WhatsApp has an encrypted child porn problem - sahin-boydas https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/whatsapp-pornography/ <comment><AUTHOR> > WhatsApp chat groups are being used to spread illegal child pornography, > cloaked by the app's end-to-end encryption. Without the necessary number of > human moderators, the disturbing content is slipping by WhatsApp's automated > systems.

Wait what? Moderators for end-to-end encrypted communication?

Something doesn't add up!

<comment><USER2> I'm guessing since these are publicly accessible groups via apps as the article suggests, moderators could in theory search out and shut down such groups. Not sure how much data they are able to provide to the authorities though, I guess prosecuting the people is the difficult part.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. It's just bad writing in the opening paragraph.

WhatsApp doesn't provide search but groups can be joined via links. Third- party apps and sites use the links to index groups. Some groups share illegal content. WhatsApp should hire people to crawl those apps/sites, find the illegal groups, join, verify and ban.

Not entirely unreasonable. Won't fix anything* but if the company is big and well funded they should at least make some effort.

* so you ban the users? $10 gets you a new pre-paid sim card

Could it be that "tech companies" are reluctant to pursue cat and mouse solutions (which also cost money) while "non-tech public" seems content enough if attempts are made to push the issue deeper under the surface?

<comment><USER3> > so you ban the users? $10 gets you a new pre-paid sim card

And then when they recycle the unused number, and you get it and discover you are "lifetime banned", and I'm quite sure there's no appeal process.

<comment><USER4> I don't get why you were downvoted. Life time banning new phone numbers is a real concern considering how often they are recycled. I mean WhatsApp isn't doing that (as far as i know) but some services do that or even do a step further and ban your whole account if you add a banned phone number.

For instance, steams anti-cheating service will lifetime ban you and your phone number if you ever get chaught cheating in any game that uses steam anti cheating services. And apparently you will also get banned if you update your account to a previously banned number. That sucks for normal users who get a new phone number but doesn't do much against determined cheaters who just purchase a new SIM card if they get caught (and they won't use their real steam account as well).

Steam is not the only service that heavily relies on phone numbers not changing and I find it very troubling how little is reported about that (which might become a real concern later).

I believe the only reason WhatsApp doesn't do that is because 90% of all people aged 16 to 69 use it at least a few times a week in many of their markets and a recycled phone number will very likely be given to a new, innocent user (unlike smaller sites such as steam where giving a cheaters number to another person who also uses steam is quite slim).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Or rather, humanity has a lot of problems. Including rape, pedophilia, murders, etc.

I don't think WhatsApp in particular has a problem.

Are houses a problem because they hide crimes with their walls?

<comment><USER6> Why aren't builders taking more initiative to employ moderators to monitor crimes inside the houses they build?

<comment><USER7> That's not a perfect analogy -- these aren't people meeting one-by-one in private spaces, WhatsApp is providing them a shared space where they can meet and share images.

This seems more like blaming a hotel for letting one of their conference rooms be used for an illegal porn swap meet.

<comment><USER8> You can have a shared space in your private space very easily, so it does seem to me like the analogy holds up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You can't have it both ways. End to end encryption or open groups with censorship by moderation, pick one. This is a side effect of private clubs and private online communities. While I don't condone the behavior, we need to get more creative on how to police this than putting in place mechanisms for violating everyone's privacy, which is just lazy and dangerous.

It's hard to read some of these stories without ignoring the current surge of schadenfreude that writers are capitalizing on.

</comment><comment><USER10> This problem is only going to grow in the future. You can't control or reliably censor information on a free and open internet. The only way to ensure that nothing "bad" happens on the internet is to completely lock it down and whitelist everything that is posted. This isn't going to happen.

In a few years blockchain based messaging apps will be launching and they will not be controlled by Facebook or anyone else. You won't be able to ban anyone. This is something we are going to have to accept and deal with. There will be things you don't like on the internet.

<comment><USER11> _blockchain based messaging apps_

Out of genuine curiosity, where do blockchains enter into the messaging space? Auditable chat histories and identities? As opposed to other cryptography/security techniques, blockchain doesn't seem like an especially good match for the problem space.

<comment><USER10> Messengers need someone to host and maintain the servers. That requires a monetization model and requires someone to act as a central figure. That figure (like Facebook) then has to either moderate the content or try to make a case of not being able to but still facilitating it.

A messenger using the blockchain as its medium requires no staff to operate it and has nobody responsible for it. There is nobody to blame for whatever it's used for and nobody to dictate what it can and can't be used for. The group chats will simply exist and require no maintenance which is very desirable from an app point of view. Also a big positive is that you don't have to worry about the company running your messenger going out of business and then you lose the ability to use your app.

<comment><USER12> There's already p2p messaging apps that do that without any blockchain nonsense. The blockchain would leave a permanent trace to which pseudonym posted what forever.

<comment><USER10> P2P messaging apps have a hard time with group messages because you have to have someone online to relay messages at all times. Group chats really have to have a shared storage medium to work.

<comment><USER13> > P2P messaging apps have a hard time with group messages

Well [https://tox.chat](https://tox.chat) and [https://ring.cx](https://ring.cx) (now Jami) can do just that as well as [https://briarproject.org](https://briarproject.org).

So these do exist. Such a thing was also being proposed for Ricochet [https://github.com/ricochet- im/ricochet/issues/54](https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet/issues/54)

<comment><USER10> That's neat. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> No. The world has a child porn problem. And until you start offering mental health care to paedophiles and going after child porn producers, nothing will change. You can ban the entire internet if you like and paedos will just meet in bars and exchange usb sticks. This is ridiculous, of course every single secure information exchange platform will be used for child porn. And drugs. And teens sending nude pictures to each other. And terrorists. Etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> Newsflash: e2e encryption is used to send content that stands to gain most from using it.

<comment><USER16> Careful there. You don't want to cause people to pull an Australia.

<comment><USER17> Australia has passed controversial laws designed to compel technology companies to grant police and security agencies access to encrypted messages. The government says the laws, a world first, are necessary to help combat terrorism and crime.

Source: [https://www.bbc.com/news/world- australia-46463029](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-46463029)

<comment><USER13> Passing a law is easy, but putting it in practice is enough thing. We of course won't hear about that side of it because "secret".

I have no doubts that the big companies which this seems mostly for will be doing everything to decentralize and remove themselves from the problem citing "systemic weakness" and then doing nothing for the government.

<comment><USER18> > Passing a law is easy, but putting it in practice is enough thing. We of > course won't hear about that side of it because "secret".

ASIO has to provide statistics on how many notices they issued in their yearly reports. In addition, recipients of reports are allowed to provide statistics about his many reports they've received. See s317ZF.

> I have no doubts that the big companies which this seems mostly for will be > doing everything to decentralize and remove themselves from the problem > citing "systemic weakness" and then doing nothing for the government.

Except that Apple (and other such companies) have explicitly designed their e2e systems in a way that they could be backdoored (users don't need to sign new identities with a key, so Apple can add a new one -- which is how the device adding feature works).

In addition, many such companies have the ability to provide a single backdoored binary to a single user. This, according to the legislation, would not be a systemic weakness. There is work you could do to make yourself resilient to company-wide sabotage but no company I'm aware of is doing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > In July 2018, the NGOs became aware... The NGO reported their findings to > Israeli police but declined to provide Facebook with their research. > WhatsApp only received their report and the screenshot of active child > pornography groups today from TechCrunch.

Huh? Who are these NGOs looking out for? Why wouldn't you tell FB in the first instance?

<comment><USER20> Because once you become aware of a crime you let law enforcement handle it? Neither these NGOs nor Facebook are Batman.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is it possible to use metadata to understand these networks without actually decrypting anything?

If you can track down a bunch of these groups through public / advertised urls you can probably figure out a whole bunch of them based on the participants in each group. I bet it forms a beautiful graph.

There might be some other user patterns you can identify which point to suspicious groups / patterns as well

How else could you solve this? Create hashes of known illegal images and check them locally?

</comment><comment><USER12> Does the postal service have a problem if people uses their service to share illegal pictures? I think they are just a victim of abuse of their service.

<comment><USER22> Yes, it cares very much, the postal service has its own police department even.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> But, if it's encrypted, isn't it impossible to quantify?

<comment><USER3> The join group links are public. So not really encrypted, since the key is public.

<comment><USER24> So then the police should do their jobs?

<comment><USER3> I actually agree, I don't think this should be WhatsApp's job. I really don't like this trend of making private companies do the job of Police, Judge, and executioner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The internet has an unencrypted child porn problem as well.

The medium used to communicate is irrelevant to the discussion here. If they can't control the unencrypted platforms, why are they pulling focus to encrypted platforms if not to influence public opinions regarding encrypted mediums?

</comment><comment><USER26> It seems impossible to determine the amount of secular empirical harm being done by child porn consumption (for example, if all of the child porn being produced in a group was fabricated, who is harmed and how?), but we can at least imagine how much harm is done by a breach of privacy by corrupt governments.

Also, this (Frankly dumb) article perhaps unknowingly just marketed the existence of these groups to new fans (I note that the link to the cited Android app for whatsapp-group-discovery now 404's) and THAT will surely be harmful.

I'd comment on the article itself but Techcrunch's website is a dogpile of shit with a terrible onboarding workflow and site design.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is this _actual_ child porn or is this the kind of child porn they found on NSA/CIA leaker's computers[0]?

[0]:[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/ex-cia- engineer-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/ex-cia-engineer- indicted-on-several-new-charges-connected-to-vault-7-leak/)

</comment><comment> S-E-P I take issue with this idea that pedophilia has been "growth-hacked" (stupid term BTW).

Like what? Does no one who looked at this article (before publishing) have any idea how the internet works? Do they have this wonderful illusion that just because something is made slightly easier to access that it suddenly boosts how many pedophiles in the world? Little Johnny doesn't just browse a WhatsApp directory listing and say, "You know what? I've never really wanted to see children abused but now that there's a nice 'Adult' section containing this sort of content... I think I'm a pedophile now!" Anyone viewing that crap voluntarily was a pedophile to begin with, and like every single one of them, public castration should be an acceptable form of punishment (legalize it).

CP (a known abbreviation) has been circulated on the world wide web since the first big wave wherein more than a few thousand people were using it (back before it was referred to as the 'internet'). Hell i remember accidentally running across several images in my early teen years (when I was moderating for a forum), surprise surprise, it didn't "growth-hack" that vile garbage into my life, you know what it did? It ruined my day that's what it dig, and I absolutely hated the fact that I even saw that, it made me want to never see it again! Flagged for deletion, offender's account was terminated, and a report was filed (with the authorities).

It was also around this time that me and some of my friends decided to have some fun on IRC, I was bored enough that I would often troll IRC for hours, found several questionable channels, where RP (a known abbreviation) was huge and a few of the members were looking for someone to RP as... well children. Yikes! So... we didn't RP, what we did was act like real 12 yr. olds just to mess with them, and after a while of conversing, we'd sometimes get these creeps to get on a greyhound and make a trip (several times across the country) to send them to non-existent meetings, often humorously sending them to a place right across from a police station or whatever we thought was funniest.

Innocent fun I'd say, but anyway, more to the point of the article. No this does not "growth-hack" pedophilia, it just makes it all the more apparent that people are not inherently good and it's stupid to think you can stop the rot. Though I do support the push to limit this as much as possible, though I'd like to see arrests, I'd like to see these bastards rot in prison till they drop dead, and any solution that just covers up the issue without actual consequences for the offenders does not get my consideration. Children are our future, they must be protected.

</comment><comment><USER28> Some people have taken to calling this 'the pedo problem' or 'pedophiles ruin everything' since it's such a recurring theme around encryption and anonymisation.

</comment><comment><USER29> This kind of shit is like the black mold of communication systems.

</comment><comment><USER30> Should be pretty easy to trace the users if it's an open group. The encryption only keeps things hidden from people not in it and anyone can join.

</comment><comment><USER31> Other than closing the Internet as someone suggests, wouldn't be possible to integrate the service that Microsoft offers to detect this material? Other apps like telegram, not e2e, could be integrated more easily, but personally I wouldn't mind such system being native on Android or IOS - allowing to make life much more difficult for pedos.

</comment><comment><USER32> Doesn't the Dark Web have the same issues?

<comment><USER20> If the news is to be believed, people on the Dark Web screw their privacy up so frequently that law enforcement probably _wants_ them to be there so it's all contained and easier to investigate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Aaaand the privacy advocate community collectively goes "Here we go again" all at once.

</comment><comment><USER34> It is almost like letting people act with impunity by putting the state at an informational disadvantage in a hyper-connected and hyper-mediated age is going to result in pretty unpleasant stuff becoming more common and more accessible.

Goodness, who knew?</comment>


The Crystal Language - <AUTHOR> https://crystal-lang.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> From a quick peek at it, it seems better than Ruby. Maybe the AWS CodeDeploy Agent and Gitlab packages can be rewritten in it, which are both coded in Ruby and slow</comment>


On the State of Economics  - <AUTHOR> http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2010/03/david-brooks-on-state-of-economics.html

<comment><USER2> I once explained this to someone like this: Suppose you were to sit down at length with [insert favorite sports hero here, I'd pick Brett Favre just for fun]. He is probably one of the worlds experts on how to read a defense, what the correct throwing form should be, what exercises to do in the off season, what qualities to make for a good wide receiver, etc.

Now imagine you ask him "Who is going to win Texas vs. Alabama this year" Is he more qualified to answer that than pretty much anyone you will probably meet in your whole life; yes. Does all of his expertise in other areas help in making that decision; yes. Is the guy going to do statistically better than a coin toss? Probably not. We don't need to "rethink quaterback theory" or "throwout freshman textbooks" because of this though as people seem to be fond of claiming.

<comment><USER3> This is true, and a good point. One thing we do need, however, is to take the opinion of prominent economists with a little bit more salt. I remember when invoking the name Greenspan among those interested in economics was like invoking the Name of the Lord - there was no higher authority. Now good ol' Al is getting hung out to dry and, in my opinion, trying to shunt blame away from himself as much as possible.

There shouldn't be a cult of celebrity in any science, economics least of all. This is what the NYT author should have argued against rather than economics in general. Before Farve went to play for Minnesota, how many Packers fans do you think would have bet against his prediction in the Texas vs. Alabama game if it was a very public prediction? The line in Wisconsin would be outrageously off as bookies bumped it more and more away from Farve's prediction. Go to Vegas and it's probably a lot closer to the money. This decision distortion is a real problem that is wreaking real havoc on our system of exchange.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dean Baker is a good economist, who predicted the housing bubble early on, as well as the resulting recession. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Baker#Financial_crisis_of_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Baker#Financial_crisis_of_2007.E2.80.932009)

I think it makes sense that some economists are a lot better at their jobs than others. Many may fall into ideological ruts, because industry and government have strong interests in the outcome of this social "science".</comment>


Ask HN: Still possible to have its mobile apps noticed as an indie developer? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, I mean original, polished app but developed outside of the "main" cool- to-be places (NY, SF, Berlin, Paris, ...)

A few years ago, when the AppStores didn't count X,000,000 apps, it was doable to handle the marketing for indie, now I can't figure how.

And all I can see is review of IM apps, tenth version of a lame game, or one more super-cool-but-sucky todolist app.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> So there is a big part of luck in the process? Not sure how to find the right people (review website and big techno site are overwhelmed and for what I see, most of the app reviewed are : \- crap from startup funded by big VC \- a n-th app from Facebook, or Google, or ... \- some random unoriginal app

So I'm wondering how to get noticed by the good people ?

</comment><comment><USER2> Yes, as long as you assume that the app store is going to provide zero traction. You need to get your app in the hands of the right people.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you mean non-innovative non-super-polished "decent" apps?

</comment><comment><USER4> It's super hard You really need niche in your hands</comment>


Corona-Warn-App Open Source Project - <AUTHOR> https://www.coronawarn.app/en/ <comment> m-localhost Can't use it on my iPhone 5s, which is a bummer. Going to be interesting what the acceptance will be.

<comment><USER2> Apple has not released an system update for the old phones that adds the new API.

This is Apples fault.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Parse recipe ingredients using JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/herkyl/ingredients-parser <comment><USER2> Does it work in the wild? Like parsing from recipe blogs and so on?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you parse the ingredients part out of a recipe yourself and feed it as lines, that would work :)</comment></comment>


Diving into the unthinkable cold truths of a nuclear war - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2016/12/diving-into-the-unthinkable-cold-truths-of-a-nuclear-war/ <comment><USER2> The author's confusion between "forward" and "foreword" does not inspire confidence. That should have been picked up before publishing.

Also questions are being raised in the comments about the numbers in the piece.

Something to be read with a pinch of salt, or an iodine tablet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Im split. The big climatic downsides are only really an issue after a large nuclear exchange involving at least a couple thermonuclears (h-bombs). So pushing climate as a reason to refrain doesnt impact limited exchanges such as between india and pakistan, or the use of tactical nukes. Im also worried that any link to "climate change" simply wont fly in many circles. I think the best and most effective arguments remain the immediate and wholesale loss of innocent life.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not mentioned in the report but I'll conjecture it would be extremely bad for property values in my region.</comment>


Inception Explained - <AUTHOR> http://inception-explained.com/

<comment><USER2> It would be nice if this worked on mobile devices.</comment>


Valve boss Gabe Newell calls Windows 8 a 'catastrophe' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18996377 <comment><USER2> For god sakes, we know! Its been on HN front page, like, 3 times!</comment>


Ask HN: What are some articles that have aged well? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Have you tried to sell a diamond?, The Atlantic (1982) [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have- you...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you-ever- tried-to-sell-a-diamond/304575/)

</comment><comment><USER3> War Is A Racket (1935): [http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html](http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html)

<comment><USER4> Written by a retired USMC Major General who won the Medal of Honor. Twice. And then saved the USA from a coup as a civilian.

In addition to writing a very well informed criticism of the 'war economy', he's definitely someone I'd buy a beer for if he were still alive.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for providing the additional context on the author to those unfamiliar. This came straight from the sausage factory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mother Earth, Mother Board (1996) [http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> How Do People Get New Ideas? (1959) [[http://www.technologyreview.com/view/531911/isaac-asimov- ask...](http://www.technologyreview.com/view/531911/isaac-asimov-asks-how-do- people-get-new-ideas/)]

Its hard to believe, someone was able to think something so relevant today, more than five decades back.

</comment><comment><USER7> The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964): [http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in- ame...](http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american- politics/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Why Men Love War, Esquire (1984) [http://public.wsu.edu/~hughesc/why_men_love_war.htm](http://public.wsu.edu/~hughesc/why_men_love_war.htm)

</comment><comment><USER8> The Ketchup Conundrum (2004) [http://gladwell.com/the-ketchup- conundrum/](http://gladwell.com/the-ketchup-conundrum/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The Economics of the Colonial Cringe, The Atlantic (1991) [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/1991/10/-quot-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/1991/10/-quot- the-economics-of-the-colonial-cringe-quot-about-the-economist-magazine- washington-post-1991/7415/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?, New York Times (1984) [https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon- luddi...](https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> M.I.A.'s Agitprop Pop, New York Times (2010) [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/magazine/30mia-t.html?page...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/magazine/30mia-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The Duke In His Domain, New Yorker (1957) [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1957/11/09/the-duke-in- his...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1957/11/09/the-duke-in-his-domain)

</comment><comment><USER9> "1,000 True Fans" by Kevin Kelly.

[http://kk.org/thetechnium/2008/03/1000-true- fans/](http://kk.org/thetechnium/2008/03/1000-true-fans/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, Scanlan's Monthly (1970) [http://brianb.freeshell.org/a/kddd.pdf](http://brianb.freeshell.org/a/kddd.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> They write the right stuff : [http://m.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right- stuff](http://m.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff)

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't have a link, but I once saw a circa-1900 cartoon that depicted a city covered in advertisements. On the side of a building one read "We'll advertise anywhere - churches our specialty!"</comment>


There's nothing wrong with making a mistake (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/ItsOKtobewrong.shtml <comment><USER2> But HN just told me yesterday that engineers should be held to a higher standard and should be executed, firing range style, when there are bugs: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10488991](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10488991). Now I don't know whether I should kill myself or pat myself on the head!

<comment><USER3> I think this Chinese quote can summarize the article:

"He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever."

In terms of lean methodology, "Fail fast and fail often."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How are you using Serverless architecture in production? - <AUTHOR> I've been hearing a ton about"serverless" software recently and am evaluating AWS Lambda for an upcoming project. I'd be curious to know how the Hacker News community has actually been leveraging serverless architecture in production?<p>Which use cases have worked well for people? Which have not? <comment><USER2> AWS Lambda is really cool, but there are a few quirks to keep in mind that make it not a general replacement for something like a box running nginx + uWSGI, etc.

There was a nice 45-minute talk given at PyOhio this year by Matt Land that covers most of the tradeoffs around running Lambda in prod.

 _AWS Lambda: From Curiosity to Production_

Abstract - [http://pyohio.org/schedule/presentation/246/](http://pyohio.org/schedule/presentation/246/)

Video - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoMhFsH9k8Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoMhFsH9k8Q)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thank you very much for sharing these. I'll have a look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yes. I have a high volume ecommerce site that sells Raspberry Pis in Australia[1] which is static and built using middleman[2]. The files sit on S3 + Cloudfront and are deployed using S3_website[3].

The contact page is powered by AWS Lambda.

Some old school jQuery keeps track of the commerce cart and forms "Cart Links"[4], that send the user to the checkout of a Shopify Store.

[1] [http://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au](http://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au)

[2] [https://middlemanapp.com/](https://middlemanapp.com/)

[3] [https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website](https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website)

[4] [https://help.shopify.com/themes/customization/cart/use- perma...](https://help.shopify.com/themes/customization/cart/use-permalinks- to-preload-cart)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm a big fan of Google App Engine; it has support for many languages now and powers some huge apps like Pokemon Go.

[https://www.g2crowd.com/blog/platform-as-a-service- paas/plat...](https://www.g2crowd.com/blog/platform-as-a-service- paas/platform-as-a-service-pokemon-go/)

<comment><USER3> >> and powers some huge apps like Pokemon Go

Perhaps not the best ringing endorsement, given their downtime :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We use it for various small tightly contained tasks in response to events (Kinesis events, S3 writes, etc), similar to how you might use Celery tasks to do something where either don't care about the result or the result might take to long to compute for you wait.

As a completely made up arbitrary example say you send two types of emails to your users, a newsletter and personal notifications. You send the notifications yourself but have a third party service for the newsletter. When a user opts out of all emails you can make the required changes on your end but calling out to the other service might take longer than you are are willing to make a user wait.

So instead you write something to S3 or Kinesis or some other stream that Lambda can access that takes the user ID and informs your email provider to no longer send emails to this address.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've spent the past two weeks working on architecture proposal around this. At a very high level my conclusions were basically:

API Gateway could be very useful but is extremely overpriced. Lambda is a bit more reasonable but not worth the trouble for me.

Both of those services have easy alternatives such as Auto Scale rules, EC2, and ELB.

Kinesis is really nice. And for our use case, isn't very expensive. If people used it for things like a distributed task queue I could see how things could get out of hand. We will use it for more of an ingress data buffer.

I'm also using the KCL which uses dynamodb to handle some distributed state issues. A bit like ZooKeeper. This will allow you to handle some coordination between your consumers and meet the demands of your delivery requirements.</comment>


Machine intelligence based neural ecommerce search engine - benipal- http://www.benipal.com/shop/aboutsearch

<comment> benipal- I thought i would let you guys know about a cognitive, deep learning machine intelligence based ecommerce search engine i created.

With a tight budget and no knowledge of computing or linux or anything really, i spent the last 5 years creating this technology on my own from scratch and in the process also built a small 10 TFlops supercomputer to run it.

Everyone is desperately trying to create Artificial Intelligence, and i can proudly say i failed. It cannot be done. What can be done is advanced machine intelligence and that i have partially achieved with this cognitive, neural network.

someone had to challenge google and bing in technology. Thousands of engineers and all we got is cats."</comment>


GNU Nano acquired by the VIM project (April 1, 2013) - <AUTHOR> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/nano-devel/2013-04/msg00000.html

<comment><USER2> Bit late for April Fool's Day.

<comment><USER3> I never heard of this before but even late is awesome.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to learn Sketch? - <AUTHOR>

I do most of my prototyping on paper, but want to pick up a more formal tool. What is the best way to learn Sketch. I'm having trouble learning. <comment><USER2> Lynda.com? Youtube tutorials?</comment>


Ask HN: What's the biggest challenge you face in your business now? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Finding customers. Which, to be clear, is a very common challenge.

<comment><USER3> I have created a MVP for a service that identifies your anonymous website users by company and thus generates inbound leads. If you are in B2B let me know if this might be of interest to you? Email in profile

<comment><USER2> Which means either you add tracking data to the pages, or you look at the IP logs.

Along the lines of mister_hn elsewhere here, I don't do tracking. I had to insist that my web developer disable cookies, and Google Analytics. So that's out.

I look at my logs. Many are to google-proxy-66-102-6-174.google.com and the like. Many more are for local ISPs like host208-179-dynamic.233-95-r.retail.telecomitalia.it .

But even if I can get a company name out of it, that's not a lead. Which of the 20,000 people in the company should I contact?

To preserve my anonymity, suppose I make software to improve headlight beam designs in cars. (I don't know if that's a thing, but why not?)

Most of my clients will be car companies, or car part companies. Of which only a small number of people will work on that task.

So, if I get an inbound link from Renault, which of the 181,000 people should I contact?

Going to my business, it seems I shot myself in the foot. I have a no- cost/open source version and a commercial version which is significantly better (faster, more capable, etc).

The no-cost version, available via PyPI and elsewhere (that people unknown to me did) has decent market penetration, based on conversations with people at meetings. But they don't know about the commercial version.

I am far from the first to find that packaging/distro sites, which sit between the user and vendor, make it very hard for users and vendors to know about each other.

<comment><USER4> I'd see if you can follow Snyk's go-to-market playbook - sounds like you have users and you have decision makers. We're in the same boat.

You know your target customers but perhaps you also need to understand how they buy software. For us, a website and the usual inbound tactics are great but our target customers will expect sales reps, account execs, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Being safe from ad tracking and identity spoofing.

The biggest challenge is getting rid of fingerprinting and password-guessing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you expand a little more? How does this impact your business?

<comment><USER5> If you have to protect your information and don't want that others access them, you need some safe mechanisms to prevent password leaks.

On the other hand, being tracked all the time alters the information that some "algorithm" present to you while surfing on net, for instance Google Ads and Search

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> content marketing, build traction</comment>


The Future of America's Contest with China - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/the-future-of-americas-contest-with-china <comment><AUTHOR> [http://archive.vn/88huO](http://archive.vn/88huO)

</comment><comment><USER2> I am curious how this article would have been written after the Phase 1 trade deal with China.</comment>


Apple's Most Profitable Quarter Ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/10/19results.html

<comment> daniel-cussen From <http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html>, March 2005, AAPL = $40-41:

"So Dad, there's this company called Apple. They make a new kind of computer that's as well designed as a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, and underneath is the best Unix machine you can buy. Yes, the price to earnings ratio is kind of high, but I think a lot of people are going to want these."

3.267x return over 4.5 years = 30% annualized. Mr. Graham must be happy.

<comment><USER2> "[2] Y Combinator is (we hope) visited mostly by hackers. The proportions of OSes are: Windows 66.4%, Macintosh 18.8%, Linux 11.4%, and FreeBSD 1.5%. The Mac number is a big change from what it would have been five years ago."

It would be interesting to see a comparison between the "five years ago" 2000 stats, these 2005 stats, and the current 2009 stats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is there any breakdown of the profits? I'd like to see how much of it was due to the iTunes store vs iPods vs Macs etc</comment>


New Fed study finds efforts to slow pandemic don't depress the economy - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-fed-study-finds-efforts-to-slow-pandemic-dont-depress-the-economy-2020-03-27?mod=home-page <comment><USER2> My entire city (Las Vegas) is closed. Most of my friends are out of work, not knowing when they will return. Of course, their rents are due in a few days. Everyone I know has cut all discretionary spending, because they either cannot spend or because they are afraid to - depending on their situation.

And then there are the folks who are better off and able to ride it out (or waiting to pick up assets for far less than their current price).

Preventative measures would have included...cutting off contact with the world's largest piece of almost every supply chain.

Something smells fishy about this "study."

> Though written by Fed officials, the paper is not officially endorsed by the > U.S. central bank.

<comment><USER3> but they _will_ return. LV wasn't destroyed by a biblical flood and the jobs are lost forever. you're looking at it at a different scale than the study (which is apparently 2 years).

even if your friends become homeless (let's hope it doesn't come to that), the _jobs_ will return and _someone_ will take them. there definitely will be some degree of fortunes that change at the exit of all this. but in economic terms, if 2 people lose their low paying jobs and 1 person gets a 2x+1 high paying job, the economy has grown.

<comment><USER2> > but they will return.

In what time frame?

How many businesses _won 't_ return because the owners couldn't afford to keep the thing going?

How many business owners themselves will be wiped out because their primary income source has been shut down?

How many people lose their homes and vehicles?

How much wealth from the average American will be absorbed by banks as people get wiped out?

\-----

I cannot imagine a scenario where the economy is not depressed for years, just like 2008.</comment></comment></comment>


On the Front Lines, In the Trenches - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2790-on-the-front-lines-in-the-trenches

<comment><USER2> This is the single best requirements gathering tool I have in my arsenal. It's unfortunate that most programmers shy away from getting in the trenches and seeing how products are actually used. I see this problem almost daily and it results in faulty products that either languish or are used with gritted teeth.

Very few people can _effectively_ make things other people want without experiencing it. On the flip side, I've also found that very few are able to accurately describe their problems when they are out taken out of their normal contexts (i.e. pulled into a "requirements gathering" meeting). Getting in the trenches solves both of these.</comment>


Nightmare Machine – Horror imagery generated by deep learning - <AUTHOR> http://nightmare.mit.edu/ <comment><USER2> The initial "deep dreaming" images were far scarier. Nothing compares to animal faces literally popping out of the woodwork, as if on LSD.

Automated generation of synthetic, photorealistic human faces was mildly terrifying as well.

Still, this is a cute Halloween project.

<comment><USER3> In my opinion, some of the images I've seen NNs produce without trying to be scary, were scarier than this. There is something really unsettling about things that look almost real, but aren't quite right.

[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/torch/torch.github.io/mast...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/torch/torch.github.io/master/blog/_posts/images/samples_during_training.png)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, those are straight up uncanny valley stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A few days back I see (yet another) article about Stephen Hawking's concerns for humanity and AI's potential for harm. Today I see we're teaching AI how to scare us.

Super :)

</comment><comment><USER6> I know it can be computationally expensive, but larger images would really help in this case.

<comment><USER7> Hi there! We actually have higher-quality versions of these images but didn't want to overwhelm the main page (and users' bandwidth). But we can put the larger images to the sub-pages, thanks for the suggestion!

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the response.

What about putting up higher res versions when you click on the "thumbnails"?

Like here: [http://nightmare.mit.edu/#portfolioModal30](http://nightmare.mit.edu/#portfolioModal30) (can't link directly to the modal)

The computed stylized can be in higher res and only query the server once the user clicks on the thumbnail. maybe even the original in higher res. I mean 1920x1080+ and maybe some options to downsample to specific res.

Another suggestion is to figure out a way to maximize artifacts. My scariest experiences with deep learning have been with unnatural mutations of natural objects.

Something like [https://zo7.github.io/img/2016-09-25-generating- faces/random...](https://zo7.github.io/img/2016-09-25-generating- faces/random-2.jpg)

Or some results from this: [https://github.com/Newmu/dcgan_code](https://github.com/Newmu/dcgan_code)

I'm sure one can take it further.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Deep torture, anyone? Gradient descent on stimuli to get what you want out of adversaries. Kind of scary

</comment><comment><USER9> On behalf of Saito Game Team, I most humbly apologize.

<comment><USER10> For anyone who doesn't get this, watch Black Mirror.

<comment><USER9> rot13: V jngpurq gur rcvfbqr, bcrarq UA naq gurer vg jnf. Ba pbaprcghny yriry vg jnf bar gb bar znccvat orgjrra gur rcvfbqr naq vzcyrzragngvba.

<comment><USER10> The more time goes on, the more confident I become in the notion that I am currently living in an episode of Black Mirror.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone else think that the haunted faces bear an uncanny resemblance to the portraits of Francis Bacon? Which, unsurprisingly, are quite nightmarish in many respects:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=francis+bacon+portraits](https://www.google.com/search?q=francis+bacon+portraits)

</comment><comment><USER12> It would be a lot more terrifying if it somehow tried to merge the photos skulls and other traditional horror imagery (the taj mahal photo refection could easily be a skull).

<comment><USER7> Great idea! We actually tried the skull style on some pictures before ([https://www.instagram.com/p/BLcU-MzBoEe/?taken- by=nightmare_...](https://www.instagram.com/p/BLcU-MzBoEe/?taken- by=nightmare_machine)) and they seem okay. We will try it on buildings and see how it turns out!

<comment><USER13> My I have a request? My friend, after seeing the images, she asked if it is possible to make Borobudur becomes a scary place.

Here is the link: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borobudur](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borobudur)

Thanks

<comment><USER14> Check out deepdreamgenerator.com -- requires a free account, and there are some usage limits, but it's a lot of fun to play with, and can do similar NN- based styling of images.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This reminds me of an episode in the new season of Black Mirror when they connect a guy to a device which data mines his memories and conjures up horrors to entertain the guy...SPOILER ALERT!!...and he dies 0.04s after the connection.

</comment><comment><USER16> For me, the grid of faces is much scarier than each on individually...interesting.

</comment><comment><USER15> You might want to check out the site of Chet Zar for more scary faces (artwork): [http://www.chetzar.com](http://www.chetzar.com)

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder where the bulk of their training images are from? The website doesn't seem to indicate it. These remind me of the parallel universe in "Stranger Things."

</comment><comment><USER18> This is disturbing :) Elon is right, AI is evil!

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder what artchitecture was used, inception, RNN or a GAN?

</comment><comment><USER20> It is perhaps ironic that I find the fright-night theme beautiful and soothing. Would love capturing them for real on camera.

</comment><comment><USER21> we may end up generating our own cthulhu

</comment><comment><USER22> Why? Is there any remote need to generate scary faces? Or is it done just to have catchy PR title. I hope there is some _real_ motivation to do this line of research.

<comment><USER23> Fun?

<comment><USER22> Is MIT for fun?

<comment><USER24> Ideally, at least half for fun, yes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is this the official source code repository of MySQL? - <AUTHOR> https://code.launchpad.net/~mysql/mysql-server/

<comment><USER2> No, it is not. It's a "code hosting" thing, which is semi-official, but is more like a code dump than a repository used for development.</comment>


Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-25/value-of-facebook-s-instagram-estimated-to-top-100-billion <comment><USER2> I've long had a theory (maybe it's not that revolutionary) that part of Instagram's success is it allowed people a free pass to be vain and show off-y. On Facebook, it was a bit stigmatized to post a picture of an expensive purchase, amazing house interior, fancy vacation, or workout picture of your physique. However, it's the entire point of Instagram. Couple that in with all the brands and other accounts of inspiration for whatever you're into and you have a lot of reasons to open the app constantly.

Edit: Also worth pointing out that you could argue Facebook's infrastructure was hugely important to their growth. Instagram was literally almost anonymous profiles. However, once FB got everyone to connect their FB accounts (which they may have been able to do with only a phone number as I did notice this became a requirement), they gave advertisers and brands a lot off resources and tools (and reasons) to devote money and energy to the platform.

<comment><USER3> [http://charlescosta.net/2014/04/how-the-seven-deadly-sins- dr...](http://charlescosta.net/2014/04/how-the-seven-deadly-sins-drive- innovaiton/)

tl;dr — Every successful social startup should bend, but not completely violate, one or more social taboos, e.g. one of the 7 deadly sins.

Edit: When designing www.fwdeveryone.com, we purposely incorporated Pav's theory by building the platform around the taboo of getting involved in other people's relationships, in this case by letting people read (and reply to) other people's email conversations.

<comment><USER4> > Spotify allows consumers to binge on music for a flat fee, however it is > crucial to note that the musicians in this case significantly lose out on > revenue.

As a side note, it amuses me to see this repeated so often, given that it's not true. If you do the math, Spotify pays about the same as a radio play. You just have to remember that each radio play goes out to a few hundred thousand to a few million people each time.

The reason artists don't like Spotify is not because they pay poorly, it's because they pay fairly. When you get a radio play, it's assumed that all the people the station reaches listened to the song. Spotify knows exactly how many people listened to a song, and pay accordingly. Unpopular artists don't like this because they get accurate counts.

<comment><USER5> > Spotify knows exactly how many people listened to a song, and pay > accordingly.

From what I understand, they actually pay based on how many _times_ a song is played, which is not the same as how many people listened to it. If I only listen to an unpopular artist, but I don't listen as often as other people listen to popular artists (lower play count, even though it's still my favorite artist), nearly all of my subscription fee goes to the popular artists.

In the old days of purchasing music, it didn't matter how many times a person played the disc/track - it cost the same. You might argue that each play represents the marginal utility to the listener (and should thus be the basis for compensation), but I'm not sure that's entirely true.

<comment><USER4> > From what I understand, they actually pay based on how many times a song is > played,

Yes, I should have been more precise. Just like with a radio play, the second play in theory goes to the same mass of people, but is counted again. So I should have said "they know exactly how many people and how many times it was played, and pay accordingly". I believe they discount multiple plays from the same person, to prevent abuse.

> In the old days of purchasing music, it didn't matter how many times a > person played the disc/track - it cost the same. You might argue that each > play represents the marginal utility to the listener (and should thus be the > basis for compensation), but I'm not sure that's entirely true.

You might argue that, but you might also argue that when you bought a CD, you bought 10-15 tracks, even if you only wanted one or two. So again, for a consumer, Spotify is more fair, because you only pay for what you consume, and artists liked the old model where you paid for 15 tracks even if you only wanted two.

<comment><USER5> > You might argue that, but you might also argue that when you bought a CD, > you bought 10-15 tracks, even if you only wanted one or two.

My same argument applies to a single track purchased via iTunes - it doesn't matter how many times you play it; it costs the same. The bundling of tracks on an album is something all artists did/do, so it doesn't affect the fairness question in my opinion (at least, not fairness between artists).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember the outrage when Zuckerberg bought Insta for $1bn. The Internet was filled with bubble-theorist.

Say what you want about Zuckerberg but the guy was well ahead of his time and could see how things would evolve and what tick with people brains.

<comment><USER7> > Say what you want about Zuckerberg but the guy was well ahead of his time > and could see how things would evolve and what tick with people brains.

Did he really predict that, or did he just see an upcoming potential competitive threat and buy it?

I feel bad for the founders of Instagram. They could have been the next Zuckerberg(s) (as Instagram seems to be taking over as Facebook seems to be starting to fade), but instead they're subordinates in Zuckerberg's empire.

<comment><USER8> You "feel sorry" for two people in their mid-twenties who made anywhere from $100M to $400M selling their 15 month old company (while making the other 11 employees rich along the way.)

Ok. Beyond that, why do you assume the valuation would be exactly the same had they not sold to FB?

<comment><USER9> yea, nothing to feel sorry about. What could anyone do with a few millions (or billions more) if they are already rich by half a million.. unless you are trying to climb the Forbes leaderboard.

<comment><USER8> >if they are already rich by half a million.. unless you are trying to climb the Forbes leaderboard.

That would be half a _billion_ and, generally, I don't "feel bad" for people who don't attain their dream of climbing the Forbes leader board (assuming that is even a goal for these two.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am quite privacy conscious. I have deleted my FB account. On principle, I dislike targeted ads, user tracking, etc.

BUT, I hate to admit this, the ads I get in Instagram are the most relevant I have ever gotten. I actually look forward to them, to discover new products. They are perfectly tailored to me.

Dammit.

<comment><USER11> I'll be honest, I like ads that are relevant to the things I am interested in. I am no FB fan boy, but their ads are pretty good... I actually click on them.

What's wrong with that?

<comment><USER12> Nothing. It's a win-win. Consumers get personalized, tailored ads. Businesses reach audiences that actually want their products.

What annoys me are ads for products I've already purchased (amazon is terrible about this), or the same ad plastered 20 times across multiple sites.

Instagram handles ads pretty well IMO. They are non-intrusive, easy to digest, and highly relevant.

Facebook OTOH, has become one giant scrolling, auto-playing, clickbait/video ad. There is essentially 90% junk to 10% information (posts/photos/etc). IG has the same ratio but in reverse.

People love to bemoan the horrors of internet advertising, but tbh I find it way less intrusive than other forms of ad placements (TV, radio, billboards).

Except autoplay vids w/ audio. Those should be banned flat out.

<comment><USER13> _I find it way less intrusive than other forms of ad placements (TV, radio, billboards)._

Talk about damming with faint praise. Ads are the top reason why I no longer listen to radio, and the TV is only bearable because I have a DVR.

That said, those are just annoying. Online ads are much more dangerous.

<comment><USER14> Why are they much more dangerous?

<comment><USER13> Because they rely on the accumulation of personal data, which can later be leaked and/or sold, and abused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> No wonder. Anecdotal of course, but I see my friends spending more time on instagram and people on the train or bus browsing instagram. I don't remember seeing FB on someone's mobile in the last 6 months.

It will only grow bigger and at some point when it becomes too big, you see less friends posts and more advts and people move on to something else. But for next 2 years, Instagram's going to be Yuuuge.(Huge)

<comment><USER16> If you travel to other countries (for me, Thailand most recently) you'll see almost everyone on Facebook. Most small companies over there don't even have a website, just a FB page.

<comment><USER17> Yes, same thing in Mexico. Many companies only have a FB page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've regained a lot of mental peace once I quit Instagram. When you have hundreds of friends and follow other random people on the platform, you get the impression that every single person is always on a beach in Bali, eating at Michelin star restaurants, riding lambos and partying with attractive successful people in the most exclusive venues out there. All the while you're a corporate drone sitting in a cubicle all day, or you're stuck in traffic, or are dealing with a shitty boss, or you're trying to figure out how to pay rent.

In reality, those people don't have that lifestyle. They're simply marketers and FOMO generators, but our brains aren't super good at seeing past that.

It's analogous to how regular people don't realize just how much Photoshop and photographic skill goes into making someone look as good as they do in magazines and on their IG feed. We look at them and immediately conclude that we're some kind of a sub-human degenerate species compared to them, whereas in reality it's all bullshit.

It feels SO much better to swim in one's lane, not looking around to see how everybody else is doing, especially when it's not real.

I'm not a religious person, but there's something really powerful in the admonition not to not covet your neighbor's spouse, house, animals (car?) etc. Except it's much worse with IG, where you're exposed daily to hundreds if not thousands of "neighbors" who are all showing off their pretend-success.

The genius of IG is that it makes people willingly subscribe to hours of marketing every day.

</comment><comment><USER19> Fun to review how many HN commenters pooh-poohed the acquisition and price back in 2012:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840)

<comment><USER20> I don't really care for hilighting peoples past skepticism but this guy literally asked for it:

\---

[...]

This is not going to be one of the best tech acquisitions of the next decade. YouTube helped to propel Google into content. It also helped to commoditise web video in a massive way: reminiscent of the way which Google commoditised search (YouTube is probably just short of being a byword for online video at this point).

Instagram is a photo service in a sea of other photo services. Photography has been around on the web in meaningful ways for a long time. Flickr lost out to Facebook in the community stakes, and Instagram is doing great in whatever- the-fuck market it's in (the share-to-my-twitter-followers market?), but this is not Google acquiring YouTube.

Bookmark this comment. See you in 2022.

\---

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3818055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3818055)

<comment><USER21> To be fair, it isn't 2022 yet.

<comment><USER22> Instagram is supposed to be at around 1.75B users and triple or quadruple their current revenue by then. Of course anything can happen, but chances are the user growth and revenue growth are going to happen. At least Instagram is only potentially worth $100B right now with only $500M a month in revenue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> To be contrarian - Facebook is transferring its own user base to Instagram at a quarterly rate which is convenient to shadow Snapchat. The people I see there aren't much different than the ones on FB every month. FB is notifying me that, every single friend on FB is now on Instagram.

My likes on Instagram aren't shown to my followers - (I hope ) and that's the main difference which affects my behavior. Likes on instagram are cheap, like a casual double tap. On FB or LinkedIn they're expensive.

<comment><USER24> > My likes on Instagram aren't shown to my followers

Your likes actually are shared with your followers.

It's somewhat useful for discovering new accounts but I wish it could be toggled off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm a 30something curmudgeon, but I have become addicted to their "explore" page or whatever it is. Their algorithms have masterfully created an infinite scroll of addictive content that generally applies to my tastes.

I caught myself a few months ago scrolling through that page for almost 30 minutes before realizing what I had been doing. I now have to be very intentional about not going down that constantly-refreshing feature for more than a few minutes.

Anytime I ask my wife what she's doing on her phone, it's almost always Instagram. No more Snapchat, no more Pinterest, and no more "official" Facebook.

<comment><USER26> Could you further explain a bit the appeal? I have never used Instagram and I imagine it as scrolling through dozens of pictures of cool stuff people do... Is that it?

Do you have "feeds" with pictures that correspond to a specific interest of yours? (Is Instagram actually the best place to find interesting pictures on a range of topics?)

Do you post a lot yourself or is it virtually all "consumption"?

Would you say the identity of the posters plays a significant role (friends, celebrities... ?) or is it really more about the content?

Sorry for the barrage of questions, feel free to ignore any or all of them!

<comment><USER27> Not op, but:

> Do you have "feeds" with pictures that correspond to a specific interest of > yours? (Is Instagram actually the best place to find interesting pictures on > a range of topics?)

Yes, the explore page has tabs for topics.

> Do you post a lot yourself or is it virtually all "consumption"?

Both. Consumption of all my different interests from small and major content producers. Then I post my photos to my ~150 friends.

> Would you say the identity of the posters plays a significant role (friends, > celebrities... ?) or is it really more about the content?

Content for me, but I do seek out some specific accounts because I know what to expect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I simply do not understand the attraction of Instagram. My brother posts photos on it, and the quality of the pictures is rubbish. They're small, with compression artifacts. The app itself doesn't even let you pinch to zoom without snapping back when you let go (fair enough given how low resolution the pictures are).

Obviously I'm looking at this wrong - it's clearly not an app for posting photos, because it sucks at that.

<comment><USER29> Clearly you missed the whole point of the app, which is not about posting pictures with perfect quality.

<comment><USER30> To expand, the fact that the pictures are _im_ perfect quality pretty much is the whole point. The inability to really zoom in, all of the filters that adjust the hue/sharpness, etc are all things that help you hide away imperfections in your photo and draw attention to the broader gist of "look at what I'm eating/where I'm traveling/what I'm doing/how pretty I am!"

The point of Instagram isn't to be able to see the wrinkles in that model's face. The point of Instagram is that you _can 't_ see the wrinkles in that model's face.

<comment><USER31> Ah, that explains why they won't allow you to post photos from their website.

I do some serious-amateur and (when I'm lucky) semi-pro quality photography using a "real camera". I was going to post some of them on Instagram, but discovered that I can't do it except maybe via the phone app. But there's no way I'm shuttling photos from my desktop to my phone so that I can upload them to Instagram.

<comment><USER32> There is an Instagram app available on the Windows store for some reason. You'd think it would make sense to build a better web client instead, but there you go.

Apparently you can post from the browser if you change your user agent and pretend to be using a mobile browser, so it's specifically desktop browsers that they don't want you to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I have some adult friends spending 1 or 2 hours a day on Instagram. I can't even imagine how much time millenials spend on it.

<comment><USER34> Millennial here, deleted my account a few days ago.

Unlike most platforms, Instagram cuts strait to the most depressing part: pictures. I've had enough with social media, and I envy those who never created a Facebook.

<comment><USER35> > I envy those who never created a Facebook.

what? is it some virus you can't cure from your mind now? just stop using it. I stopped about 6 years ago and have never missed it.

<comment><USER34> _sigh_ One of these days.

<comment><USER36> A starting point (at least it was for me) might be to unfollow (not unfriend) everyone. That way, your feed is empty and you'll get bored opening facebook after a while. You'll still get event invites and direct messages, so you're missing very little of substance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Hell of an acquisition by Zuckerberg

<comment><USER38> I can remember how everybody was laughing about the acquisition: "Waaat? Billions for a chat app? hahaha" It's amazing how things are turning out.

<comment><USER39> Well, I think FB has probably lost 100B in value, and as someone who stopped using FB this year because I dont enjoy it anymore-

I moved to instagram and twitter.

Mind you, 100B for an app that is filled with bots and corporate accounts makes me think whoever did the valuation has never actually used IG.

<comment><USER40> Facebook owns Instagram, so they haven't really lost you, have they?

<comment><USER39> That was my point with that sentence. They still have me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> FWIW this is the HN response when Facebook acquired Instagram: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840)

Fun to see how well Amanda Peyton's comment held up.

</comment><comment> dao- Social pressure to be on instagram seems to be growing. For years I could get by with facebook, and my phone number / whatsapp for close enough friends. I'm now on instagram after a bunch of people I met independently in Berlin, Amsterdam and San Francisco in the last few weeks expected me to have an account there. I told the youtube UX person who I met in SF that I noticed this trend and don't fully understand it, and her response was that instagram is just how you write messages these days, as if this was totally obvious and not a side feature of instagram.

<comment><USER42> > instagram is just how you write messages these days, as if this was totally > obvious and not a side feature of instagram.

At times, I just give up on my ability to participate in society because of shit like this.

<comment><USER43> If you have a message to get across, that's where the eyeballs are

<comment><USER42> What if I just want to hang out with my friends? It's easiest when everyone actually uses the same thing—people literally complain if I text them. The result is I lose touch with people because it's exhausting keeping track of all the places my friends are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I wonder about Instagram's success if they had decided to reject the Facebook acquisition. While there's no way to know who got the better end of the deal, it would be better for the tech ecosystem to have more large players and their success feels inevitable in hindsight.

<comment><USER45> Facebook probably would have copied them somehow, though I don't know if it would have been successful. FB's duplicate of Snapchat has been a huge success and is a major part of IG today. I don't know if FB would have been able to successfully replace Snapchat without using the Instagram app as a springboard.

<comment><USER44> Instagram Stories seem like a logical extension of Instagram itself. Adding a pure photosharing section to Facebook or something like that in order to copy Instagram seems much more redundant and difficult.

To be fair though, the minds of Facebook have much more incentive to find a good way to do so than I do

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I enjoy IG because I have narrower friends and family there. ...and Orvis. Love flyfishing and honestly I couldn't consume the content there or see amazing fishing or be "up" on their stuff by watching tv or browsing. It's condensed. I tried following some skiing stuff but just get spammed by people trying to hawk stupid ski sayings on tshirts. Mostly recycled junk. I now almost have more followers by people hawking ski t-shirts than friends. It's just stupid.

<comment><USER47> I get a t-shirt spam account following me roughly every day or two, except for climbing crap.

Report them for spam. Instagram nukes a lot of them, and either way you end up blocking them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Instagram is a perfect business case on how to integrate an acquisition and make it better than it could have been on its own. It should be studied in business schools as to how to not fuck up an acquisition. So many companies buy things that die, and I thought this would happen to Instagram but it has only become more popular, it's quite an impressive feat.

</comment><comment><USER49> For reference this is about one-third of the value of Bank of America, the largest bank in the country. I wonder.

<comment><USER50> 100b is insane. That should price a basically risk free security giving 1b profits/yr

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Facebook (the company) is in for the long haul and this is a perfect example of it. It's insane how Zuckerberg has managed to establish the company so well in a segment (social media) that is so susceptible to fads. Facebook.com's usage could very well plateau, but the company has Instagram, WhatsApp, and some bets that are yet to play out (Oculus VR). Zuckerberg isn't lucky here, he just has incredible insight about what matters in the social media business and what he has to do get there.

</comment><comment><USER52> The acquisition of Instagram was more about keeping Facebook as a company to stay relevant. Well played.

</comment><comment><USER53> If someone were to buy Instagram for $100B, how long would it take them to make their money back and then turn a profit on top of that?

<comment><USER54> The money is invested, not gone. Any growth is profit once you sell the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I recently started using Instagram (at first, to boost the number of followers for someone's organization's account). But it's actually kind of fun, every once in a while I see something interesting and instagram is a place I can post that without really bothering other people (since that's the point!)

</comment><comment><USER56> There was a hot take yesterday, that _Instagram_ is slowly morphing into the _WeChat_ of the west. And no other app is even close.

[https://twitter.com/dhof/status/1010902202691538944](https://twitter.com/dhof/status/1010902202691538944)

</comment><comment><USER57> At the time of the acquisition, people criticized the cost per user of the acquisition. $1B for 40M users was a cost of $25 per user. That analysis failed to take into account Instagram's growth, and the cost per user today is roughly $1.

</comment><comment><USER58> $100BB strikes me as true on the face of it, but there's something in my gut that tells me that is much too large a valuation.

Is a television network worth $100BB? That's what Instagram/Youtube/Netflix etc. are becoming a network of original shows. Of course, Instagram/Facebook are still early so they still look like Youtube in their early days, but they'll all converge to the same point of just outright creating their own original content.

</comment><comment><USER50> Gotta be careful with estimates, a random analyst says it's worth 100b and a research firm says it's going to reach so many users in a few years, but zero attention is paid to what assumptions underlie those estimates; publicly available investment research information is useless

</comment><comment><USER59> The thing I wonder is whether some of this value is coming at the expense of people reading books. My guess is there's a significant overlap in the demographics. Which is too bad, because I view books as a positive for society while Instagram really seems to be a big net negative.

</comment><comment><USER60> Not surprising, considering Instagram is the #1 marketing tool for brands and businesses right now.

</comment><comment><USER61> I think I'm officially old now since I truly don't "get" Instagram or care to.

<comment><USER62> Instagram is one of the simplest social networks. It's twitter with a focus on picture posts. It's blogging but every post is centered around a picture.

It's one thing to not want one yourself, but to be willfully ignorant about something so simple and publicly visible seems like an odd thing to feel the need to advertise.

<comment><USER28> Bizarrely I find that Twitter is better for posting pictures (they're not so low resolution and compressed, and the UI is less hostile to viewing them).

<comment><USER62> I disagree, but only because reply tweets are the same "class" of content as the initial image tweet itself. It makes it less a comment on the image and more a post directed towards the image's poster. I also think Twitter's UI is still somewhat hostile to viewing them because of how thumbnails aren't just shrunk but also trimmed. I can see where you're coming from though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Now more than ever is the time to force Facebook to spin-off Instagram.

Wouldn't the world be a much better place if Facebook had to _compete_ with Instagram? (And Snapchat, and Twitter, and WhatsApp...)

</comment><comment><USER64> Facebook acquiring Instagram (good move)

Google acquiring YouTube (good move)

Microsoft acquiring Github (good move)

Yahoo acquiring Tumblr for over a billion (bad move)

Did anybody really think that was a good idea? I personally didn't. Not now, not ever.

<comment><USER65> Sun acquisition of MySQL for a billion was pretty bad too

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> The founders sold to FB for 3 billion. Makes you wonder what WhatsApp is worth to Facebook. If 3B then is worth 100B now to FB is WhatsApp worth 633B now? ((100/3) * 19)

<comment><USER67> I know that's just back of the envelope math, but I'd suspect monetizing whatsapp has been far trickier (do they make money at all?) so it wouldn't be multiplied at anything like Insta.

The e2e crypto must really kill opportunities to sell data or push ads.

Edit: spelling

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Wonder if they will ever spin it off as a public company? Seems like Facebook is on the way out and shareholders are going to want to double down on the future.

<comment><USER69> What's the point of that? Facebook as a company can have multiple products that aren't Facebook. Buy FB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Does this mean 1 active monthly user equals $100 in your companies value?

:D

</comment><comment><USER71> Too bad that "worth" doesn't come from anything. Oh no wait. User data. I can't wait for that to become an illegal trade.

<comment><USER72> > I can't wait for that to become an illegal trade.

Why would that ever happen? How could that ever happen? That would destroy everything (note: hyperbole) of value currently offered for free on the internet.

<comment><USER73> Everything of value can be paid for.

The worth of an ad impression or click is measured in fractions of cents and the adds up to peanuts per month.

Publishers can just charge those peanuts directly and I'll be happy to pay up (plus they'll get more without the dozens of middlemen in the advertising/cancer industry).

But seems like publishers are greedy and want _more_ than what the ads pay them, so that's why subscription-based content sites don't work at scale. For example, "Le Figaro" (a French newspaper) asks 9€/month for their subscription, despite making less that 1€/month from serving ads to me, so obviously I don't subscribe and get by with blocking their (really shit, think Outbrain/Taboola "related content") ads.

On the other hand, I've recently started supporting creators on Patreon at the tune of 1$/video. It's something I can afford to do for every creator I watch, and while being an insignificant amount by itself it would be a significant bag of money should every viewer pay (and definitely more than they can even dream of making from ads).

<comment><USER72> But then you have to maintain dozens to thousands of micropayment relationships. I'm not willing to do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> I guess I'm one of the outliers. The worst part of FB to me is the vain pictures and constant "look at me attitude", which is pretty much 90% of the instagram content I've seen. The comments are about on par with FB comments on the "look at me" picture posts as well, so little to no improvement or added value there.

I don't have an instagram account and have 0 interest in getting one or ever posting anything to it.

</comment><comment><USER75> I tried to use Instagram couple of times and I just don't seem to get it. What am I suppose to do there?

</comment><comment><USER76> Zuck bought Instagram for 1Bil. That is like the yahoo guys investing in Baba.

</comment><comment><USER77> Let's take it to zero. Who's with me?

</comment><comment><USER78> Interesting!

</comment><comment><USER79> A useless product valued at $100B? Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER80> but why?

<comment><USER38> It has a loooot of users, and it's growing faster than any other social network. FB growth is staggering, but instagram is exploding.

Instagram's innovation strategy is working out nicely > new features are launched, and are loved by it's users.

On top of that they are now also focusing on SMBs (mostly in NBUs) with Whatsapp Business. (That branch could add >100M users)

<comment><USER81> It's exploding because apart from being a really good product, they made the UX super, super simple. With just enough little nuggets of complexity to make it feel whole.

<comment><USER81> On another note, what do you call this phenomenon, when something is super simple, but you can just _tell_ how much work went into it? iA Writer, Instagram, Dropbox, iPhone, a great chair...they feel expensive, regardless of price.

<comment><USER82> Minimalism / "less is more" ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> contents on instagram are toxic.

</comment><comment><USER84> What a time to be alive. Many tech companies now that don't offer any actual product or service and don't even make money are valued multiple times more than the biggest car manufacturers.

<comment><USER85> Instagram makes money. Companies pay them to purchase ads. Isn't that obvious ?

"In 2018, [Instagram]'s estimated net mobile advertising revenues are projected to reach 6.84 billion U.S. dollars, up from 1.86 billion U.S. dollars in 2016."

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/448157/instagram- worldwi...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/448157/instagram-worldwide- mobile-internet-advertising-revenue/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> That's funny. I don't pay for it so I suppose I estimated it to be worthless. Make me pay for it to get a more accurate estimate. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER87> Indeed it does. Most people doesn't even browse the web anymore. World news, social updates, gossip... Everything in one app.</comment>


Does anybody offer "Practice Negotiation" services? - <AUTHOR> I read Eric Barker's post on NYPD's hostage negotiation simulator (http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2015/11/hostage-negotiators) and realized that I've never seen anybody offering a similar services for people in high tech. (Albeit in obviously less critical situations.)<p>Being able to negotiate and think clearly in stressful circumstances is common to most topics on HN. How do you gain practical experience? <comment><USER2> Sell your car on Craigslist. You'll get more experience negotiating with sociopaths than you could ever hope for.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are plenty of negotiation courses around, and the better ones tend to use cases and simulations. Unfortunately there is also a lot of on the job training in negotiations going on, which can be rather costly and not very effective. I have been giving a bit of thought to how to address this and I think some sort of platform where negotiation teams can train with/against each other using customized cases would be an interesting proposition. Feel free to PM me if you want to discuss.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me chew on it. Having an agitated human being across the table from you was always my acid test.

<comment><USER3> That is a good point, although a Skype connection or just a conference call is a pretty good substitute, and without body language as a guide actually tends to make negotiations much harder and increase the risk of tempers flaring.

<comment><USER4> I am just throwing this out here.

Reading this thread, I thought of a meet-up type of group where the purpose would be to lie to the person in front of you. If the person buys X amounts of lies then you get Y amount of points.

What does lying have to do with interviews? Nothing at all, but to make a person believe you, you must utilize and have a full comprehension of the social dynamic that occurs in a interview.(IMO)

Like I said, I am just putting this out there. However one thing is certain you need humans for this, it can not be a program. Also lying and wondering if that person believes you would add the stress of uncertainty that inherently comes with interviews. A minimal simulator.

I do not think this will ever gain traction, as the community of people interested to participate would not be centrally located geographically.

An other alternative is to invest in an interview coach. I know old school but I think this is the route to go. If you can find a HR professional who does IT headhunting. Her wisdom is priceless. Search for HR firms and head hunters on linkedin or whatever they are called officially and you will get the angle from the insiders. Might be pricey but I would consider it an investment.

just my 2 cents

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Negotiation is typically one of the topics covered in MBA curriculum. Some of the business school faculty also specializes in negotiations and do consulting on the side. You might be able to find negotiation training and seminar through such faculty members. Also, look up a few books on negotiations and reach out to the authors. They most likely will be able to refer to negotiation training.

</comment><comment><USER6> > How do you gain practical experience?

Suggest reading Stuart Diamond's brilliant book Getting More. He offers some practical everyday negotiation advice.

Here's his presentation at Google > [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOZo6Lx70ok](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOZo6Lx70ok)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think it would be novel to have a negotiation seminar, but where the price of the seminar would be ... negotiable. a la [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y).

</comment><comment><USER8> I had a really excellent online class in Negotiation and Conflict Management. A simulation was part of it. I thought it was really good.

So, look for a class, either online or local.

</comment><comment><USER9> Try Harvard's Program on Negotiation. The materials are golden and excellent and gilded excellent. pon.harvard.edu</comment>


Show HN: Templated Webhooks - <AUTHOR>

I'm building WebGun. It's SendGrid for Webhooks.
A key part of our service is support of a new approach to webhooks we have developed that is essentially "template-driven transformations for web hooks". The purpose of them is to enable your app's end-users to customise your webhooks via templates, and integrate them with other services in new and unexpected ways.
More detail here:
http://webgun.io/articles/templated-webhooks
We're pretty excited about the potential of templated webhooks, and the feedback so far has been very positive.
Very keen to get feedback from the HN community. <comment><AUTHOR> The link in the OP didn't seem to work, here it is again:

<http://webgun.io/articles/templated-webhooks></comment>


Ask HN: Looking for a really lightweight Linux distro for my netbook - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently running Jolicloud which I like, but it's running pretty slow and my HD has almost no space left (with almost nothing but the OS and a few apps on it).<p>Any recommendations for something that is small and fast? Running Chrome is more or less the only thing I need it to do. <comment><USER2> If you're not afraid of the command line (or are willing to learn), Arch is as lightweight as you want it to be. The initial install is very minimalist and the package management system makes it almost trivial to build up from there. Install Openbox and Chrome and you're all set with a pretty lean system.

<http://wiki.archlinux.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not scared of the command line, but I'd rather not spend a long time setting up stuff like wifi, sound, etc. Is all that pretty easy to get going?

<comment><USER3> It's more involved than doing it on Ubuntu. To be honest the hardest thing you're likely to do is getting X running, closely followed by picking a window manager. Sound and Wifi are generally straightforward on Arch.

To put it in perspective, I use Arch on a P3-850-based Sony Vaio with 128mb of Ram and it flies.

The main things you'll get from Arch on a netbook are:

* Rolling release means that you don't have to do distribution upgrades.

* Have it your way - you pick what you want, what window manager you want, what editor you want etc. Use something like AwesomeWM, Xmonad or OpenBox to get the most out of your screen real-estate.

* Efficiency - Because you're only running what you want to run, your memory usage will be better and you wont have things you don't need lying around your hard disk, leaving the space to be filled with things you do.

The downsides:

* It's not a mainstream distro. While it has a great community, it's not as ubiquitous as something like Ubuntu. Still, Arch hasn't yet had it's eternal september so the people you do encounter know what they're talking about.

* You will tinker more and it will take up your time - if you don't play around then everything should work fine, but with the amount of flexibility Arch offers you will inevitably go through Window Managers and various tools, at the risk of breaking something.

Hope this is useful.

<comment><USER4> > Rolling release means that you don't have to do distribution upgrades.

This goes beyond the OP's question. How does arch handle changes in essential components like the switch to upstart in ubuntu? Does this work well with rolling releases?

<comment><USER5> I've been an Arch user for ~1 year (Gentoo before that), and "essential component" upgrades seem to take place just fine. For example, there was a recent shift from Python 2 to Python 3 as the primary Python interpreter, and there were no noticeable problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Running the standard Fedora 13 Gnome spin on a Dell mini 10v at the moment - 260MB RAM in-use with Firefox and Thunderbird open, which seems pretty light to me. Remove the bottom Gnome toolbar and set the top toolbar to auto-hide (put the task switcher in the top toolbar), to get your vertical screen real estate back. Set 'resample-method' to 'speex-float-0' in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf to stop PulseAudio sucking up gobs of CPU and you're good to go.

i386 Fedora has been compiled with '-mtune=atom' since F12, which is nice for netbooks. (Not so nice for my Core Duo Mac Mini server, but it's not exactly CPU-bound so No Big Deal).

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://wiki.dennyhalim.com/ubuntu-minimal-desktop> and I installed fluxbox

<comment><USER8> I love Fluxbox and its extended family (BB and OpenBox).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Try Meego for Netbooks ([http://meego.com/downloads/releases/1.1/meego-v1.1-netbooks-...](http://meego.com/downloads/releases/1.1/meego-v1.1-netbooks- google-chrome-browser)).

It comes configured with easy Wifi tools, works with my Netbook's Volume up/down button. Chrome is pre-installed. A different look than the other distros.

</comment><comment><USER10> Like many who have commented here I am a big time Arch linux fan. However if setting up X seems something that you do not want to deal with, you can give Chakra linux a try. Its based on Arch so you get a lean set up. But the installer does some of the heavier lifting for you. Off late they have been moving away from Arch though.

You could also run prelink after the install to make the startup time of your applications snappier.

Often time I do wish there was a more Debian stable'ish equivalent of Arch to put on servers. A distribution that is optimized but does not tip toe the bleeding edge as much and does not have a rolling release cycle.

</comment><comment><USER11> Tiny core linux is the smallest one I know of that is fully packaged (at 11MB). I use it for a similar purpose. Another option is to install a server version like debian and add back only those pieces you need.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting related Metafilter discussion:

[http://ask.metafilter.com/161150/Jolicloud-10-Vs-Ubuntu- UNR-...](http://ask.metafilter.com/161150/Jolicloud-10-Vs-Ubuntu- UNR-1004-FIGHT)

</comment><comment><USER13> ubuntu 10.04 netbook edition runs very well on my 5 year old laptop (thinkpad x41, the 'netbook' of its day).

<comment><USER12> It runs very well on my Asus Eee PC 1000HE as well.

<http://www.ubuntu.com/netbook>

And I also prefer the 10.04 version to the 10.10 version. No idea what Ubuntu was thinking with that new space-wasting sidebar in 10.10. Can download the older version here:

<http://mirror.pnl.gov/releases/10.04/>

<comment><USER14> They switched to a sidebar because all screens are widescreens now. Having toolbars on the top or bottom just worsens the situation. If your netbook screen is only 1024 x 600, you don't need to lose even more vertical resolution to a task bar.

<comment><USER15> A vertical auto-hide toolbar, to me, is much more convenient than the clunky sidebar with no customization options that you're stuck with in 10.10.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. It definitely needs an optional auto-hide for those of us who use Gnome-Do and the like.

Imho that's the ultimate solution to limited screen real-estate on netbooks and tablets - no more menu at all, replaced by an easy hotkey that pops up a panel with all the functionality and information you need.

Menu bars are relics, but maybe the UX designers making these decisions think that's too much of a departure from what most of their users already know?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Slitaz is tiny, runs in RAM and tends to just work in my experience: well worth a try if you want to get up and running quickly - <http://www.slitaz.org>

That said, Arch is much easier to set up than it might appear and would be a perfect base if all you're going to run is Chrome. No need for a desktop environment/window manager, either:

        xinit /usr/bin/chromium $* -- :1

</comment><comment><USER17> "A really lightweight Linux distro", this doesn't makes sense at all. The Linux kernel is the same for everybody, it depends on what your are running on it.

Pick your favorite distro, just install a tiny window manager, avoid running background applications and that's it.

If you don't have a favorite distro, then all depends on your Linux skill and/or the time you have. Good distros have already been given in this thread.

<comment><USER18> There's a huge variation in default installs depending on which distro. He was asking which distro, not which kernel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you want something that is easy to use and doesn't need to be configured, used Fluxbox edition of Linux Mint.

</comment><comment><USER20> Linux Mint LXDE is very lightweight without sacrificing functionality and looks. I use it on my netbook for several months now, and it works great. Battery life improved 40% since I switched to it, everything works out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER21> Puppy Linux is a good choice for a very lightweight distro.

The latest release only weighs 130 MB and there is a large choice of distributions (puplets) including one specifically tailored to netbooks (Puppeee).

</comment><comment><USER22> I use knopix once in a while. You can boot it off of cd/DVD and can also be installed on hard disc. <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knoppix>

</comment><comment><USER23> This sounds like exactly what you want:

<http://www.browserlinux.com/>

It mission is to answer your exact question, pretty much.

</comment><comment> Ocho-Bits Install Ubuntu Minimal and just download what you need. You'll get the popularity of Debian (with all those packages) and a fast system (you can install any WM and such).

</comment><comment><USER24> Ubuntu Netbook Remix works for my mini9 and its scant resources.

<http://www.ubuntu.com/netbook>

</comment><comment><USER25> You may want to tell us which netbook it is. There is a big difference between the original Eee PC and netbooks with the latest Atom CPU.

</comment><comment><USER26> Has anyone tried out chromium OS? Its difficult to tell how complete the project is yet but it seems like the ideal solution.

</comment><comment><USER27> You could just install Ubuntu server and then add the GUI stuff you want.

<comment><USER28> More accurately, you could do a command-line only Ubuntu installation with the Ubuntu alternate CD, which isn't the same thing as a server installation, and then add what you want. [https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/LowMemorySyst...](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/LowMemorySystems) has more information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I would go with puppy linux - really small and fast.

</comment><comment><USER30> You could try Crunchbang Linux. It's rather neat.

</comment><comment><USER31> backtrack .... lol i kid i kid, puppy linux is Astonishingly small you could try that if your looking for something in that range

</comment><comment><USER32> why not just buy a larger drive? Time wasted will be less.

<comment><USER18> If you've got one of the first netbooks, the HD is unreplaceable flash.</comment></comment>