER10> FB is slowly becoming background noise, a part of our infrastructure that everybody has come to depend on, but that noone is really hyped about. Kind-a like Google Search.

<comment><USER5> No it doesnt. Not only i personally not care about all the "be the first of your friends to like this post about deadly car crash", there is further no "infrastructure" that internet relies on when it comes to facebook. To me and billion other net users it could dissapear overnight and i would see or feel the difference, other than websites would get little bit cleaner. Google, on the other side feeds website owners with monetary gains by leasing space from them for adsense. If that would get shut down, i would assume many could not afford to continue with their websites.

<comment><USER11> And my grandparents would be quite happy to see the internet going down.

But that doesn't mean that billions of people don't rely on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Facebook has done what every other company only dreams of doing, which is get almost everyone in the world to use them, and on a relatively consistent basis.

The problem is that they haven't been able to follow this up with another home run. They have all these users, and unfortunately their best way of monetizing these users so far has been ads. And even then there is anecdotal evidence that these ads aren't very effective. And even worse, their users are moving onto mobile far quicker than they anticipated, and because that space is unmonetized, they are losing a large source of income. They are facing the perfect storm of poor monetization of their current users, a mobile platform that is completely unmonetized, and quicker-than-anticipated migration of their current users to this unmonetized platform.

The Facebook desktop experience is a lot less sticky than they believed, and now they need to scramble to fix this gap in monetization, and until they do (and if they can), their stock will be under pressure. The movement of users from Facebook desktop to Facebook mobile is something that probably could have been picked up a lot sooner through their analytics, and something they should have addressed a lot sooner, instead of publicly scrambling now for a solution.

I thought 2-3 years ago that the logical next step for Facebook was to invest heavily in their Facebook app ecosystem, so that people would log into Facebook and stay there the entire day. They could have email, IM chat, world news, tv shows, music, word processing, etc all from various Facebook apps and keep their users engaged all day long. It would follow the natural progression of Operation System to Browser to simply Facebook. And with the iPhone App store as a model, maybe they could charge 30% and make loads of money that way.

But this never seems to have taken off, which seems like a strategic misstep. I find the Facebook app space to be relatively inactive, except for games like Zynga, but even Zynga's results show that Facebook app usage appears to be dropping. Because the Facebook app experience is relatively non-existent, it means that the only really useful feature of Facebook is the newsfeed and photos, both of which can be reproduced very well on the mobile. If they had a healthy Facebook app ecosystem, it might slow down people's migration to strictly mobile, and allow for better monetization of users as well.

As a side note, I've been trying to develop a Facebook app just to learn, and I have to say that the developer documentation is amongst the worst I've come across. Things have changed so quickly that doing Google searches is relatively useless. And even the latest documentation doesn't appear to be proof-read, lacks good explanations or examples, is confusing in many places, and some links don't even work. Thank God for stackoverflow! There are a lot of weird loops that have to be jumped through as well, which feels hacky, but I imagine there are technical reasons for it. But still, it feels like the entire experience of developing an app should be cleaner and easier. Part of it is probably because you can't host your apps on Facebook servers, so all this indirection causes technical issues, so maybe the solution (if it even matters anymore since app development doesn't seem very popular) would be to offer their own hosting service.

</comment><comment><USER13> This article is just a rehash of all the articles that have been discussed on HN in the recent days. I just don't understand why stuff like this gets upvoted. This anti-facebook anthem on HN has to die

</comment><comment><USER14> I really, really wish an Open Source alternative to Facebook and Twitter would happen so we can put the proprietary social era behind us.

<comment><USER15> I'd prefer a standards-based approach.

Define an open standard for a message; a photo-share; tagging; etc etc. Include stuff that clients and servers MUST do, or MUST NOT do. Write a nice server, and host it. Write a nice client (Browser extensions? Website?)

Now you have an open ecosystem that is as flexible as people want it to be. There's a reason that all discussion sites end up being a worse implementation of Usenet.

<comment><USER16> _I'd prefer a standards-based approach._

Exactly. The problem isn't that we don't have useful social networks. The problem is that we have too many of them, with varying heights of wall between their respective gardens that make interoperability and data migration absurdly difficult in many cases.

I suspect the roadblock is that these networks are tied together by the underlying concepts of identities and relationships, but for many valid reasons a lot of people would like to present different identities in different contexts or treat some relationships differently to others. Until there is some reasonably standardised approach (or set of compatible approaches) to representing these ideas, there's no robust foundation so you can build different kinds of messaging and content sharings systems on top.

That in turn leads to practical issues of authentication and trust networks, and we haven't completely solved those problems in a way that Just Works for non-technical users yet.

<comment><USER17> Consider the ecosystem of the internet plus phones and computers as "the social network". You'll see what we have actually works how you'd like, right now.

Facebook lets you talk to your old friends, twitter lets you meet new ones, and google plus is there if you want to get serious. Tumblr for a more expressive context, and wordpress for the rest.

The problem with creating a new social network is that you'd have to replicate a dozen companies with varying degrees of porosity in their services.

Add to that my second point: we don't know what we want yet. Things are still evolving and developing, in a high pressure cauldron of talent and money. Once things cool down and take shape we'll see what we like and someone will spend time making open source plugins. It's a really fun time to play on computers.

<comment><USER16> _Consider the ecosystem of the internet plus phones and computers as "the social network". You'll see what we have actually works how you'd like, right now._

Not quite, because everything is so heterogeneous that there's no unifying, consolidated view to help me use it.

I want a single private, secure, easy to use platform to look up my friends and colleagues on-line, and on top of that I want to have convenient plug-and- play functionality for everything from IM to sharing photos to collaborating on a coding project to scheduling a business meeting.

Right now, we have the Internet infrastructure sitting a level below all of this, and numerous web sites (not to mention e-mail, IM tools, Usenet, distributed version control systems, etc.) trying to be both the platform and one or more of the plug-ins. This is not what I want as a user, i.e., as a person who wants to get stuff done and doesn't really care whose badge is in the corner of the screen as long as it all works properly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Back to Go, Rust Is Sloooowww - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cEunr8hPE0 <comment><AUTHOR> Your opinion?</comment>


Show HN: A chess game-application written in python, has many cool features. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ankith26/My-PyChess/ <comment><AUTHOR> If you are a fan of chess or a fan of python programming, then surely you got to check this out. I am open to any suggestions on how to improvise this app.</comment>


Startups in EU are acting as unpaid R&D department for Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/iday_july_7/status/1201077573238902784 <comment><USER2> Wouldn't that argument extend to any company that might get bought?

Anywhere?</comment>


Shrink your Conda Docker images with conda-pack - <AUTHOR> https://pythonspeed.com/articles/conda-docker-image-size/ <comment><USER2> I've been doing a lot of research on this issue and I can't remember what it was but I remember getting a few weird error messages with conda-pack. I've found your articles at pythonspeed.com really useful, so I'm glad to see this article. I've been exploring a few other options that I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on. I'll explain them separately in replies to this comment.

<comment><USER2> * conda-store * [https://github.com/Quansight/conda-store/](https://github.com/Quansight/conda-store/)

This one is really interesting, particularly for data science workloads. I think it's not a good solution for serving applications, but really interesting for things like JupyterHub, Dask, and Fargate.

The general idea is that you store your conda environments (the equivalent of the /venv folder in your example) on an NFS drive (or EFS if you're on AWS). Your containers then mount the network drive. This can help you a lot if you want to build containerized development environments for data scientists. For an application you can strip down your conda environment to the bare minimum package set required to run your app, but if you want to containerize a jupyter (or VS Code) development environment your users will likely want to have 10-20 packages at the minimum. The package sets I've worked with often lead to 3GB+ images if you're really aggressive about trying to keep it down. The official jupyter/datascience-notebook image is 1.8GB compressed and 3.8GB after the pull is finished.

conda-store is a component of the QHub project from Quansight. The architecture diagram from that project might be of interest. [https://github.com/Quansight/qhub/tree/master/architecture](https://github.com/Quansight/qhub/tree/master/architecture)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Could it be smaller if you used alpine instead of debian?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. But the Alpine C library is musl, not glibc, and musl can sometimes be incompatible with code compiled against glibc, so I don't like using it.</comment></comment>


Belgium defies France as it mints €2.50 coin to mark Battle of Waterloo - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/08/belgium-france-coin-battle-waterloo-euro-napoleon

<comment><USER2> I don't recall that the Belgian (Netherlands) troops distinguished themselves at the Battle of Waterloo. Isn't it a bit like North Carolina putting the Wright brothers' flier on its quarter?</comment>


Show HN: A website to help people learn git - <AUTHOR> http://git.rocks/getting-started/

<comment><USER2> It'd be cool to see rebase covered. Feel like that's the only big one missing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we were discussing that today at the office. I'll add it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Feedback is welcome and would be helpful to improve the site. Thanks!</comment>


How a CPU works - <AUTHOR> http://www.interlopers.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=36102

<comment><USER2> One of my favorite classes in college was how to build a MIPS processor. How program counters, muxes, ALUs, branch predictors, and such worked blow my mind.

I wish I still had the notebook of my CPU drawing.

</comment><comment><USER3> This post is not worth bothering with. It is a really simplistic world-view, with some errors along the way too. Certainly not suitable for HN crowd.

</comment><comment><USER4> "C++ (gets translated into C)" - oh really?

<comment><USER3> No mention of JIT compilation of Java either.</comment></comment>