Christmas tree made out of form elements (webkit) - <AUTHOR> http://hakim.se/experiments/css/domtree <comment><USER3> Totally reminded me of: <http://unicodexmas.com/> <\- Christmas tree made out of "valid, semantic, and imageless HTML and CSS", ornamented with Unicode characters.

</comment><comment><USER4> Impressive. I wonder when Firefox will get the transformation support - <USER2> that it's very practical for anything right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> They added support in FF10, so it should make it to their stable release in around two months.

<comment><USER5> Are you sure? I'm using Nightly 12.0a1, and it is very slow (1-2fps). It's still smooth in Chrome, though.

<comment><USER6> It works, but the native widgets aren't getting retained layers, so it's really slow. I filed a bug: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=713532>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love that you can still click on the dropdowns and they work. You can also type in the text entry fields.

<comment><USER8> It was weird to click those elements on an iPhone and see mobile Safari's select dialog appear from the bottom of the screen, ruining the effect. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That looks pretty nice on an iPad :)

</comment><comment><USER10> This was a trap for my iPhone 4 - I couldn't navigate away because it was so graphics intensive. I had to force quit then quickly load another page on startup.

<comment><USER11> It was fine on my iPhone 4.

<comment><USER12> Surprisingly, this was usable on my iPhone 3G.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cool. Christmas trees aren't flat though, you could have made it use the whole space rather than one plane. Merry Christmas.

<comment><USER14> This tree is just as 3D as the trees in current state-of-the-art first person shooters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Caused Chrome on my Linux machine to crawl, CPU usage of my dual core CPU is about 100%!!

But its pretty cool as an experiment :)

<comment><USER8> Really? It ran quite smoothly on my iPhone 4S and my parents' ancient Athlon X2 3800+ (running Windows 7). It took 2-3 seconds to get going, but then it was quite smooth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Runs fine on iPhone 3G. Impressive.

</comment><comment><USER17> more clever working coming from you, hakim. love that the elements are still usable.

</comment><comment><USER18> I was watching memory usage rapidly climb. Pretty fun though!

</comment><comment><USER19> That's marvelous. Good work. And Merry Christmas!

</comment><comment><USER20> Well, that completely destroyed my iPad 1.

</comment><comment><USER21> That's awesome! Keep up the great work. :D

</comment><comment><USER22> Awesome. Merry Christmas!

</comment><comment><USER23> Cool. Merry Christmas.

</comment><comment><USER24> Freezes my iPhone.

<comment><USER25> Fine on the iPhone 4. I suspect running the page through a UIWebView as opposed to MobileSafari will introduce the performance issues of application sandboxing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> hahahahaha, I approve of this DOM debauchery.

</comment><comment><USER26> works fine on (Gecko/FF10).</comment>


Our unpredictable and overburdened schedules are taking a toll on society - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/why-dont-i-see-you-anymore/598336/ <comment><USER2> Can somebody reconcile this with statistics about TV watching, which suggest that people watch about 3-5 hours of TV/Netflix per _day_ [1]?

A possible argument is that, as the article describes, time off is so unpredictable that scheduling time with other people is much harder than just turning on the TV. But if most people have hours of free time every day, it seems hard to believe that schedules don't line up at least several times per month.

Are these entertainment consumption statistics skewed by superusers who do nothing else or something?

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption)

<comment><USER3> I think TV, YouTube, or even Podcasts can trigger a similar mechanism to socialization, but without any of the risk that comes from interacting with real people.

Speculating I'd guess that the low lift and reduced anxiety means more people get stuck in it as a local maximum even if they'd be happier otherwise.

<comment><USER4> I think you're looking in the right direction.

Speaking from anecdotal experience with online communities, when idling or toying at home during their free time, people actually engage socially with friends through chats, networks, games — pick your entertainment drug. They're everything but alone, and it's genuinely real if limited cognitively compared to a real physical interaction.

If you add voice chat to that, at the end of the day you really feel like you spent X hours with friend(s), there's just no other way to put it except for the physical location.

It's almost a given to me that with appropriate videoconf wall-sized (real- world size) screens in all living rooms, we'd just "invite" friends this way most of the time unless the physical interaction was necessary. Less maintenance, less friction to just spend a cool quality hour.

The 'effort' required to move out of your house is getting increasingly higher, your 'local maximum' would essentially converge to an actual maximum in a perfect virtual reality (of which the "80%" / good enough might be just around the next decade).

<comment><USER3> I haven't read it, but I think your example is closely related to the plot in The Machine Stops, which was pretty prescient. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops)

<comment><USER5> It's amazing how old this story is. It feels so relevant even today

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd like to offer up the concept of the casual home-based "brunch" as the most effective way to spend quality time with your way-too-busy friends. This version of "brunch" happens at someone's house, from, say, noon to 5pm on a weekend day, and people do bring food, but it's a drop-in affair and not a sit-down meal, and showing up without food is also fine.

The timeslot works for people with or without kids. Friends with gig economy or service industry jobs might have a shift that overlaps it, but a Lyft driver might be able to take a break and drop in, or a restaurant server might get a gap between the lunch and dinner shifts to come by. Hosting is easy because you've already set low expectations for providing food or entertainment; you're just providing some chairs with a roof over them.

Do other people do this? Among my social circle, we have "brunch" probably once a month or so, attended by 15-20 people at various of our houses, and it strikes me as a useful social institution that everyone should have.

<comment><USER7> In Vancouver, somehow "brunch" has morphed to a massive obligation. Everyone should bring a dish, all the dishes are high effort, and people secretly hope to skip the whole thing so they don't have to get up at 7am to cook.

Same with dinners parties too, and the only alternative seems to be placing the whole burden of cooking on the host. Whatever happened to just making a giant stew and someone bringing a few loaves of bread?

<comment><USER8> There seems to be an obvious opportunity for upscale takeout food delivery here. Much easier to split a bill than cooking chores.

<comment><USER9> isn't this called "catering"? I know some wealthy people who will often have catered food delivered (or prepared on premises) if they're having more than a couple people over and don't feel like cooking. this is also what my office does when they give us free lunch. I think the economics work out in a way where the per-head cost is pretty bad for 10-20 people, but reasonable for ~100 or more.

<comment><USER8> I thought catering involved things like waiters or at least servers. Seems excessive for a dinner party.

<comment><USER9> I think there are different tiers of service that are all called catering. when we get "catered" lunch at our office, they usually just put out a buffet of prepared food and we line up and take what we want. the catering staff will replace trays of food when they're empty and occasionally take your plate if you're finished eating, but that's about it. no idea what it costs per head.

no matter how you slice it, having other people prepare good food (ie, not pizza and wings) for you is relatively expensive. if you expect the food to come to you, it either has to be limited to dishes that travel well and don't suffer from sitting over heat for an hour, or you have to pay even more for people to cook it on location.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't like the explanation that everyone "back in the day" had the same schedule. Service jobs still existed back then. Upper middle class (white) people worked 9-5. Women stayed home. The example used was literally the Beaver family.

Even my other 9-5 friends office coworkers are not making time for their friends. Something bigger is definitely at play.

<comment> non-entity > Even my other 9-5 friends office coworkers are not making time for their > friends.

Personally, I haven't had any friends since graduating HS and I dont have the time to make new ones. For one, I'm pretty transient, moving every few years to take a new job as thats the only way to get a significant pay increase (I might finally settle down when and if I find a job I can enjoy somewhat)

<comment><USER11> It's interesting to hear that "not having time to make friends" is associated with career growth. All the high achievers I have met specifically carve out time for networking and the best networking usually depends on having an actual personal connection with someone. Even in tech, I have found most of my jobs by invitation which has eased the stress of the interviewing and having to get a foot in the door.

Are you finding the opposite to be true?

<comment> non-entity Not really, I suppose my definition of "friend" just must be stricter as I don't consider most people I end up networking with the really be friends. More of acquaintances

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you look at the actual data, average hours worked has gone _down_ steadily in the US over the past 200 years:

> 1830 69.1 hours per week

> 1880 60.7

> 1929 50.6

> 1988 42.4

> As the twentieth century ended there was nothing resembling a shorter hours > "movement." The length of the workweek continues to fall for most groups — > but at a glacial pace. Some Americans complain about a lack of free time but > the vast majority seem content with an average workweek of roughly forty > hours — channeling almost all of their growing wages into higher incomes > rather than increased leisure time.

[https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s- history/](https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/)

In my own estimation, spending time with friends may be less emphasized in the current era due to the increased role of social media and the personal atomization it unintentionally prmootes.

<comment><USER13> Yeah but for what quality of life?

Wages haven't increased while inflation has gone up.

So just fundamentally this means that the amount of work to maintain the same standard of living has increased.

So this statement/study is missing one or more variables.

<comment><USER14> > wages haven't increased while inflation has gone up

...That's not true, at all? Adjusted for inflation, wages have _at worst_ been flat for _certain_ sectors. The vast majority of people have seen _inflation adjused_ wage increases.

<comment><USER15> The official inflation numbers are useless. Cost of goods is flat, sure (after you include the hedonistic adjustment gimmick), but cost of other's people time has skyrocketed (daycare, teachers, doctors, waiter, plubmer etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Moved to the Bay Area from LA couple years back. The Bay area seems like everyone is perpetually overworked and stressed. I take my kids for soccer/basketball lessons, and standing on the sidelines, hope to chat up with parents, but they are glued to their phones or horror of horrors ( some have their laptops open and coding!). LA was so much more chill, just easier to chat up with people, invite people over spontaneously and make friends.

<comment><USER17> For another anecdotal data point, I grew up in LA, moved here as a teen, and have spent my career here with regular visits back to LA, and haven't found that to be the case. Leisure is so much _easier_ in San Francisco that it's hard to avoid it... Every resident is a maximum ten minute walk away from a park, there are constant awesome free events, and your life isn't fully governed by the dictates of constant traffic between any two points in the city. I've spent my time in the city itself but I've had plenty of exposure to different parts of the Bay and, controlling for the fact that it's less dense, much of the same applies.

The sheer success of the metro economy relative to LA over the last ten years means that there are a lot of people who moved here with dollar signs in their eyes, and I don't doubt that that's shifted the culture a bit, but it's very easy to avoid IME.

Our data points do differ in that it sounds like you're primarily around families and I'm around single people or young couples. Perhaps what you're describing is true for that subset of the population.

<comment><USER18> Maybe he was in bay area but not SF itself. A common ambiguity when talking about the area

<comment><USER17> Right, I alluded to that in my comment, though it wasn't the focus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >Perlow describes how she developed a solution to white-collar peonage at Boston Consulting Group. She called her strategy "PTO": predictable time off. It didn't seem like a big deal. Teams would pull together to arrange one weeknight off per member per week.

what a nightmare to read. i wish i could say i have never worked with any company so apocalyptically dysfunctional as to need a policy like this.

after 5PM on a weekday and for 100% of the weekend, the default expectation should be that 100% of teammates are not working and are unreachable, even if there is an "emergency". yes, even if it means you or the team is blocked from doing something because you need their input. yes, even if it is "just one tiny question". yes, that means that clients will get mad sometimes.

the team doesn't need to be pulling together to ensure that one person's time off on a weeknight is not interrupted. the team needs to be pulling together to tell management that work stops at 5, every night. then, they need to follow their own rule and be unreachable by 5:01 PM, as a group. this is a problem of labor against management, and the solution is for labor to organize aggressively and set ground rules rather than being picked to pieces by their own sense of industriousness and their desire to please authority by working longer than required.

<comment><USER20> Completely agree. After a few years as a startup founder (ie: in super high stress environment), I now no longer work anywhere where time outside of contractual work hours are not 100% mine, I don't do "on call" anymore and won't work anywhere that contractually asks me to work longer than normal for my country hours or on weekends.

This means that I leave/stop as soon as the day ends and am not reachable for work stuff.

Yes, I will make the occasional exception when it really is an emergency, but in return I expect that the company makes occasional exceptions for me when I need some flexibility.

Its been much less stressful.

<comment><USER21> I'm about to make this transition

I'm kind of worried that my skills will atrophy because I'll be working less, but I almost dont care at this point, because I'll finally have a social life

<comment><USER22> You will atrophy when you never learn new things. Time off does not prevent you to learn.

<comment><USER20> Yes, it can even give you more opportunities that you otherwise would have missed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Articles like these make me very pessimistic for the future. Not because the article is incorrect, but because the fact this has become such a widespread issue is like a bad joke. If you told me in the 90's that people's work schedules would become so unpredictable that families would start dissolving, I would have called you dramatic. But now, it's happening to basically everyone I know, and only in the last few years have I broken free from that myself.

Every clever scheduling algorithm or trick that people try applying to "fix" this situation feels like a band-aid solution. It begs the question, WHY are so many people taking jobs that they know will destroy their relationships with their family and friends?

That immediately takes the subject to the unpleasant conversation of "rent", which has shot up dramatically all over the world in the last few decades. I'm honestly no longer convinced that the systems we have for property acquisition nowadays are actually any better than homesteading. We pay taxes so the government can defend property claims; except 90% of people don't own much at all, so we are basically paying for rich people's security guards.

<comment><USER24> Rentier capitalism results in artificial scarcity. With rentier schemes and behavior dominating aspects of life so fundamental as housing and health care, conditions of artificial scarcity have stretched their tendrils into the fabric of our wellbeing: into our mental, spiritual, social health, into our very sense of having the time to freely work in pursuit of healthy lives.

And the most difficult thing of all is that this is all a wicked pyramid scheme, one that is hard to break without seeming violence against people we care about. We are dependent.

<comment><USER25> What artificial scarcity do you have in mind, bearing in mind that there is a true scarcity (or at least fixed supply) of land close to desirable places to live?

<comment><USER26> Try buying a house in the sunset and turning it in to flats.

<comment><USER24> Try buying a house and selling it for a similar or lower price without walking away in debt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> People just have more competing for their time. Endless streaming, phone usage, video games, etc... not only compete with each other, but also with things like hanging out with friends. It used to be that there really wasn't much to do so for better or worse you hung out with people who were close to you geographically. Now, it's much easier to eschew people who are physically close to you, but may not share your exact ideals, for people who you genuinely want to interact with.

I'm not sure if this is universally a bad or good thing. It's just different than before.

<comment><USER28> >>>I'm not sure if this is universally a bad or good thing.

One of the side-effects of hanging out with physically-proximate but non- optimized-personality people is that you learn to compromise. You learn to build productive relationships despite differences in temperament and interests.

I think that is largely lost in the digital age. It's part of why we see such uncompromising partisanship in political movements. People are so accustomed to interacting with exactly the sort of opinions/viewpoints they want to experience online that they don't know how to handle anything contrarian when they are in meat-space.

<comment><USER27> This is a great point I hadn't considered. Interacting with people you do not agree with not only causes one to learn to compromise, but also softens extreme viewpoints.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This would be an argument in favour of the oft-maligned rules about opening hours in the UK, France, etc. (it can be a challenge to buy DIY goods in France on a Sunday, for instance).

If you have the same time off as people without a 9-5 M-F job it might be easier to befriend a few of them and aid interclass social cohesion.

<comment><USER29> If it's a good thing to ban retail from opening on Sunday, it's also a good thing to do the same to restaurants, transit, and everything excepting emergency services. The UK only restricts retail over 280 m^2, and only in England and Wales—a Scot-lead UK government blocked deregulation in 2006, and more recently Scots did it again.

France is no different; its closing laws also apply only to retail, plus they exempt tourist areas. Germany's exempt train stations. Israel comes closest (at least for Jewish employees), but still allows more than the minimum necessary employment on Saturday; and assuming Benny Gantz forms a government in two weeks the faction who want to impose their religion on everyone else will lose more control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> And this doesn't just affect America, but I think it affects every country.

I never see my friends any more and very rarely see my family. It's a really sad state of affairs, but I'm just working to make a living so I can hopefully one day own a house and go travelling with my wife.

<comment><USER31> Be aware that if you live for tomorrow and that tomorrow never comes, you might end up regretting not having lived for today :-)

<comment><USER32> yea and if you live for today you could be in the street tomorrow

<comment><USER33> Though sadly there are a fair number of folks who both live for tomorrow and also fear ending up in the street tomorrow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Most people I know would say that they don't "have friends". It's humorous, but I take that at face value. Because it's certainly my experience as well.

</comment><comment><USER35> I see my friends almost every night at the gym. We meet up down the pub and have nights out more than once per month too. Often we'll converge on someone's house for a barbecue or just to drink wine and chat shit.

We all work at least full time and some of us run businesses (myself included). I honestly can't relate to this. I'm 35, for what it's worth.

</comment><comment><USER36> productivity increases were meant to help us earn more by working less. what went wrong

<comment><USER37> It's not like you can't work fewer hours and have all the things greater productivity offered. But it's also created even more things you can get by continuing to work more, and most people do not feel satisfied living without them

<comment><USER38> I'd work 30% of what I do now if I could. The truth is that no one will ever employ you at 30%.

<comment><USER9> first of all this is an incredibly white-collar centric claim. shift work pays by the hour for however many hours you work (and possibly overtime), and most of these jobs don't expect you to work full-time. in fact, they might prefer that you don't. you're probably not gonna get an aeron chair and a mechanical switch keyboard though.

even in software, there are people working less than full-time. there was a thread about this just the other day.

<comment><USER38> > first of all this is an incredibly white-collar centric claim

Well yeah obviously I wouldn't be able to live working @30% doing food delivery or cleaning bathrooms...

> there are people working less than full-time.

There are some for sure but so far I haven't found a company accepting my requests. It's probably highly dependent on the country/industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This article misses a fundamental point.

Historically, people have liked to socialize by drinking, smoking, gambling, gossiping, gaming in some way, etc.

But those activities have become too risqué for the modern professional class. Socializing has to be inclusive and bland and you have to put in a ton of effort.

<comment><USER28> >>>But those activities have become too risqué for the modern professional class. Socializing has to be inclusive and bland and you have to put in a ton of effort.

How much of that is due to demographic changes in the _Western_ professional class? Asia still knows how to mix business with pleasure.

[https://theaseanpost.com/article/deal-making-asias-escort- ba...](https://theaseanpost.com/article/deal-making-asias-escort-bars- thriving)

[https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/01/23/national/social...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/01/23/national/social- issues/metoo-dealmaking-escort-bars-thrives-corporate-east-asia-including- japan/)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121268021240548769](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121268021240548769)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I see my friends all the time. We are very busy, but we make time. If you care, you can make time.

<comment><USER41> A thing we've found very helpful is if something ends up working out well time / place-wise, just suggest doing the same thing again next week. It's like building any new habit. You have to be very intentional about it to start with, then it becomes easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> i work a predictable 40 hours a week schedule but it's corporate, conformist malaise that's killing me.

</comment><comment><USER43> > Experiments like this one have given social engineering a bad name.

What a remarkable understatement.

</comment><comment><USER44> On that note, any hobbies / pastimes that you're passionate about that actually lead to more time with friends and new serendipitous connections?

</comment><comment><USER45> LOL, this is just called getting older. As you get older, it gets harder to make new friends, harder to see your existing friends. I suspect it's always been this way.

<comment><USER46> My first suspicion upon reading this was that some writer or editor observed that they weren't getting together with friends as much as they used to and spun a story with some plausible theories and anecdotes out of it.

The real answer may be as simple as they got a bit older, people they know got busy with partners, family, kids, etc. and tend not to be available on random nights and weekends.

I'm willing to believe that there are meta-trends which have caused shifts in how and how much people socialize in addition to this but I'd need to be convinced.

<comment><USER47> No, I come from a country where having friends is not strange at any age. The US are weird and can't put my finger on it but I never felt so detached. I will definitely leave when I'm done working, I hate the lifestyle here, it's so hollow and boring.

<comment><USER48> The US is a big place. You would have a different experience in Georgia than you would in SF.

<comment><USER47> I lived in California and Michigan. In most of the ways that matter it's not that different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> give them a call

</comment><comment><USER50> I had a good childhood and decent teenage years with very few but really good and precious friends, those memories will forever stay as a warm bonfire in my heart at which i can rest during whatever coldness i might face in reality. In my view as a Zoomer, barely seeing the people you treasure anymore is just a part of being an adult, you have to go out there and face the world with everything you got and sometimes you meet good people on your road with which you can share a moment with before you have to head out again. That's just life.

TLDR: man up

<comment><USER51> The world is worthless. "Everything you got" is usually not enough. Good people are hard to come by.

Treasure those precious friends of yours. They're actual people who care about you. They will have your back when memories can't. And sometimes you'll have to inconvenience yourself to have their backs too. _That_ is life. Or at least a life that is worth living.</comment></comment>


Pixate - beautiful native mobile apps with CSS - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2015210423/pixate-beautiful-native-mobile-apps-with-css

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I absorbed the message as it was supposed to be put across. The video showed a (seemingly) quite advanced prototype, and they expect to be able to ship before the end of the year. So what is the $200k for? Seemingly to "make it happen" but it appears to be happening already, so it's kickstarting a hefty salary?

If I did somehow miss the point and this seems like a cynical response then obviously I apologise in advance, but that's how it came across.

Edit, cancel the nicety... I just saw that it's retailing for $299. It all feels rather cynical. Perhaps I have too much of a rose-tinted view of the attraction of Kickstarter?

<comment><USER3> I'm getting the same vibe. And I'm beginning to think that allowing this kind of thing will be the downfall of Kickstarter. Yes, I will explain.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely _love_ the Kickstarter concept. But in practice, their scaling seems to quickly be turning hem into a sales platform that has no controls or accountability.

And I have nothing bad to say about this project in particular, but they are a YC company, and the state of the prototype shows that they already have all they need to make it happen. This project doesn't need money. The campaign seems to me to be nothing more than a simple "I'm making something cool, so give me cash". And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that -- by all means, people should be free to do what they wish with their money, and the Kickstarter campaign will probably work out beautifully for them. That's great.

But this whole perception of Kickstarter being a place for bootstrapping interesting projects is turning into a dangerous myth. Like many things before it, Kickstarter is becoming a place for people with money (and/or obvious ability to make money), to make even more money, though marketing under a vague guise of "bootstrapping", with no checks or balances to keep people honest.

This isn't an accusation leveled at Pixate -- I don't believe they're doing anything wrong and I have huge faith in YC's filtering. But once enough clever people figure out that you can earn a killing or huge bonus on top of _anything_ , just by tacking on a nice Kickstarter campaign, it will become impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. And then people will move on to the next thing, and the cycle will repeat.

</bubble-y doomsaying>

<comment><USER4> > And I have nothing bad to say about this project in particular, but they are > a YC company, and the state of the prototype shows that they already have > all they need to make it happen. This project doesn't need money. The > campaign seems to me to be nothing more than a simple "I'm making something > cool, so give me cash".

I fully agree. Honestly, I hope both that this campaign fails and that the guys at Pixate are able to develop and launch their product successfully. The point of Kickstarter is to enable creative endeavours that would have trouble succeeding in a market environment -- a talented friend of mine financed his first short film via a similar site, which will hopefully get him a foot in the door of filmmaking. In his case, the Kickstarter idea is a great thing: It guarantees artistic independence and audience involvement.

This app, however, already _has_ backing and will easily make plenty of money on the market. It's not a catastrophe in the long haul, but I sincerely hope this doesn't catch on: That's not audience involvement, that's a commercial transaction. You give me money, I give you product. On a larger scale, it's abusing opportunities for people who have few, which is particularly nefarious if it comes from people who have no need to beg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Feedback on the Listr (ugh, that name) re-imagining: the little icons weren't particularly informative in the original, but at least there was some text to try and explain. Now I get to guess what each icon means, plus instead of everything fitting on one screen, you apparently must scroll down to select e.g. "Projects".

By the way, what is up with every project talking about "beautiful"? "Beautiful Javascript", "Beautiful native apps", "Beautiful text icons", etc. Is this just the Steve Jobs school of selling?

<comment><USER6> Apparently they've been taking tips from Google. "Sometimes obscure icons with no names? We love that shit.' -- Google UI team

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So does it __compile __to Objective-C? It sounds more like an 'engine' that is a part of your actual app and interprets the CSS realtime. Sounds more processor intensive than just loading up flat graphics. (not an expert, please chime in)

<comment><USER8> They are somewhat vague on the technical details - however, it sounds like they are indeed basically rendering out their own graphics context and not using Apple's native UI components ("[a] 2D graphics engine facilitates the rendering of scalable, resolution-independent vector graphics).

As to performance, it depends how they do it. I wouldn't want to comment until they revealed some more technical details about this 'graphics engine'. They say 'style native apps and components', but it's unclear to me whether this means they are interpreting CSS and applying these styles to UIKit elements or rolling their own UIKit-like elements (I suspect the latter, but I might be wrong).

<comment><AUTHOR> The Pixate Engine styles native controls using the standard iOS bitmap approach. Bitmaps allow your controls to take advantage of the speed offered by the GPU. However, in contrast to today's workflows, the Pixate Engine renders and caches content to bitmaps dynamically as needed at runtime, giving you the ultimate in flexibility in your designs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 200k is a lot. I can't see how you need so much money (unless you want to add another supercar to the video)?

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks good and all, but I really don't think it's worth $200K. And $150K more for Android support? Where's all this money going to go?

</comment><comment><USER11> This feels like a marketing fail. Kickstarter is supposed to be about helping people create things who would normally not have the resources to do so. Impressing the audience by showing off expensive luxury items (player piano, supercars, etc) does not help this cause.

They also failed to really communicate how the app changes your normal development workflow. Does it replace interface builder processes? Besides styling with CSS, how does it help in creating complex vector elements that would normally be made in Photoshop? Is it a standalone dev environment or a lot of pieces? Can you mix assets (pixel and vector)?

</comment><comment><USER12> This looks similar to Qt Quick / QML, which is actually very cool. <http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7/qdeclarativeintroduction.html>

</comment><comment><USER13> The CSS part is particularly interesting, and has a ton of potential. But frankly, I don't like nor would I use a proprietary library like this.

Also, I don't see why they need Kickstarting at all. If they are going to sell the product, then sell the product. They appear to already have a product that is finished or near completion, and are in Y Combinator and thus have funding. It doesn't make sense.

My real hope is that one day we get an open source tool like this for writing native UIs in CSS.

</comment><comment><USER14> I doubt they will reach $200k, but this is sorely needed for iOS apps. If they had launched this without kickstarter, and at a reasonable price, I bet developers would be flocking to it.

<comment><USER15> Needed? It looks to me like a terrible idea not very well implemented. It's easier (and more WYSIWYG) to style controls in Interface Builder using the properties. It's probably just as easy to write NIBs by hand.

<comment><USER16> Ha, I doubt you are an iOS developer at all :)

<comment><USER15> Doubt away.

It's not like this eliminates any of the complexity of ios development. Stuff like animating properties of controls is one of the things iOS handles beautifully. Any graphic workflow that doesn't eliminate rework and isn't WYSIWYG is a step backwards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> To me, this kind of product needs crowdsourced equity financing (that's becoming legal soon, right?), not Kickstarter-style.

I have a hard time imagining there are, say, 2000 people willing to pay $100 in advance for this with no guarantees. This isn't a sexy video game which can build up lots of viral demand...

Despite that, I wish them the best of luck! From what I understand, CSS-style formatting of native iOS components is sorely needed...

<comment><USER18> Yes, it's becoming legal sometime later this year or very early next year. SEC is currently working on the regulations that we'll all have to follow in making use of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I know I'm missing something here, but if they get enough money, they'll add Android support - but doesn't Android already do this (not with CSS, but with XML, like everything else in Android)

<http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/themes.html>

<comment><USER20> I think it's more to do with making it "cross-platform", the code-once-build- multiple-platforms aspect of PhoneGap, etc.

<comment><USER19> You can't use this tool with PhoneGap - it's for styling native code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> While I'm totally stoked for seeing this concept come to fruition, these are the _worst_ reward tiers I've ever seen on a Kickstarter campaign.

The $5 minimum should be $10 or $15, and there needs to be a tier between this one at the $50 tier.

And the rewards themselves? For $2k, I get "Access to a private forum to influence product direction." For two grand, I can't get a phone call to the CEO? I get access to some forum?

</comment><comment><USER22> Currently there are very few styling options for iOS and Android app dev. That results in an incredible amount of grunt work that really shouldn't be necessary. At least if you make apps commercially, a quality app that solves this would be huge. It looks like they are adding a lot of features beyond styling, and even moving beyond mobile... so hey, no question, sign me up : ).

</comment><comment><USER23> I agree with all the current opinions, but I still donated, an iOS dev friend of mine really misses the three20 libraries ability to apply CSS.

I like the idea of doing it properly but to be honest I'd expect that someone would release an open source version that does something similar that I can contribute back to.

<comment><USER24> Nimbus Stylesheets: <http://blog.jeffverkoeyen.com/nimbus-chameleon>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> here's a message I sent on Kickstarter:

I'm very impressed by your demo, but I'm also skeptical about performance, how well this integrates into existing apps, and what happens to my apps built on your framework if you go out of business or get acquired.

Along the same lines, I'd love to be able to pitch this to my clients, but I can't in good conscience without knowing that they're never going to get screwed in the process.

Can you address these concerns? I'd love to back your project, but I need to know I'm not going to be left holding the bag in 12-18 months.

Thanks! Aaron

<comment><USER25> Agree wholeheartedly. The tradeoff for cross platform is tying your fate to these guys.

Also code once run anywhere doesn't work for native apps. You usually get an Android app that looks like iOS. Barf. Or your have to use some new UI paradigm foreign to both. Chance of being featured in either market without conforming to UI guidelines: 0%.

This only really works for games and Unity has that covered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why in the world would you put a ferrari into a _Kickstarter_ video?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are no Ferraris in the video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> When committing to CSS, isn't the natural way to go the HTML5 + CSS3 way? Currently it is all about performance. I would like to see better solutions than phonegap and titanium.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm interested in how animations work with Pixate. Would they also have to be in CSS, if not, then how smooth/seamless would transitions be? Looks good so far though, but 200k?

</comment><comment><USER29> is this not backwards in any ways?

<comment><USER30> same feeling; you either develop native apps and deal with the provided options or you move to html5 and css3. why create a frankenstein solution by botching native apps together with a css engine; feels like an intermediate and futile attempt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Does this affect performance in any way when the app is running?

Also, does it provide any benefit over Quartz2d other than familiarity that comes with CSS?

</comment><comment><USER32> CSS is the new native. (Initialized by Apple, the walled garden company, can you believe it!)</comment>


Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo

<comment><USER4> When a friend of mine was in grad school, he helped a classmate prepare for her Test of English as a Foreign Language exam. They were going over some fine point about past tenses when, attempting to explain a mistake she had made, he said: _If you had had "had" here, you would have had to have had "have" there._ She screamed.

<comment><USER5> Reminiscent of the classic 'John, where Peter had had "had" had had "had had". "Had had" had had the examiner's approval.'

<comment><USER6> Interesting that Wikipedia only dates this from 1947; my 1964 copy of the 1935 book "Tricks and Amusements with coins, cards, string, paper and matches" by R.M. Abraham includes this problem on page 3!

<comment><USER7> Please correct the article! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One can't buffalo buffalo without thinking of the two old standbys:

The horse raced past the barn fell. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence>)

John while James had had had had had had had had had more fun. (That one was from an old puzzle book I had—had had?—as a kid. I find it much like the Buffalo sentence, in that you puzzle over it for a while, are told the resolution, and then say "Huh. OK, if you say so.")

EDIT: While my mind's on random funny sentences, this one was an old favourite of my mother's (who taught me all the grammar I know) from _Cheaper by the Dozen_. It is the reaction of a child, whose bedroom is on the second floor, on being presented with an unacceptable evening's reading: "What did you bring that book you know I don't like to be read to out of up for?"

<comment><USER9> More hads can be had there -

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_ha...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_a_better_effect_on_the_teacher)

<comment><USER8> That's beautiful! It must be 20 years that I've been subconsciously bothered by that puzzle, because I couldn't understand what "more fun" was supposed to mean in that context. With 'where' in place of 'while' and "a better effect on the teacher" in place of "more fun", it sudddenly makes sense.

Also, the linked article links to "List of linguistic example sentences" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sent...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sentences)), which introduced me to a beautiful Mitch Hedberg quote:

> I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long.

and helped me remember a word that has been eluding me for some time: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sent...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sentences#Syllepsis). Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm always reminded of this by code like

        Buffalo buffalo = new Buffalo(BUFFALO);

</comment><comment><USER11> Interestingly, one can in fact create valid English sentences of arbitrary length composed entirely of the word "Buffalo." By induction:

n = 1 is valid as the imperative of the verb. That is to say, "Buffalo" means "You should harangue someone."

n = 2 is valid again as the imperative, this time with a subject: buffalo. That is, "Buffalo buffalo" means "You should harangue some bison."

For n > 2, assume that the sentence for n - 1 is valid. This sentence will contain at least one instance of the noun "buffalo" (meaning the animal), either with or without the adjective "Buffalo" (meaning the city) prefixing it. If there is no adjective, we can add one to get an n-length sentence. If there is an adjective, we can replace "Buffalo buffalo" (meaning bison from New York) with "buffalo buffalo buffalo" (meaning bison that are harangued by other bison), again yielding an n-length sentence. Thus, by induction, a buffalo sentence can be constructed for any n.

<comment><USER12> For n=2, you have a verb and an object, but no subject.

<comment><USER12> What's with the downvote? I understand the implied subject, but this part:

 _n = 2 is valid again as the imperative, this time with a subject: buffalo. That is, "Buffalo buffalo" means "You should harangue some bison."_

is wrong. The two "buffalo" are the verb and the object. Neither of them is a subject.

<comment><USER11> You're right. I got my terminology mixed up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The AI dream: code code codes codes code.

</comment><comment><USER14> From the Wikipedia article, the following was the only one that let me make sense of this:

""Alley cats [whom] Junkyard dogs intimidate [also happen to] intimidate Sewer rats.""

(Where the place "Buffalo is replaced by "Alley", "Junkyard", "Sewer" - <USER2> the act, to buffalo, is replaced with "intimidate", while the animals "buffalo" is replaced with cats, dogs, and rats.

I'll admit it took me a few minutes to get the implicit "whom" and "also happen to".

<comment><USER15> The way I remember it myself is by building it up in my head first:

cows intimidate cows

Scranton cows intimidate cows.

cows Scranton cows intimidate intimidate cows

Scranton cows Scranton cows intimidate intimidate cows

Scranton cows Scranton cows intimidate intimidate Scranton cows.

Once I've got the structure in my head with pauses to break it up for myself: Buffalo buffalo _pause_ Buffalo buffalo buffalo _pause_ buffalo Buffalo buffalo it's pretty easy to grok (and spit out on cue to the disbelief of others).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Similar but (1) better because it doesn't use coincidental multiple meanings, (2) better because it doesn't use anything so obscure as buffalo=harass, and (3) worse because it needs two different words:

oysters oysters oysters split split split

"oysters split": oysters come apart into two pieces.

"oysters oysters split split": oysters whom oysters split, split: those oysters whom other oysters take apart into two pieces, come apart into two pieces.

"oysters oysters oysters split split split": oysters whom (oysters whom oysters split, split) split: those oysters whom (those oysters whom other oysters take apart into two pieces, in turn take apart into two pieces) come apart into two pieces.

Much as with the buffalo sentence, this works for arbitrary values of 3.

</comment><comment><USER17> I bet Natural Language Processing Engines would crap them selves if they try to parse this correctly.

 _This is why we can't have nice things_

<comment><USER18> That's ok. Biological language processing engines crap themselves if they try to parse this correctly.

<comment><USER19> The real problem is that an artificial language processing engine _will_ find a parse for it.

One actual example I remember is a parse of "New fans run." About the operation of recently acquired fans, right?

Well, the lexicon in our system found an instance of "New" as a proper noun (a band or something), the use of "fans" as a transitive verb, and one of the definition of "runs" as a noun (think baseball, for just one example). So you had this proper noun New fanning this abstract usage of runs as the parse that the system selected.

This more than anything demonstrated to me the necessity of statistical techniques in NLP (now taken as a given, but a fairly recent development relative to the history of NLP research).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like "The Los Angelos Angels", which means "The The Angels Angels".

<comment><USER21> Kind of like "Montgomery of the El Alamein," which means Montgomery of the the the Amein.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ah, fun with grammar ;) Dutch comedian Kees Torn came up with a (Dutch) sentence, repeating one word 16 times in a row: "Als er bij het drop (waar bergen bergen bergen bergen bergen) Bergen bergen bergen bergen bergen bergen, bergen bergen bergen bergen bergen." (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHnpjsR5q6g>)

<comment><USER20> No coke, pepsi

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wouldn't the sentence "I want to put two hyphens between the words Fish and And, and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign" have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, and after Chips?

</comment><comment> loup-vaillant Which is why overloading and type inference aren't very good friends.

</comment><comment><USER24> One in German:

Wenn fliegen hinter fliegen fliegen, fliegen fliegen fliegen hinter nach.

It means something like, "when flies fly behind flies, then flies fly after flies."

<comment><USER19> Shouldn't there be time and arrows in there somewhere?

<comment><USER25> Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

<comment><USER26> Time flies like an arrow; space flies like a bow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I remember one from grade 5 which is kind of similar ... "I saw a saw to saw a saw "

(The Buffalo based is definitely not easy to comprehend in the first go)

</comment><comment><USER28> Make sure to click the 'Listen to this article' link at the bottom - <USER3> Wikipedia articles are _much_ funnier if someone is reading them to you.

</comment><comment><USER29> I am also reminded of Marklar from South Park.

</comment><comment><USER30> Everytime I come across this I have to go to the wikipedia page to check the grammar.

I find these types of sentences incredibly creative (and confusing).

A similar thing, inspired by buffalo and illustrated: <http://myapokalips.com/show/15#comic>

</comment><comment><USER31> we have something similar in the hokkien dialect.. which goes .. kong kong kong kong kong kong kong kong kong kong

which consists of ... kong kong = grandpa kong = says kong = can kong = hit kong = dizy

but you have to get the intonation right .. lol

<comment><USER32> Also [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den) .

It's a private theory of mine that the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods were so lively because "this is an excellent shoulder of pork" sounded exactly like "I will attack your city at dawn"... :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> my sentence parser is officially buffalo'd

</comment><comment><USER34> The buffalo sentence may be grammatically valid, but it's not "valid" by any real test of human understanding.

Chomsky-esque generative grammar can't tell the whole story about human language.

<comment><USER35> I think that's the point, actually. The fact that a sentence can be grammatically correct but not logically correct, or be both, but still not "make sense," is interesting in itself. It shows how difficult it is to determine whether a sentence is "valid" for speakers of that language.

(Chomsky's classic example of "grammatical but not logical" was "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.")

<comment><USER35> Think of it like this: Chomsky was testing the brain's language parser by handing it weird things and seeing how it reacts. Like you might do with a new programming language: what happens if I try to add strings, or divide them? Is zero true? Is the string "nil" true? Is == different from ===? Can I pass a function into a function?

The brain's language center is undocumented, so we try throwing potential sentences at it and see what works or doesn't, then try to reverse engineer what it's doing. The buffalo sentence conforms to the rules we know about word order, and can be logically explained, but somehow it fails. Finding out why is part of the reverse engineering process.

<comment><USER34> Yes... the interesting question is whether it fails because of a "rule" we're not aware of, or because it's simply too complex. The human mind is recursive, but is it simply that it only have a "stack depth" of 3 or 4 and can't parse more deeply than that?

<comment><USER36> >The human mind is recursive, but is it simply that it only have a "stack depth" of 3 or 4 and can't parse more deeply than that?

That was Chomsky and Miller's theory (although they weren't dealing with that particular example).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I saw a video a while back about Cyc where Lenat talks about how they make sure their AI is still acting somewhat sane by feeding it sentences like this one, or, "Can a can can-can?"

</comment><comment><USER38> the article touches on the fact that a sentence of any length could be constructed entirely out of buffalo, but it doesn't really explain how. here's how to make it arbitrarily long:

start with "Buffalo[place] buffalo[noun] buffalo[verb] buffalo[noun]"

after any "buffalo[noun]", insert "Buffalo[place] buffalo[noun] buffalo[verb]" to change the meaning to 'bison that Buffalo bison intimidate'

youve just created a new grammatical sentence of length n+3. iterate and enjoy

<comment><USER39> pumping lemma?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Well, it's good to know Buffalo NY has _something_ going for it.

<comment><USER41> That they have a bunch of overgrown cows that harass each other?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Malkovich, malkovich malkovich malkovich. Malkovich?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur3CQE8xB3c>

</comment><comment><USER43> In college, my wife was told this sentence by a metaphysics professor. He also used to have acid flashbacks during class.

</comment><comment><USER44> I like:

Oysters oysters eat eat oysters.

</comment><comment><USER45> Malkavich Malkavich, Malkavich Malkavich Malkavich

</comment><comment><USER46> Mind = Blown.

</comment><comment><USER47> Hey, it's available:

buffalobuffalobuffalobuffalobuffalobuffalobuffalobuff.com

:-)

...but I think I prefer BadgerBadgerBadger.com</comment>


Dungeon Project - a CMS for gamers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getdungeon.com/dungeon-the-beginning/ We share the story and our motivation to build a new open-source CMS. <comment><USER2> Looks like a really well put together (and professionally presented) project from a young group. Very interesting.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looking really nice. Is this already coded, or are these still designs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Yes these are still designs, the coding part is in progress. More announcements on the project will be posted in the upcoming weeks.</comment></comment>


An Entrepreneur's Guide to Relationship Management - <AUTHOR> http://blog.contactually.com/2012/04/an-entrepreneurs-guide-to-relationship-management/

<comment><USER2> Nice, article! Thanks for sharing your 'Bucket' strategy. Have been giving thoughts to how frequently I want to stay in touch with people.</comment>


Chiropractor sues patient for posting criticism on Yelp - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/07/MNN81559L2.DTL&type=business&tsp=1

<comment><USER2> Perhaps I'm just a demanding modern man, always looking for the fastest way to get information, but would it have hurt to included the review, or at least link to the review, in the article?

This happens all the time.. news stories about something related to the internet NEVER link to what they're talking about.</comment>


What is a Browser? - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ

<comment><USER2> Posted many times before - I'll be interested to see if this engenders any discussion. Usually it didn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> Blah... good to know. That's what I was hoping for and I'm surprised it doesn't.</comment></comment>


Try to guess what "Mantra" is just from the landing page of the website - <AUTHOR> http://www.getmantra.com/ <comment><USER2> One of the icons is copied from the old iOS Game Center icon. Maybe they got it from this package: [http://www.iconarchive.com/show/ios7-style-metro-ui- icons-by...](http://www.iconarchive.com/show/ios7-style-metro-ui-icons-by- igh0zt/MetroUI-Folder-OS-Game-Center-icon.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Spoiler: Mantra is a collection of free and open source tools integrated into a web browser, which can become handy for penetration testers, web application developers, security professionals -- [https://sourceforge.net/projects/getmantra/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/getmantra/)

</comment><comment><USER3> No idea whatsoever!

<comment><AUTHOR> But it has a powerful set of tools!</comment></comment>


Show HN: WutWutWut Amazon Affiliate Bookmark - <AUTHOR> http://jeremyaboyd.micro.blog/2019/05/06/launching-a-new.html <comment><AUTHOR> This service is hard to explain, so I linked to the blog post about it instead of the website itself.

Basically I built this because I have a few family members who always need money. In the past, my wife and I would just send them money. Now, instead of sending them money, I can just buy stuff on Amazon, and they will receive a commission. So I don't show any bias toward one sibling vs the other, it will chose at random who's affiliate tag to use.</comment>


Bitcoin surges to all-time high above $1,700 - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-markets-forex-bitcoin-idUSKBN1852DL <comment><USER2> The bull run going on with Bitcoin right now is very concerning to me. There's been no recent improvements to the utility of Bitcoin, instead there's been scaling issues and an ugly, contentious civil war over how to solve it. It's utility if anything has dropped considerably, as mining fees have become far higher than traditional methods and more unpredictable, leaving smaller transactions to sometimes take 16+ hours to confirm, even with the default fees set by the wallet.

Historically, a lot of this activity tends to be from unregulated exchanges in Asia, many of whom could be engaging in some form of price manipulation (it wouldn't be the first time - google for Willy Bot). My Bitcoin friends in town have started to joke that the reason it's going up is just the word "China", because it tends to be a repeated explanation of why the price is increasing, suggesting to me that nobody really knows what's going on or even where the demand is coming from.

I'm not anti-bitcoin, but I'd vastly prefer to see a slow, stable increase in price based on the currency improving in utility, not these giant blasts of speculation that, IMHO, only work to discredit Bitcoin as a serious instrument for financial systems. An extreme example of how bad this is getting right now that I seriously hope is just a joke: [https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6a3lvd/today_i_took...](https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6a3lvd/today_i_took_out_a_325239_equity_loan_on_my_house/)

<comment><USER3> One way to read this is that every year that goes by without the discovery of a major, world-ending flaw in the Bitcoin protocol should increase your confidence that there won't be one soon, so you should expect growth even if all else is equal. It's not just time either, as the "bounty" on such a discovery is proportional to the market cap of Bitcoin.

<comment><USER4> All crypto will eventually be broken. SHA-1 seemed bulletproof a few years ago, and now people are trying to phase it out.

If it becomes worth it to break bitcoin, these vulnerabilities will be used, discovered faster, and likely won't be published before someone uses it to profit off Bitcoin and crashing the price.

Bitcoin is priced this high because uneducated people expect it to replace paypal and credit cards but it will never be able to because 1 transaction take 30+ minutes and that is by design. The faster they make transactions take, the higher chance of forgery. Other crypto-currencies that attempt to have faster transactions are simply trading safety for speed.

<comment><USER5> For a merchant a CC transaction can take up to 30 days. A customer can initiate a charge back any time between when they txed and when they pay their bill.

With bitcoin the ~10m+ tx time is a cost, but is in material if you are dealing with either a trusted party or a small amount of $

<comment><USER4> > For a merchant a CC transaction can take up to 30 days. A customer can > initiate a charge back any time between when they txed and when they pay > their bill.

Customers don't care how long a transaction takes for the merchant.

Have you ever tried selling anything for bitcoin? Nearly no one will use it even when being told of all the "benefits". They don't want to wait 30+ minutes. When they see they need to give some exchange a scan of their passport and wait 3-5 days to link their bank account, and losing the ability to do a chargeback, they never think about using Bitcoin again.

<comment><USER5> I've only bought a couple things with bitcoin, never sold.

The current story for bitcoin is pretty sad, largely due to slow adoption and not much of a good story for consumers.

The good thing is that bitcoin doesn't have to compete directly with CC companies. There are cases that it solves that CC companies aren't interested in.

There's all this concern about price volatility and tx rate, but it's been used continuously in spite of price volatility, and saying no one wants to use bitcoin because there's too many outstanding bitcoin transactions just isn't a serious argument.

I care about bitcoin because it is an interesting piece of technology that enables things that weren't possible before. I'll hold bitcoin so long as they don't go to zero, none of the concerns listed about bitcoin that I have heard are serious arguments on why it might go to zero, so I'll hold.

<comment><USER6> >The good thing is that bitcoin doesn't have to compete directly with CC companies.

Current CC companies are essentially two products. One is the transaction processing side of things, and the other is the financial + insurance product which protects both parties from fraud, chargebacks etc. Crypto currencies should be able to make transaction processing effectively free. All you need is an insurance product that operates at margins lower than 2-3% (current credit cards).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Currency isn't SUPPOSED to be this volatile.

Currency is NOT supposed to be an investment mechanism in and of itself.

If I buy a loaf of bread for $1 now, I should be able to buy a loaf of bread for $1, 10 years from now.

Currency inflation is BAD, and so is currency deflation.

Stability is GOOD.

The fact that bitcoin's value keeps skyrocketing proves that it is a speculative currency which is too volatile for use. The only way I would trust bitcoin for anything would be for short-term holding to transfer value from point a to b, and then convert it back into a stable currency.

The only way I would invest in Bitcoin is if I was totally okay with potentially losing every penny I invested. It could literally drop to zero tomorrow if something happened to it (like a major country making it illegal, for example).

<comment><USER8> Why stability is better than volatility?

It doesn't seem that obvious to me. Every time price stability is forced onto something, it just destroyed its market.

<comment><USER9> > Why stability is better than volatility?

It's self-evident that a stable currency is preferable to volatile, though I'm interested in reading an argument to the contrary.

volatile: liability to change rapidly and unpredictably, especially for the worse.

stable: not likely to change or fail; firmly established.

<comment><USER10> Let me play the devil's advocate, and day that volatility is an enabler for gambling or betting, and people are known to want to bet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting to note that at the same time bitcoin's dominance in the cryptocurrency market is down to 55.5%, hugging historic lows. [http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance- percentage](http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance-percentage)

<comment><USER12> Market cap is a fairly easily manipulated statistic, and doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a comparison anyway.

For one thing, a lot of those tokens are either centralized or represent products that don't even exist.

For another, they are over-counted. Imagine the thought experiment: I create a new eth token and sell a bunch, pumping the market cap of my new asset to $100M. That eth that was paid for my asset was not sold - I'm still holding onto it.

Now I've just added $100M+ to the 'dominance' factor by doing nothing. People bought my token, and maybe even bought eth to buy my token, with no sell pressure being added anywhere in the eth ecosystem. This extra dominance was just sort of poofed out of nowhere.

So, 55% is not really as meaningful as some people ascribe.

<comment><USER11> True, no statistic tells to whole story and should be taken with a grain of salt. However, I think this metric has a lot of psychological value as it's easy to grasp and has been generally accepted by the bitcoiners when it was 80%.

Do you think there could be any other metrics that can tell a better story? (serious question, just wondering what your thoughts are)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Still remember when it was $7 per bitcoin and sort of a joke. Hard to believe it's worth over $1700 now.

<comment><USER14> It's amazing to think of the RoI you could have gotten for a few hours of computer time if you were mining early.

Of course, for every Bitcoin, there's a million stupid schemes that don't work out, and it's hard to tell them apart.

<comment><USER15> I mined 50BTC back in college. My harddrive died and I discarded it, thinking nothing of the ~$0.03 I was throwing away.

<comment><USER16> I wonder if in the future "bitcoin miners" might be a more literal name, for those digging through landfill looking for hard drives like the one you threw away.

<comment><USER14> It's already been done at least once: [https://www.cnet.com/news/uk-man-tries- to-retrieve-7-5-milli...](https://www.cnet.com/news/uk-man-tries-to- retrieve-7-5-million-in-bitcoins-from-dump/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The reason BitCoin has spiked is because it is the most supported crypto currency and the easiest to get hold of when setting up your wallet with a bank or exchange.

There has been and influx of people trying to buy Etherium but first they need to buy BitCoin.

</comment><comment><USER18> Where does the $52 billion market valuation come from? All BTC ever created or those traded recently?

Any evidence of the # of coins lost forever? I know I had one or two from the early days that got forgotten and lost with a hard drive wipe.

Also, do BTC disappearing from circulation affect the currency differently than a fiat currency?

<comment><USER19> > Where does the $52 billion market valuation come from?

That seems to be a mistake in the article. $52 billion market cap is of all currently tracked cryptocurrencies, not just bitcoin.[1] Bitcoin is ~$28.7 billion right now.[2]

[1]: [https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/](https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/)

[2]: [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/)

<comment><USER20> Also, beware that the marketcap figures are not quite true [1]. They calculate based on the total supply rather than the circulated supply and on some (scam)cases like the recent Gnosis ICO it results in crazy amounts.

[1]: [https://blog.sia.tech/want-to-deflate-the-token-bubble- fix-t...](https://blog.sia.tech/want-to-deflate-the-token-bubble-fix-the- market-cap-indicator-d50f7f1e1ec4#f4f4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm still waiting for my MtGox coins to be returned :_(

<comment><USER22> it could actually happen

([https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6a24et/if_p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6a24et/if_price_keeps_rising_mtgox_may_become_solvent/))

<comment><USER23> Something about this doesn't make sense. Either he pays in BTC or JPY. If he pays in JPY, then he has to sell the BTC, which if he does that on market, will tank the price. If he pays in BTC and the courts recognize it, then BTC must be officially recognized as a currency, no? Not sure.

In any case, _if_ the courts recognize that he can pay back in BTC, and he has enough BTC to do so, then I don't see why it's contingent on the BTC price. He could do it today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's not just bitcoin. ETH and LTC have both spiked in price recently as well - ~2x for ETH, and ~3x for LTC, vs. prices 30 days ago.

<comment><USER25> LTC spiked because Coinbase added them to their trading service - I'm surprised that making something simple and easy to use would bolster activity like that.

Is it safe to say "Coinbase is the iPod of Bitcoin"? That's what it feels like.

<comment><USER26> Only if trying to buy songs on an iPod caused your bank to freak out. I'm at a top 5 US bank for my checking and credit card. They were nonplussed with my attempts to move money to Coinbase.

<comment><USER27> I'm at a credit union and had no problems whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> For anyone who is interested in looking at some growth data take a look at this chart showing the worldwide value transfer of Bitcoins through localbitcoins denominated in USD:

[https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins](https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins)

</comment><comment><USER29> It's amazing to me how many people on HN don't really get why Bitcoin is valuable.

The simplest way of putting it: if one doesn't believe gold is going to imminently plunge in value, then there you go. That's why Bitcoin is valuable. It's digital gold. The analogy isn't perfect, but as far as analogies go, it is a very good one.

<comment><USER30> It's not digital gold, and it has plunged in value far more dramatically than gold ever has.

That said, I don't grok the value of gold either. It doesn't have any intrinsic value, it's only valuable because people agree they need something that has value. Bitcoin is the same, except without the centuries of history of people irrationally relying on its value.

<comment><USER29> Value is socially constructed by people wanting things for complex, dynamic reasons -- it is entirely dependent on the context, which is never static. My understanding is that the concept of "intrinsic value" is flawed and leads people astray. Gold has strong money like properties [0], which is why it has remained valuable for so long (ornamental and industrial usage are a small fraction). Bitcoin has all of these properties as well (perhaps with minor caveats about fungibility), plus some of the very interesting benefits that come from being digital. Being digital brings a few negatives as well, but it seems the positives more than compensate.

There are other considerations -- gold is found in the ground and has limited alternatives (platinum and silver, for example), while anyone can create their own cryptocurrency. It appears to me that the huge network effects, first mover advantage, and the principle of "well, it's good enough" are very important dynamics that counteract the near infinite possible competitors.

[0] Recognizable, durable, fungible/uniform, and very hard to counterfeit. Two other big ones are portability and divisibility, which it's alright at.

<comment><USER30> Intrinsic value is a real thing. Land has it. Labour has it. Companies and machinery do. Anything that can produce useful things. And of course the useful things themselves.

The real reason for the value of currencies is not the gold backing up that currency, but the economy backing it up. And when that economy goes down, so does the currency. And that's the problem with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: they only have value when people accept them as payment for something valuable. Without that, they are worthless, as shown by both the history of bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, and by the fact that anyone can make a cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin works as long as there are enough people who have faith in it, and as long as there are a lot of people accepting it as payment. But when nobody accepts it because nobody trusts it, then bitcoin is worthless. Trust is the only thing it's based on.

Of course being able to pay digitally is tremendously useful, but you don't need bitcoin for that.

<comment><USER29> Hey, I meant to reply earlier but got caught up.

> Intrinsic value is a real thing. Land has it. Labour has it. Companies and > machinery do. Anything that can produce useful things. And of course the > useful things themselves.

These things all have value but that value is not static or independent of the context. The word intrinsic implies otherwise, which is problematic.

Valuable beach front property may become essentially worthless if the sea level rises and the area becomes flooded. Varieties of labor can become mostly irrelevant (and thus much less valuable) if technology provides a more effective solution.

> Trust is the only thing it's based on.

People trust bitcoin as the protocol and immutability of its ledger have proven to be impressively reliable, to name a few reasons. It isn't blind trust.

Of course, it is an open question to see how this will play out in the future. But the bitcoin experiment has been quite successful so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's killing me too because I'm waiting on the next correction to come before buying any more, but I thought that was going to happen earlier and I'm kicking myself for not buying some a week ago.

The future looks bright for cryptocurrencies, but I don't want to buy some at 1700 and feel like a fool when it crashes back down to 1100

<comment><USER32> So just wait. It's going to crash again, it always does.

<comment><USER12> The question is whether it will crash from 2000 to 800, or from 6000 to 2500.

<comment><USER30> And we can't know, because it has no intrinsic value and nobody even understands why it's so high right now. It might drop from 6000 to 2500, it might drop from 1800 to 300.

Its value only comes from the trust people put in it, and from nothing else. If that trust evaporates, so does the value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Of course the price of Bitcoin is going to keep rising due to the fixed amount of coins that can be mined and all the long forgotten stale accounts with coins just sitting in them. There will be a real issue with the velocity of coins exchanged decreasing over time as they're horded in this fashion.

</comment><comment><USER34> Some of these exchanges have come a long way and the volatility makes it great to trade cryptos. I still view it as the wild west, so scammers everywhere, but where there is chaos there is profit!

</comment><comment><USER35> TL;DR: "sky is the limit", "this is not a bubble but a new paradigm", "the price is going up because of China", "buy before it gets too late", etc.

</comment><comment><USER36> It's not just Bitcoin. I see most cryptocurrencies going up in recent months. Probably people and organizations pouring money from other assets into cryptocurrencies, as these are not taxed and not subject to state/central bank control.

</comment><comment><USER37> For speculation on short term direction, current price of BTC which is above $1,750 is a SELL. This move is parabolic and looks to be complete. I'd put a stop loss for a short trade at $1,875.

</comment><comment><USER38> Went to a bitcoin conference recently and met a plumber who had quit his job to margin trade altcoins. I think a lot of his positions would have been wiped out in the beartrap 12 hours ago.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'd like to understand where the trade flow is coming from, it may have something to say about other, legitimate markets. That's way more interesting and valuable.

</comment><comment><USER40> Anyone know a creative way I could go short bitcoin over a long time period? eg. >5yrs

<comment><USER41> Write your own call options.

The challenge will be finding a counterparty. But look at _The Big Short_ ; they're out there.

<comment><USER40> On what market? I don't think there are any on CBOE. I'd be skeptical of a market run by a bitcoin company even if it raised VC because: 1) The failure rate of VC in general, and especially in fintech bets. 2) It's probably "pre- revenue" eg. not profitable company 3) It will probably be a low volume market & therefore have few counterparties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania)

<comment><USER43> Previously on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2561043](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2561043) (May 2011, price $7.50)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> its clearly going up now because... its going up. its a cycle.

</comment><comment><USER45> I can't tell you that Bitcoin is a scam, but I can tell you that if I were going to devise a Ponzi for the 21st century, Bitcoin is what it would look and feel like.

<comment><USER46> Can someone explain to me why Bitcoin is compared to a Ponzi scam so often. I understand what a Ponzi scam is and have a decent understand of Bitcoin. I'm curious if people just mean it's scam and a Ponzi scam is fresh in their memory.

<comment><USER47> Here's one way to see it: if you _need_ to use Bitcoin to pseudonymously transfer large amounts of money anywhere in the world relatively easily, then you should worry not about the price it's currently trading at. If you want to transfer 1 million $'s, then you buy the appropriate amount of BTC and cash out when the transaction is done. A lot of people who are "invested" in Bitcoin are there to make money selling it for a higher price than they bought it for.

<comment><USER48> By that standard all investments made for purely financial gains are scams.

<comment><USER12> No because a lot of investments intend to create value along the way. Investing in a startup for example hopes that one day they will be profitable. You may intend to sell or exit before that point, but the people who buy from you are looking forward to real world profits from adding real value.

It's only ponzi-esque if each person just expects the next one to pay more than the last, with no value-added at any point in the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Historically, as soon as bitcoin makes national press, it drops. Amateur investors jump on without the stomach for the hiccups, leading to the subsequent virtual "bank run"

<comment><USER50> A bank run is a pretty specific thing ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run)), you shouldn't use that term for any general situation where lots of people decide to sell something at the same time, or where a price of something drops precipitously.

<comment><USER49> Feel free to contribute a more accurate term

<comment><USER51> Price drop. Supply glut. Demand shortage. Investor flight. Fire sale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I think I can claim that I wrote the 1st academic paper on Bitcoin in early 2011. Anyone else trying to claim that title? :)

Unfortunately I was broke in school so bought and sold only a few coins. Asked my lawyer dad for money, he laughed, just as all my Wharton finance friends did.

[https://www.scribd.com/document/86764784/Diepenbrock- Bitcoin...](https://www.scribd.com/document/86764784/Diepenbrock- BitcoinReport2011)

<comment><USER53> The bitcoin paper was the first academic paper on bitcoin.</comment></comment>


Nvidia finally releases a 28nm Kepler-based GPU, the GTX 680 - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/123271-nvidias-gtx-680-emphasizes-efficiency-pours-on-the-speed

<comment><USER2> Faster, more efficient and cheaper than their AMD rival.. it has been a long time since you could say that!

Hopefully Nvidia's move to 28nm starts some price competition.

More in depth anandtech review: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia- geforce-gtx-680-re...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia-geforce- gtx-680-review)

<comment><USER3> How do you know if it's cheaper? AMD cards still outperform on price and raw performance 5TFlops > 3TFlops.

<comment><USER4> AMD 7970 = $550 GTX 680 = $499

I can tag a brick 6TFlops and sell it for $551

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if they've improved performance of the 32 bit rotate operations which currently make ATI 3-5x+ faster for Bitcoin mining (I don't think bitcoin mining is a really worthwhile use case, but being able to do faster crypto operations in general is nice)</comment>


Beyond Meat Is Developing a Plant-Based Substitute for Bacon - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-24/beyond-meat-is-developing-a-plant-based-substitute-for-bacon <comment><USER2> I just want fake cheese that's as good as their fake meat. Give me cheese!</comment>


Sam Altman: Social Change and Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2017-04-13/sam-altman-social-change-and-startups <comment><AUTHOR> At 32m 41s in this podcast.

"People should be able to support a political candidate and express the reasons they do especially if they're unpopular, without someone ascribing all of [the candidate's] worst traits."

[http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.commonwealthcl...](http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.commonwealthclub.org/audio/podcast/cc_20170413_Inforum_Sam_Altman_Podcast.mp3)

Altman makes two revealing claims:

1\. That it's possible to support a political candidate without being accused of supporting all their views.

2\. That the protests against Thiel are inneffective at changing Thiel's mind.

Taking each of these:

1\. If the candidate is openly inviting a historic national adversary to disrupt an election, if he is a direct attack on liberal democracy itself, if his platform is a direct translation of fascist platforms from the 1920s and 1930s, and all this is being openly discusse, then no, there is no conceivable way in which support for that candidate, by someone claimed to be "one of the smartest guys in Silicon Valley", can be considered to be anything other than absolutely anathema, deliberate, and abhorrent.

Peter Thiel deserves all the approbrium he's received, a millionfold.

2\. The audience of the outrage is far from Thiel alone. It's to /all/ the political and entrepreneurial class within Silicon Valley and elsewhere: you must not do this, or tolerate those who do -- or their counsel, presence, or money.

That Sam Altman, CEO of Ycombinator, and personal friend of Peter Thiel, fails to grasp either point is beyond profoundly disturbing.

Wake up, Sam.

</comment><comment><USER2> Understanding poverty and what it really takes to lift a person or a family out of desperate poverty and into a steady state of self reliance is an enormously complex issue. It involves whole communities and societies as well as giving them a sense of value in society. You are a brave and kind soul for trying, be pragmatic and hire a social worker to make it real</comment>


Human + Fallible = Love; Corporate + Sterile = Refund - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asmartbear.com/human-company.html

<comment><USER2> To expand on the content in the article:

In the early days of our startup, we did some telecom consulting as a means to supplement income (a.k.a., make some money to pay employees/bills). We worked with smaller carriers who, despite their efforts, could never reach the level of reliability of the RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies) who had practically unlimited budgets and infrastructure that dwarfs anything a small firm could even conceive. Despite the fact that the smaller carrier delivered service that was sub-par compared to the RBOCs, the customer seemed happier. What gives?

The answer is pretty simple. With the smaller firm, it was possible to have your IT managers dial an engineer directly. When you call their office, you don't get an IVR; you get a human. The RBOCs have a policy of depersonalizing the customer experience. This is intentional, and is directly related to cost- cutting measures. Voice and data service has been commoditized, and any time your service is pushed in to the commodity space, cost-cutting is your only opportunity to increase profits. ATT/Verizon/Qwest/Etc are masters at this, and it is the cause of huge amounts of customer dissatisfaction.

The question is, how does this apply to you? When communicating with your customers (on your website, through your blog, or even on the phone), remember that often what separates the companies we hate from the ones we love is the personal connection. Don't be afraid to admit when you've done something wrong. Pay close attention to how often you have to do this, however. Recognize the areas where you or your team are incompetent and find talented people to fill the gap. Eventually, even the closest of connections to your customer will be frayed and severed by incompetence.</comment>


How Not to Apply for a Job - <AUTHOR> http://joshsymonds.com/blog/2012/06/20/how-not-to-apply-for-a-job/

<comment><USER2> There is a repeating pattern I don't understand with these hiring posts:

1\. The need for a programmer which is in the top 1%, nothing else will do.

2\. How important is to hire that programmer but still they don't have time to read the resumes. Instead of that they write a lengthy blog post.

3\. Why they assume people is passionate about working in a company they don't know.

</comment><comment><USER3> Or, How My Idiosyncratic Biases Prevent Me From Finding Qualified Job Applicants.

See <http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-dont-hire-unlucky-people> for more details.</comment>


Be cautious about using Chartio (or at least, don't follow their directions) - <AUTHOR> http://codingkilledthecat.wordpress.com/2013/05/10/please-dont-use-chartio-or-at-least-dont-follow-their-directions/

<comment><USER2> Hi, founder of Chartio here. Other than the title (which makes me a little sad) I liked your post. Its great to fully inform people of the security tradeoffs and you've done a nice job of laying out the levels and options of security that we've spent a lot of time developing.

In anything that is cloud based there is going to be some level where some hacker could get in and destroy everything. Most people on this site use cloud hosted servers, all of which would be at risk if Amazon or Rackspace got hacked. BI in the cloud is a new space and will be cautiously entered by some, but benefits will outweigh the potential risks and just as has happened in every other segment of cloud computing.

(will write more soon)

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's go for less sad. I've changed the title a little to better reflect the intent of the post.

With regards to cloud - you're right, Amazon and Rackspace and so on are a single point of failure for a lot of businesses... but they also have a lot of people dedicated specifically to keeping their systems secure. The average startup, on the other hand, doesn't.

<comment><USER2> I'm curious, what was the reason you chose to highly Chartio out of all the companies in the cloud BI space? We actually feel that we have the best security practices in the space, mostly due to the fact that we're the only ones not doing data warehousing, where you're required to upload a copy of your database to the provider.

<comment><AUTHOR> Luck of the draw, actually. Someone in an IRC channel I'm in mentioned it [in the context of "someone asked me to set this up, I told them heck no"], I glanced at the page, did a double-take.

It's debatable whether DWH is more or less secure than your approach - and it also depends heavily on how the DWH is done. Having to explicitly move data around also gives an opportunity to scrub it.

For the record, the proactive approach you're taking with your responses here is heartening. The goal of my posts is always, in the end, to push for something better, not just tear down what's there. Glad to see that you've an open mind towards improvements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm a founder of Emergent One, a startup that uses similar agent-based technology to Chartio to access production databases and build out RESTful APIs. Some of our APIs are write-enabled, which makes the proposed risk even higher than that of Chartio's.

We've spent a _lot_ of time thinking about security risks and writing code to reduce them. I thought I'd share a few things we do and that we've learned from our experience:

* The agent approach is the most popular because it allows for a system administrator to easily sever the connection from the database server without having to worry about writing queries to revoke user access.

* We never run unindexed queries without an explicit request from a customer and a manual entry from an Emergent One employee.

* We're currently looking into security consultants to continuously test our production environment.

* We're building an appliance version of our software much like Github Enterprise in order to accommodate the customers that aren't comfortable with their data hitting the cloud.

* We strive to have very quick and personal customer service directly from engineers. The vast majority of the responses are within the hour.

and last but certainly not least...

* The very best thing we can do is be honest and straightforward about the inherent risk behind our platform. Being able to build and maintain a pristine level of trust is the only thing that will keep us in business.

I'm sure Chartio does things very similarly. Direct-database access technology is not for everyone, but it's also proving to be extremely valuable for both Chartio's customers and ours. The cloud advantage that makes most SaaS software great is still there.

<comment><USER2> Hi Kevin, thanks for the great response! We should continue to share notes on best practices in all of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Having a product that also involves connecting to other people's databases we're pretty well versed in this problem. I will admit its a bold step to allow an external service access to your production databases but as a trade off of convenience vs security the former does win more often then people would think. This is especially true for people using PaaS/DBaaS providers which by default allow access from all inbound IPs (ie not white listed).

One thing we try to do is be open about all this and we explicitly mention it in our docs[1]. This includes instructing users to explicitly limit the permissions that they grant.

Another poster mentions loading a pre built VM. thats actually our goal for the enterprise as there will always be systems are not (and should not!) be accessible to the open Internet. In the meantime though there plenty of folks happy with the convenience of living in the cloud.

[1]: <http://www.jackdb.com/docs/#security>

</comment><comment><USER5> While there are clearly some significant security considerations, the author writes Chartio off without considering applications where it could be a good fit.

Also, the oozing, patronizing tone of the author is really annoying. Just make your points and be nice about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> From the article: "It's quite possible that the risks I've highlighted above are ones that you feel it's okay to take, and in that case, go for it – as long as you're respecting your end users' interests as well."

<comment><USER6> That's not "considering applications where it could be a good fit".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I've done when using chartio with postgresql:

* make a new schema called chartio_only

* add a chartio database user that can only access that schema

* add views to the chartio_only schema

Now chartio can only access the views in the chartio_only schema.

</comment><comment><USER8> Chartio certainly isn't the only company guilty of this.

Take Splunk, a $4 billion dollar (in market cap) machine log analytics service. They rolled out a new service called DB connect which allows you to integrate database analytics with their platform. Their implementation of DB connect is equally intrusive. However, I can still see these services being useful for visualizing operations that are less critical.

<comment><USER9> One could write a whole essay on the inability of this $4bn company to fix the most basic bugs in their product. I'd love to see evidence of people actually usefully using the features like this that Splunk provides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I work in the BI / analytics space, with a fair amount of what's called "big data". The security of something like cloud IO is typically not too much of a concern on the kind of projects I work on: more often than not, our clients deploy dedicated analytics databases. Perhaps I'm biased as we tend to work from the outside, but I'd be surprised to find many sysadmins allowing chart IO to connect to the production DB. The ETL process for analytics databases tends to either obscure user data or aggregate it to an impersonal level of detail.

I'm more concerned about the more enterprise-y products aggressively advertising 'enterprise' security features like Active Directory integration, smoothing over their total lack of transparency in vulnerabilities and bugs.

</comment><comment><USER10> Of course giving out access is probably a bad idea -- so what would be a good alternative for them to do instead?

<comment><USER11> In our case we set up a dedicated cheap database server only for ChartIO. Then we have a script that copies to it analytics data from our production servers every few hours (while also anonymizing what needs to be just to be extra safe).

<comment><USER2> Great use case! We don't support an API that you can push data to, but that's because whatever API we build, it would never be easier to learn or have as much language support than just spinning up a PostgreSQL instance and writing the data to it. Quite a few of our customers use us this way.

<comment><USER11> You guys should really suggest this approach in the setup guide (it can be phrased in a way not to scare potential users). The alternative of directly accessing production database servers is really risky.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. I'll work on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The options typically are: 1) Run this package on your own (SQL/HDFS) server and pay use for a licence. Keep your own data and maintain your own servers. 2) Send us the data and we will store a replicate which we serve back to you in dashboards. 3) Let your users use your data on your servers through our web interface.

Each involve giving away some type of control.

</comment><comment><USER13> What we have done is use Chartio but connect it to our Slave database. I like this approach for many reasons. Our charts implicitly test that our slave connections are working well. If compromised, it wont _immediately_ impact our site. You could argue it will eventually. All the load from Chartio is on our slave which again does not impact our production.

</comment><comment><USER14> A Y-combinator startup asked me to set up chartio for them. The script generated some random error during setup, so I logged a support ticket with chartio. A month later they still hadn't bothered replying. I'll forgive you having a buggy setup script, but I won't forgive you when you don't even bother replying to my support query about your buggy product.

<comment><USER2> Super odd... We use Zendesk and I don't have a record of any open support tickets. Feel free to send me a note directly to dave at chartio.com if you're still having an issue.

<comment><USER14> I see it is closed now. I opened the ticked on June 25 2012 and it was resolved on April 1 2013 (although he didn't actually resolve the problem). Anyway, the client used google analytics instead.

Also your support system is annoying: why do we need to register for support if we're already registered on your site? And having to have a password with uppercase and symbol is overkill for a support system (and is pointless anyway, as you'll probably have to write the password down).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've seen stuff like this pretty regularly, and I'm always dumbfounded by how people don't even think about how bad this is.

This is the exact definition of a "crunchy center", and I wouldn't be surprised if they do other horrible things. You know for certain there are no passphrases on those SSH keys either.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you recommend seller financing a car loan? - <AUTHOR> I am selling my car for around 13 or 14k. I'm only considering private sale, and a potential buyer asked me if I would do seller financing since presumably his credit won't allow a bank loan.
Has anyone had good or bad experiences doing this? I understand it's a higher risk considering the buyers low credit score.
If you have had experience doing this, what kind of terms are you glad you put in the contract/what do you wish you put in the contract? <comment><USER2> Run away! Run away! If a bank won't touch someone neither should you. Heck, there are numerous buy here/pay here car lots and I'd assume this buyer has been turned away by all of them. Seriously, don't even _think_ about going this route.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it a friend? I'm assuming not and I don't want you wishing that you never did this. Towards that end, because you're asking you almost certainly don't know how to properly retain a perfected security interest in the car. You need to determine if it's worth dropping $500-1K on having your attorney draw up the loan and security agreement and instructing you how to go about perfecting the security interest in your state.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Alright everyone, after your input I'm going to dive in and write up a simple agreement today. Is 3% interest too much?

Lol, just kidding thanks for the comments

</comment><comment><USER4> Bad idea, if they can't get a loan from someone who is in the business of loans, why would you go that path? ( Most likely you'll end up in court trying to collect )</comment>