TSA redaction fail: hidden text easily readable via copy & paste - <AUTHOR> http://www.wanderingaramean.com/2009/12/tsa-makes-another-stupid-move.html <comment><USER2> It's helpful to understand a little bit of how a PDF file works.

A PDF file stores a sequence of instructions for what do draw on a page. The instructions are commands, such as "write this text here" or "draw a circle there." When you draw black redaction boxes, you are just appending an instruction to the end of the list ("draw a box here"), but most of the time the previous instructions are all still there.

Really, the only way to redact a PDF with certainty, short of manually reading the file itself (yes, PDF files are text-readable; you just have to decompress them) is to rasterize the file to a large image. Otherwise, the instructions for writing the text are all still in the file, and there are any number of ways to extract them (for example, simply by deleting the instruction to draw the redaction box).

<comment><AUTHOR> Mrs Browl works at a e-discovery company where documents are often redacted depending on which bits are admissible in court; I gather they use TIFF files for exactly the reasons you describe.

I suppose the (extremely limited) redaction features in Acrobat stem from the belief that the document is ultimately destined for printing rather than computer reading.

<comment><USER3> I have no personal experience and at best perhaps a vague recollection of having read or heard something, but would document images be or in the past have been used also to make discovery as inefficient as permitted for the opposition? Images require a person to analyze, or pre-processing before electronic search and analysis can be performed against them.

<comment><AUTHOR> OCR is very good nowadays, so that's not so big a problem - and for big lawsuits (eg patent fights) there are literally hundreds of lawyers hired to comb through the vast array of documents deciding whether they're responsive or not.

The pre-processing is largely automated but there's certainly a portion (maybe 5%?) of documents that need to be hand-classified in the database before they get to the lawyers. It an interesting field - lots of money to be made, intense competition for it, relatively simple technology requirements but a legal industry which has been resistant to technology for quite a long time. Autonomy seems to be the leading software company in this space.

<comment><USER4> I can't speak for their other products but in my experience their enterprise search product is a useless piece of crap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Want to know which twelve passports will instantly get you shunted over for secondary screening, simply by showing them to the ID-checking agent?_

Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, or Algeria

<comment><USER6> That's such an obvious list I'm not sure if it's from the document itself, or if you just wrote down what it would probably be.

<comment><USER7> I was a little surprised about Cuba. They're not our favorite government, but I don't see them as a security risk.

<comment><USER8> Are you serious!!!!

America has been living under the shadow of imminent Cuban aggression for 50years. There have been Cuban attempts to invade America and numerous assassination attempts on the US president by Cuban agents.

And their chemical weapons kill 1000s of Americans after being secretly delivered from Canada.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently your sense of humor is too subtle for some other HNers!

<comment><USER9> Or perhaps a bit too blunt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This isn't the first time this has happened. Several years back, another government agency made the same mistake. On a slow computer, the text would render first, and could be seen for several seconds before the black boxes would appear.

Googling around, it seems to be a fairly common mistake, going back to at least 2000.

<http://www.securityfocus.com/news/7272>

<http://cryptome.org/iran-cia/cia-iran-pdf.htm>

<http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=12907>

<comment><USER3> In the same vein, if not the same format: Distributing a Word document from which you've not removed change tracking (and/or other metadata). (Or whatever Word calls it; it's been a while.) I had to correct my teammates on this one, a while back (and yes, the documents were going to external clients). Nothing novel; the problem's been in the news repeatedly. Nonetheless, people -- even "technical" -- still don't get it right.

(I encouraged them to go further and switch to PDF format for the distribution, but they wouldn't.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This should be required reading on redaction in the government. <http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/dod/nsa-redact.pdf>

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice one. I had to giggle at the ubiquity of the MS Office assistant down in the corner... _It looks like you're trying to conceal some information from prying eyes. Would you like help with that?_

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's a version with the redactions lifted and the areas highlighted. <http://cryptome.org/tsa-screening.zip>

<comment><USER13> it would be really interesting if the government attempts to go after you for hosting that document.

<comment><USER14> That's actually hosted by cryptome: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptome>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> On Scribd: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/23757640/Screening-Management- SOP-...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/23757640/Screening-Management-SOP-Redacted)

<comment><USER16> It's a lengthy document. Luckily, they've highlighted the areas of interest.

<comment><USER4> They aren't all that remarkable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A responsible citizen would not google the following:

"SENSITIVE SECURITY INFORMATION" site:.gov filetype:pdf

Less than 2000 such PDFs. A very determined and very irresponsible citizen could have already mirrored all of them.

<comment><USER18> Well, not from their home IP they wouldn't anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I like watching Security Theater as much as the next guy, but this season's plot is so thin, I'm having trouble suspending disbelief.

</comment><comment><USER20> I downloaded it earlier but it seems to have been taken down now. Very interesting. I bet that will lose some people their jobs - but I think it definitely highlights an underlying issue within the government bureaucracy that shows why people getting paid 30k with degrees from the University of Phoenix shouldn't be entrusted with national security... I wonder how many security people that passed through...

<comment><USER4> "bet that will lose some people their jobs"

I doubt it. the more likely outcome is they mandate all their employees attend document redaction training developed and administered at great tax payer cost by a government contracting company. It's also quite likely that they use the incident to justify spending millions to have a government contractor write document redaction software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Most interesting thing I learned from the document: members of Congress get special ID cards. It makes sense, I just never thought about it before.

</comment><comment><USER22> Using the link in the article, it appears that it's already been taken down (link leads to a 404 page). However, from the comments in the article, it's been mirrored at <http://cryptome.org> (at the top of the list, in fact, filename is tsa-screening.zip, in case that makes it easier to find it).

<comment><AUTHOR> Looking at the dates on the document, it was last revised in May 2008, so it seems like the horse left the stable some 18 months ago as far as actual bad guys and spies (who presumably seek out this information more actively than your or I) are concerned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Pretty ridiculous. Why not just make one version for internal distribution, and a completely separate document for the public?

<comment><USER24> Because that would cut into your Solitaire time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> searchable too. are we feeling safer yet?

</comment><comment><USER26> My sister is an attorney and asked me about software that can catch things like this, remove metadata, etc. Does anyone have experience with something along these lines?

</comment><comment><USER27> Schneier is going to have a field day with this one.</comment>


Ask HN: Cash-flow muses - <AUTHOR>
 Timothy "Four-Hour Work Week" Ferriss has a concept he calls a "cash-flow muse".  That's a little business that generates some monthly cash without taking up too much of your time.  I think the idea is that with a couple of these running, you're pretty much free to do as you please most of the time.
Some desirable attributes of a cash-flow muse:
- You own it.
- The value proposition is simple enough to explain in one sentence.
- High margin: 4x to 50x.
- Easy to automate or outsource the selling, record-keeping, and whatever other businessy stuff is needed.
- Low capital investment.
- Takes no more than about 4 weeks to manufacture the product.
Ferriss often casually mentioned that generating this sort of cash flow is easy to do.  It might take a month of real work to set one up, and you'll likely have to market-test a few ideas before you find one that's solid enough to commit to, but once it's up, it should pay your living expenses.
That sounds really good--when talked about abstractly.  The main idea is really not that a cash-flow muse can free up your time, it's that cash-flow-muse opportunities are abundant and easy to find.  I myself have little concrete idea of what sort of tiny product you could turn into a tiny business like this, and scarcely any idea how to begin searching for one.
My question:  Has anyone actually done one of these? <comment><USER2> I run the Bedbug Registry (<http://bedbugregistry.com>), which covers about half my living expenses. Every six months or so I put in a week's work on it; otherwise it's just a matter of site babysitting (irate landlords, requests to rescind a report), which takes no more than an hour a week.

Getting the site to this point took about two years, so I would counsel patience and perserverance. It also helps to really care about the project, even if you don't spend much time on it.

And it especially helps when your business partners are relentless insects who spread very efficiently and feast on the blood of people's sleeping children.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thanks: another rich-information, insight-stimulating data point.

I heard an NPR story about bedbugs being on the rise a year or so ago. It didn't occur to me that bedbugs presented an entrepreneurial opportunity.

<comment><USER3> problem = opportunity

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have one of these businesses. Took me 2 months to build the product (on the side, after my full-time job). A few more to market and see sales (it takes time to close sales and generate site traffic). It should generate 10-20k this year, hopefully more next.

My advice is to focus on a niche market filled with people w/ money, willing to pay for stuff. And avoid any market/problem that your typical computer geek would be interested in or aware of (you want to relax on the beach, not code away 60hrs a week fearing some other startup will catch up and take the market away).

<comment><USER5> Are you worried that because it didn't take long to create (and presumably has a small barrier to entry), that an influx of competitors will appear?

<comment><USER6> I think people are overly concerned about competitors.

At least two people now have read my blog and set up their own businesses. One of them practically Xeroxed my business, and his I-can't-believe-its-not-me is fairly decent. I always joke that since my sales have doubled since then all I need is to recruit two more people who understand copy/paste and then I can retire. (The numbers in the joke are way out of date.)

Similarly, I was myself a new upstart competitor to the established market participants back in 2006, and I haven't killed them, either. (The idea is not to pick a market with no competitition -- that is a red flag there is no money to be made. Instead, pick a market where there is an addressable niche for whom the existing choices are painfully inadequate. Then, sell pain relief.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The idea is to set yourself up in a way that allows you to generate passive income. I like this as in it seems particle and beneficial. I don't think you can agree with it or disagree with it. It's not morally wrong.

For example, I am not a professional photographer but I have photos on iStockPhoto and ShutterStock. 33 cents per purchase ads up and I have paid for a nice amount of gear with the income generated from photo purchases.

In another example, the google ads still point to my account on an old message board I started. It's 1 check per year at best but it's nice.

If we all put our web designs, a widget of code, anything of that sort for download for free on a page with ads or for $1 on a purchase paid, you will be surprised at how it can add up over a long period of time. That's the idea.

I plan to put some of my own webdesigns on an online gallery, people would pay and get a link to download the .zip. After it's set up, it would be another source passive income flow.

A bit differently, at one point I experimented with answering questions for the text messaging service kgb_ whenever I would watch TV. By forcing myself to do this, I was able to get a nice check at the end of the month. 10 cents for 2 min of work isn't really worth it though.

Making rules for techniques like these is silly. The idea is to make some extra spending money however you can... in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER6> _Has anyone actually done one of these?_

Yep, although I don't think I could comfortably describe it as a fun little sideline these days.

See <http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats> and look at the historical sales data: back in early 2007 when it was selling high three figures a month I think it would have been a fairly decent example of this.

Tim Ferriss would not be my first suggestion for who to look for for advice on how to accomplish this. I think he sells "You can avoid doing actual work!!!" when the real lesson is "You can do actual work _very, very efficiently_ these days if you're prepared to spend significant amounts of time and mental effort laying the groundwork for it."

Incidentally, the amount of time you spend on "manufacturing the product" is rounding error next to the amount of time you will spend on this project. 90% of the value happens outside your IDE.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. Thanks for the data point(s)! Your web site cum stats page has got to be the most useful information I have ever seen or heard of, for the small, hacker entrepreneur.

Of particular interest to me is that the price for your program is $29.95. Being a software guy who never buys anything except necessities, books, and meals out, I have a hard time imagining myself in the place of a buyer. The reality, of course, is that for some people, $29.95 for the bingo-card creator is a good deal, and you found them.

<comment><USER6> At the risk of tooting my own horn, you can find my blog linked in my profile. I think it is probably more useful to you to hear what I've done to get those stats graphs than to see the graphs themselves, since many of the techniques will also apply to your business, where the sales numbers will not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm glad to read that people have actually set up decent, wholesome businesses that fulfil the criteria of cash-flow muses. My reaction when reading the book and even now is just to think 'set up one of those dodgy affiliate sites, ebook sites or drop shipping resellers', none of these being something I ever want to do.

The idea of spending a month making something and then the rest of your time reaping in the profits with low overhead is a great one. Not only does it give you the freedom to work on a startup (or whatever) without worrying about rent, but I'd warrant it gives you a fair bit of credibility too - and a possible exit, even; cf. the recent post about Mingle^2 which took 66.5 hours to build and which got sold to a competitor.

 _Edit_ Actually, I kind of have a cash-flow muse of my own. I helped build up a gaming blog to the point where it pays significant money to writers, and am retained as a columnist there, contributing about 1 hour's worth of work every Saturday. Without going into _too_ much of the gritty detail, if I doubled that to 8 hours of work a month, I'd about cover my rent. However, there's a catch; as my startup's become more exciting, I've had no time to play the game I blog about, and have stopped writing. I can imagine this working a wee bit better if I was writing a column a week for TechCrunch or something similarly in line with the 'day-job', though.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't agree much with the idea, seems like trying to take a shortcut instead of focusing on real hard work to achieve what you want.

I think that "cash-flow muses" are kind of a myth. If there's something easy to do, it's probably easy for a lot of people, hence you'll have a lot of competition, and market price will be low. If you want to differentiate yourself, then you'll have to put time and work into it, and it'll stop being a cash-flow muse. Also, if you need many cash-flow muses, each taking up only a bit of your time, together they'll take up a lot of your time.

Anyway, why do you want to free up your time anyway? If you'd like to focus on doing what you really want, then you should read this: <http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html> (a bit long but worth it).

<comment><USER10> i disagree. why are they mutually exclusive?

many times, doing hard work towards what you want to do in life doesn't quite pay the bills. for him, it was traveling around and doing interesting things. for you, it might be working on an interesting startup that won't even be ramen profitable for a while.

<comment><USER9> I am not saying they are exclusive, I'm just saying that from my point of view, cash-flow muses are not worth it.

<comment><USER11> First, let me say thanks for linking to that essay. Through the essay, though, pg implies that cash-flow muses could be a path to what you love through the two-job route.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> matthew-wegner I created one of these. My company used to actively develop for a particular market. Today we no longer develop for this market, but it's a big market and the large players have affiliate programs. We utilize these affiliate programs --they provide XML feeds and the like, and our site's backend combines them together and figures out the overlap--to run our own site in the space. The market players are quite competitive, and feud over exclusive product distribution, so ironically I think we actually have the largest inventory of any single non-affiliate site.

It took about two months of my time to do the original website, much of it spent on SEO optimization and traffic generation strategies. Today we earn ~$8k/month on the site with an upkeep of ~30 minutes/week.

This worked primarily because of deep knowledge of the market (from back when we were developing this kind of software). I don't think an outsider would have been able to predict hit products far enough out to lay the proper groundwork for SEO/etc. When I was actively creating the site site you could search for "Product X" on launch day and we'd be #1 or #2.

Note: I also launched the site on our company's domain name, taking advantage of our existing inbound links. SEO from scratch will take a year or more to really see predictable traffic levels.

So, yeah, it's definitely possible to create a cash flow muse; I think I could build another one today in around the same amount of time.

It _would_ be hard to do from a totally cold start, though; I'm not sure you could say "you know what, I'm going to make money by creating a local real estate website", or whatever random topic, and actually make it happen. But if you had friends/family in the real estate business, or somehow had accrued expert knowledge in the area, you'd be off to a strong start. If you're smart about the area you pursue you should be alright...

<comment><USER12> Funny you mention local real estate websites, that's actually been something I've been thinking of. I'm a real estate broker learning to program, and my "muse" hopeful is <http://mysinglepropertywebsites.com/>, which is targeted towards real estate agents. Average age of agents is 54, and they have a lot of pain points. I'm still pretty weak on programming but deep on real estate industry knowledge, if you (or anyone else) is actually interested in that area email me: mlapeter at gmail.

<comment><USER13> I'm also a real estate broker. And a programmer. And a few other things ;-)

We looked at this exact market a bit. In the course of doing our research, we found a company with a similar (but better...or at least more functional) offering than the one you cite. And all of the sites are completely FREE for real estate agents. It's difficult to compete with a company that has a nice, easy-to-use system that is FREE. And they're just starting to market nationally. We eventually just started using them instead of developing our own...and we're a company with 50+ full-time developers on staff. I'd genuinely be interested in your ideas if you have a way to compete with free...

<comment><USER14> Are you talking about Postlets? I'm actually just getting involved in a property (leasing) related business and it's going to be a great stopgap for us while I build the real site

<comment><USER13> Not Postlets. The site I'm talking about used to charge $10 per listing directly to agents, but they now have a bulk listing package which is completely underwritten for active real estate agents by third parties, including lenders. It complies with all RESPA rules. I bought one of the bulk listing packages to offer to agents. (I also own a mortgage bank and a few brokerage offices.) Where are you located?

<comment><USER14> We're in Los Angeles. Getting started by filling vacancies in a few key markets in the general LA area. Website is still under development; I still have a day-job, So we're using Postlets right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have a small one that looks like it'll bring in about enough to buy a new laptop this year. It's taking maybe 60 hours so the rate sucks but those are mostly otherwise wasted hours where I'm already watching TV or other crap.

This is a direct result of doing Ed Dale's 30 Day Challenge last year. That's a free online course on internet marketing, especially on market testing, that often gets confused with a "make money fast" scheme. I went into it last year with what I thought was a decent product but soon realized that the online market (search hits) for it is tiny. Almost a year later and I still only get 20 hits a week on that one.

In the last week of the challenge I stumbled upon a market niche that works and now generates up to a thousand hits for me a week. It's not a market looking to spend money so my conversion rate has sucked, but I'm slowly finding what sells to them.

If I hadn't done this testing, I would have wasted some money and a lot of time trying to get the first idea off the ground. If you've got a product or service (or even just an idea for one), I'd recommend the 30 Day Challenge as a free/cheap way to get rolling.

</comment><comment><USER16> I fell into one of these with one of my hobbies--nature photography.

A couple of years ago I setup JS Nature Photos (<http://photos.jstechs.com>) basically how it is now as a branch of another site at the time. Soon traffic to JS Nature Photos dwarfed traffic to the main site. The other site was fizzling anyway. Practically all of the revenue from JS Nature Photos is from ads (people don't buy photos online). It brought in some pretty good money through the first half of 2008, till the economy tanked.

I don't have time to do much with it with school, etc., posting a photo every week or two if I'm lucky, but it still pays the rent each month.

</comment><comment><USER17> Unrelated to the question, I apologize but am I the only one who is annoyed by the usage of the word "muse" in this context?

For me a muse has such a noble connotation about deep tought, meaning and inspiration that I feel it is cheapened by being associated with selling pills online and other near-scams. Not to say that a small, low maintenance business can't have value to the world.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm somewhat facing the same dilemma. I will be having a good amount of free time in a couple of months' time (4 weeks, at least, possibly more), so I really want to do one of these, even if it only ends up providing me with a couple hundred euro per month.

I have one micro-b2b idea, but I'm not really convinced of its value. How do you generate more ideas of the sort? The impending time pressure isn't helping me either :-)

</comment><comment><USER11> I hesitate to dive into a startup for a number of reasons, one of which is that I have little knowledge of the markets. Where do people have problems? What are they?

A more difficult question: What non-obvious "problems" become manifest once a solution is evident? (Perhaps, A key to victory in this consumer culture).

Anyway, more directly on topic, here's a cash-flow muse I came up with recently: make a pasta-chute that lets you put in the pasta without burning yourself in the boiling water. Let me know if you wanna collaborate with me.</comment>


High-level development in C with libcello - <AUTHOR> http://libcello.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Not sure how this is useful comparing to c++ etc but it looks very interesting.</comment>


Building stateful microservices - anand-s https://clusterhq.com/2015/06/17/emc-partnership/

<comment><AUTHOR> This article mentions EMC backends (ScaleIO and XtremIO) but flocker also has a mechanism to connect to any storage backend. Curious what type of storage people want to use for their microsevices. [https://docs.clusterhq.com/en/1.0.0/gettinginvolved/plugins....](https://docs.clusterhq.com/en/1.0.0/gettinginvolved/plugins.html)</comment>


BBC homepage returning nothing but JSON - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/ <comment><USER2> Looks like it's back to normal now.</comment>


Motoko, a programming language for building directly on the internet - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/08/24/motoko-the-language-that-turns-the-web-into-a-computer/ <comment><USER3> Code sample:

Actor model with explicit synchronicity and access scoping:

      actor Counter {
        var value = 0;
        public func inc() : async Nat {
          value += 1;
          return value;
        };
      }

Types and specificity:

      type Tree<T> = {
        #leaf : T;
        #branch : {left : Tree<T>; right : Tree<T>};
      };

      func iterTree<T>(tree : Tree<T>, f : T -> ()) {
        switch (tree) {
          case (#leaf(x)) { f(x) };
          case (#branch{left; right}) {
            iterTree<T>(left, f);
            iterTree<T>(right, f);
          };
        }
      }

Source: [https://sdk.dfinity.org/docs/language- guide/motoko.html](https://sdk.dfinity.org/docs/language-guide/motoko.html)

Not to my taste personally.

<comment><USER4> Looks like Scala, but uglier.

<comment><USER5> an impressive feat in itself

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks cool. One thing though, the page says

> Actors are a great model for concurrent programming because they > automatically prevent race conditions (thanks to atomicity and encapsulated > state) and deadlocks (because execution never blocks)

This isn't really true afaik. You can still have logical race conditions if you don't synchronize messages (but they won't be architectural races), and you can still have deadlocks if two actors wait on messages from each other at the same time.

I feel like people often treat race conditions and deadlocks as small, computer-architecture ideas when really they're quite broad concepts. You may be able to prevent them automatically at certain scales, like say a single uint64, but when you try to treat two uint64s as a single uint128 then suddenly race conditions are possible again, despite the guarantees your language has made on the smaller scale.

<comment><USER7> I agree completely! And this shows up in just about any language because of that — however — I kinda get where the author is coming from.

When a certain amount of state is encapsulated within a single actor (or a single message for that matter) you can act on all of it sorta transactionally since no other actor has access.

This is probably more power/control than some programers have had in other languages or paradigms.

Your full program state dosn't retain this property once it spans actors but what can ya do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Instead, the Internet Computer implements orthogonal persistence—yet another > old idea where a program has the illusion of running "forever" and its > memory staying alive (at least until it is explicitly taken down). In > Motoko, this means that developers do not have to worry about explicitly > saving their data or bother with files or an external database: whatever > values or data structures are stored in program variables will still be > there when the next message arrives, even if that is months later.

My guess is that storage persistence is the Godzilla of all leaky abstractions. There are huge tradeoffs in regards to consistency, durability, random access, performance, and cost. In addition, there are huge issues with lock-in. If I can save my data to sqlite or postgress or even S3, I know that I will be able to migrate the data to other languages and systems pretty easily. But if all my data is in a abstract "Internet Computer persistence pod", that is a huge issue.

<comment><USER9> This model also seems to ignore data deletion, which is a huge concern for any serious business of any size.

You can't have users' personal data lingering in a soup of opaque cloud continuations for months. There needs to be a way to strongly commit deletions and audit that the data is gone. And once you build that on top of the "Internet Computer", my guess is that it will look disappointingly like a very slow ordinary database.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> IMO, the next step for distributed programming, and one web assembly could finally enable, will be communicating with code, not messages.

Imagine you're building an app that lets users of a music streaming service see how much time they spent listening to particular genres of music.

The way you would do this with REST, SOAP or similar could roughly be:

1\. Retrieve the user's whole listen history.

2\. For each track, send a request to get the track info, which includes album and duration.

3\. For each album, retrieve the album info, which contains the genre.

4\. Tabulate the returned data.

That's thousands of requests, and a lot of network bandwidth wasted.

GraphQL is a bit better, you only receive what you need, and you send just one request, but you still get a whole lot of track objects, which need to go through the network and be processed on your side.

With my proposed approach, you would send a piece of wasm code, a bit similar to a Lambda function, which would run on the streaming service's API cloud.

Such a function could use fine-grained API calls to retrieve what it needs. It would be executing on the service's network, so round trips would be either short or nonexistent. After tabulating the data, it would send back a simple JSON with the genres and time spent.

This approach would allow developers to extend any service in ways the original developers have never imagined. We could also re-think the way backends and frontends communicate, giving frontend devs a way to do even more, without changing the back end.

<comment><USER11> You're really on to something with this query language for structured data idea! I'd find it super-useful as a dev to be able to think of a backing service not as a set of disconnected endpoints, but a base of operations for dealing with data.

If only such structured query language data bases existed, I bet they would get a lot of use.

(No but really: how is what you're describing meaningfully different from SQL, especially with the restrictions you'd want to put on the code in practice?)

<comment><USER12> I agree with your comment highly.

I also find the idea of arbitrary code execution on a remote host to build a derivative service to be a quite naive point-of-view. Even if you can validate that the code isn't going to pwn you - a mighty stretch - how can one justify being a recipient of free compute cycles on someone else's infra? It's not quite realistic to me

<comment><USER10> > I also find the idea of arbitrary code execution on a remote host to build a > derivative service to be a quite naive point-of-view. Even if you can > validate that the code isn't going to pwn you - a mighty stretch

Be aware that's exactly what you are doing when you go to any modern site. You let a remote server execute arbitrary code on your computer, trusting it's not going to pwn you. Sure, there were tons of loopholes in the first few years of JS, but now browsers and operating systems are so secure that it's mostly a non-issue. Web assembly is a sandboxing-first technology, so I don't think it's an impossible or even a particularly hard issue to solve.

>how can one justify being a recipient of free compute cycles on someone else's infra? It's not quite realistic to me

Well, there are API call limits, or something equivalent to them. Maybe computing credits in this instance. Calculating how much computing resources you're using is something that i.e. AWS Lambda does already, no reason why an open-source runtime couldn't do so either. The fact it wouldn't be native code, executed directly by the CPU, but Wasm executed by a VM, makes things even simpler.

<comment><USER12> >but now browsers and operating systems are so secure that it's mostly a non- issue

Right, which is the point - it took an absolutely behemoth effort backed by megacorps to get us to this point. These applications are public-facing because that's the key way for the corps to make money - content delivery.

Why would anyone put this same effort into building more complicated internal services _enabling derivative services to extract value from their platform_?

> Calculating how much computing resources you're using is something that i.e. > AWS Lambda does already

Yes, exactly - another megacorp built a service that makes them huge amounts of money, and now they sell access to it. This code is certainly not publicly accessible

So, again, help me bridge this gap - what possible reason would Spotify (to further GP's example) build such a platform for? This means that Spotify needs to maintain massively more infrastructure in order to help _others_ extract value from their platform.

It just doesn't check out. Is it objectively a more efficient method of computation? Yes. Is it also completely misaligned with corporate incentives in the modern day? In my opinion, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > and of course it has a flexible type system that is actually sound, ... No > holes!

And this is where I went from "good faith reading" to actually not believing the article. Every general language that has made this claim has had holes - and those holes are usually patchable, but to claim a language with almost no adoption is leak proof is foolhardy at best. Just because you haven't discovered how your particular abstraction is broken doesn't mean it isn't.

<comment><USER14> Copy/pasted from google search:

> A sound type system means you can never get into a state where an expression > evaluates to a value that doesn't match the expression's static type.

It's not actually _that_ hard to make a provably sound type system. The claim can only strain belief if it includes some type-level feature that makes this difficult.

Of course, it should also be proved. e.g. Java's type system is not sound even though there is no good design reason while it shouldn't be (to be fair - <USER2> only happens in cases so intricately twisted that nobody will ever stumble on them by accident).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The programming model seems nice (orthogonal persistence especially), but the fact that it's running decentralized is a big cost.

Maybe someone will provide the same developer niceness in a traditional cloud way. The only people who would prefer DFINITY at that point are people who really care about decentralization (which is fewer than the marketing hype suggests imo.)

</comment><comment><USER16> Disclosure: I work at DFINITY, but not on this team. I can probably answer most questions folks may have...

<comment><USER17> If I understand the persistence stuff correctly, programs don't do explicit I/O but instead just run forever and thus use normal variables and data structures to store state.

This sounds very convenient until one fine day you decide add a new feature, so you need to change your code, but the new code has different variables and there may not be any sensible way to "port" the data.

<comment><USER18> " Motoko provides numerous features to help you leverage this environment, including language features that allow your heap to self-migrate when you upgrade the software of a canister." [https://sdk.dfinity.org/docs/language- guide/motoko.html](https://sdk.dfinity.org/docs/language-guide/motoko.html)

So in this sense it could be a bit like creating migrations to your database. Maybe on "cloud scale" you just would like to migrate the data when it is used.

Edit: Few more details in this document: [https://sdk.dfinity.org/docs/language-guide/actors- async.htm...](https://sdk.dfinity.org/docs/language-guide/actors-async.html)

<comment><USER17> Okay, so the magic ingredient is that variables that are marked "stable" are treated specially. Nice!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> No code examples in the entire article?

<comment><USER20> I was thinking it might be AI-generated, and while it could string together these common concepts very impressively, it could not generate code samples.

But I suppose it's probably actually the kind of article the AI engines digest in order to be able to generate similar ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I keep seeing that wasm is safe and secure. But to my understanding wasm is just a bytecode spec. The interpreters are what have to be judged secure. If an interpreter has a hole then the sandbox is escapable. As you add jits and various cpu optimizations and other options, the more likely there's a bug there somewhere someone can exploit. I don't understand. Is there a mathematical way to verify that a wasm interpreter is secure?

<comment><USER22> Yes, there is, but you need to define what it should be secure against. Then, a proof can be constructed, given particular assumptions. I doubt this will ever be done for wasm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sounds a bit like Ethereum but without a cryptocurrency?

<comment><USER24> It's more like Solidity done right, by a team of expert language designers. It's the scripting language for DFINITY, so it does actually have a token, fwiw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Perhaps I should learn this? ;)

Idk web assembly yet though, scanning to figure out how this could be useful for an amateur web-dev.

<comment><USER26> Don't learn this or web assembly, learn TypeScript and then Rust. TS will teach you a lot about type systems, classes, modules, interfaces, async/await, etc. Rust will teach you about memory management, filter expressions, futures, (im)mutability, etc. They are both mature languages that are usable in your web dev context and that you'll be able to find resources to learn. No one is writing WebAssembly manually, it's even lower level than regular assembly. It would be super painful to write directly, it's meant as a virtual architecture that can be efficiently executed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Makes me think we're close to the stage where different languages can be easily combined in the same project, and therefore can be created willy-nilly as easily as DSLs in Lisps.

<comment><USER26> This already exists on the JVM or the .NET CLR. The concept of an intermediate language is also old. It's easy to call between languages as well. The "innovation" is really the true OO nature of everything being message passing, and no real persistence mechanism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> So, this is Erlang.

</comment><comment><USER29> That sounds more like clickbait. Just as if someone took the latest marketing buzzwords and somehow tried to make a product out of it. If there was any meat to this, they would lead with the use case and say "Hey here: This is the problem the world has. Here is how we solved it". But anything blockchain related already went more like "Uhh look, here is a blockchain. Enjoy". This is worse...

This seems to be just like Ethereum without the blockchain. What does "building directly on the internet" even mean? What do I ever need distributed, cryptographic consensus for? The use-case escapes me completely, this even seems more useless than Ethereum, where I can see at least some applications thanks to the blockchain. But that thing without the blockchain just doesn't make any sense. But hey, it got WASM, so must be cool.

<comment><USER30> the fact that you call Ethereum useless shows that you are way too ignorant to voice such a strong opinion.

educate yourself and try again.

i work with bchains since 2013 and ethereum is a major driver for a lot of innovation and real life applications. i've built an energy trading platform on top of it that allows local business to localize their energy management. its deployed and working, granted , in a small poc here in Adam. but still.

also what do you think powers 99% of all altcoins?

<comment><USER31> is there a hub of some sort to follow ethereum projects? last time I checked (few months I believe) cryptocats was the app with more activity. also I'm curious about your project, if there's anything you're willing to share

<comment><USER32> Just search for DeFi (decentralized finance).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Ghost in the shell reference? Motoko Kusanagi

<comment><USER34> Ah, I was wondering which anime they were referring to with this...

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

<comment><USER36> I think the guy who made the internet is also trying to fix the worst bits rather than reinventing it. I'm backing Mr Berners-Lee. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_\(web_decentralization_project\))</comment></comment>


Show HN: I'll help you name your next startup/product for $50 - <AUTHOR> http://startupgods.com/ Hey HN. This is a weekend project of mine. It's an idea I had after seeing so many comments here about the lack of available .com names for startups.
As PG once said: "Take a luxury and make it into a commodity"[1]. So, I decided I'd try turning name consulting from something only large corporations could afford to something anyone could. I hope you'll take me up on it :)
If you'd like to see a few examples of my work, just check out the links in the footer. Thanks for your attention.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is a weekend project of mine. It's an idea I had after seeing so many comments here about the lack of available .com names for startups.

As PG once said: "Take a luxury and make it into a commodity"[1]. So, I decided I'd try turning name consulting from something only large corporations could afford to something anyone could. I hope you'll take me up on it :)

If you'd like to see a few examples of my work, just check out the links in the site's footer.

[1] <http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html>

<comment><USER2> Did you take into account how much time it will take you to process a non- trivial order? $20 seems quite low to me when you want to achieve a good hourly rate.

Maybe you should bump it up a bit (> $50). It would still be a commodity price.

edit: By the way, I totally love the design!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, you're right, I've increased the price to $50 for new orders.

<comment><USER3> $50 is also too low. Price according to the value you generate. You generate obvious value in three ways:

(1) Company operators waste tons of time coming up with names. SWAG the number of hours you think people typically take to settle on a name (it took us several days). Back that out to a dollar figure by dividing the typical yearly salary of a _funded_ company operator by $2000 and multiplying by hours.

(2) Companies frequently rename. Put a dollar figure on the cost of a company rename 6 months in, then multiple that by the percentage risk you think the typical company has of renaming (how many renames do you see? how many companies do you think there are in your market?).

(3) Better names generate business (or, they ostensibly do). By the way, I'd probably use Mint vs. Wesabe as my primary example here, since both sides mentioned Mint's name as a key asset.

There is no way these three factors add up to just $50.

A side benefit of charging something closer to your value is, working with people who think $20 is OK but $50 is too much will absolutely inevitably cause you heartache. The people that think $50 is too much are going to be bad customers (as a group). For any business, be it outsourced order management for prop trading firms or hobby figurine sales, $50 is a rounding error.

Geeks have a hard time remembering that pricing isn't just about optimizing customer acquisition vs. customer value. It's also a key component of your positioning. If you charge hobbyist rates, you will serve the hobbyist market. Look at graphic design. It is very possible to get good-looking illustration done near your price point, but _impossible_ to get it done by anyone with a reputation. Designers that serve real companies charge multiple orders of magnitude more just for piecework. And real companies wouldn't dream of slumming with the $50-$100 illustrators, even when those people have more talent. Pick the market you want to serve, and then tailor the price point to that.

<comment><USER4> Apparently you missed the part where he quoted PG saying: "Take a luxury and make it into a commodity"

It's because he's charging a commodity price that I decided to give it a go and pony up. I would never _ever_ pay the going rate for a 'professional' in this business.

<comment><USER3> No, I got that part, and also the part of his positioning where he said "name consulting was previously only available to big companies and we want to make it available to smaller companies".

Pricing isn't a binary decision between "cheap" and "nosebleed". This is another geek pricing pathology.

I think $50 is too cheap. I think, if your market is "people that actually need names but are smaller than PepsiCo", there are very few three-figure prices that aren't rounding errors. Why would he want your business? How many entities are there like you, and how often do they pony up for names, and how much does it cost to support them?

<comment><USER4> Well, in our case we would normally just come up with a name ourselves. But because 50 dollars is worth a shot we're giving him some business. And something tells me there might just be more people in the same situation as we are. But I guess we won't know until he lets us know how many from HN decided to give it a go.

<comment><USER3> If DHH went with HN's take on what Basecamp should cost, he'd be racing Honda Civics instead of supercars. Is my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would help if you showed some project descriptions, and the names you have found for them (of course with consent from the customers), as a kind of portfolio.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. Eventually you want to get to something like <http://www.thenameinspector.com/portfolio/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe I'm cynical, but because you emphasis the "money back" part, it feels more like a scam. I was sort-of half expecting an auto-name-generator: "$randomstring.com is still available!" If only 10% don't ask their money back, you make a profit. I once heard about a "baby gender predictor", with money back guarantee, which just always emailed you "Congrats, it will be a boy!". About 50% right :).

<comment><USER8> Maybe a bit off-topic, but this scam has always intrigued me. You can, in fact, do better than just "Money back guarantee!" You can do as much as, say, "We'll give you your money back, plus an extra 50% of the fee!" So your "customers" pay $50, and if you are wrong you give them back $75. You still make $12.50 on average per customer by guessing randomly, so long as you scam sufficiently many people.

<comment><USER9> This is precisely how sports handicapping services work. Every week, 50% of your customers are happy and return, the other 50% are unhappy and _might_ not return.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _Finding a good name is hard. Finding an available domain name is even > harder. Fortunately, we do both. Really well._

and then you probably meant to say...

> _Here are the examples of the names we created:_

followed by a list of really good names.

</comment><comment><USER11> You could do more to get the potential customer comfortable with your product. 7 days and $50 is a lot to request of people, when there is competition for this service. It looks like one of those competing tools was created by you, <http://impossibility.org> . And for full disclosure, I am working on a domain name suggestion tool too: <http://domainjig.com>

During testing, I learned that many different opinions exist about what makes a good domain name. So while you may have settled the matter in your own head, you should take care to set expectations for your customers. A quick list of domains you think are good (perhaps also domains you think are not good) would help people see if they agree with your priorities.

For instance, I've heard differing opinions about the importance of these characteristics:

.com only vs other Top Level Domains

fewer characters vs simpler concepts

distribution mechanisms: SEO, ads, word of mouth

misspellings, or non-obvious spellings

similar style to recent successful startups

country-specific registrar risk

combine TLD letters into the word

non-english languages

adjective + noun

rhyming / puns

describes the product and/or a tone

As an example, this article describes priorities baked-in to the domain name suggestion tool at domainjig.com : <http://domainjig.com/ideas/great-domain- names.html>

btw, I like the eyebrow raise on mouseover.

</comment><comment><USER12> Did you read the naming philosophy section? This bit is interesting:

"Think about this scenario: You're at a party and someone asks you where you work. If you say "I work for shoes.com," it's pretty obvious that you work for a website that sells shoes.

But, if you say "I work for shoe.ly," then you have to go on to explain it to them: "It's a website that sells shoes." If you owned the .com, everyone would already know that."

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a very cool idea, but I would lose the whole Zeus thing, it gives an air of adolescence to the site. Also,

* Saying you'll find the perfect name is a bit of a stretch, what does "perfect" mean in this context? Is _google_ a perfect name?

* When you say results are guaranteed, you mean the customer will like it. However, in most cases, the founders liking the name has little bearing on how good the name resonates with customers, that's what's important (read pg's discussion about their initial agony when their cool name for their startup was taken, their original choice sounds horrible) . I think you should provide a methodology, even a simplistic one, to help people decide which one is better.

* If you don't have a portfolio yet, which I assume since you say this was a weekend project, do analysis on 5-10 company names (if YC the better), and explain why they are good using your methodology. This will give you credibility. Show that you are the expert in this field. Right now, it looks like another name guessing site.

</comment><comment><USER14> startupgods.com? I dunno, you look like a plumber with a leaky faucet. I'd have a little more confidence if you had a name more like "PerfectNameFinder.com" or something like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I own PerfectAlias.com as well, but I felt StartupGods.com was more brandable, and would capture the attention of my target audience.

<comment><USER15> StartupGods > PerfectAlias. Perhaps it is because my first language isn't English but French. To me alias means second name.

<comment><USER16> It means the same to those of us with English as a first language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How about an India price? I'll do it for 20$. As a starter, here is a free name for anyone to register:

nameonic.com: rhymes with mnemonic and is a great name for a names company.

Let's see how long the name lasts.

UPDATE: The name was just registered. Thanks Guys. wow that was fast. 32 minutes standing.

<comment><USER18> Looks like the negative feedback about the name didn't stop someone from registering it. Any other good names?

<comment><USER17> Lots. Just ask. Having registered serial sites with clever names, this is a hobby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Have you heard of <http://www.pickydomains.com>?

</comment><comment><USER20> Thank you for this post, as it inspired me to charge myself $50 and come up with a name for a venture of mine. Just bought instarchive.com, neat!

</comment><comment><USER21> We were John's first customer. It was mostly an impulse buy because it was so cheap.

We have a restaurant guide in The Netherlands with a dutch name (eet.nu, translates to eat.now) with a big community of reviewers. We want to expand, so a international name is required.

If we brainstorm about names, it takes up a lot of time and we're never completely satisfied with the results. Naming stuff is hard, and it's even harder if English is not your first language.

After 4-5 hours of waiting, John gave us a list of 14 names (we got 7 bonus names!), and we picked the name HungryJury.com. Registered the .com and twitter account a few minutes ago.

We're pretty satisfied with the service and will probably use it again in the future!

</comment><comment><USER22> You should also try to do twitter handle availability.

I think I saw a website long time back which checked a username availability across many websites and social networks. Can't remember it. Can someone help me out here.

<comment><USER23> <http://www.usernamecheck.com> :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wish you were around when Jen and I were wrecking our brain coming up with imoveyou.com (from getupandmove.me).

We kept asking ourselves "surely there are people who are good at naming things, WHERE ARE THEY?!"

</comment><comment><USER25> Was it always $20 as the HN headline says? The website says $50 now...

<comment><USER26> ... and he just changed the HN headline to $50!

I did the same double take, thinking the price changed. They changed the price! Sneaky!

<comment><USER27> You have to appreciate though, that $50 is still a modest price if the service is as good as it claims. Just look at domain squatter prices, you get pretty much nothing with $50.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Alright I'm testing you out. 50$ for a great name is an awesome price point imo. It's just enough that I find it expensive but small enough that I'd pay for it. With a money back guarantee I'm glad to test the waters.

<comment><USER15> I'm replying to myself to give you some feedback. After the checkout process it would be nice to be given a time frame that I can expect an answer by.

<comment><AUTHOR> You should have received an email within a few minutes of your order with timeframe information, can you let me know if you got it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'd like to use this--I have a site I soft-launched recently that I'd like to rebrand--but without examples of names you've come up with in the past, it's a hard sell for me.

I know I can get my money back, but I really would rather not do that... I'd rather only make the buy if I can be reasonably sure I'll be happy, instead of having to make you work and then ask for my money back if it turns out we have separate styles.

</comment><comment><USER29> I spent $900 naming on a non-profit startup. F __k.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think startupgods.com is a cool name for this business. Nice layout also. If I had a new business in mind I wouldn't hesitate to try your service. The money back guarantee makes me feel comfortable, but I am just curious on the amount of refunds you will be processing - I guess it depends on how creative you are at naming. Please report back with results.

</comment><comment><USER31> Will you be publishing any names you come up with, so potential customers can see for themselves if they like your "style" or not?

</comment><comment><USER32> Seems to me like a good way to farm start up ideas. Willing to sign an NDA before I give you my idea?

</comment><comment><USER33> I was about to give this one a try but it seems the price has gone up to $100 now!!

I hope thats as a result of demand because $50 was at a level that I didn't think twice, but $100 has made me reconsider. Hopefully for your sake I am the minority then!

</comment><comment><USER34> This is super cool. I haven't signed up yet, and obviously haven't seen the quality of the results, but it's a great idea, and definitely something I would pay for for my next project. (Naming is definitely one of my weak points)

<comment><USER35> I agree, although I'd love to see some results or examples (and I must admit I'm a little pessimistic). I hope to see some on the website soon :)

<comment><USER34> That's true.. When anyone gets some results page from this, would be great to post them here for the rest of us to see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This sounds like a great idea. I find shortish domains all the time and try and squeeze an idea into them, but I have real trouble finding something properly appropriate (for .com anyway). I've signed the forms :)

</comment><comment><USER37> Sounds cool. I have a company name already, but I may need (a|some) product name(s) later... when I get to that point, I may give you a shot. I mean, it's $50, with a money-back guarantee, what's the harm?

</comment><comment><USER38> Wow, ok $100 now? Must be getting some pretty serious orders to jump from $20 to $50 and now to $100? Good for you. I'm with the rest of them though, I'd like to see some results/examples!

</comment><comment><USER39> Do you check candidate names for possible trademark conflicts? (I understand that you are not a lawyer, but at least some preliminary checking would be nice.)

</comment><comment><USER40> So what happens if I pay, say I don't like the name you come up with, and then buy the domain and launch with it anyway?

<comment><USER41> I presume you get a free name and an unpleasant nagging feeling from your conscience. It's probably not worth the effort to try to prevent this in the beginning.

<comment><USER42> I suppose they could take $10 of the $50 you paid them and register the name before sending it to you, and if you like it they'll transfer it to you. If you don't they'll give you your money back and try to sell the name to someone else. But, yea I guess the hassle of doing this probably isn't worth it in the beginning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Great idea! I was just racking my brain last night for a good name so this is a great service to have available!

</comment><comment><USER44> Tried to order. Not working. Got an error and now I get "state not valid" when I try to place the order again.

</comment><comment><USER45> You should give some example names you came up with. This is like going to a designer without a portfolio.

</comment><comment><USER46> I'll do it for $40, and have a few who can attest to the awesomene-ness of the domains I suggest.

Email is in profile.

<comment><USER47> I don't see your email in your profile?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> <http://www.namingthingsishard.com>

</comment><comment><USER49> Cool!

At this price, I'm sure many will go for it.

One quick question:

Do you check/ensure the .com domain availability of the names you find?

<comment><AUTHOR> I do. Dot com availability is one of the major items on my checklist.

<comment><USER49> Double cool!

One suggestion, though: A quick look through your home page did not reveal this. You might want to revise the copy to mention this (prominently).

HTH

<comment><USER50> Don't know if it's already been changed, but it's pretty prominent right now. It's the 3rd sentence of the "What do I get" section (and it's in bold).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Just signed up for a project of mine, excited to see what you come up with.

</comment><comment><USER52> Just submitted our order. Should be interesting to see the results.

</comment><comment><USER53> ok, anyone actually got a good name? Would like to do this if it ain't a scam and i can verify someone got their money back when not satisfied..

</comment><comment><USER54> Why not just crowdsource names on HN?

<comment><USER55> There's a site for that: <http://www.needanym.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I was so impressed, I bought one!

</comment><comment><USER57> point me to a few happy customers and i'd be happy to try it

</comment><comment><USER58> I will too!

</comment><comment><USER59> lol... you do know people pay branding companies $10,000 per name to do this right?

<comment><USER60> Hence his comment about making a luxury a commodity. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2257574></comment></comment>


Looking for Hackers in Orlando, FL - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/workurbn We are building a start-up team here in Downtown Orlando, we have an incubator off of Magnolia and Jefferson called WorkUrbn.  We are searching for a developer to join the team on a few start-up projects. If anyone's out there near by let me know, or send us a message on our workurbn Facebook page. <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the responses. We are located in downtown Orlando, we created an urban incubator to try to build up the start-up community in Orlando. We are working on the website for workurbn.com, should be up within the next week.

</comment><comment><USER2> I spent a couple days there during my last vacation ;-)

Would have been delighted if I met some fellow hackers, but schedule was _very_ tight.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm in Tampa, might be able to make the drive.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm in Orlando too. Where / what / when etc?

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm in Orlando, when/where?

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm in Tallahassee, and meeting some local hackers would be really nice.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm a student out in Melbourne, if I got a ride, this would be great.

<comment><USER8> I might be starting one up in Melbourne in a few months. add me on facebook <http://www.facebook.com/esnellman>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a little north in Gainesville.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not too far away on I-4 East

</comment><comment><USER11> I know a great hacker in Orlando; his name is Mickey. You don't have a problem with rodents, do you?</comment>


Microsoft Customer Support Exposed 250M User Records - <AUTHOR> https://cybsploit.com/2020/01/27/microsoft-customer-support-exposed-250-million-user-records-bTBoMGtIaWcyZFdTRlN3bnNFK3piZz09 <comment><USER2> This is from January and already made the rounds …</comment>


No, Facebook Didn't Decrease Page Feed Reach To Sell More Promoted Posts - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/07/killing-rumors-with-facts-no-facebook-didnt-decrease-page-news-feed-reach-to-sell-more-promoted-posts/

<comment><USER2> Wow, this graph is crazy [http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/page- pos...](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/page-post-reach- graph.png) The standard deviation is more than twice the average!

This is a bit disingenuous: "The launch of Promoted Posts had no impact on the news feed reach of the average Page." And I think this is just wrong: "Sadly, news outlets like Ars Technica that are typically level-headed covered the Dangerous Minds rant as true despite its lack of hard data to back up its anecdotal claim." The linked article says: "Ars' own Facebook page has experienced similar fluctuations: even as likes continue to climb, traffic generated by the page has remained unusually low." So they do, in fact, have data.

<comment><USER3> Really should have modeled it at a Poisson distribution. The Normal/Gaussian distribution doesn't seem to model the information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks like a PR move, nobody knows their algorithm. Similar situation to Google, what comes on top of the stream? I mean you pay to manipulate it, so there is no neutrality to begin with.

The paid concept is flawed, think about it:

You follow 100 Sites/Friends nobody promotes their post. Now everybody pays to promote their posts for the same amount.

Stream looks exactly the same.

So Facebook obviously hopes for a race to the top here where everybody pays more to stay up. Great idea, it will depend on CPA in the end anyway. Seems way too expensive right now.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting... I'm still trying to figure out how a smaller page I like (~2000 likes) and interact with - which I know has very little spam reports has almost completed stopped showing up in my News Feed, yet every time I log in I'm told to Like Mitt Romney.

</comment><comment><USER6> From a reasonable sized set of people I know who use Facebook Pages they saw a massive downward trend in engagement from people who liked the page at the same time Promoted Posts came in. Complete conjecture as I know a statistically small set of people in comparison to the number of people using Pages, but 30 people with the same issue is a bit of an odd situation.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Basically if you never click, Like, comment, or share posts by a Page, Facebook made that Page less likely to show up in your feed. Cathcart says "That's a relatively large change. It resulted in a large decrease in spam reports", meaning it succesfully made the Facebook news feed better."

Following that logic I know a really good way to make the news feed even 'better': don't show any page updates ever. Or even any updates at all.

<comment><USER8> Somehow, all of this implies that i would 100% of the time i find a post showing up on my wall being interesting like or comment it.. Which is just not true - i might skim over it, look at the attached picture and that's it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> this Constine kid is as annoying about facebook as MG Siegler is about Apple.

boring.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand why he would provide facts that aren't facts and pretend like those things make his argument for him. wut?

<comment><USER11> You must not be familiar with the Author. Let's just say He's extremely bullish on Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER13> sure they didn't, also can techcrunch and gawker rags make a post without including some stupid meme shit image?</comment>


Steve Jobs' Commencement Speech at Stanford, 2005 - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

<comment><USER2> One of the last things I bothered printing was a transcript of this. [http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-06150...](http://news- service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505?view=print)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking"

I can't decide if this is good or bad advice. How do you find the fine line between being ambitious, and being arrogant?

<comment><USER4> the way I look at it, ambition is your own personal goal/view/desire (directed inward) . . . arrogance is when you push your ambitions on others (directed outward).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've seen this multiple times but now I'm going to have to watch it again.

Thanks for posting.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> loved the quote at the end. "stay hungry, stay foolish"

<comment><USER6> Here's the issue he's talking about [http://www.wholeearth.com/issue- electronic-edition.php?iss=1...](http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic- edition.php?iss=1180) \- it's on the back cover. This is one of the many 'last' Whole Earth Catalogs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is definitely one of my favorite speeches of all time. It's so inspirational, particularly for a young college student aspiring to be a great entrepreneur.

Too bad they couldn't find someone better than Anthony Kennedy for the '09 Commencement.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you recommend Open Office? - <AUTHOR>

I decided not to buy Office suite that came with the laptop when it will expire next week. Are there Open Office users here? I know it opens Excel files. Is the spreadsheet as good as Excel? Are you happy with Open Office as an alternative to Office? Thank you. <comment><USER2> I use Open Office and iWork on a Mac, and Open Office on Linux. On the Mac, Open Office's GUI sticks out as ugly and buggy. I think it's ok, but not great, on Linux, though. (This probably reflects that the Open Office port to Mac is still relatively new.)

I prefer Open Office Writer to Word because the way that it handles styles and document hierarchy make more sense to me. Also, the document layout seems to be relatively stable; at least I haven't observed many cascading layout catastrophes in Open Office Writer yet (as opposed to Word).

A big downside of Open Office Writer is its inability to embed many file types as figures (for example, you can't embed PDF). Apple's Pages is much better in this regard.

I dont use spreadsheets much, but even my light use brings Apple's Numbers to its knees. Open Office Calc is much better in this regard. However, Open Office's charts looks like crap, and Excel's chart feature is powerful but a pain to use. Numbers' charts are easy to use and quite pretty, but Numbers breaks down in flames for even moderately-sized documents (as in _click, click, draw chart, go get coffee, come back in 5min, Numbers still not responding_ ). I now crunch my data in Open Office Calc or Python and render down-sampled graphs with Numbers.

Open Office Impress is terrible. You are pretty much limited to bullet points, images, and ugly transitions. I hate PowerPoint. Keynote is great; there is no way I am ever going back to a presentation package without a "magic move" transition.

<comment><USER3> Regarding impress, the transitions and effects are indeed pretty horrible, but I've never seen any serious presentation with bouncing words and spinny slides. It looks corny and unprofessional.

<comment><USER2> True, but that's true for any feature if you use it just for the feature's sake. You can use animations for so much more than that. For example, it can be very illustrative to animate a data structure manipulation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> All the time. Especially for it's export to pdf feature; can't believe people still pay for "pdf printers"...

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a Linux user with Open Office 3.0 by night and Win XP with MS Office 2003 by day. A friend recently sent me a .docx file from MS Office 2k7. I was unable to open it in OO 3.0 but it worked fine in Word 2003 (it's supposed to work in OO). Just yesterday I typed a Word 2003 doc with heavy use of formatting... OO was unable to preserve the margins. I've found that Excel spreadsheets which make heavy use of macros will open but the macros probably won't work. That being said, I used Open Office exclusively when I was in school and personally felt the UI was easier to use didn't find the features lacking. I've never had trouble taking a file from OO to MSO, but the reverse will often have cosmetic defects.

</comment><comment><USER6> YES ! Open Office has been my only office package for over two years now. Use it mostly on Ubuntu but also on a spare Windows XP notebook. No problems sharing files between the two environments. Send documents, etc to others in PDF. Have struck some compatability issues reading Office 2007 files, but so do Office 2003, etc users. I just ask people to SaveAs in an older version.

I have tried Office 2007 out of curiosity, for me it was less of a transition effort to go to OO than to get used to MSO'07.

For publication quality writing I use Lyx and Latex. Lets me concentrate on the content and not futz with styles, etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've used Open Office in the past and advocated it to my friends but I hypocritically use Office. The ribbon for all it's criticism seems to be highly functional, aesthetically pleasing and usable (using pictorial representations that aren't 16x16). There's a "Save as XPS/PDF" plugin for Office as well, no one has mentioned which works fine. I only use LaTeX for technical documents with a lot of math, but the Office equation editor does the job nicely with a few quirks here and there though. My only qualm is the lack of ligatures and kerning in Office, which will hopefully be added in '10.

<comment><USER6> I would think that for touch typists (those that avoid the mouse) Latex is more productive that Office. The typesetting is far superior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been using Open Office almost exclusively (over MS Office) for the last three years on both Windows and Linux.

For basic day to day tasks OO works very well.

If you want to accomplish something more esoteric, you can probably do it(and there might be more than one way), but you will have to look at external help sites, and that might take some time.

Then again, trickier things in MS Office might take some time to learn, as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> Open Office has improved spectacularly over the years. It's very good for people who just want to work with data. There was a time when its interoperability with Office was poor, but that has come a long way. These days interoperability between versions of Office is poor, so there are times when OO can do a better job of reading a file created by a different vintage of Office.

</comment><comment><USER10> If I have to use a word processor, then I use Pages for OS X. The full screen mode is nice, and it seems more responsive that OO or Office.

IMO, best is LaTex, but some collaborators, publishers, and customers don't like it. The advantage of LaTex is that you can spend more time writing and less time worrying about styling and formatting.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've used it extensively when compatibility with a bunch of MS Office users was not a concern. Never had any trouble opening other peoples' MS Office files, but I wouldn't trust it if I had to send lots of files to people.

For home use it's superb - even my computer-illiterate parents are using it exclusively.

</comment><comment><USER3> Custom build of OO, with added features: <http://www.go-oo.org/>

</comment><comment><USER12> I use Open Office all the time and have no problems with it. My wife does proof reading and she has to use Word, because taking a Word documment into OO then exporting it back out again as Word format changes the formatting.

Personally, I only use OpenOffice and have no problems.

</comment><comment><USER13> I frequently have issues opening word documents from some users of Word 2007. I know this is likely an MS Problem, but if interoperability is a concern, I would be wary. That said. I use it for most of my tasks. I also find OO spreadsheet's csv import to be superior.

</comment><comment><USER14> I use OpenOffice, and Calc is better than Excel. It has regular expression find/replace, and no 65,536 row limit. It is my favorite part of OpenOffice. I've used Writer a few times, mainly for the PDF export.

For most other uses, I just use Google Docs though.

</comment><comment><USER15> As long as you don't have to send/receive MS Office files to/from other people, it should be fine. In my experience there are still some horrible incompatibility issues (specially in formatting).

</comment><comment><USER16> It's fine for working with someone else's doc files. Sometimes you have to bend. For producing my own work, I'll take LaTeX over Office any day.

</comment><comment><USER17> Yes. Completely happy. As everyone else said, the export to pdf is great.

</comment><comment><USER18> OpenOffice has the best save-as PDF feature.

<comment><USER2> I beg to differ. On a Mac, Open Office's export to PDF is broken in weird ways (line weight sometimes wrong, fonts rendered incorrectly, other glitches), but printing to PDF from Pages (or any other application that allows you to print, including Open Office itself) has not yet let me down so far (and I use it a lot). NeoOffice, when I was still using it, did not have this problem, but failed in other interesting ways.

<comment><USER18> Finally got a Mac so I'm having to unlearn some assumptions/habits. Thanks for the FYI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks to everyone with your comments. I downloaded it and so far it is working great for me. There are many little things that I like much better than excel and word. I am glad I don't have to deal with the ribbon anymore. And also it appears to be faster. Help is very useful and unlike excel help, it is well organized, and very easy to find answers. I think overall this is a better user experience than MS Office.

</comment><comment><USER19> My company, of almost 30 employees, uses OO exclusively. We also use GoogleDocs if we're on the road and don't have access to a laptop. Nowadays, we have no issues with it at all. We just don't see the need for 90% of the MS Office features that we would never use, especially at that price.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a version of HTML that bans JavaScript? - <AUTHOR> Javascript is a privacy nightmare, and a CPU hog. We need a way to technically ban it. <comment><USER2> [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP)

      Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'none';

<comment><AUTHOR> Not like this?:

Content-Security-Policy: script-src 'none';

<comment><USER2> Probably yours, yes. On my own blog, I use:

      default-src 'self'; base-uri 'self'; style-src 'unsafe-inline' 'self'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_\(web_browser\))

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant server side, not client side. I can also install browser plugins, but that does not help.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How will we handle security when computation gets even faster? - <AUTHOR> The current encryption/hashing algorithms are based on the premise that it is virtually impossible to generate all possible permutations of the character set to reverse a hash or decrypt a byte stream, in meaningful time.<p>How are we planning to address this in the future when the computational powers exceed way beyond what we have today? Just curious what is being done to address this. <comment><USER2> You're talking about a brute force attack, right ? That's not something our encryption algorithms rely upon, but that _is_ encryption. I don't know much about this, but I suppose if computation gets way faster we can just scale up the encrypted values proportionally (larger key size/output text).

For e.g. we can generate larger primes for use in the RSA algorithm with the faster computer and it would take proportionally more time for it to factorize the numbers.

The problem would be when the required computations' (prime factorization in case of RSA) order of complexity is changed. For e.g. the Shor's algorithm can factorize prime numbers in polynomial time on a quantum computer: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry to be slightly short of knowledge here, but could you elaborate on why encryption algorithms don't rely on the fact that brute force is physically not meaningful?

And indeed, it goes without saying that if we follow the same computational paradigm, we might just as well scale up the values that we currently use.

My question was more around what if computational paradigms change. As the example you mentioned, the problem becomes solvable in polynomial time. What could be the basis of the next generation of encryption/hashing?

<comment><USER2> > could you elaborate on why encryption algorithms don't rely on the fact that > brute force is physically not meaningful

I didn't mean that the infeasability of brute forcing an encrypted text is not useful, I was rather suggesting that it is precisely the definition of encryption. I was trying to differentiate between: 1\. Using brute force method to convert an encrypted text to the original text without considering the encryption method. This is an inherent property of encryption, and does not pose a problem as you can scale up encrypted values to make brute-forcing infeasible on the fast computers * 2\. Breaking the algorithm instead.

> As the example you mentioned, the problem becomes solvable in polynomial > time

I think the issue in the example is not that the computing methods changed, but that the particular algorithm we use for encryption (prime factorization) has a polynomial solution on those computers. The point is that this shift in computing does not break all the encryption algorithms, there are other algorithms you can use that don't have a known solution (yet): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice- based_cryptography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice-based_cryptography).

* All of this is assuming that everyone has access to the same class of computers. Obviously if someone gets their hands on a drastically faster computer while everyone else is still using smaller keys/prime numbers, then you have a problem.</comment></comment></comment>


Evidence that "disfluencies" in speech enhance comprehension - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/your-speech-is-packed-with-misunderstood-unconscious-messages <comment><USER2> I'd love to see the study broken out by people who are listening for _confidence_ vs. _content_.

I recall showing my mom Paul Buchheit's Startup School 08 talk:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZxP0i9ah8E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZxP0i9ah8E)

I thought it was great, and I remember listening very intently to parse out exactly what he was saying and figure out what he was saying. I showed it to my mom, and her first reaction was "Why are you listening to him? He seems kinda nebbishy."

Notice how many pauses, umms, y'knows, and other filler words are in that speech. I ignored them because I already knew what he had accomplished; my assumption was that he knew what he was talking about, and so I should pay close attention. My mom, who knows nothing about tech and didn't start using GMail until 2012, came away with the impression that he was unconfident, rambling, and didn't really know what he was talking about.

The advice to eliminate filler words may be a consequence of a world where people make snap judgments about the credibility of a person in seconds, and usually are not qualified to judge the _content_ of the speech at all. Notice how the article says that this advice first caught on in the 20th century, right as mass communication and soundbite messages caught on. The studies they cite, however, all featured listeners _from the same field as the speaker_ who already cared about the content.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for posting this, can't believe it only has 10k views.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love these disfluencies, at the right times.

Obviously there are variations on use; where cases like overuse from being unprepared can be painful to listen to... But when obviously pausing to think of the best way to describe something to a particular/unfamiliar audience, or summarize a broader idea down to a specific area being discussed, I've noticed how helpful it can be in understanding, at least for the way that /I/ listen to people.

When I hear somebody "um", to think of the best intersection between what they know, context, and what I know, my mind is trying to do the exact same thing, or even beat them to it. For me, this definitely engages me more; even if I come to the wrong conclusion, my conscious thought is saturated with putting these pieces together. Any related information is already active, and easier to link together. -- Compared to someone speed-reading a prepared statement, where I may come away with some high level knowledge, but be too busy parsing the flow of speech to contemplate many of the finer points as they come.

</comment><comment><USER5> What I find interesting are the phrases and "turns of speech" we use without even knowing what they mean. I was day-dreaming about something last night, and a phrase flickered through my mind, and I remember thinking "I say that all the time, but I don't - strictly speaking - know what it means". I wish I could remember what it was, but I've actually forgotten now.

I'm sure most of us could come up with some examples in short order though. Here's something close: saying "dead XXX" like "dead simple". We know that when we hear that it means something like "really simple" by why would "dead" work there? Of course English is famous for overloading words with many meanings, and this stuff is dead common. But I still find it interesting to ponder the various phrases and what-not that we use.

None of which, of course, has a ton to do with the material in this article. It was really just the title that got me thinking down this path...

<comment><USER6> Phrases like "dead drunk" or "dead simple" use "dead" as an adverb. That usage dates back to the 15th century as is equivalent to "utterly, completely". A more curious case of "What... why?" come from certain non-literal idioms.

"Raining cats and dogs", "by the skin of one's teeth", "steal someone's thunder".

Regarding the article, I thought it was going to allude to things like "implicit microaggressions". Was glad to see it was focused more on credibility and use of "uhm", "ah" and other natural stumbling blocks of speech.

The more someone pauses, to me, the more sincere they appear to me. As if they are trying to think of the best way to phrase something for their audience. Even if in reality they're frantically trying to remember what they were about to say...

<comment><USER7> I like the notion that we are all, to some degree, synaesthetes. Hence the colourful similes and metaphors that add spice to speech.

See? Can similes be colourful? Can speech be spicy?

To me this chimes with human brains being pattern seeking/matching machines. Enough meaning leaks across discrete word definitions that we can freely use phrases such as "an icy stare", "a prickly relationship" to appeal to senses that are not directly involved in stares or relationships.

I have heard language theorists suggest that this appeal to multi-sensory communication may have influenced the evolution of language among early humans. Unfortunately I have no memory of who said this.

Still. I enjoy the theory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The study probably controlled for this, but not mentioned in the article: um's give listeners time to think.

Corollary: removing disfluencies from online lectures diminishes comprehension.

I took Ullman's "Automata" course, and they'd edited out all the um's and pauses etc in the vidoes, making them half as long. It reduces download size, but made them really difficult to understand. You don't have time to process one interesting thought before the next is upon you. Very different from live lectures. I often had to rewind 5 to 10 times.

Yes, the material isn't easy and Ullman is full of insights, but this happened even with the beginning of the introductory lecture.

From this article, it seems that the um's and pauses would also have helped signal difficult vs easy ideas. (Sometimes I worked hard to grasp his precise meaning, only to realize he was speaking casually).

</comment><comment><USER9> You have to agree though, "uhm"s and "uh"s are very annoying to listen to from a speaker.

<comment><USER10> Editing podcasts makes me very aware of these types of speech patterns--both in people I interview and myself.</comment></comment>


The obsolescence of Hedge Funds & the rise of digital agents - <AUTHOR> http://learningann.wordpress.com/2014/03/09/the-obsolescence-of-hedge-funds-the-rise-of-digital-agents/

<comment><USER2> Neural nets are a useful technology but they are not magic. I doubt they will play much of a role in any effort to improve financial markets.

First, neural nets have been used for decades by various financial market participants, in particular hedge funds, and there impact has been very modest. Second, they are hard to understand thus unlikely to be favored most governments, regulators or even market participants in the unlikely event there was some agreement for global market reform. Lastly, there is no evidence that neural nets have any real advantage in valuing assets over existing techniques. If there were they would be more widely used for that purpose.

<comment><AUTHOR> the Neural Network as a fundamental device is only as powerful as the person who designed it.

However you could add every single possible training data segment in as an input parameter, however if you don't have the horsepower and fast RAM storage to process the information then it will take an extremely long amount of time.

with the advent of GPGPU technologies, neural nets are resurfacing as the goto machine learning algorithm.

<comment><USER2> Yes they are great and all the things you mention are super cool but since neural nets are only as good as the humans that design them we can't expect them to solve fundamental problems like market failures. For example would better weapons prevent wars? Maybe but not always and not forever?

<comment><AUTHOR> You make good points, however it wouldn't be one or two networks that would solve such an incredibly complex problem.

In my next post I'll try and answer this question, I still don't see eye to eye with you on this as I feel that a fairly well abstracted net structure could solve this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anyone interested in my new blog post? I'm currently looking for work and this blog I've made is documenting the work I've done in trying to make my self more employable.</comment>


Humble People Are More Helpful to Others and Perform Better at Work - <AUTHOR> http://healthland.time.com/2012/04/27/humility-a-quiet-underappreciated-strength/

<comment><USER2> Well no shit.</comment>


How a Bill Actually Becomes A Law (Infographic) - <AUTHOR> http://www.mikewirthart.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/howlawsmadeWIRTH2.jpg

<comment><AUTHOR> Original context is in: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3369541> but I thought this infographic was informative enough to deserve its own post.</comment>


Jare.io, an Instant and Free CDN - <AUTHOR> http://www.yegor256.com/2016/03/30/jare-instant-free-cdn.html?2016-13 <comment><USER2> AWS CloudFront is already very cheap and easy to get setup, probably less than 5 mins. No reason to go through a 3rd party. CloudFlare is even easier, better and completely free.

I don't see why this is worth the risk (or IMO, the trouble).

<comment><USER3> CloudFront is cheap to start using, it does not stay cheap much like most of Amazon's offerings.

<comment><USER2> Then use CloudFlare.

And if it doesnt stay cheap for you, then why would it for this guy? He even says to keep the traffic small in which case paying for your own CloudFront distribution with the security, performance and control it brings is far better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ease of use and price I don't think are the most important issues when you the most important issue is reliability and how do I know you won't shut this down because too many people use your service .

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is it free ? How do you pay the servers ?

>If your traffic is huge, you need your own account in CloudFront or somewhere else. My service is for small projects.

Can you define exactly what small is ?

<comment><USER6> Small is probably "Anything goes until I see my bill next month"...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Kudos and props for offering a service like this. Could basically be abused very easily by some nefarious dev.

<comment><USER8> So why give props and kudos? It a very bald idea but (and I am talking from my own experience) when offering free services like this; when they really get picked up in no time you can not afford to keep them up unless you start to implement a paid service. In this case that would mean just reselling CloudFront one-on-one. So, cool for now but not really maintainable if you ask me.

<comment><USER9> In theory there is an arbitrage opportunity here, given that with enough users on the service Jare could be paying for most of the bandwidth at higher tiers ($0.06 - $0.02) and solo the users would likely be in the lower tiers ($0.085 - $0.08).

However, I suspect without an AWS Partner agreement in place, they will be skating on thin ice.</comment></comment></comment>