The Chaos (1922) - <AUTHOR> http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

<comment><USER3> Isaac Asimov, Benjamin Franklin, Richard Feynman, and many many other famous public intellectuals have argued for the simplification of English spelling. Many frame it as an ethical issue, arguing that our complex nonsensical spelling rules contribute to illiteracy. As the father of a three-year-old, I can attest that our illogical and inconsistent application of phonemes puts up uneccessary obstacles to my child's ability to read. Unfortunately, any time the suggestion that we simplify spelling is put forth, it gets waved away because the older generations think the new way "looks funny."

[http://mxplx.com/schema/4/](http://mxplx.com/schema/4/)

<comment><USER4> Learning inconsistent/inefficient languages doesn't stifle literacy - <USER2> look at Asian languages. The problem with reform is that you'd be fine with it except if they decided on something you didn't agree with. Multiple by millions of speakers and any committee decision is laughed off the pages of public discourse. I remember the case of some place name being standardised a decade ago, and I guess they won the edit war on wikipedia but no normal person uses that pronunciation and they are just making it more difficult to find (although google's fuzzy matching can figure it out).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Written-spoken and spoken-written are interestingly asymmetric problems. In the first chapters of his autobiographical "The Words" Sartre tells of his troubles learning to spell French, but reading French out loud is not especially hard; there's more of a problem in writing underdetermination than speech underdetermination.

Sooo the simplification of spelling movement may aim to bring these to better symmetry (as is in Spanish, German, etc.) but it's not necessarily about this poem's complaints.

<comment><USER6> Given that English is a hybrid language anyway and historically has demonstrated a willingness to accept loaner words from any source, a solution could be to adopt the 160 symbol IPA. According to Wikipedia, seems like everyday English could get by with around 20 vowel and 24 consonant symbols. Regional variation spellings, for example battery: bat-er-ree (US) v. bat-tree (UK), could be learned as synonyms. But how would you handle homophones? EG Japanese, which is loaded with homophones, had that problem way back when they tried to convert from Chinese hanzi logograms to an exclusively phonetic kana writing system. They wound [homograph] up mixing the two with Chinese ideograms setting the intended theme followed by phonetic kana to particularize pronunciation and grammar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If anyone's looking for a mostly idiomatic American reading, I made a recording of a variant of this poem at some point several years ago, after a discussion on IRC with several curious non-native English speakers who: [https://soundcloud.com/jrus/english- pronunciation](https://soundcloud.com/jrus/english-pronunciation)

Also see SJ Klein's page about it: [http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/concordant- chaos/](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/concordant-chaos/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Problem is not the writing, but pronunciation. The word "battery" is the worst in my experience. Everybody understands my pronunciation (Spain, Norway, Singapore) except all of the english-speaking world. But Google Talk to the rescue, it is prounonced "Bäätdrii", but I have zero clue why.

<comment><USER9> I feel your pain.

For me, as somebody that learned English mostly reading, to know how to spell a word is easy but I never know if I am saying it "properly" (whatever it means in this crazy language).

I think the opposite is true for the native speakers: they started learning to speak and then they have to learn how to spell.

I used to joke that learning English is like learning Japanese; you have to learn two languages, oral and written.

<comment><USER10> Having someone to talk to is of great help. Thing is you get to pick their pronunciation as well, so you have to choose wisely :) For example, due to this, I tend to say route that doesn't sound like root. There are some words which have a tendency to sound the same when spoken and you need context during speech to differentiate them (depends on the speaker) - for example, flour vs flower. It's definitely a language that needs to be learned both written and spoken, but then which isn't?

<comment><USER9> "It's definitely a language that needs to be learned both written and spoken, but then which isn't?"

As mentioned in other comments, Spanish and German, for instance, are consistent. You know exactly (mostly) how to write a word even if the first time you heard it and you know how to say an unknown word that you see in writing.

<comment><USER11> Spanish speaker here: when you are a child you are taught "M plus A sounds MA", no further explanation needed. Obviously we have a good bunch of exceptions to the regularity of the language:

      * B and V sounds exactly the same.
      * ll + vowel and Y + vowel sound he same.
      * Y can work as the vowel I.
      * C, K, Q and Z share and overlap pronunciation:
        + CA, CO, CU = KA, KO, KU
        + CE, CI = ZE ZI (these later two are not valid combinations)
        + QUE, QUI = KE KI. (All other Q combinations are not valid).
      * H is always mute!, except for ch + vowel which always sounds like in chocolate.
      * G and J:
        + Strong: JA JE JI JO JU, GE, GI.
        + Soft: GA, GUE, GUI, GO, GU. This makes the sounds GU followed by "E" or "I" need a special writing: GÜE
        + Ñ: no comments.

Blessing and damnation: the stressed syllable is always encoded in the word.

Bonus point: the word "sal+le", imperative of go and indirect subject of the action is the third person, can not be written as it would be said, as the two consecutive L wold become the sound of Y.

<comment><USER12> Well, Spanish certainly has some inconsistencies, but it's more consistent than both French and Portuguese. And verbs are easier to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not related to the subject of this post itself, but did someone noticed the double-post on HN (with short 1st page hit) and 9gag ? This is quite rare, I'm not sure if it already happened !</comment>


Hackers got access to Matt Honan's iCloud account by calling Apple Support - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/mat/status/231958263149764609 <comment><USER2> There's a lot of verification steps that are bunk.

Full name? Home address? Available from the electoral roll in Australia. Phone number? Look it up. Date of birth? Check with the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages. Mother's maiden name? Ditto.

Too many of these verification questions rely on shared secrets that ... aren't secrets.

<comment><USER3> ...and it's getting worse with all the extra 'security questions' random sites now ask. Why do I have to drop all these obscure-but-not-really-secret details into all these databases? Are they all guarding them as well as a salted-hased password? Do I now have to give them all unique fake answers lest it become another path-of-least-resistance for compromise?

<comment><USER4> They really are horrible. When I'm given a small list of questions to choose from, they generally fall into three buckets:

\- Completely non-applicable (I'm not married and don't have any kids or pets)

\- Transitory and inane (I don't really have a favorite meal or movie, and if I did, who is to say it will be the same forever?)

\- Rely on information that is relatively easily to figure out (birthplace, high school mascot, mother's maiden name, etc)

Security questions alone should never be sufficient to reset a password or gain access to an account, and I'm not really sure they add a whole lot in other contexts either.

<comment><USER5> I find them horrible as well. That's why when I'm given the opportunity to write my own questions I always do so. Then in this security theater I hopefully am a little bit safer than most people that just pick a question from a list.

On a side note, one of these days I've got really scared when a reputable credit card company asked me for one of these security questions. WTF?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's easy to forget that social engineering is one of the oldest and easiest way for a hacker to get access to a system.

<comment><USER7> So true. Speculation in the original comment thread (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4337938>) included MITM attacks, keyloggers, sleeper programs left over from an earlier (known) breakin, brute force, etc.

Most of the ideas batted around were technical in nature and somewhat advanced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is just a good reminder to treat all cloud services out of your control as semi-public.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Wow. Okay. So I've confirmed with both the hacker and Apple how this happened. Was via a phone call to Apple tech support."

There should be enough of a trail to track down the hacker and have him charged, right? The call to Apple would be logged by at least the telephone company, wouldn't it?

<comment><USER10> You subpoena the phone company for that kind of information when terrorism is involved. This is more like having your bicycle stolen. There is not going to be a CSI team, fingerprinting, detectives, interrogations or high-speed car chases.

Apple's call center probably has the CLID of the caller logged, but equally probably that person called from a prepaid cell phone.

<comment><USER11> _There is not going to be a CSI team, fingerprinting, detectives, interrogations or high-speed car chases._

Sure, probably not from the police. But I will put down the rest of my year's salary that Apple will be investigating like all hell how this happened and taking all kinds of steps to make sure this _never_ happens again. Whether or not it actually will is a different story.

<comment><USER12> I would expect so, but catching the guy who did this isn't necessarily part of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So question is now, what are Apple doing about it given the impact. Think they said it would take alot of forensic work to restore the iMac as well, I've got the popcorn ready to follow this one.

<comment><USER14> The iMac is gone.

The remote wipe would be equivalent to a format so you may be able to get some data back but most of it would be unusable. I don't think Apple can do much about not having a backup. What Apple probably needs to do is have a popup to remind people to backup when they switch on the Find My Mac feature. But I doubt they can do more than that.

<comment><USER10> Even if Apple could recover the data by doing so they would be admitting their remote wipe feature is worthless.

I rather doubt they will add a "I see you have enabled Find My Mac--you better back up your system because we will give any random idiot who calls in access to wipe your hard drive. Thanks for choosing Apple!" popup, though.

<comment><USER15> Useless? No, flawed, but if the guy has backups like most folks should - he'd have been fine.

Apple even makes it easy with Time Machine - they can't be faulted for the wipe (I don't have this on my Mac - I just use disk+memory encryption).

Apple can be faulted for allowing the security breach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Suppose a Mac has multiple drives. Say, two internal drives and an external drive. Does remote wipe just wipe the boot drive, just the internal drives, or all the drives?

</comment><comment><USER17> At the very least Apple should pay to have professional forensics restore the lost data.

<comment><USER18> Why should they treat this person any different than their other paying customers?

The remote wipe isn't the root issue here.

<comment><USER17> Isn't the root issue the fact that Apple's lax security allowed the hacker to do the remote wipe?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How?

</comment><comment><USER20> I find it hilarious that Apple wants to store my File Vault decryption key and hide it behind three security questions.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm totally lost now.. look at the last line on the screenshot of Mat's Gmail inbox. Seems like they reset the password through iforgot.apple.com since instructions were emailed? Or was that just an attempt?

</comment><comment><USER21> Wait a bloody minute... if you are calling about iCloud password, wouldn't Apple's tech support automatically suspect why the caller isn't going to iforgot.apple.com instead? I mean it doesn't make sense if the person calling says "Oh I badly need the iCloud password, but I don't have access to a browser".

On the other hand, if the person said "yes yes I tried iforgot.apple.com but I can't seem to remember any of my security answers/email address used", then that should naturally raise suspicion in the mind of the Apple tech support person, right??

<comment><USER22> Nope, lots and lots of apple customers who aren't techs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The really annoying thing about this is that it's going to be that much more difficult now to persuade Apple support to intervene in legitimate cases now that they've been burned this badly in public.

Hackers (in the pejorative sense of the term) and software pirates really are the scum of the earth.

<comment><USER24> As opposed to, for instance, rapists, war criminals, and corrupt politicians?

<comment><USER23> People abusing the information networks are disproportionately damaging because they empower those that are just looking for excuses to turn the whole internet into one big surveillance machine.

<comment><USER24> No, they are unnecessary, if those who are in power want it to happen, they will find a way, regardless of our actions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Synchronized, NSLock, pthread, OSSpinLock comparative performance - <AUTHOR> http://perpendiculo.us/?p=133

<comment><AUTHOR> Just ran this on my macbook pro core i7:

      NSLock: 3.364240 sec
      NSLock+IMP Cache: 2.772781 sec
      pthread_mutex: 1.733382 sec
      OSSpinlock: 0.323426 sec
      @synchronized: 4.250744 sec
      isMainThread: 0.373637 sec
      myDummy++: 0.063998 sec

The last two are [NSThread isMainThread], and a simple increment of a static variable. And same test on the iPhone 4s:

      NSLock: 21.619565 sec
      NSLock+IMP Cache: 18.740027 sec
      pthread_mutex: 11.585992 sec
      OSSpinlock: 3.576578 sec
      @synchronized: 28.453087 sec
      isMainThread: 2.662025 sec
      myDummy++: 0.634946 sec</comment>


Intent to Implement: CSS Modules V1 - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/blink-dev/vCrJCQxNnzo/OAYI9cPWAQAJ <comment><USER2> This proposal isn't what you think. In particular, they're not implementing "CSS Modules" as defined in [https://github.com/css-modules/css- modules](https://github.com/css-modules/css-modules) but instead they're doing a Web Components approach, where `import 'styles.css'` will return an opaque CSSStyleSheet object that you then "attach" to a Shadow DOM root.

To differentiate between the proposal here and the existing "CSS Modules" thing, I guess I'll call the existing thing "ICSS Modules," since (as an implementation detail) they compile to so-called "Interoperable CSS" files.

ICSS modules and CSS Modules V1 sound identical (they're both just called "CSS Modules") but they behave completely differently.

* ICSS modules mangle class names for scoping; CSS Modules V1 returns a CSSStyleSheet, which has to be attached to a shadow DOM root in order to have any scoping.

* ICSS modules export a mapping of class names to mangled names, allowing a tree-shaking algorithm to drop unimported ICSS rules. CSS Modules V1 returns a big old CSSStyleSheet object, which the user would then attach in bulk.

* ICSS modules work great with server-side JS, allowing developers to return plain HTML + CSS with no client-side JS required for rendering. I can't see how a CSSStyleSheet could be used on the server side at all.

* ICSS modules are popular, and developers have been asking (perhaps naively) for native browser support for "CSS Modules" for years, in the same naive way that they wish for JSX built-in to the browser. This proposal is not at all what they meant.

Then there's the naming conflict. Imagine trying to Google for this: "How do I port my code from CSS modules to CSS modules?"

If I may be so bold as to speak for the many, many developers who never use Shadow DOM and never plan to start using it, it seems like this proposal is just going to make our lives worse.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a link that actually shows some code and I think explains what this is about: [https://github.com/w3c/webcomponents/blob/gh- pages/proposals...](https://github.com/w3c/webcomponents/blob/gh- pages/proposals/css-modules-v1-explainer.md)

It's nice to see Microsoft pushing this forward as it's pretty neat, but we'll need to see work in Safari and Firefox before this can be truly useful.

<comment><USER4> Or you can just ask Firefox users to install a browser that actually supports web standards? The standards that chromium supports and firefox don't is astonishing.

For safari the problem remains because of IOS which has too much marketshare. That said, there are a lot of IOS users but how much of them are going to use a non GAFA website? Most of them should be casuals that don't really use internet outside of top 20 ALEXA. I would like to see statistics of this.</comment></comment>


Box Scores A Big Enterprise Deal: 18,000 Procter & Gamble Employees Up In Clouds - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/07/box-scores-a-big-enterprise-deal-18000-procter-gamble-employees-up-in-clouds/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

<comment><USER2> Great news for Box. Great service and very nice people to work with.</comment>


Pandas author on unsustainabilty of project, lack of funding - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/wesmckinn/status/909860120074555392 <comment><USER2> Comes on the heels of StackOverflow blog post attributing meteotic rise of Python to Pandas.

[https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/14/python-growing- quickly...](https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/14/python-growing-quickly/)

<comment><USER3> I read that as, "StackOverflow confirms: Pandas is poorly documented."

<comment><USER4> I read that as, "Pandas is poorly documented because of lack of funding".

Django is the exact same way. 52% of it's $200K goal.

And in a other thread, people wonder why the entertainment industry won't give their content out DRM free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I do worry about the tragedy of the commons with FOSS. Massive amounts of social benefits accrue when there are high quality libre tools out there. Outside universities and some rare corporate positions, it's hard to find instances where engineers can work full time on the highest value, but lowest compensated projects.

Selfishly, I looks at things like a basic income as a means of getting to spend a year earning ramen money on valueable but non-economic projects.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://mobile.twitter.com/wesmckinn/status/9097726525329530...](https://mobile.twitter.com/wesmckinn/status/909772652532953088)

Well that certainly escalated quickly. The anger issues seem misplaced. Not a good way to solicit contributions.

<comment><USER6> Senior people at very wealthy companies whining that the software they take for free isn't up to their standards is a worse look.

<comment><USER3> >software they take for free

Software they were given. More cringe:

[https://mobile.twitter.com/wesmckinn/status/9098543516944588...](https://mobile.twitter.com/wesmckinn/status/909854351694458880?p=v)

It sounds like Wes has given a gift and now expects something in return for it. r/niceguys anyone?

[https://mobile.twitter.com/wesmckinn/status/9097774823830691...](https://mobile.twitter.com/wesmckinn/status/909777482383069184?p=v)

Berating your users publicly is not very becoming. I feel sorry for lebigot. He's really being mobbed now.

Looking at the comments, it reminds me of a poor tourist lady I saw surrounded by San Francisco beggars. She gave one some change out of kindness. She was mobbed by four more, who became upset because she had nothing for them.

I doubt she goes back to SF any time soon. Beggars everywhere. I doubt many quants will recommend improvements to Pandas any time soon. Beggars everywhere.

<comment><USER7> Who are the beggars? The quants who take but don't give back?

<comment><USER3> [https://mobile.twitter.com/mrocklin/status/90977822841123635...](https://mobile.twitter.com/mrocklin/status/909778228411236352?p=v) [https://mobile.twitter.com/wj_chicago/status/909901211855458...](https://mobile.twitter.com/wj_chicago/status/909901211855458304?p=v) [https://mobile.twitter.com/astrojuanlu/status/90977665123129...](https://mobile.twitter.com/astrojuanlu/status/909776651231297536?p=v)

Some examples.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


You Want How Many Years Experience? - <AUTHOR> https://howoldisit.glitch.me/ <comment><USER2> It is weird how many things in this list are now 20+ years old that I've seen being the hot new thing that would solve all our troubles.

Truly, this profession does not learn from its own past.

And I feel old :-/

</comment><comment><USER3> In case it's down, here's a remixed version (since it's using Glitch) [https://pewter-winter.glitch.me/](https://pewter-winter.glitch.me/)

</comment><comment><USER4> It lists Logo and BASIC but not Pascal/Turbo Pascal or Delphi? I'm mildly disappointed.

<comment><USER5> Make a pull request.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > MySQL has been out for 23 years

> PostgreSQL has been out for 22 years

 _feeling old intensifies_

</comment><comment><USER7> HN killed it:

This project has received too many requests, please try again later.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very cool, but minor ux nitpick: No need to have the select options in the dropdown when all of the options are already on the screen. The doubling of content is distracting from the experience.

</comment><comment><USER9> well, Drupal is out for a long time but Drupal 6, Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 is different enough that your job experience in one might not be particularly relevant for others...

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems at least some inaccuracy: Rust has been out for 3 years

Rust was originally released in 2010.

Anybody spot any others?

<comment><USER11> I assume you're already aware, but Rust hit 1.0 in May 2015. The further back before that, the less it resembled the Rust we have today; there were some major differences in early Rust (green threads, a heap-pointer operator, etc.). I don't think it's a stretch to say that no Rust job today actually requires Rust experience that dates back further than 1.0, and any job description that requires that likely was written by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > PHP has been out for 23 years

Feeling old.

<comment><USER13> Good old Personal Home Page...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Brilliant:

> Lisp has been out for 60 years

<comment><USER15> I wonder if there are people who have been coding LISP for 60 years? A few names might come to mind.

<comment><USER16> I tried, but the paragraph symbols kept breaking on all the keypunches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Python 1 is 28 years old??

<comment><USER5> I remember learning on 1.52? around the turn of the century.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Angular has been out for 2 years" Oh?

<comment><USER19> What do you think they're getting wrong? Are you counting the alpha period or AngularJS?

<comment><USER20> Angular has been out for much longer than 2 years. I remember using Angular 2 in 2016.

<comment><USER19> Right, so did I, and people were using it in production in 2015, but the first release was in late 2016 so you were using a testing version or used it late in the year. So this site rounded down from a little over 2 years from the first release. I imagine many of these dates would change depending on how you're defining when the technology first existed. And I remember how there was a sentiment that Google should just officially release the thing and there were worries about how the project might just be limping along and that could discourage one from adopting it if the project was going to be abandoned. But if the original commenter was just saying you could get an early version of it more than 2 years ago then it doesn't seem like that interesting of a comment and it doesn't justify the tone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> hug-of-death-ed. :'(</comment>


Ask HN: I have a 3,500 subscriber email newsletter. How do I make $50/mo off it? - <AUTHOR> The details:
I have a daily emails newsletter which, basically, acts like a blog.  I write a story sharing some true, typically unknown item (Abe Lincoln created the Secret Service the day he was shot, for example) with the readers.  I'm not putting the URL here because I want to be clear that this question isn't intended as a promotional vehicle.
The email costs me $50/mo to send.  (I'm using Mailchimp and that's their monthly fee.)  It'll cost me $75 when/if I break the 5,000 subscriber plateau.  It's not expensive, but I'd like to break even, and I'm looking for easy ways to get there.  (The list is waaaaaaaay too small to consider direct sales brand advertising.)
I can't run AdWords or, for that matter, any standard ad network's banners, because the content is delivered via email.  I occasionally drop in an Amazon affiliate link but I don't want to overdo it.  (Perhaps a "Book of the Day" line would be good, or "Related Reading.")
I'm looking for ideas which are out of the box.  Anyone? <comment><USER2> Affiliates. If you write about Abe Lincoln, link to the best biography about him.

If you always write about surprising stuff, find books that map to that: [http://www.amazon.com/Never-Shower-Thunderstorm- Surprising-M...](http://www.amazon.com/Never-Shower-Thunderstorm-Surprising- Misleading/dp/080508312X)

Sponsors are good too but require a bit more hustle.

<comment><AUTHOR> That speaks to my "Related Reading" idea in the OP. It's actually pretty easy to do, too. Definitely going to consider it highly, even though it won't work every day.

<comment><USER3> contact me, I might be interested in advertising email@example.com

Have an awesome and very brigth day!

:-)

Jaime E

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a great newsletter, and here is the URL: <http://dlewis.net/nik/> (I subscribe and actually read it often.)

Regarding your question, check this out: <http://www.kehalim.com/> It's contextual advertising for pretty much anything, including email.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks (x2)! Hadn't heard of Kehalim -- will look closely at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If it is a daily email, I'd put a little note that says something like "Advertise here for $5 a day and be seen by over 3000 viewers!" If I was an active reader of the newsletter, and owned a small website somewhat related to what you email about, I'd spend 1/10th of a penny per eyeball.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've considered it a few times, but I don't really like asking my readers to become my advertisers. (Among other things.)

But I grant that I may be overly stupid here.

<comment><USER6> I will confirm you are being overly stupid here.

Your readers are of a certain type. The probably have projects and businesses that align with that type. They want their projects and businesses to have more attention from people like them.

You could even not allow ads that don't represent high quality awesomeness if you're so inclined. Make it an exclusive type of advertising and say, "$5 to offer my readers something awesome" so then you're aligning your readers wishes of finding out about cool stuff and getting a discount on cool stuff with your own financial interests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do you know anything else about your audience other than that they enjoy "daily facts"?

The more relevant your affiliate ads, the higher conversion rate you should have, so target with that in mind. Obviously, the more you know about your audience, the closer you can target.

It seems like something like this could initially go after books with trivia info, mental floss, etc. But I wouldn't get too caught up with this step. It's a daily email, so you could try out 365 different things each year and see what works.

Your best bet is to just play around with products, measure everything you can (obviously MailChimp clicks, but you must also measure conversions after they click, revenue, etc).

<comment><AUTHOR> About 20% of my readership comes from an informal deal with Mental Floss, so I assume that their demographics match mine well.

I try and measure as much as I can, but I'm a part-time one-man band.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just ask for it. I remember putting a "Buy Raganwald a Coffee" Paypal link on my blog and presto, people started clicking the link and sending me $1.27 each. I tried raising prices: I changed the link to "Buy Raganwald a Double Espresso" and people started sending me $3.15 each, and numbers did not fall by 2/3.

Start by asking for donations. You may be pleasantly surprised by what your readers will do for you.

<comment><USER9> That is true. For my newsletter I get subscribers every couple weeks asking me if they can donate some money. I still haven't added a link though, as I thought it might come off the wrong way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Have you looked at how your competitors make money?

This reminds me of omg-facts.com which I follow on Twitter and greatly enjoy (@OMGFacts). Seems they're reasonably successful with 1.6mil followers and various subcategory accounts (OMGFactsCelebs, OMGFactsSex, etc.) Their strategy seems to be occasional cross promotion and funnel readers to their site which is laden with advertisements. That's one option. (1)

(2) Charge subscription fees (perhaps $5/yr) for a premium version of the mailing list and treat the free one as a light upsell. Assuming you get 5% conversion, that's $750/yr or $62.50/mo. You'll need to figure out what kinds of extras you need to provide for your audience to consider it worth pulling out their credit card.

Alternatively could beg for donations, but I would rather donate by buying something from you.

(3) Find a cheaper way to send newsletters. Given Mailchimp's price points, seems the only way to go cheaper is to do it yourself. This is probably not worth it for you.

(4) webwright's point of doing Affiliates. No reason not to do this, very little effort and adds value to the newsletter.

(5) Merchandise. Perhaps compile a book of a year's worth of factoids and self-publish? Could do a paid ebook or printed on-demand via Amazon or Lulu.com. Could also do calendars (the one post-it per day kind, or the monthly flip ones). Once you have some solid merch, you could try and peddle to other resellers.

I like all of these, but not at the same time. I'd start with affiliates, then make a destination blog that mirrors the content but has a bit more engagement and some ads (also mirror on Twitter/Facebook, start building a brand), then do a premium newsletter/merchandise, then someday when you're a kingpin with millions of subscribers you can look into rolling your own mailing server.

P.S. I subscribed to your newsletter via acangiano's link. Looking forward to it. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. All great points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hi Dan, You can partner up with startups that are really hungry for reviews and exposure... just like us www.quoteroller.com :) A little blog post and paragraph about our app won't hurt while would be happy to pay a little fee for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly, "a little blog post and paragraph" is a lot more than I'd offer. But you should look into <http://hackernewsletter.com>

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the mention Dan. Yeah, one day that is something I want to do more of... but still growing my subscriber list now. Getting subscribers, even with great content, has been the biggest surprise to me running a newsletter. You have done a great job getting to 3,500... that is no easy feat!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'll be happy to sponsor 1 month of your cost (i.e. $50) against suitable mention (once or twice a week, in any form and style) of either one or both of our recent by-products:

<http://www.RapiDefs.com> and

<http://getLocalNe.ws>

Check out these two URLs (I believe both would have a good general match with your readers) and let me know (email in profile).

</comment><comment><USER13> Drop MailChimp and save the $50. Get a server running Linux. Use Mailman to manage your mailing list or do something custom. Write a custom maier program in Python to distribute the emails. Write the list content in HTML If you don't have a spare server, you should be able to find one suitable for this task for $20 or less per month. Use other suggestions here to generate additional income.

<comment><USER13> I am curious why this post was down-voted. It provides a simple engineering solution to the problem as stated.

<comment><USER14> Didn't downvote, but hes not goign to get Mailchimp'ss deliverability doing it himself. And its going to cost him at least $30-$40 for an appropriate server.. so spending an extra few hundred hours to set all that up properly, in exchange for saving $10...blah.

<comment><USER13> He has a group of subscribers who have opted-into receiving his emails. He is not sending email to people who do not want to be quasi-spammed. He has only 3500 emails to send. Setting up such a simple system might take an hour or two, not a "few hundred hours".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this can be addressed by really thinking about your users and their profile. If these people tend to like to be informed about unique or little- known facts, they are probably fairly inquisitive. They might even like brain teasers, quiz games, etc. I think you should test this out by including one or two featured links to products that your market might appreciate.

For example, when talking about the Abe Lincoln/Secret Service example you might include further reading about Abe Lincoln with a link to the book Team of Rivals. This is a good example of an obvious subject-link related to the little-known fact. However, you could also include links to trivia games on Amazon, or general knowledge books like the World Almanac of Presidential Facts. I would include some humor in your links as well.

Take your best ideas and include a short survey in your email to get your users' opinion on the options.

</comment><comment><USER16> 1\. Gather some stats on who your readers are (ie., country, language, profession, interest, gender, etc). 2\. Look for a sponsor who will give you $100/month to sponsor your newsletter. In return they get some kind of ad space in your newsletter. It could be tasteful, like some kind of sponsorship banner or something.

</comment><comment><USER17> What about creating a paid premium newsletter using Letter.ly Perhaps send the premium daily and the free one weekly. Depending on your conversion rates it should be enough to cover expenses and gives you an opportunity to grow paid subscriptions into potentially meaningful income.

</comment><comment><USER18> You could do a number of things depending on your subscriber demographics.

If you want to go the advertising route, it's best to go directly to relevant businesses. See this - [http://garyvaynerchuk.com/post/78967452/want-to-get- advertis...](http://garyvaynerchuk.com/post/78967452/want-to-get-advertisers- on-your-blogvlog-go-and-get-it)

The other way is to just sell something directly to your readers. First test a few different products (some rare history book, photobook etc) by adding a link to the bottom of your email and seeing which one gets the most clicks. Once you know what's popular, buy it in bulk and sell.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sell t-shirts and mugs with some of the more popular facts. Github was able to sell out of tees and mugs with just their logo on it, so I imagine people would want them with interesting content rather than just a logo.

Additionally (or alternatively) you could create a fmylife.com equivalent for your facts. Even if you don't let users submit content, it's a place where the community can vote on their favorite bits of info. Doesn't even need tons of ads, and you can take private advertising and make sure they are all in good taste for your audience.

</comment><comment><USER20> I would ask the guys at Cool Tools (first result on google) for their ideas. They post cool or unique tools and reviews from users, often with an affiliate link at the bottom (to Amazon for example). Don't force it, but if you find yourself mentioning a product, affiliate link to it. For example, your post about purple carrots had a link to seeds. Use a referral to get a percentage of the sales from people visiting that link.

</comment><comment><USER21> How about something like those motivational posters or t-shirts? It seems like the same crowd would enjoy those that enjoy 'now you know' one liner facts.

You could also turn your one liners into partnerships. I saw you had a post about purple carrots and linked to seeds, why not have a partnership once in a while for things like that with sites that sell seeds and see how things convert. Hope that is helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have some intro text in each email, a personal message from me type of thing. I could definitely use that space (and have) to promote things. The question, I guess, is sourcing those deals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here's an idea.

There is Follow Friday on Twitter. You can do a Sponsors Friday, where you can send over offers related to your blog, topic, and its readers.

You need to track the CTR, etc. Put a decent infographics. If your CTR is good, and your topic is niche, approach folks into affiliate marketing or affiliate managers, they will be able to tell you what offers to run.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure that I follow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Set up a page where you display a graph of hosting costs. Next to it, a graph of revenue from your existing affiliates plus donations from readers. Accept donations. Every time someone donates the graph changes.

Put the link in the footer of your emails.

I don't know if it will work, though.

</comment><comment><USER24> how about just making people pay for the newsletter?

<http://tinyletter.com/?pay>

Might lose some people, but if all 3500 stay, you only need each person to pay .015 per month. Of course this is just hypothetical. Maybe its $1/month.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the opposite direction of where I'd like to go :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Accept sponsorships from people who target that audience. Once a week, send a mail about the sponsors (or put it into one of the daily mails) and explain what they do and why they might interest the audience.

</comment><comment><USER26> provide good content and (most likely) no one will mind affiliate links, even if there are a few per email. people will only start to care once you start generating content specifically for the ability to link.

just keep doing what you're doing and don't shoehorn them in. only insert them where relevant.

</comment><comment><USER27> Are there any remnant advertising networks like AdSense that serve opt-in mailing lists? If not why not?

</comment><comment><USER28> If you ever write anything around a women centered topic, hit me up, I'd like to advertise.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I have one planned for the day before Mother's Day, how should I best reach you?

<comment><USER28> Can you send me your mail ID and the link to your newsletter? mail me at:

sv at tamarint dot com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What could you sell/exchange/provide for 1.5 cents per subscriber?

</comment><comment><USER30> When you do include an affiliate link, how does it do?

<comment><AUTHOR> Depends. I don't typically target the links toward anything, because my readership is so varied in interest that I'd only get a few (less than 5) sales on a book, and that's maybe $2-3 total.

I can link to virtually anything on Amazon and tee it up in a way which I'll get, say, 100-200 clicks. If I talk it up, I can get 400, maybe more. (I have one today which is at ~350 and there's a lot of time left on it.) Because of how Amazon's affiliate tools work, I can get 2-3c/click on those (at scale), even if the clicker doesn't buy the item. But I can't do that more than once a week, if that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> btw, I just added you in LinkedIn

</comment><comment><USER31> 1st take your costs down. If you start at $-50 per month it's going to be more difficult.</comment>


Map: More than half of humanity lives within this circle - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/07/map-more-than-half-of-humanity-lives-within-this-circle/

<comment><USER2> I'd be interested to know where the demographic center of the world is, presumably somewhere around the middle of this circle.

</comment><comment><USER3> Makes for a nice twist on the recurring meme "what space could the world's population fit in?"</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any press-release service that you can recommend ? - <AUTHOR>

Reocities.com is now starting to be full enough to be of actual use to people, I've restored well over 500K accounts and I would like to announce this somehow.
There seems to be a great glut of companies that claim they are specialists in getting your message out there but I wouldn't know how to tell the real ones from the wasted money ones.
Is there a service anybody here has used that they can recommend ? <comment><USER2> My experience is while press releases are valuable marketing tools, press release services are worthless. I've done probably a dozen press releases utilizing some of the expensive services. Not once has a service been directly responsible for a write up or driven any substantial amount of traffic.

Identify your target audience of bloggers and writers and get your press release directly to them.

I wrote my experience with press releases here.

[http://www.bigstartups.com/matt/blog/122/Effective-Ways- to-P...](http://www.bigstartups.com/matt/blog/122/Effective-Ways-to-Promote- Your-Startup-Cheaply)

</comment><comment><USER3> Check these 2 people out: they are pretty good at what they do:

<http://www.imalwagner.com>

<http://www.publicityhound.com>

Whatever you do - don't go for a cookie cutter plan where all they do is write a press release and submit it out and then offer tracking services. Make the publicist sit down with you and create a customized plan.

</comment><comment><USER4> Instead of a press-release, you could try contacting some blogs individually which focus on your target audience (admittedly I'm not sure what your target audience is).

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty much everybody that got caught unawares by their sites sudden demise. The mail I'm getting makes me believe that rather more people than you'd expect suddenly realized they had some precious family photos and stuff like that on geocities and thought they'd lost if forever.

<comment><USER4> That makes a lot of sense. It would probably make a lot of sense to optimize your site for search-engines as I'd imagine that is where a majority of your users will go looking for you. Additionally, you may want to go around and post on some forums as well (such as this thread which is #8 for "geocities backup" [http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=33&th...](http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=33&threadid=2340250)).

I realize I've effectively managed to not answer your original question at all - good luck though!

Edit: Also if you haven't already, post to Digg and Reddit. This thread might also be helpful - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=908275>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Posting on here will get you more coverage than an actual press release.

Could of course always submit to techcrunch but they lurk here as welll.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, did that.</comment></comment>


Man completes first round-the-world autogyro flight - <AUTHOR> https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/northern-ireland-man-norman-surplus-completes-first-roundtheworld-autogyro-flight-38267038.html <comment><USER2> This is the model of aircraft he used: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RotorSport_UK_MT-03](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RotorSport_UK_MT-03)

<comment><USER3> Is there a site that talks a bit more about the technical aspects (aircraft, modifications, how he made it across the oceans, maybe a route map) than the article?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From Wikipedia:

 _An autogyro (from Greek αὐτός and γύρος, "self-turning"), also known as a gyroplane or gyrocopter, is a type of rotorcraft that uses an unpowered rotor in free autorotation to develop lift. Forward thrust is provided independently, typically by an engine-driven propeller. While similar to a helicopter rotor in appearance, the autogyro's rotor must have air flowing across the rotor disc to generate rotation, and the air flows upwards through the rotor disc rather than down._

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

<comment><USER5> The thing that made autogyros (and helicopter autorotations) click in my mind was when someone pointed out that the outside of the rotors is spinning faster than the inside. As such, there's a balance where some point inward of the rotor tips will be driven by air flowing through causing the outside to spin fast enough to generate positive lift. There's obviously more to it, but if anyone is wondering why air going up through a rotor somehow causes that rotor to push air back down, this might be a helpful way to think of it.

<comment><USER6> Huh, that makes sense. I always wondered about that.

It's a little like the related (though different) question of "can you sail downwind faster than the wind is going" (and the answer is yes: [https://inhabitat.com/wind-powered-vehicle-travels-faster- th...](https://inhabitat.com/wind-powered-vehicle-travels-faster-than-the- wind/) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" To arrive back at the same place, approaching from an entirely different direction from the one you set off on, can only be achieved by venturing right around the other side of the globe to get there," he said._

or you could fly in a large circle /s

Kidding aside, sounds like an epic achievement!

<comment><USER8> I thought the same thing: if I go around my house I achieve the same thing. Not the same epic adventure though.

<comment><USER9> Really depends what happens along the way, doesn't it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Gyro facts: [https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-pros-and-cons-of-a- gyroc...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-pros-and-cons-of-a-gyrocopter)

I heard from a private license pilot that these are very unsafe, but he told me that in 1990 but it sounds like things have changed.

<comment><USER11> > sounds like things have changed

Nope, compared to fixed-wing aircraft these things are still horribly unsafe.

<comment><USER12> Their inventor died in a Douglas DC-2.

The instability causing most of the crashes is now understood and prevented by construction. They are now considered no more dangerous than other light aircraft. That means that to be safe they must be operated by a well-trained pilot in safe weather conditions.

Some frequent causes of fixed-wing aircraft fatalities, such as engine failure, are much less worrisome in an autogyro, because they can land unpowered at very low speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unfortunately the article is somewhat unclear about how it's using the words "round-the-world" and "flight".

I assume he didn't follow a great circle, so what is the minimum path length needed for a flight to be round-the-world?

> In Thailand, he even crashed into a lake.

So it wasn't a "flight"? More like a successive series of flights.

<comment><USER12> All round-the-world flights have had stops for fuel and rest, except one.

Not counting orbits, of course.

<comment><USER14> Two, actually! Both built by the incredible Burt Rutan. From Wikipedia on the Rutan Voyager:

"Sanctioned by the FAI and the AOPA, the flight was the first successful aerial nonstop, non-refueled circumnavigation of the Earth that included two passes over the Equator (as opposed to shorter ostensible "circumnavigations" circling the North or South Pole). This feat has since been accomplished only one other time, by Steve Fossett in the Global Flyer."

<comment><USER13> > that included two passes over the Equator (as opposed to shorter ostensible > "circumnavigations" circling the North or South Pole)

This is a really funny way of describing what I assume was a great circle path. It's certainly possible to do a "shorter ostensible circumnavigation" that passes over the equator twice: take an axis through the earth that passes through the equator twice, and take a circular path around that axis of any size. It's only a bias that says such a path counts less than circling the North / South pole.

You can even circle one of the polls _and_ cross the equator twice without it being a real circumnavigation. Fly a path around the Arctic circle, dip down just past the equator, and come straight back...

<comment><USER15> It is possible to cross the equator twice without following a great circle, but it's not possible to follow a great circle without crossing the equator twice; perhaps this is the source of the confusion. In other words, you can reasonably say that crossing the equator is a necessary, but not sufficient, criterion for circumnavigation (it is of course not possible to cross the equator only once and return to your starting point).

A good additional stipulation might be that the equatorial crossings must be separated by 180 degrees of longitude, plus or minus however tolerant you're willing to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > An autogyro is a small, helicopter-like aircraft made famous by the James > Bond film You Only Live Twice.

I though it was made even more famous by Mad Max 2.

</comment><comment><USER17> The late Ken Wallis was a great enthusiast for these things and built and flew 'Little Nellie' in the Bond movie [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VTXVbHz1m4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VTXVbHz1m4)

</comment><comment><USER18> [http://archive.is/OMpNP](http://archive.is/OMpNP)

</comment><comment><USER19> > Opens article.

> Assaulted by popups.

> Closes article

</comment><comment><USER20> So autogyros cant bank when turning? If so Is that a problem?

<comment><USER12> They can, and must. No bank, no turn. How they bank varies. Some tilt the rotor directly. Others use aerodynamic control surfaces.</comment></comment>


Three. It's a magic number - <AUTHOR> http://www.iqcontent.com/blog/2008/05/three-its-a-magic-number <comment><USER2> Marketing and versioning is often done in threes because that's the minimum number you can use to take advantage of the psychological aversion to extremes that people have.

It's well known that if you have two versions of a product with some purchase distribution, you can often "force" people who otherwise buy the cheap one to "upgrade" to the more expensive one by simply adding a third super-expensive version.

There are people who will pay for the premium third level, but often more importantly, it causes psychological angst in anyone who wants to buy the cheapest, often forcing them to upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's easy to process mentally.

</comment><comment><USER4> Works in landscaping, too!

</comment><comment><USER5> As every mathematician knows, two is the most magic number. A lot of strange things happen with two. Take fields of characteristic two for example. (That is fields were 1+1=0.)

<comment><USER5> I know the article was about marketing.</comment></comment>


Using Redux at scale [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQta2urK3zk <comment><USER2> Here is the source medium article for those who cannot listen to the video: [https://blog.matters.tech/10-redux-tips-from-the- trenches-55...](https://blog.matters.tech/10-redux-tips-from-the- trenches-55e06ed1c0a8)</comment>


Facebook's effect on Uloop. - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> With the introduction of Facebook's new marketplace, they seemed to have ventured into a territory that Uloop has tried to claim. Uloop ads can be seen plastered allover Facebook and has been gaining much traction lately with their success at various campuses.

Two of my friends were asked to leave school and work for Uloop for a year based on the fact that they would be receiving more VC money in about a month or so. Now I am wondering whether they will be granted such funding with Facebook's newest development.

What do you guys think? Will Uloop, a company that's been utilizing Facebook's popularity to gain traction and users, be crushed by the very company that has probably been Uloop's most important venue of advertising?

<comment><USER2> I think that facebook, like google, has become another company that startups should steer clear of.

Just like Google dominates the information gathering space, Facebook is now becoming a one stop shop for social/communication tools. Why use twitter when all your friends use facebook status? O'r why use a dating site when all your peers are on the book? You can see that most students don't use flickr or zooomr because they have facebook photos already. I've noticed that since all my friends have become heavy facebook users that we no longer use IM at all and that SMS usage is dropping. We instead just send facebook messages, wall posts or share links/youtube clips using fbook shares.

On the up side facebook + api = universal buddy list. You wont have to worry about importing all your friends to the latest cool social app because everyone is already on facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This method certainly did wonders for Microsoft and should work fine for Facebook. MySpace is mostly doing it as well.

1) Build a platform.

2) Encourage others to develop on your platform.

3) Copy/Crush/Buy the most popular applications yourself.

4) Profit.

Facebook's corporate slogan should be: "Do no evil -- Let others do it first and just copy them if it's popular."

</comment><comment><USER4> my thoughts as an ex-competitor: <http://mealticket.wordpress.com/2007/05/14/36/></comment>


I'm making 30 VR projects in 30 days to learn - <AUTHOR> https://risonsimon.com/days-in-vr/ <comment><USER3> I do like it when people set themselves challenges like this. Clear beginning and end, finishing something in combination with iterative learning is very satisfying. A bit like a hackaton or a game jam. But this made me think, because in a way it limits yourself in what you can do with what you previously learned. The more you learn the more complex projects you can create and halfway through you can create something which doesn't fit in a day anymore; complexity pushes build time up exponentially. E.g. it needs some extra tooling for generating procedural content. So what I propose is instead of 'over the course of 30 days I will every single day finish a project', why not follow the Fibonacci sequence: I start with nothing (procrastinating), next a one day project, followed by another single day effort. Stepping up with a 2 day project -> a big 3 day project -> 5 day full blown project -> 8 day epic. And finally: a full 13 days working on a single masterpiece! (33 days in total).

<comment><USER4> With this scheme if you do even 15 projects, you're already into multi-year time frames and your 25th project will take 200 years. Fibonacci numbers grow quickly!

<comment><USER3> Knowing when to stop is one of the most important things about delivering a project. After trying this method a couple of times I think many will have learned when to draw the line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone explain what's radically different in "VR dev" compared to "3D dev" (from the graphics programmer perspective)?

<comment><USER6> You render twice per frame: half the "screen" rendered with a camera at ([-eyeOffset, 0, 0] * cameraRot) and the other rendered with a camera at ([+eyeOffset, 0, 0] * cameraRot). The main thing is this has some surprising performance implications (such as geometry complexity being more important than shader fillrate).

You also need to keep an untraditionally high frame rate without dropping frames (90 FPS on the desktop headsets), which also has significant performance/app architecture implications.

It's actually not that radically different in terms of graphics; a game programmer should feel right at home.

The harder part is the UX implications when you realize "controlling the camera" is no longer in your hands. That might require fundamentally rethinking how your game and/or app functions.

<comment><USER7> There is one major difference in terms of graphics programming - <USER2> rendering doesn't work well in VR since it's incompatible with proper multisampled antialiasing, and the edge-detect and/or temporal AA methods typically used instead are too blurry when combined with the low perceived resolution of today's VR headsets.

For this reason there's been a trend back towards forward rendering, with some modern twists to efficiently handle many dynamic lights like deferred does. UE4 for example:

[https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Performance/...](https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Performance/ForwardRenderer) | [https://youtu.be/6kfMVxNSowM?t=3046](https://youtu.be/6kfMVxNSowM?t=3046)

<comment><USER8> In the youtube video, they mention that moving lights can't cast shadows. [https://youtu.be/6kfMVxNSowM?t=3276](https://youtu.be/6kfMVxNSowM?t=3276)

That's a significant limitation for a modern technique.

Here's the full algorithm for anyone curious:

> The Forward Renderer works by culling lights and Reflection Captures to a > frustum-space grid. Each pixel in the forward pass then iterates over the > lights and Reflection Captures affecting it, sharing the material with them. > Dynamic Shadows for Stationary Lights are computed beforehand and packed > into channels of a screen-space shadow mask, leveraging the existing limit > of 4 overlapping Stationary Lights.

<comment><USER7> That was a limitation of the initial implementation in UE4.14, not the technique itself. They iterated on it in UE4.15: [https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal- engine-4-15-release...](https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal- engine-4-15-released)

> Forward renderer now supports shadowing from movable lights and light > functions.

> Only 4 shadow casting movable or stationary lights can overlap at any point > in space, otherwise the movable lights will lose their shadows and an on- > screen message will be displayed.

<comment><USER8> Excellent! Thanks for passing along the technique. This is an interesting evolution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Slightly OT:

Google Trends on VR search queries: [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=vr,psvr,%2Fm%2F0k...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=vr,psvr,%2Fm%2F0knkq2w,Oculus,Vive)

(interesting here is the decline after the peak)

Same query again but with 'iphone' this time (to represent the mobile space and its size compared to VR): [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=vr,psvr,%2Fm%2F0k...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=vr,psvr,%2Fm%2F0knkq2w,Vive,iPhone)

<comment><USER10> "Vive" means "lives" (verb) in spanish, so I guess that's why it shows more popular in spanish speaking countries.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the overwhelming support guys. The entire code is also available on github at [https://github.com/viewportvr/daysinvr](https://github.com/viewportvr/daysinvr)

You can also ask me any questions, if you have any.

<comment><USER11> So where you going from here? It would also be great if you could do a little write up of what you learned!

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely! Once the 30 days is over, I'll be writing about what I learned.

I'm also building a product to make VR dev easier at [https://viewportvr.co](https://viewportvr.co)

<comment><USER12> I would like to learn more about viewport but when you click docs it requires you to make an account first... if I have to make an account just to find out what your product does I leave and never look back.

<comment><AUTHOR> it doesn't ask you to create account. It asks you to give your email address so that we can send you the docs :) You can also try the 360 photos demo at [https://viewportvr.co/demo](https://viewportvr.co/demo)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The best way to learn. I would look forward to it. I am pretty eager to set myself a goal like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. You should try it. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seems like a great project. Would have loved to see some more concrete projects though; maybe do a 10VR projects for 30days and have something more substantial .. A+ on effor though

</comment><comment><USER15> Another challenge is desktop streaming. I achieved it using webvr-boilerplate (threejs) and jsmpeg-vnc. I still need to do lots of tweaking but it works quite well over LAN to mobile.

<comment><AUTHOR> share it with us :)

<comment><USER15> The other projects did most of the heavy lifting. jsmpeg-vnc does the screen capture and sending the data over websocket to jsmpeg which renders it to canvas without buffering. I then took the canvas and used it as a texture in webvr-boilerplate. I needed to make sure the texture was a power of 2 and set texture.needsUpdate to true on each render update. Three.js made it easy to switch the cube out for a plane which I moved a bit closer to the camera. The command arguments I used for jsmpeg-vnc: -b 1000 -s 1024×512 -f 60 -p 9999 "desktop". jsmpeg-vnc doesn't support sound which doesn't bother me since I can use the computer speakers but I'd like to add mouse capture for when the headset is on. And here's a screenshot of it on my Moto G (2nd gen): [http://imgur.com/a/uhRuN](http://imgur.com/a/uhRuN)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's holding the camera in the day 2 project?

<comment><USER17> I'm guessing the rod holding it is patched out using software.

<comment><USER18> Yea that is generally the approach, the tripods are a common artifact in 360 degree videos and photos, if is of professional quality it gets blurred or patched some other manner.

<comment><USER16> I don't see the patch, do you?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lion removes Java? - <AUTHOR> http://lookfirst.com/2011/07/lion-removes-java.html

<comment><USER2> _My guess is that there is some sort of Oracle licensing agreement that prevents Apple from distributing Java with the release. You'd think that these two massive public companies would be able to work something out_

This is pure unfounded speculation.

In reality Apple probably wanted to make the Lion base install leaner.

Many components are are now simply loaded and installed on demand. Like for example also extra voices for text2speech.

<comment><USER3> Mike Swingler (Apple JVM developer) said: [http://lists.apple.com/archives/java- dev/2011/Jul/msg00041.h...](http://lists.apple.com/archives/java- dev/2011/Jul/msg00041.html)

 _After a decade of shipping Java on the Mac and tricking old apps that hardcode paths to the 1.3.1 JVM, or putting in class loader hacks to fake out Xerces XML classes that were moved in 1.5.0, we are ready to try something different._

In [http://lists.apple.com/archives/java- dev/2011/Jul/msg00044.h...](http://lists.apple.com/archives/java- dev/2011/Jul/msg00044.html)

 _What you loose in a per-app embedded model is shared memory mapping of the native libraries and .jar files, but this is the same problem as a half dozen apps embedding (often different) versions of the Sparkle.framework to do app self-updates. The cost of the JVM heap is still the same, and class-sharing was never ported to 64-bit by Sun, so that optimization hasn't been around for a long time on Macs._

In [http://lists.apple.com/archives/java- dev/2011/Jul/msg00038.h...](http://lists.apple.com/archives/java- dev/2011/Jul/msg00038.html)

 _Long-term, we recommend that app developers who use the JavaApplicationStub should transition to embedding the Java runtime within their own app. We are working with Oracle on the OpenJDK project to provide an open source version of JDK7 that can be embedded, and several developers have already started deploying their apps with an embedded JDK7 (but it requires many manual steps right now)._

 _We are tracking the progress of creating an embeddable JRE in_ <http://java.net/jira/browse/MACOSX_PORT-105>

Conclusion: Apple's JVM team think this model is better for solving end users problem with JVM compatibility.

<comment><USER4> And conveniently it means that mac app store apps can't be java apps, which leads to them being better integrated and (slightly) higher quality.

<comment><USER5> There are already apps on the Mac App Store embedding their own JRE.

[http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cyberduck/id409222199?mt=12&#...</a>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No, it's just not installed fully by default.

I Spotlighted for Java Preferences and when I started it I was told that Java will be downloaded. After Lion downloaded and installed Java the Java Preferences started.

IntelliJ et al works as expected.

You don't need to do these manual step the article suggests(for running Java apps). (See comment below when you need to do these steps)

<comment><USER7> It was previously included and is no longer included... It has been removed.

<comment><USER6> Not removed, stubbed in such a way it will be installed automatically when needed.

<comment><USER8> If it was there and isn't now it has been removed. The ability to easily re- add it doesn't change that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We have known this was coming for many months now - why is anyone surprised? The support will revert to JVM vendors where it belongs. Personally I think it is a good thing - we will get JVM versions much faster than Apple supplied them.

<comment><AUTHOR> It isn't about being surprised. Apple is still supplying the JVM. At my company, some IT guy sends out an email saying 'don't install Lion cause Java isn't installed and it breaks Network Connect'. It is this kind of unnecessary confusion which doesn't help anyone. My blog post is simply telling people how they can fix their stuff after Apple decides to make things difficult and confusing for people.

<comment><USER10> When I first launched Xcode after installing Lion, a dialog popped up saying I would need to install Java and relaunch, and gave me a button to press that would do that for me. It worked exactly as advertised -- literally one mouse click. Not at all difficult or confusing, and in fact simpler than the command-line approach your post describes. Other folks I've talked to had the exact same thing happen with apps like Photoshop and Java-dependent games: just one click. Was your experience different?

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't find opening up Terminal.app and typing 'java' difficult or confusing either. The rest of the blog post (with the symlinks) is about telling Eclipse where to find the source code.

That said, I think that it sure would be nice if my OS already came with Java. But I use Java every day, so maybe I'm biased.

For those of you who are worried about Apple needing to spend a few of the billions of dollars it has in the bank on paying a couple engineers to maintain security patches, it doesn't have to be the Apple or Oracle one either. OpenJDK would be fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It makes sense for Apple to not bundle any extraneous, non-core stuff like the JVM/Ruby/Python runtimes with the OS and let people download and install things on demand from their preferred source. Microsoft has always done it this way.

The problem in the JVM's case is that Apple made some intricate changes to the JVM to better integrate with OS X / Cocoa - like the look and feel and other integration stuff. A JVM with default Swing implementation on a Mac, without these changes, would have never been used at all - it just doesn't go with a Mac.

These changes are not going to be Open Sourced and the required OS level support for these changes is going to be deprecated. Which means whatever solution OpenJDK comes up with is likely going to be at the level of 'bare minimum' - enough to run server side apps and stuff and may be some horrible looking alien Swing Apps based on X11 or something.

There's the hold up I think - they need to come up with open source reimplementation of the integration bits without needing any OS/framework level hacks and that ain't no easy task!

<comment><USER12> _It makes sense for Apple to not bundle any extraneous, non-core stuff like the JVM/Ruby/Python runtimes with the OS and let people download and install things on demand from their preferred source._

But they do bundle Ruby 1.8.7.

<comment><USER13> And in private frameworks you can find macruby as well interestingly. Tonight I'm going to find out whats using it, i'm curious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wasn't this announced in October of 2010?

[http://www.cultofmac.com/steve-jobs-explains-was-java-was- de...](http://www.cultofmac.com/steve-jobs-explains-was-java-was-deprecated- on-os-x/65324)

"Java runtime at the same level, and it may even be removed from future versions of Mac OS X."

<comment><USER15> Read the article. The news (for people who weren't in the Lion beta program) is that if you open up a Terminal prompt and type 'java', it will automatically install Java for you.

So, it's not really deprecated anymore. In fact, Java was updated a few times during the beta process.

<comment><USER16> They never called it "deprecated" — they said it was an optional install in 10.7 and would no longer receive the same level of support. They gave Rosetta the same treatment in 10.6. It's gone now. All signs point to this being a grace period for Java devs to figure something else out.

<comment><USER15> It's always best to qualify your statements with "... that I'm aware of." ;)

Straight from the horse's mouth:

 _As of the release of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, the Java runtime ported by Apple and that ships with Mac OS X is deprecated. Developers should not rely on the Apple-supplied Java runtime being present in future versions of Mac OS X.

The Java runtime shipping in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, will continue to be supported and maintained through the standard support cycles of those products._

[http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#releasenotes/Java/Ja...](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#releasenotes/Java/JavaSnowLeopardUpdate3LeopardUpdate8RN/NewandNoteworthy/NewandNoteworthy.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010380-CH4-SW1)

<comment><USER16> I see it as fairly unnecessary to qualify things that way, because it's implied in any statement of fact that we're speaking according to our knowledge. I'd never write "according to your knowledge."

At any rate, this is still not a reversal of any stance. Apple never said it would not ship a Java runtime for Lion (and iirc it has been this way in Lion for a long time), and it still isn't recommended that developers depend on this.

<comment><USER15> I was just responding to your erroneous correction that Apple never said it was "deprecated", when in fact they explicitly said so. :)

Even our Apple rep said it was deprecated and he sure as heck doesn't read Developer notes, so I'd have to assume he got the news through some other chain at Apple.

Perhaps other orgs were protesting as loudly as our org was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Unless I missed a subsequent announcement, this was a silent change of policy — my understanding from their earlier announcement had been that you'd have to get a JRE from Oracle directly. Which gave me a bit of a scare when I realized my VPN software relied on Java and I hadn't seen any announcement from Oracle of a downloadable JRE. Happily, the first time I tried to connect, Lion popped up a window asking if I wanted to install Java; I said yes, and a few minutes later, everything worked as it always had.

</comment><comment><USER18> Java and Flash aren't installed by default on Windows, right? Then, what's the big deal of loading your own copy assuming you need it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Apple has gone to the same general distribution scheme for Java as they've implemented for themselves with Lion, Xcode, and many other pieces. Download it when you need it, and download the newest bits. (The Java download is certainly not as integrated as the Mac App Store stuff, but then the Xcode download that is in the Mac App Store is also a little weird, too. Download on demand, or whatever you want to call it.)

What's more interesting (to me) is the remote satellite boot that's now feasible during Lion recovery (where your Mac can boot off software loaded from Apple's servers via the Internet), and additions such as the ability to perform a recovery boot that can go as far as to launch Safari and get to the Internet to access services or to research whatever has caused me to be in the recovery path.

This certainly looks to be an operating system that's moving out onto the web/cloud/Internet.

</comment><comment><USER20> I recalled there was an internal Apple support stat showing that the two major sources of security holes on Mac OS X are Flash and Java. Apple has to maintain its own JVM stack, which is basically nightmare for a company with so few head counts compared to its product volume. The majority of OS X users won't ever use Java in their life time. Seems a really good idea not to bundle it.

</comment><comment><USER21> After upgrading my MBA to Lion, I couldn't launch Photoshop CS3 without installing a Java Runtime. Took 5 mins. Not really a big deal ...

</comment><comment> the-kenny They don't ship it by default.

If you run `java` in the terminal, Lion detects this and automatically installs it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, you must have read my blog posting!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I remember when OS X was promoted as the "greatest platform for running Java".

<comment><USER20> That was years ago. Practically no one has ever written pleasant Java-based consumer-facing applications running on OS X. Then iOS and OS X attracted a lot of native app developers using Xcode/Obj-C, and it paved the end of pre- installed Java on OS X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It does...but you can put it right back.

</comment><comment><USER24> What about Flash?

<comment><USER17> Not included anymore; you have to install it from adobe.com. They'd already switched to that on their hardware (at least on the storage-constrained MacBook Air… others too, though, I think) a few months back.

<comment><USER25> If you upgrade from a Snow Leopard install with Flash, it seems to carry over to Lion with the upgrade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Nobody thinks the removal of Flash's hardware acceleration and now Java are somehow related? My guess is they don't want to support technologies that are "helping" Android.

<comment><USER27> They didn't remove Flash hardware acceleration.

[http://www.macrumors.com/2011/07/22/adobe-retracts-claim- sug...](http://www.macrumors.com/2011/07/22/adobe-retracts-claim-suggesting- lion-may-lack-support-for-flash-hardware-acceleration/)</comment></comment>


A workflow for cloud instances baking and provisioning - <AUTHOR> https://blog.kintoandar.com/2017/06/Baking-delicious-cloud-instances.html?utm_source=hn <comment><USER2> Great walk through of Packer + Ansible. Very useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you liked it.</comment></comment>


Bootup Demo Days and the Seed Accelerator - <AUTHOR> http://www.techvibes.com/blog/bootup-demo-days-and-the-seed-accelerator

<comment><USER2> We haven't agreed with anyone about what to call things like YC. "Seed accelerator" seems a worse name than "incubator."</comment>


MoviePass will raise prices to $15 a month and limit access to blockbuster films - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/moviepass-will-raise-prices-to-15-a-month-while-limiting-access-to-blockbuster-films/ <comment><USER2> This service is looking less and less appealing by the week. I go to the movies often (6-10 times per month) but I've yet to sign up for MoviePass. The weird restrictions - you have to be within so many feet of the theatre, you can't purchase IMAX or other premium tickets, etc. - made it a deal-breaker for me. I've been an AMC Stubs member for a few years and while I'm still not convinced that AMC Stubs A-List would be worth it for me I definitely know that MoviePass is not something I'll be looking at going forward.

It's still so baffling to me how many people fell for their business scheme. They were losing money from day one (I know they had a service before but for all intents and purposes let's just say their service 'began' last year when they started offering the $10/month plan). In what world is that sustainable? Well, now we're seeing the effects of that: price hikes with little to no warning (the article says that the prices will go in effect for everyone on their next billing period), blackouts on popular movies (unless movie studios pay $$$$ of course), and surge pricing (none of these things were made apparent that they might occur during all of MoviePass's promotion). Can you imagine if other companies tried to pull this? Say Netflix dropped their streaming price to $3.99 per month. They then get millions and millions of new subscribers. But their network gets bogged down so they start saying 'oh, you can't watch that movie now because there are too many other people watching it.' Or, 'sorry about the $3.99 thing, we're raising our price next month to $9.99 to handle the demand.'</comment>


'Google Hobbies' proof of concept - <AUTHOR> https://blog.prototypr.io/google-hobbies-a-retrospective-on-a-new-feature-to-help-google-users-find-and-learn-new-skills-650947f0be#.c0si6ns7l <comment><USER2> Reminds me of [http://www.nina4airbnb.com/](http://www.nina4airbnb.com/) who made an extensive analysis of where airbnb should target next in an attempt to convince airbnb to hire her.

After her website went viral, she did eventually get an interview with airbnb. While making such an analysis is no guarantee of a job, she was rejected because the interviewer couldn't contextualize her experience because she "hadn't worked at facebook or google or studied at stanford".

She did however in the process land several interviews with different companies and picked a company called upwork in the end. So this kind of work can have several positive side effects even if your initial objective is not reached.

Her complete report can be read here: [http://eatwritewalk.com/2015/07/14/the- good-the-bad-and-the-...](http://eatwritewalk.com/2015/07/14/the-good-the-bad- and-the-ugly/)

<comment><USER3> Yikes. If the CMO of Airbnb actually said that, that's awful.

<comment><USER4> Of course he didn't.

<comment><USER3> Why is that?

<comment><USER4> It's exactly the sort of thing people who didn't get a job say was the reason ("ah they didn't like me because I'm not from Harvard") and it's exactly the sort of thing interviewers don't _actually_ say.

Maybe he thought it - he might have said something like "I don't think we're looking for someone with your background" or "we're looking for someone with different skills", but people always read what they think into comments like that.

There's almost no chance he _actually said_ "Sorry we're looking for someone from Harvard" (especially as that is obvious from the CV so you wouldn't even get an interview).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is excellent work, almost a whole book here.

At Code 4 SF where I've been volunteering a subgroup has been running a series of tests/challenges using design thinking. This is a hugely effective methodology for understanding problems, identifying opportunities, opening up the creative process in order to address them.

Design thinking works, but you have to really invest in it. If you don't want to make the full leap, there's also a large number of individual methods/tools emerging in the design thinking community that you can try out.

[http://www.designkit.org/methods](http://www.designkit.org/methods)

<comment><USER6> That's an awesome site. I've been reading this book on a specific implementation of the design thinking methods with GV's "design sprints" \-- might be worth checking out if you haven't heard of it already: [http://www.gv.com/sprint/](http://www.gv.com/sprint/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why pitch this to google? If you think there's a useful tool here, why not built it and own it yourself?

<comment><USER8> The author seems to be a product manager and designer, rather than an engineer.

<comment><USER9> The author could still work with people to create it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Startups have won on a lot less than the feature / ux innovation the author just laid out.

Forget google - build this with a "Show HN:" to find a cofounder!

</comment><comment><USER11> Is this a form of appropriating other peoples' content? Google 's already borderlining, I think, with the instant answer stuff. This seems like it's definitely crossing copyright lines.

<comment><USER12> Also, I don't like Google to become a universal place to go to for anything. They already dominate search; they don't have to dominate the entire internet.

Further, I am afraid that these tutorials could lead to a "bubble" effect, where everybody who learns to play the guitar starts with the same songs. Boring.

<comment><USER13> Everybody who learns to play guitar already starts with the same songs. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Had more or less this exact idea for a website before, with the exception of using wiki for the main technology, and there being different paths to learning the material provided by curators.

Essentially it'd say go to this tutorial, now this tutorial. Now watch this video. Now do this exercise. Very similar to online courses nowadays, except it all pointed to external links and volunteer contributions, and there'd be more than one path for learning the same material (probably with comments and ratings to help you pick which one to try).

There's a billion tutorials online, but things get out of date, and you have to hunt them down, and some people might think one link is more important than another, hence the different paths.

But I shelved the idea after seeing online courses getting better and incorporating a lot of my ideas.

</comment><comment><USER15> 1) This seems awful close Google Helpouts. Why do you think that might have been discontinued?

2) If you're trying to get attention of someone at Goog, fix your branding mockup -- the product name is in grey, and doesn't have the jaunty "e". See e.g. the header of [https://www.google.com/services](https://www.google.com/services)

<comment><USER16> I think some reasons products like Needle and Google Helpouts don't make it is the time investment, minimal payback, and the fact that this type of information is generally available all over the Internet for free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> lmao at "Before and after showing how awesome the 960 grid is.". Half the page is now ads.

By the way, I find it incredibly annoying when a page performs some action 2 seconds delayed. It makes me click on things I didn't intend to because the content shifts.

Anyway, thanks for giving me a introduction to UI?UX.

<comment><USER18> Agreed, Medium makes me furious with how they load images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It seems intrusive - questionnaires, tracking, etc. Very Google.

If you want to find out how to do something, Instructables is probably more useful. That's owned by Autodesk. Autodesk doesn't want to know about your social life; they just want to sell you tools for designing and making stuff.

</comment><comment><USER20> nice, i call this modis: method of discovery

if i am learning something new i will log whatever i read or watch or listen to in the order in which i did in order to achieve the level of expertise i currently possess

my goal is more of a possible vector of learning instead of thinking it 'the' way to learn something</comment>


Ask HN: Personal email hosting service on the cheap? - <AUTHOR>

Now that google charges for google apps for small business, how do people go about hosting just an email address at their own domain on the cheap?
Many of the services I've seen (rackspace, fusemail) require $10 per month. Google apps for small business is approx $50 per year, There's got to be something better / cheaper for just email. (ideally sub $20 / year)
I'd like to find a reliable, well known, add and spam free, hosted imap server that allows multiple addresses (aliases) that point to a single mailbox.
Suggestions? <comment><USER2> namecheap.com offers hosted email with Open-Xchange for annual prices ranging from $3 to $30 (details: <https://www.namecheap.com/email/email- hosting.aspx>).

Basics: 3GB/5GB/10GB, all have POP3/IMAP, some have "mobile" meaning ActiveSync and comparable technologies. Since the most expensive is still only $2.50/month it's not likely to be a wallet-buster either way.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.codero.com/small-business-services/email-hosting/>

</comment><comment><USER4> I guess one part of the problem is deciding on a flat-fee for a year, or a price which is dependent upon the number of accounts/users you have.

Were it me I'd rent a VPS and configure email myself. A less technical user might find that too much work (although online control panels might make it more palatable).

A decent VPS might cost $20/month or $100/year and would be sufficient to handle mail for 50ish users.

Sure a VPS just for email might seem like overkill..

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> yeah I have one user, one mailbox.

</comment><comment><USER5> Fastmail.fm

<comment><USER6> Hmm... just checked out fastmail.fm The tier with custom domain starts at $40. Not that much better than google's $50 per seat which includes access to lots of other google apps in the bargain.

Try zohomail.com You can create a zoho apps account (including ad-free email) for upto 3 users with custom domain for free.</comment></comment>


Commanding a Tesla Model S with the Amazon Echo - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jsgoecke/commanding-a-tesla-model-s-with-the-amazon-echo-a06f975364b8#.ha3vdpzaw <comment><USER2> The demo video in the article is kind of incredible. It's one of those magical moments where you're just like "aha - this is what the future looks like."

Despite the necessary security and safety criticisms that are likely to come up, this is truly awesome; I wish we saw more stuff like this surfacing on HN.

<comment><USER3> Not sure if you're interested, but I've got a couple of my lights hooked up with Google Now so I can say "Ok Google, turn the living room lamp on" and also when I connect to my wifi network and the sun has set it'll turn my living room lamp on.

<comment><USER4> Can you give me a general direction how to do this project?</comment></comment></comment>


Can Naples reinvent itself as a tech capital? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45486674 <comment><USER2> I have done some work with a good friend and his company which is located near Naples.

No, this won't happen.

That place is pure chaos. It is closer to a so-called developing nation (ethiopia, guatemala) than a "European Country". It is filthy, garbage everywhere, chaos drivers, mafia infiltrating everything; Nothing really works as well as it should; absolute corruption at every level of society.

Sure, Naples has a beautiful city center, and there are some impressive technical universities around. But this is not enough.

<comment><USER3> > It is filthy, garbage everywhere, chaos drivers, mafia infiltrating > everything; Nothing really works as well as it should; absolute corruption > at every level of society. Sure, Naples has a beautiful city center, and > there are some impressive technical universities around.

Sounds a lot like San Francisco to me /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No, it can't. Mafia won't allow it and every decent human being born out of that city moves out of it sooner rather than later

<comment><USER5> This is my impression as well.

Only city in the EU that I've felt unsafe in, granted I was only passing through so that feeling was probably just a manifestation of the city's reputation.

<comment><USER6> Really? There are worse EU cities regarding security.

<comment><USER7> Berlin and Leipzig, for starters, both of which are major startup capitals.

<comment><USER8> Huh? I have never ever felt unsafe in those. What areas are unsafe in Berlin?

<comment><USER6> If you can read German,

[https://www.berliner- zeitung.de/berlin/polizei/die-23-unsich...](https://www.berliner- zeitung.de/berlin/polizei/die-23-unsichersten-orte-der-stadt-wo-berlin- gefaehrlich-ist-23459052)

[https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article210846209/An- diesen-...](https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article210846209/An-diesen-Orten- muessen-Berliner-und-Touristen-aufpassen.html)

<comment><USER8> Thank you, I can manage. Are these considered serious newspapers?

<comment><USER6> Yes, they are not like Bild and friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder how important Naples's local issues really are for a tech startup. Naples has a pretty bad reputation, but it's mainly about public services like waste collection, sanitation, water and infrastructure.

If I were starting a construction company or a restaurant there I might be concerned about mafia involvement, but as a tech company I worry more abut Italy's general bureaucracy and its broken legal system.

The somewhat baffling political situation doesn't exactly inspire confidence either (although I suppose I shouldn't be throwing stones from my UK glass house in that respect)

<comment><USER10> One of the reasons that Berlin is so popular is that everything works smoothly (everything is relative, of course), and it has a great, multicultural social life.

Neither of these apply to Naples.

<comment><USER11> The first applies for sure, but if you think Naples isn't multicultural and social then you haven't spent much time here or aren't paying attention to the faces and habits of people in the city. There are people from everywhere here, and lots of them.

This city is hypersocial to the point that it exhausts visitors from places like Berlin and the states. Thousands of people gather together spontaneously any night of the week in the public spaces in the city center. You cannot walk two minutes without the chance of talking to someone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Salaries in Italy are simply not high enough to attract or retain talent, in my opinion

<comment><USER13> You are underestimating italian talent. Italy is fully of hungry minds and determined people and that applies even more in Naples where opportunities are scarce.

<comment><USER14> Is it possible that instead of underestimating Italian talent, parent is carefully considering the immense power, value, skill, hunger, and determination of Italian talent? Especially when those incredible people have ready access to a sizable number of other places that pay better!

I've personally met more than one _absolutely brilliant_ Italian engineer... who lives in London.

<comment><USER15> Italy has a massive brain drain problem. Many university educated professionals live overseas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> * >The University of Naples, the first university in Europe dedicated to training secular administrators,

* >Naples became part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 as part of the Italian unification, ending the era of Bourbon rule. The kingdom of the Two Sicilies had been wealthy, and as many as 443.2 million ducats were taken from the old kingdom's banks as a contribution to the new Italian treasury.

* >by 1884, Naples was still the largest city in Italy with 496,499 inhabitants, or roughly 64,000 per square kilometre (more than twice the population density of Paris)

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

I had no idea that Naples had been that advanced. Building on that history, they should have a huge potential. Unfortunately, I don't see how they can recreate their strategic advantage the way they do.

The Mediterranean Sea was the Internet before the industrial revolution. Naples is an expression of that network effect. Which network can they offer today? Won't they suffer the same problem as India, that they educate programmers who will take the first opportunity to move to Silicon Valley?

<comment><USER17> Comparing Italy to India is a disproportionate

<comment><USER18> it is true that a lot good Italian programmers go abroad looking for better wages. Source: I'm one of them (Italian, not good, that is).

<comment><USER17> Silicon Valley has a global pull and a lot of programmers will end up there regardless of nationality.

Italian programmers can go easily to other places, and the internal market is not too bad as well, so I guess most don't bother looking to go to SV

<comment><USER18> Sure, I wasn't thinking about SV. Europe is big and has a lot of opportunities with better salaries. London, where I live, is just around the corner for an Italian (at least for now).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Such a pointless story. Saying that startups can only succeed in SV, London or Berlin is myopic. There are plenty of startup successes (around the US and around Europe) proving this wrong.

Every location has its advantages and its disadvantages - you play the best cards you get, and the only sure way not to win is to not play at all.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes, but not by companies investing. This is a great place to live, and if you have remote work you will live really well with minimal costs. It is just too corrupt and anarchic to be a good target for investment. The idea of a company headquarters here is simply impossible. It would have to be placed out in the middle of nowhere.

Naples can be a tech hub, but in the leftist anarchist community sense rather than the big business sense. People will have to choose to do so. From what little I've seen this does seem to be happening already.

</comment><comment><USER20> the main things, i think, necessary to make somewhere a great location for a startup are public infrastructure and talent, i dont know anything about naples, but i wonder first and foremost how good the local talent is, and second how well it can attract talent. is the airport accessible to direct flights to say sfo, etc. are there incentives to place datacenters, although not a hard requirement because of aws, gcp ovmh, but it helps, i imagine it's a volcanic zone, so probably not. look at all the great startup cities in the world and you'll find strong universities that have great talent, the univiersities help to lure the talent, the companies help to keep them.

obviously this has lots of ties with government where they could make things easier.

from the first picture, it looks like a great place to live on the mediterannean, but the crime and filth sounds bad.

<comment><USER20> i would add to this, the culture must embrace entrepreneurialism, like tokyo is a great place in terms of infrastructure, but the society is more bent on having salarymen that have stable careers, so the startup scene is more stagnant than other places where the schools/talent arent as good and access to sfo, other places are great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Italy has a problem attracting talent, capital, and companies even in the "better" and more developed areas. How can Naples fare? The article mentions student academies, which is the only way it can manage since salaries would be way too low for experienced workers.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm Italian and no, it can't (would love for the people of Naples to prove me wrong though)

</comment><comment><USER22> Yes they can, if politics change its behaviour.

</comment><comment><USER23> Does it need to?

</comment><comment><USER24> Instant advantage towards the two pizza rule.

</comment><comment><USER25> Coincidentally there is a stable US Navy base in Naples.

Don't turn Naples in another gentrified hellhole like you did with Lisbon.

<comment><USER26> What happened in Lisbon?

<comment><USER27> Gentrification, mass tourism and special privilege for some people that can afford to buy entire buildings are causing major social issues: \- [https://www.euronews.com/2017/09/19/lisbon-s-tourism- magnet-...](https://www.euronews.com/2017/09/19/lisbon-s-tourism-magnet-is- kicking-out-local-residents) \- [http://www.theportugalnews.com/news/president-promulgates- te...](http://www.theportugalnews.com/news/president-promulgates-temporary- suspension-on-evictions-as-rents-skyrocket-and-housing-stock-falls/46197)

People using words like "prosperity" either don't live here, or especially don't work for a living here...

<comment><USER28> This sounds like AirBnB effects again :(

<comment><USER27> That, and the fact that the government has decided to keep giving away EU visas to people from geographies that are notorious for corruption (e.g. Brasil, Angola, China) in exchange for meager (500K€) real estate "investments" [1]

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/18/portugal- golde...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/18/portugal-golden-visas- corrupt-brazilian-tycoon-among-applicants)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> More questions for headlines. Just clickbait pretending to be a news article. You would think that the BBC would be immune to this form of "journalism" since they are an established news company backed by taxpayer money.

But since the BBC asked, I'll apply Betteridge's Law and simply answer no. Did I pass?

</comment><comment><USER30> Please keep such madness out of the EU...</comment>