How to save money running a startup - <AUTHOR> http://calacanis.com/2008/03/07/how-to-save-money-running-a-startup-17-really-good-tips/

<comment><USER2> To save money running a startup, follow these tips:

1\. Hire a competent but old programmer who has debt, and a wife and kids. Pay him well.

2\. Hire a bunch of interns to work on your code. Pay them badly.

3\. Let the interns do the unimportant stuff, under the control of the old guy.

4\. When the mission critical parts of your software come, for example design or scaling issues, bring in freelance consultants to help you do this

5\. Hire lit major students to write a bunch of content for you. They are cheap and good at writing.

6\. Release upgrades often and publicize each release as much as you can. You don't need PR.

7\. Fire anyone who believes he is a rockstar, knows the best way of doing something and insists it has to be done that way, or somehow thinks he is owed something

8\. Get small offices. Make your workers work short hours, so they have time to do stuff at home, and so that they stay with your company because of the amount of freetime available

9\. Make your team friendly. If there is a socially akward or shy guy who does not relate with the other members of the team, fire him

10\. Get a guy whose job is to manage outsourced projects. Outsource as much as you can and hold this guy directly responsible for the results

11\. Don't go to conferences, don't stay in hotels. Spend to promote your product, not to promote yourself.

12\. Take the money you make and put it back in company development. Keep the teams small and unified as you grow.

13\. Spend your ad money on measurable ads like adsense etc. No expensive placement ads. You can optmize then

14\. Hire people on freelancer contracts. You can save on their benefits as well as the management costs for doing their taxes

15\. Take the guys in the startup to strip clubs. Get them laid.

You wanted to save money, right? If you do the above, you don't need aeron chairs to keep your team happy, productive and cheap. However, it's unsexy, and some people will look down on you.

<comment><USER3> _1\. Hire a competent but old programmer who has debt, and a wife and kids. Pay him well._

It's actionable age discrimination, but go ahead. You gotta break some eggs if you want to make an omelette.

 _9\. Make your team friendly. If there is a socially akward or shy guy who does not relate with the other members of the team, fire him_

It's actionable discrimination and a shitty thing to do to an otherwise valuable but shy person, but he's too shy to bring this to your attention or to hire a lawyer, so it's a win-win. (Again, eggs->omelette.)

 _12\. Take the money you make and put it back in company development. Keep the teams small and unified as you grow._

Also, breathe air, drink water, and eat food.

 _15\. Take the guys in the startup to strip clubs. Get them laid._

Again, actionable sexual harassment, but you're a nouveau web entrepreneur and therefore not concerned about things like legal liabilities. Let IBM, Microsoft, and other old school outfits worry about things like that. Besides, you're saving so much money by doing this that you can afford the suit.

I feel like I've fallen victim to a motivational seminar version of Poe's law.

<comment><USER4>
9\. Make your team friendly. If there is a socially akward or shy guy who does not relate with the other members of the team, fire him

It's actionable discrimination and a shitty thing to do to an otherwise valuable but shy person, but he's too shy to bring this to your attention or to hire a lawyer, so it's a win-win. (Again, eggs->omelette.)

I don't see anything actionable here unless he's a member of a protected class and can claim that's why it was done. Being shy is not protected. For that matter, it's not a shitty thing to do: he's bringing down the team. Sucks to be him, but if he's affecting productivity, out he goes.

<comment><USER3> Not to quibble, but there are disorders like Asperger's syndrome, social anxiety disorder, clinical depression, and so on. Many of these would qualify the person as handicapped and therefore a member of a protected class. If there's even a doubt, you might have to settle out to avoid legal fees or a potential defeat in court. Besides, reasonable accommodations are, by definition, reasonable. Maybe he/she can be one of the people that works odd hours to avoid others?

 _he's bringing down the team. Sucks to be him, but if he's affecting productivity, out he goes._

There was no mention of a productivity hit. We have to take the OP at his word that he/she meant, "If somebody isn't suave or outgoing enough, fire that person." I think I'd rather educate my team about diversity, tolerance, and respect than fire technically competent people who happen to like to keep their doors closed. If you have a team that requires all others to be social sophisticates and can't function in the face of shyness, then this is your second biggest problem after handling the inevitable discrimination suit for firing Joe Shy. Also, if I worked with me, I'd probably want some alone time, too.

There are just so many things wrong with point (9) that it's hard to get them all out. Here goes:

1) Team managers, unless highly skilled (and sometimes even then) don't always understand the factors that make their teams function/fail.

2) The aforementioned possible legal liability of insisting on a team of suaves.

3) The inadvisability of insisting on a team of suaves.

4) The presupposition that the person who is awkward/shy is the problem. Maybe (the hypothetical) you and your team are a gang of unproductive dicks?

5) Maybe you're productive dicks but it will never scale?

6) The whiny intolerance of anyone who's not having absolutely the easiest time of things.

7) The fact that none of this has ever been an issue on any team I've ever worked on?

8) The insipid notion that it's a zero sum game or that the only thing is the productivity or that you can improve productivity with misguided social engineering.

I could go on. I think that what it really comes down to is that I'd rather be the guy who succeeds by helping others succeed. Entrepreneurship is as much about finding value where others can't as it is about creating new value. That includes finding it in employees who are less than socially perfect.

<comment><USER5> _I think I'd rather educate my team about diversity, tolerance, and respect._

Sounds nice in theory, but in a startup you don't get points for being swell. The team needs to click, and if there are people that don't fit with the group dynamic socially, then that's already something working against you.

Fortunately the scene itself is pretty diverse. There are enough different sorts of founders out there that hire people like them that there's a place for shy and outgoing people to find a place to do their thing. I think the fallacy that kicked this off was that all founders are socialites. But if you've got founders that are socialites, they'll probably do better off with a team that is too.

For the record, I had one job that I didn't get because I would have slowed the rest of the team down (in that case it was because the rest of the team was German and I wasn't yet fluent in German). They were right not to hire me. They may have ended up hiring someone less qualified than me, but that made their team more cohesive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "1. Buy Macintosh computers, save money on an IT department"

# tail -f /var/log/messages

Oct 15 15:45:47 mike-laptop Bullshit detected.

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry to say but for development a Linux machine is way more productive.

<comment><USER8> Expect for the learning how to use and set up Linux part, I would agree with you. I would say it takes about 10x longer for an amateur to become comfortable with Linux then OSX, which is a serious weak point in the productivity area.

<comment><USER5> If you're hiring amateur developers at your startup, then you're doing something wrong. If you're forcing experienced developers to use a particular OS because you read in some dumb blog post that it was a good idea, you're doing something wrong.

Really, I think on a small team, the best OS choice is the one that people know. There are very few cases where I can see OS dogmatism as being worth spending brain cycles on in an early-phase startup. If you're still small enough to all be eating at the same lunch table, you're also small enough that you don't need an IT policy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find the idea of doing meetings over lunch horrible. The point of lunch is to switch off and recharge so that you can get going again in the afternoon.

Plus having an hour to recharge is more effective than 30 minutes. You may save 100 hours a year on lunch, but what do you lose in productivity and morale?

<comment><USER10> Maybe you're thinking of the boring sort of meeting that has an agenda and 20 people there. Just eat lunch with people you work with and talk about work stuff.

<comment><USER6> I don't want to eat lunch with the people I work with. Go out for a beer afterward if I feel like it, sure, but during lunch, give me solitude, sun and a newspaper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If he's trying to save money, why is he using the word "buy" so much?

<comment><USER5> Definitely agreed. "Learn to think cheap." has been important for us. "Money saving tips" that include Areon chairs and a several thousand dollar expresso machine are retarded. My co-founder wanted an external monitor for his laptop ... so he picked one up a 19" CRT for 5€ on eBay. We like expresso, so we have a 15€ coffee grinder and a 25€ mocha pot that goes on the stove. This isn't rocket science.

<comment><USER12> "so he picked one up a 19" CRT for 5€ on eBay."

Depending on what you do, a good monitor can actually help you earn money by making you either more efficient or enjoy your work more.

<comment><USER5> So can Areon chairs. That doesn't mean that they're the most effective use of money. Really, this is a list of motivational tips, not money saving tips.

But even there, the sort of people I'd like to hire are much more excited about hard problems than fancy office accessories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What I like about these tips is that they are mostly about buying things that are one-time costs, and avoiding the recurring costs.

</comment><comment><USER14> the list mostly consists of 'spend/buy this and that (mac, 2nd monitor, aeron, espresso machine, etc) to save more money further'

those seem to be in direct opposition to the epitome of startup: steve wozniak

"All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before"

<comment><USER15> I think this quote is misapplied to the original post. He didn't have enough money to get to the next level and do things that in fact were expensive, like get access to million dollar machines (once he went to college, he did get access to a mainframe, and ran up the bill so much he never went back until he started Apple, and only went back after Apple became a success.)

Therefore, I think a modern-day Steve from Silicon Valley would in fact have at least two monitors. If he could get parts at 11 and 13 to build a ham radio and computer, he could also find or build some lcd monitors in this day and age.

I think Waz wanted to learn about everything, and at some point money would stop anyone, and cause them to re-create things in their own room. But I'm sure he would either have monitors or assemble them. For a lot of people right now who concentrate on software, though, it is cheaper to buy monitors outright.

Steve was a hardware guy. If you're a software guy, write your own software. But you will need to spend a lot of time on your butt to program, and I think that is what the post is getting at.

Also, while a design for a circuit might lose value (besides the learning experience), monitors, desks, and chairs will be used for many, many years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am in grad school and need to live frugally so tomorrow I am buying a $4,000 espresso machine.

<comment><USER17> A 4k espresso machine is not for one person. If you have 20 people they might spend around that much a month at Starbucks. (10$/day) But I still think it's a perk and has little to do with saving the company money in the short term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think there are a lot of weak points in the article.

\- Outsource all HR, he even calls it a no-brainer. To me outsourcing the well-being of your employees, probably the most important asset you've got is downright stupid.

\- All this talk about saving five minutes by having in-house great coffee instead of lettin gpeople fo to Starbucks, having meetings over lunch, etc. misses an important point and tells me that this guy has no idea how to deal with human beings. Your employees don't go to Starbucks just to get a coffee, they go to get a break, to ponder over a problem, have an informal meeeting, or something else. It's not about the coffe. Same with lunch. People need breaks, particularly people that make their money by thinking. I read a post by Joel Spolsky where he claims that he probably works around 4 hours a day, the rest of the time he just goofs around trying to get his thoughts together, thinking over a problem, etc. And he seems pretty productive. People aren't machines - if you treat them as such expect results thereafter.

Jeez...

<comment><USER19> I think by outsource HR he meant all the documents/401k/tps stuff, not the actual hiring & interviewing. Calacanis has mentioned before that he personally interviews everyone. This obviously could have changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The last comment shows me how out of touch Calacanis really is:

"Outsource to middle America: There are tons of brilliant people living between San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York who don't live in a $4,000 one bedroom apartment and pay $8 to dry clean a shirt–hire them!"

Hardly anyone pays $4,000 for a one-bedroom in SF, and if they are they're not working for a startup (or shouldn't be). For reference, I pay $1k in rent and have my own room and a backyard in SF.

Also, you _need_ to be in the same locale as your colleagues. especially in an early stage startup. You need to see people's facial expressions during brainstorming sessions and after idea pitches. You need to read their moods and work with them on a personal, in-person level.

I've worked with outsourced teams in India and the Ukraine, despite the talents of my foreign colleagues things NEVER went as smoothly / quickly as they would have locally. Especially with a fast moving early stage startup, that's of the essence.

</comment><comment><USER21> Disagree on the phones. Buy a pc, a digium card and a few lines and spend a weekend setting up asterisk. It does not instill me with a lot of confidence when I call a business and get some guys garbled sounding cell phone voicemail instead of "Thanks for calling X...." and being able to dial a real extension. (Even if said extension just forwards to his cell.)

</comment><comment><USER22> Billions of dollars could be saved by businesses everywhere if they were to migrate away from Microsoft products. It is a fact that Individuals and Businesses alike pay Billions of dollars in Microsoft Software Licensing and Computer Security alone. Clear and viable alternatives exist today in what is termed "Open Source Software". A number of viable alternatives exist under the generic name "linux" in which the expense is optional or "Free". For those individual users requiring additional assistance the optional support License average around $80 U.S. currency. Linux is an extremely "User Friendly" Operating System which by itself is not only easy to install, use and Update, it comes complete with "Open Source" Microsoft Compatible Desktop Utilities to replace those commonly used and relatively expensive applications such as MSWord and MSExcel Word Processing and Spreadsheet applications. In addition to these, a complete array (literally thousands)of readily available, easy to locate, install, use, update or even un-install just by selecting / de- selecting a check box!And most are equally functional to their commercial counterparts!. Applications such as Games, Educational Applications, highly useful Computer Utilities and Internet Applications exist TODAY. Not only is Linux easy to use, is well known as being invulnerable to attack by Computer Viruses. The fact that additional Billions of dollars are spent on System Security as a result of these omnipresent and dangerous Computer Viruses should be enough for the average PC user and business owner alike to see the value at hand. In just minutes, any computer system can be converted to the Linux Operating System by even the least savvy Computer user. As if we need any additional reasons to switch, Linux will outperform Windows which is like going out and buying a faster computer, without actually going anywhere! Do yourself and your pocketbook a huge favor by converting to any of the number of Open-Source Linux Operating Systems. I personally recommend "UBUNTU Linux" for any user. Not only will you have a Desktop Operating System that is much faster and easy to use, you will have removed that "Virus Target" from your PC as well....

</comment><comment><USER23> I feel like this taints his motives. Prior to this post employees might have felt that Calcanis really cared about them.

"Working at Mahalo is sweet. We get Aeron chairs, 2 monitors, free food, free coffee, and free sodas."

It's still a sweet deal, but it just doesn't feel as nice when you learn that he was doing these things more for the bottom line.

<comment><USER24> Those things aren't mutually exclusive, they're actually quite complimentary. Nice working environment = happy, more productive employees = better for the bottom line.

Also, I wouldn't want any employee working for me that thinks to themselves, "Gee, I thought this company was being good to me but it turns out they're trying to make money." It's the whole point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Most of these make sense, but I don't really see how a 2nd monitor can save half hour a day. Also the $3000 espresso machine might be a little expensive when you can get one for $500 that's pretty decent.

<comment><USER10> I would say that's an underestimate of the value of a 2nd monitor. If you're a programmer, get a second monitor if you have to buy itself. It's worth it.

<comment><USER26> I think it depends on the OS. OSX does a good job letting one monitor effectively host several applications. I find that harder to do in windows and the linux desktops I have tried.

Of course, OSX still needs a lot of pixels to do its job, so a single laptop screen won't really help. At my current job I have a large second monitor for my MPB and find myself hardly using the laptop screen for anything.

<comment><USER14> In Linux/BSD/Unix, it depends more on the window manager (dwm/wmii/ion3/ratpoison/etc nullify the need of 2nd monitor)

I guess the 2 monitor programmers are windows guys (nothing wrong with that) ... and then they migrate to osx/linux, bringing the bad habits and polluting osx/linux over time

your second monitor for MBP, is it used for extending the view for osx, or it's just a cloned view of the laptop screen (let's say via external monitor cable)?

if it's a cloned view, vnc is an old and reliable technique that works regardless of cpu/os used (you can control powerpc mac, intel mac, windows, linux, bsd machines ... in one box)

dual/multi-boot and parallel guys, try to beat that! :D

<comment><USER10> Ratpoison hardly nullifies the need for a second monitor. It's all about screen real estate. You're working on a tough programming problem, you want a few different files of code, a browser open to some documentation, and some extra emacs (in my case) buffers and/or terminals for various errands. You just want it all to be visible at once. It's much easier to just keep everything there rather than "put it away" somewhere that's not visible. This is true regardless of your window manager.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Don't buy a phone system. Savings? At least $500 a year per person..

Uh, maybe if you've never heard of VOIP. $39.95/mo for an entire company plus $0.03/minute.

</comment><comment><USER19> I know 95% of what Calacanis writes is garbage or just promoting himself/Mahahlo, but these were some great tips.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yea, I'm curious as to what he would add to this list for running a startup in a recession</comment>


Toronto Old IBM Datacentre Renderings - 52-6F-62 https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nNvJo <comment> 52-6F-62 This was linked in a Reddit thread about the old IBM Datacentre located on King St E in Toronto circa 1960's

I also wanted to link this hilarious story about operating the machines there:

\---

 _Ah, yes, Nosferatu.

That was the name for the reel-to-reel tape drives, for two reasons.

The tapes had to be fed manually into the input loop, until the light sensor detected the start of tape, at which point the automated feed would clasp the tape and start reeling it in automatically.

One of the problems was that on sunny days, the light coming through all that glass to the outside confused the tape sensor, and it would refuse to feed the tape. Operators would either have to shield the sensors from the light with their bodies (which was difficult), or wait for a cloud to go by, at which point the tape sensor would work properly until the sun came out again.

The other problem was that the tape clamp on some of the drives was a little too aggressive, and clamped down so quickly that the operator couldn't get his finger out of the way in time. There were lots of tape that had skin and blood from slower operators.

The tape drives had a taste for human flesh and drank their blood, but at least they were powerless in sunlight. And that's how the nickname "Nosferatu" came about.

They later added some kind of polarizing filter so that that outside light didn't confuse the light sensor (at least as much), as well as some safety features to cut down on the finger eating. Later models were a lot tamer, but operators would still occasionally get nipped by overly aggressive tape feeders._

\---

(Original comment: [https://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/eojygy/the_ibm_dat...](https://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/eojygy/the_ibm_datacenter_in_toronto_1963/feddepy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x))</comment>


Minecraftsoft – Acquiring a Hit Game Like Minecraft Is Stupid - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/13/lessons-learned-from-zynga-rovio-and-flappy-bird/

<comment><USER2> While the points are valid, I do wonder what TechCrunch would be saying if Apple, for example, was doing the acquiring.

<comment><USER3> They would say it's a bold new move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> By itself it might not be great but Microsoft may be planning to acquire several small companies and together they may get enough exclusive software to get them to a tipping point. Once past it, the customers and developers will follow.

10 companies @ 2 billion each isn't much money. Microsoft is cash rich.

</comment><comment><USER5> whats the difference between group A and B?

A: Zynga, Rovio, King and Dong

B: blizzard, valve, bethesda, rockstar..(at a stretch bioware? square?)

</comment><comment><USER6> What a joke! Minecraft is not game, it's an ecosystem, a lifestyle. My kids are crazy about it! Given the fact that Microsoft is/was working on something similar (Project Spark), it makes total sense for them. But, hey, it's Microsoft and all Microsoft does is crap unlike Apple, which shit even smells like roses (excuse my French, I couldn't help it).</comment>


ACME v2 API Endpoint Coming January 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://letsencrypt.org/2017/06/14/acme-v2-api.html <comment><USER2> I will update acme-tiny, letsencrypt-nosudo, and gethttpsforfree.com to support ACME v2 when it is released.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your (past and future) work on those clients!

In case you haven't seen it yet, Let's Encrypt is working on a testing-only server implementation called pebble[1] that's based on the latest ACME draft. Might come in handy if you want to start working on this before the production ACME server (boulder) is ready.

[1]: [https://github.com/letsencrypt/pebble](https://github.com/letsencrypt/pebble)

<comment><USER2> Will there be a v2 staging domain like there is for v1?

<comment><USER4> Yes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The blog post was a little vague on what the changes are to the standard.

Found the repo were development is being managed: [https://github.com/ietf-wg- acme/acme](https://github.com/ietf-wg-acme/acme)

<comment><USER6> Agreed -- the actual draft appears to be at [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-acme- acme-06](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-acme-acme-06)

<comment><USER7> Does anybody know what significant changes were made in this draft, compared to the version that was previously implemented by Let's Encrypt?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there some tiny ACME client implementation with DNS validation and CSR support? Basically: I don't want to make my private keys accessible for acme software and I don't want to rotate them, so I want to generate CSR once and re-use them to generate new certificates. So far I didn't like other implementations, probably will make my own, but may be I missed something.

<comment><USER9> It sounds like Dehydrated[0] suits your usecase - it's meant to be truly tiny so it doesn't bundle DNS validation; that's generally handled by the DNS Tool Lexicon[1], which includes an example config for use with Dehydrated.

0: [https://dehydrated.de/](https://dehydrated.de/) 1: [https://github.com/AnalogJ/lexicon](https://github.com/AnalogJ/lexicon)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Do we get wildcard certs?

<comment><USER5> The spec draft still explicitly denies them:

> Wildcard domain names (with "*" as the first label) MUST NOT be included in > authorization objects.

<comment><USER11> Does anyone know why this is exactly?

<comment><USER3> This is not intended to prohibit wildcard issuance. It just makes clear that identifiers in authorizations (and therefor challenges) are always actual FQDNs. You may still submit CSRs that include wildcard identifiers, and whether they're issued, which identifiers will have to be validated and what challenge type is required is up to CA policy. This is mentioned in section 10.5 of the spec[1].

To me, Let's Encrypt not supporting wildcards seems mostly like a policy decision where they're choosing not to support some use-cases in exchange for a security win: Not having the compromise of one domain affect certificate issuance for all of its subdomains, less overall complexity and preventing users from getting into the habit of using one wildcard certificate with the same key across multiple services.

[1]: [https://ietf-wg-acme.github.io/acme/#rfc.section.10.5](https://ietf-wg- acme.github.io/acme/#rfc.section.10.5)

<comment><USER12> Also ensuring a market for premium certificates, lets not forget that one bullet point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Props for collaborating to make ACME v2 an actual Internet Standard.

So many of the things we use today use custom APIs that can change on a whim. That makes me sad.

</comment><comment><USER14> This would be great especially for paid alternate CAs, so we can automate renewals, etc easily.

You could also bring functionality similar to Caddy, for other CAs.</comment>


The Moral Sense Test - <AUTHOR> http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/index2.html

<comment><USER2> All 10 questions were variants of the trolley problem. The problems were also poorly formed which is what made answering them difficult, not the actual moral dilema. For example, in the real trolly problem it is clear that you really only have two options flip the switch or not, it is hard to imagine there are other alternatives. But in many of these problems, it is hard to believe there is not a better option available, even though the problem states "but the only way..."

<comment><USER3> Yes, they were quite poorly formed, which renders the study entirely pointless. The idea behind these problems is to collect people's intuitive reactions to simple, clear situations. If the problems are so poorly formed that intuition simply rejects them, the exercise is useless, except as a study in human frustration. (Perhaps that's the point? It would explain the poor UI design.)

Several situations present you with the option of causing one immediate and fairly certain death to prevent several more distant, much more speculative deaths. You can't predict the path of a boulder down a mountain. A boulder that would be stopped by one person would be unlikely to kill five. The man driving the injured people to the hospital actually has little idea how quickly he needs to get them there to save their lives. The certainty presented in the problems is so unreal that they might as well have been posed in an entirely abstract way in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This test uses a variant of the good old "trolley dilemma" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem>) where a trolley/train is headed for five workmen on a track and it asks if you'd pull a lever to divert the trolley onto a track where only one man is working. (This test then goes on to vary that situation somewhat.)

Studies have been run on this in the past and to my dismay most people would, in the initial scenario, flick the switch to save five but kill one - immediately becoming murderers rather than bystanders. I suspect this test is trying to weed out what could make people flip-flop from one point of view to the other, as when replaced with "pushing a fat man off a bridge to block the trolley" the stats have tended to swing the other way.

<comment><USER5> Involvement in the world isn't voluntary; actions have consequences, some people prefer some consequences to other consequences.

In your case you value maintaining an unsullied self-image over assisting 5 people in mortal peril, and would prefer if other people saw your choice the same way.

But you're right (I've met people who were familiar with the people involved here): the intuition is that the stronger the perceived interpersonal relationship between you and the unlucky bloke the less likely you are to flick the switch, but teasing out exactly how much relationship is needed to make the moral intuition flip is tricky business.

<comment><USER4> _In your case you value maintaining an unsullied self-image over assisting 5 people in mortal peril, and would prefer if other people saw your choice the same way._

"Maintaining an unsullied self-image" is largely what personal moral codes are about. If I actively killed someone, I would find being a murderer harder to cope with than being a _witness_ to the death of a larger number of people.

I think this is a purely moral standpoint, whereas "killing one to save the five" is the result of people playing a "numbers game." I think this is demonstrated by the opposing results of the "push the fat man off the bridge" dilemma - once you change the mechanism from a lever/switch to actually pushing a dude off a bridge, people's sense of morality comes rushing back.

<comment><USER5> This is the argument of the ages, no?

I would say moral codes are about trying to use your agency to do good, not bad; there's no obvious reason why "doing good" would always and everywhere equate with "easy to cope with".

You claim you're not doing a #s game but I think I can prove that you are, even if you're not yet aware of it.

Consider this alternative scenario: the trolley is hurtling towards the 5 men as before and you've got the option of throwing a switch; what's new is that _this time_ the switch moves the train into an empty railyard, saving the five lives at no one's expense.

The #s game is removed and it's just a case of: do you think yourself morally obligated to throw the switch and save the lives, or not?

Careful here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These tests just annoy the crap out of me. I put up with the first few questions because I wanted to see if they would do something novel. But no, they had all the standard problems of morality tests:

1) False dichotomy. (There are _exactly_ two actions you can take, no more.)

2) Unrealistic foreknowledge. (These are _exactly_ what the results of these actions will be.)

3) Unrealistic scenarios. (How many of us are ever going to be standing with our foot stuck in the tracks of the sideline right near the switch when five other people are...blah blah blah.)

This kind of test is exactly what gives philosophers a bad reputation. They are studying important issues; could they /please/ take the time to build a test that respects the intelligence of the testee?

<comment><USER7> These are simplifying assumptions; it's rather like a scientific experiment that aims to control for other factors, in order to distill the experiment down to its essential core.

<comment><USER6> Assume a spherical cow....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Andrew has been kayaking and is six miles from the nearest town. He hears on the WBZ4 radio station that the damn has broken upstream and that the river is about to flood._

Spelling and grammar mistakes reduce your credibility.

<comment><USER9> Interesting, my radio station was not WBZ4, it was WBZ60. This corresponds well with the observation in other comments that there was some numerical priming going on that might have been the real point of the study and not the moral part of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Joshua Greene's thesis provides us with some ways to think about how we think about these problems. There's some nice excerpting, and ensuing discussion, at lesswrong: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/10f/the_terrible_horrible_no_good_ve...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/10f/the_terrible_horrible_no_good_very_bad_truth/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I have no patience for these contrived dilemmas that few people will ever encounter. When humanity is done making war with one another then maybe we could ask these questions. But until then it is like treating someone's skin rash and ignoring that they are in cardiac arrest.

<comment><USER12> Why do you think there are wars? It has to do with the moral standing and beliefs of the leaders who wage those wars. These types of tests are actually very appropriate for "treating" the problem of war. One life for one more important one, or one life for many, or a few lives for many are the foundations of war. Is the study and the results a fix for these things? No. But they can give a much greater understanding of the decisions people are willing to make, allowing for better judgement of reactions ot situations.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Diogenes - a cronjob in a webapp to remind you to talk to your friends - <AUTHOR> http://diogenes.co <comment><USER2> A few issues:

* Because you are only using http basic auth for authentication and aren't using cookies, if I reload the page or go back to the page later, I have to log in again.

* You are generating the person UUID's client side in the backbone model as well as initializing data (like contacted:false) for a new person. UUIDs and default values are better created server-side as you should never trust that your client side code hasn't been tampered with or that someone isn't hitting your app programatically.

* based on how chrome handles saving the login credentials and password, it tries to autofill the e-mail address but your system expects the username.

I'm pointing these out because I really like this app idea, and I'd like to use it and see it improved.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to learn http basic auth and not have to deal with cookies, and it is sort of the pattern for usage that you never have to deal with this thing more than once every few weeks. But I guess I could add cookies or localstorage or something.

I do do some server-side checking to deal with UUID tampering, but I guess that is a better idea to handle it all server-side.

The email autofill is an easy fix, thank you! I didn't notice because I autofill nothing.

I actually have no idea whether it's a good idea or not in the abstract, but I've been using it and it works for me and I like it, so I wanted to share it. It's good that you liked it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> It would be awesome if you added a weighting/priority value for each friend. As I am adding my friends from Facebook, I am only including those I want to keep in touch with; however, there is still a dramatic difference in precedence across friends (with some I want to contact 10X over others).

This should be trivial to implement since weighted sampling is trivial.

<comment><AUTHOR> I initially put in weighting and priority values for each friend, but my contacting style is pretty exhausting if I contact one friend 10x that of others. But that's me, and I've been asked this by two other people before, so on it goes to the feature list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have been wanting something like this for a while, thank you! I think your comment in this thread might answer my question, but: Does it require Facebook or some other social network? Or can I enter the names of my friends manually?

<comment><AUTHOR> I quit fb and blocked it on my hosts 3 years ago, so I imagine that answers that question (to be clear, all you need is an email address). I think HN is the newest social network I use?

<comment><USER4> As always, I am a day late and a dollar short, so I don't know if you'll read this, but here is a feature request:

1: Allow people to import their facebook friends 2: Set up a script they can download that will block fb on their hosts for *nix, osx and win platforms. 3: Set up a step by step guide on how to download all their data and completely delete their facebook account. 4: ??? 5: You profit by being responsible for creating the world's newest, largest decentralised social network

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm. I did do that for myself, sort of manually. That's a good idea! Although I don't think I will profit much, and looking at my EC2 box right now it seems pretty centralized to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OK, what the cronjob does is to email you, if you were wondering if you needed to install anything.

This the final incarnation of a fairly elaborate cronjob system that has entirely replaced facebook for me. I had consistent hashing of friend ID's in the non-online cronjob, so I'll have to reimplement that in the online thing sometime.</comment>


TeamViewer fixes 'iframe' bug that lets attackers access your PC - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/teamviewer-fixes-bug-that-lets-attackers-access-your-pc/ <comment><AUTHOR> Using iframe and TeamViewer's custom URI scheme, attackers could initiate connection from your Windows PC to their SMB shares!</comment>


Nokia just bought Alcatel-Lucent for $16.6B - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2015/04/15/nokia-just-bought-alcatel-lucent-for-16-6-billion/#continued

<comment><USER2> Very big move by Nokia. They have been looking to expand their network business, after they sold their devices division to Microsoft. I remember rumors about a year ago of them acquiring Juniper Networks, but I guess the price wasn't right?

</comment><comment><USER3> That means Bell Labs is now (or at least as of 2016) part of Nokia.</comment>


For Better Cell Signal, Buy the A1865 Model of the iPhone X - <AUTHOR> https://www.repeaterstore.com/blogs/main/for-better-cell-signal-buy-the-a1865-model-of-the-iphone-x <comment><USER2> So doesn't this sentence from the article give anyone pause?

 _We don 't know exactly - we haven't seen any definitive tests comparing the two chipsets yet. _

And why would they recommend "a cell phone booster" for your home? All a cell phone booster does is use your home internet connection to create a mini cell phone tower. If you are at home, you are probably connected to WiFi, WiFi calling and texting have been supported by the iPhone for years.

<comment><USER3> Agree this is a poor ad for their repeater.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this a Qualcomm PR effort?

<comment><USER5> Pretty sure. Their suggestion for those with the "inferior" chipset is to buy a crappy femtocell that probably has a qualcomm chip in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Forbes ran an article about this same issue for the iPhone 7:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2016/10/21/how- to-b...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2016/10/21/how-to-buy- iphone-7-intel-qualcomm-modem/#4d658566c795)

</comment><comment><USER7> "It just works" is becoming "ignorance is bliss"</comment>


Volante, an embedded database for .NET - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/volante/database.html

<comment><USER2> I have been looking for something like this. Are there any known alternatives?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Perst for C# : [http://www.mcobject.com/perst](http://www.mcobject.com/perst)

It has a less liberal license (commercial or GPL)

<comment><USER2> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Pure JS: Experimenting with a Pure-Functional Subset of JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tehsenaus/pure-js-experimenting-with-a-pure-functional-subset-of-javascript-3afc86d9f89c <comment><USER2> Hi, I have been exploring pure functional JavaScript alternatives the whole weekend to finaly come to the conclusion that I wanted a subset of JavaScript then found Pure JS to be the exact match! I will be happy to have a try to see if it correspond to what I had dreamt or if would need any tweeking... Thanks Sean, Nicolas Roumiantzeff</comment>


Ancient crystals might rewrite Earth's early history - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/10/20/ancient-crystals-might-rewrite-earths-early-history/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10415212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10415212)

</comment><comment><USER3> PNAS Paper Abstract:

Evidence of life on Earth is manifestly preserved in the rock record. However, the microfossil record only extends to ∼3.5 billion years (Ga), the chemofossil record arguably to ∼3.8 Ga, and the rock record to 4.0 Ga. Detrital zircons from Jack Hills, Western Australia range in age up to nearly 4.4 Ga. From a population of over 10,000 Jack Hills zircons, we identified one >3.8-Ga zircon that contains primary graphite inclusions. Here, we report carbon isotopic measurements on these inclusions in a concordant, 4.10 ± 0.01-Ga zircon. We interpret these inclusions as primary due to their enclosure in a crack-free host as shown by transmission X-ray microscopy and their crystal habit. Their δ^13 C_PDB of −24 ± 5‰ is consistent with a biogenic origin and may be evidence that a terrestrial biosphere had emerged by 4.1 Ga, or ∼300 My earlier than has been previously proposed.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's good news for those of us that hope we find life outside of Earth. Inhospitable, once again, is shown not to mean lifeless.

<comment><USER5> And bad news for those terrified by Drake's equation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm really confused why a fleck of crystalline carbon is considered a bio marker.

<comment><USER3> From my read, its the ratio of carbon 12 to 13.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hate headlines with "might" in it. Let me know when you figure it out - otherwise you're just littering my brain.

<comment><USER8> The actual paper is also fairly cautious. This is some pretty tricky stuff at the edge of what is technically capable to conclude. They're basically sharing their findings with the community to get feedback and criticism- and if they survive the criticismthe terminology will get a bit stronger.</comment></comment>


California Is the Future of American Politics - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/state-of-the-future/california-is-the-future-6601cdf8caf8 <comment><USER2> > California not only has faced up to the 21st-century challenges, but it's > begun to seriously adapt to them.

I would disagree with this point with one particular exception. Most coastal communities keep pushing the eroding cliffs problem down the road. At-risk property values will likely plunge, and these beachfront properties tend to be among the most expensive.

Managed retreat options are not popular with voters in coastal communities.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are numerous errors in this ranting, partisan screed.

"Republican statewide officers were key players through the 1990s and were active in the legislature into the early 2000s — which accounted for the political paralysis of the state during that period."

Uh, no. Except for _part_ of _one_ 2 year term (1995-6), Democrats have controlled _both_ houses of the legislature the cast majority of the time for _six decades_... often with supermajorities.

There are numerous other misrepresentations, but that was the most blatant I saw before I gave up. And, of course, Reagan was _not_ President in 1980.</comment>


Personify.js – JS Library That Integrates IBM Watson and the Twitter API - <AUTHOR> http://personifyjs.github.io/#

<comment><USER2> Hi, I'm one of the creators of the library and app. Apologies for the site issues. The sample app was created in a couple of days and we weren't anticipating as much activity as we've received over the last couple of days, so it was a bit overloaded. We don't seem to be having any issues anymore. Cheers!

-Phil Elauria

</comment><comment><USER3> The demo link ([http://personify.mybluemix.net](http://personify.mybluemix.net), buried at the bottom of the page) isn't working for me:

404 Not Found: Requested route ('personify.mybluemix.net') does not exist.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/philelauria/PersonifyApp](https://github.com/philelauria/PersonifyApp)</comment></comment>


Mozilla to Remove Support for Built-In Feed Reader from Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to-remove-support-for-built-in-feed-reader-from-firefox/ <comment><USER3> It's understandable that this is done, given the usage numbers. I've never really used live bookmarks in the past 10 years, but I always had the 'feed' navigation button appear if a site has a feed.

It still saddens me, because it's another nail in the coffin for an important technology. It's technologies like Atom/RSS that once broke us out of silos. We're back in the silo though, and I would love Mozilla to lead the front in breaking us out again.

Maybe it's not RSS and Atom that lead us into the next revolution. Maybe it's activityfeed? I want it badly though.

<comment><USER4> The people most likely to use these features I imagine are also the ones most likely to turn off telemetry. Making decisions to remove long-standing features based on telemetry seems short-sighted to me because of this reason.

<comment><USER5> Also the ones most likely to be able to install an extension to do the same job.

That said, if you want Mozilla (or other organisations, for that matter) to make decisions based on how you're using their products, then it doesn't seem like an unreasonable expectation from their side that you tell them about that usage, i.e. through telemetry.

<comment><USER6> There are other means of getting usage data than just telemetry. Depending on it when you know some percentage of your userbase has turned it off is disregarding those users completely.

At the same time, people disable telemetry because as we've come to understand much more clearly as a society (and some of us already knew long before "recently"), there is too much data floating around about us as it is. Not all of it stored in a secured, anonymized fashion even if the organization in question claims to. People are skeptical of automatic telemetry data collection for good reason.

<comment><USER5> As I said in another comment: this is a valid concern, but not one that has a better way to deal with it other than what Mozilla is doing now, i.e. ignoring telemetry-disabled users. Or at least, there's no better way of dealing with that that I know of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dh-g I replicated FF live bookmark handling for Chrome years ago via an extension. This morning I laughed when I saw users opening github issues asking to port that extension to FF.

extension: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live- rss/jp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live- rss/jpgagcapnkccceppgljfpoadahaopjdb?hl=en)

<comment><USER7> Best part of all is that Web Extensions API is totally based on the Chrome extension API so it should be easy! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!

<comment><USER8> Well, Foxish had been ported on the same day [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/livemarks/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/livemarks/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For what it's worth, I just recently released a simple feed reader that sits in Firefox's sidebar. It's meant to blend in as much as possible in the vein of the older Firefox plugin Sage. You can import OPML files from all your favorite sources (probably).

Extension is here: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed- re...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-reader/)

The full source is here: [https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook](https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook)

Even if you don't fancy using it, you may find the source handy if you want to build an extension yourself. Also if you're interested, I'd love feedback, suggestions and bug reports.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can't say I was even aware of it, much less used it.

I have a perfectly serviceable FOSS application to be my desktop Feed Reader (Liferea), but to be honest I never really use _that_ , either. Wading through my news feed is now an activity that I do almost exclusively through Feedly on my phone or tablet, usually either while I'm having my morning coffee or as I'm winding down for bed.

I suppose if Mozilla had done a better job of advertising it I might've given it a second look. FWIW, Firefox's "Reader Mode" is _fantastic_ , and if they had somehow combined that with the RSS reader, particularly on Firefox Mobile for Android where I do the majority of my reading, I probably would've been all-in. I don't believe Feedly is open source, so having one that is would be preferable in case Feedly ever decides to go the way of Google Reader and/or Pulse (which just went to garbage after LinkedIn bought it).

<comment><USER11> A _very_ long time ago, iirc, Firefox installed with the bookmarks toolbar default on and a live bookmark example with some help text and populated with BBC news (Perhaps different in non-GB locales).

From that start it's been successively made more discrete (i.e. buried) with subsequent releases. They defaulted the bookmarks bar to off and at some point removed the pre-created example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I feel this is a disgrace!

Not the removal of live bookmarks, it's fair to expect this to be an extension, but the removal of feed discovery. of course, it wont matter that much to most people, since Mozilla removed that functionality from the URL bar years ago and put it into a button that is not visible by default, thus making sure Joe Average never needs to think about what an RSS feed could be. I would argue that started the trend many sites picked up, where there are still feeds available, but they are nearly impossible to find unless you stumble upon some old sub page via a search engine that used to advertise them and someone forgot to delete it when it was unlinked.

Honestly, RSS is great and I don't see it dying anytime soon, but there will also be no more adaption, because it is just such a technical topic and is nearly impossible to discover the feeds and how they work unless someone knowledgeable shows it to you.

And for a web browser to have no option of displaying available feeds to the user is just embarrassing. But then, that also was the death of micro formats as useful to end-users, having no UI available to interact meaningfully.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've been using a Firefox extension to read RSS feeds for years - the built-in RSS functionality has always been far too basic for real use.

Still, I'd have much rather seen Mozilla build better RSS functionality, rather than simply removing it altogether.

<comment><USER14> "far too basic for real use."

For some, myself included, basic is all we want. IF something piques my interest, I will open it. Otherwise, I have a basic idea of current events in < 10 minutes and get on w/ life... sans cookies, tracking, ads, java heavy page loads, etc.

Engineering 101: Simple is the most advanced technology. It is not the most profitable, however. YMMV.

<comment><USER15> I agree with all you say, except for one thing.

When I installed the fantastic Cookie Autodelete extension [links below], I had it with the option for allowing notifications on deletion, and I realised that all my live bookmarks were setting cookies.

No big deal, but thought you'd like to know.

[1] [https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie- AutoDelete](https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete)

[2] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie- autode...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/)

[3] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie- autodelete/...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie- autodelete/fhcgjolkccmbidfldomjliifgaodjagh)

<comment><USER14> Thanks, TIL. I presume Ctrl+Shift+Del(all) & BleachBit address such trackers, I use former closing tabs & latter when I close Pale Moon.

I wonder if UB Origin or NoScript address them beforehand...

<comment><USER15> > _I wonder if UB Origin or NoScript address them beforehand..._

It's not their main mission, I think... Some info:

\- uBlock Origin: [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/827](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/827)

\- NoScript: [https://forums.informaction.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=22532&p=...](https://forums.informaction.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=22532&p=86435&hilit=cookies#p86435)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm a heavy user of live bookmarks. Best way to check headlines or blog updates quickly.

It's sad to see it go, but I'm sure an extension (hi, dh-g!) will surface, and the situation for fans of the feature will remain the same or even better in the end.

Still the best browser for the savvy user.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't think browsers make the best feed readers, but it'd be nice if they at least offered a button to detect them by default. I guess its fine to want an extension to do that, but anything that gives RSS more visibility is a win to me, even if its best consumed in a different app.

<comment><USER15> > a button to detect them by default

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome- rss/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/)

<comment><USER17> > by default

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In my mind, this is a good thing. Browsers should do one thing well. They should support the standards, but not be everything but the kitchen sink. I don't want Pocket, which is what I think they are trying to drive people towards. I've disabled it under about:config. I want a browser. More and more, I find myself using uzbl-tabbed under Arch Linux because it does one thing well. I use Mozilla now for multimedia and that's about it. My bank also balks at uzbl-tabbed. As a *nix guy for three decades, I simply cannot escape the "do one thing well" paradigm. It just simply works.

<comment><USER19> > In my mind, this is a good thing. Browsers should do one thing well. ... As > a *nix guy for three decades, I simply cannot escape the "do one thing well" > paradigm.

As with every tool, what counts as that "one thing" is entirely subjective, in the eye of the beholder, highly personal, often arbitrary.

Why should Firefox support tabs? Shouldn't my window manager do that? Why does a browser keep track of history when my operating environment should keep track of a history of things I've seen recently - documents, files, URLs?

It's the exact same debate about whether programs should do any of the things that can be handled by tmux / GNU screen / readline / whatever.

For you, the "one thing" browsers should do maps exactly to what you think counts as "one thing." To others, that might include Firefox's RSS support, and leave out something you consider essential, calling it "bloat" and against the spirit of Unix.

<comment><USER20> > Why should Firefox support tabs? Shouldn't my window manager do that?

You're close to enlightenment. ;)

There should be a renderer, there should be a network engine, there should be a persistent storage, a secret storage keyring, a history tracker, etc - <USER2> they all should be small separate programs, talking common protocols, easily replaceable.

Non-interoperable giant monoliths are why we can't have nice things anymore and have to stick with whatever large companies can provide us at their own discretion. Because it's incredibly hard to patch that behemoth and even less so to maintain the patchset. That would be possible again if there'd be a plethora of small programs, each doing its own single thing and not trying to be everything and a kitchen sink.

<comment><USER21> I'd love to be able to have only one tab bar across all my applications. Probably a Tree Style Bar though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I actually use this feature quite a bit, I have various sites (HN included) in my toolbar so it makes it nice and easy to have a quick look and see if there is something interesting.

Hopefully there will be a nice simple replacement extension (or maybe it will give me a chance to make something myself!)

<comment><USER23> I use this feature for about a dozen or so sites with RSS feeds. It's nice to have essentially a dynamic bookmark that refreshes periodically to directly access articles and I'm saddened to see that this feature is going away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm concerned about this, because its removal makes it harder for basic users to use RSS/Atom. The web has become unreasonably centralized, and feed readers + RSS is tool that enables the web to be more decentralized. Yes, some people can install a separate reader, but many can't, and Feedly (etc.) provide more features than some people need. Some people really do need only the basics.

</comment><comment><USER25> FWIW, there is a very nice sidebar-based Firefox RSS add-on called Drop Feeds - [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/drop- feeds/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/drop-feeds/)

It is very similar to the pre-WebExtensions Sage/SageToo/Sage++ add-ons.

</comment><comment><USER26> I am a big fan of RSS feeds but have never used the built-in reader, but the add-on brief. Highly recommended to follows blogs, reddit or any kind of forum:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/brief/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/brief/)

</comment><comment><USER27> They could have done this when they got rid of the RSS icon in the URL bar.

<comment><USER5> They didn't get rid of it, they just removed it from the interface by default.

Now they're getting rid of it, i.e. you can't simply add it to the button back in. But of course, there will probably be an extension that does that.

<comment><USER28> >there will probably be an extension that does that

And then another draconian compatibility-breaking change to the extensions APIs will permanently disable said extension a year later...

<comment><USER5> The good news is that Firefox somewhat recently switched to a proper API (i.e. WebExtensions), which should prevent that from happening.

But I guess you're probably sour from WebExtensions being introduced in the first place. Which I can understand, because it did lead to many extensions no longer working. Still, it should lead to that problem being one of the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Also removed in the next version is The Developer Toolbar (accessed with Shift+F2).

Another thing I never used or knew existed. :)

<comment><USER30> edit: apparently the exit _menu option_ cleanly closes all windows...woops.

I only use this to restart the browser cleanly when I have multiple windows open.

I use the "restore tabs/windows from last time" option and I don't see how else to close/restart ALL windows natively within FF. Guess I'll go back to killing it.

<comment><USER31> Funny, I used to have an extension for restarting the browser, but those all broke when they left XUL behind. I care enough about it that I'm patching and building myself to get a restart button (and some other stuff).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> As a long time Mozilla user, I recently found Waterfox[1] and it is terrific! I found out about it here on HN so here I am spreading the Good News.

[1]: [https://www.waterfoxproject.org/](https://www.waterfoxproject.org/)

</comment><comment><USER33> I see many recommending extensions but IMO is a good idea to minimize the number of extensions you use, if it was a Mozilla or other trustworthy entity behind the extension then it should be safer to install it.

<comment><USER15> But wasn't one of the points of the move to Web Extensions/API redesign/enhanced Mozilla review process, that extensions would be more trustworthy?

<comment><USER33> Yeah, maybe but I don't think you can 100% trust extensions, an extension can read all the content on your pages, they can do network calls so it is always a risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's hard to imagine using a stripped down browser-based feed reader after using an excellent dedicated application like NewsBlur. Did FireFox synchronize your read stories across devices?

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm pretty sad to see it go, although to be honest I've been using elfeed for awhile now. I wish that the promise of RSS & the open web had been fulfilled.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've moved to using rss2email YEARS ago.

The basic idea is that RSS gets polled, and you get an email for new entries.

Your email client handles read/unread status, has labels/filtering, and can keep stuff in sync across devices. Plus, you've like A MILLION clients to choose from.

I run this as a cron script, but I'm pretty sure there's very cheap services out there that do the same (if not, here's a good business idea).

</comment><comment><USER37> I hope feed rendering will still work. Live bookmarks where a bit cumbersome anyway, but feeds should still be properly rendered. They are an important part of the web.

Maybe this cleanup can be used to bring back the rss icon in the url bar and to link it with a better way to subscribe to feeds in a web based rss reader?

</comment><comment><USER38> Still on Firefox 55 because I love the LiveClick RSS addon which didn't survive the switch to WebExtensions.

More and more I'm using AutoIt to provide extra features instead of a collection of addons, so I'm thinking doing the same for LiveClick.

</comment><comment><USER39> I use it to keep track of my pinboard tags, each of which has an associated RSS feed.

</comment><comment><USER40> Could they, perhaps, leave the indication of a feed being available for a given site as an optional component of the UI with the ability to pass to things like Feedly? I find it very useful.

<comment><USER15> I'm reading this as ending support for live bookmarks and feed preview, but not necessarily for the "open with" feature in Preferences > General > Applications that lets you pick a reader; just that Live Boomarks wouldn't be one option

Anyone knows for sure?

<comment><USER31> I expect this to still work, but I think GP and I want the "subscribe to this page" button to still work, and send the rss link to the user's third party reader. It's nice to have rss links open in the right app, but there are a ton of sites that don't have an obvious rss link on the page, but it's embedded in the html because of the spec.

<comment><USER15> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622254](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622254)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I found this feature perplexing even when I did use RSS.

</comment><comment><USER42> It's the first thing I use whenever I open Firefox since years. Feeling sad about it

</comment><comment><USER43> I love following these "RSS is dead" discussions from my RSS feed reader.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's not really such a big deal. Everyone uses dedicated feed readers nowadays. Feedly mainly.

<comment><USER45> More than anything, I think it was just a nice to have feature. Not many people were really using it as a dedicated RSS reader, but if you ever just wanted to extract an MP3 from a podcast or get an overview of what a blog was writing recently (if there wasn't an easy way of accessing that), it came in handy.</comment></comment>


New Uber CEO Says Company Could Go Public in 18 Months - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-uber-ceo-says-company-could-go-public-in-18-months-1504119090 <comment><USER2> I'm going to re-post one of my previous comments on this topic because I think it's relevant:

"In my opinion, all they need is someone who is demonstrably competent and experienced to stabilize the ship and steer it towards an IPO.

There's no need for the candidate to be a visionary or meddle drastically with something that's already working extraordinarily well. That part is largely done - the Uber machine is mature and chugging along.

A seasoned operator needs to come in to provide PR cover, put in some basic organizational guardrails and rebuild the executive ranks to get the company IPO ready. Hiring a CFO is probably top priority as well as getting PR back on track.

Those two moves alone would suppress external distractions and start the IPO process by having someone working on it full-time (CFO)."

Original comment here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15113953](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15113953)

\----

So I think this is pretty much par for course. Dara will likely be laser focused on removing distractions and kicking off the IPO process and shepherding it along. In fact, there's probably a clause in his employment contract that gives him some kind of large bonus for successfully delivering an IPO within XYZ timeframe.

<comment><USER3> Good point. From the outside it does appear Travis go caught up in himself more than focusing on his real role.

<comment><USER4> Seems to me he was more focused on building and growing the business, while at the same time preventing existential long-term threats (although with hiccups along the way), than wasting time preparing for an IPO .

Uber is still at risk to lose their current monopolistic world market share, everybody knows it (Travis too), and they need to work and fight hard 24/7 to retain it. IPO is a distraction.

<comment><USER5> The problem is that Travis thinks it's still possible to defend their monopolistic market share but I'd bet (just personal opinion) that investors don't feel that way. Honestly, what could Uber do to ensure their monopolistic world market share would last? They want to IPO soon so they can get some return. Uber has had years and billions of dollars, I don't blame investors for wanting to push the bird out of the nest and see if it can really fly.

<comment><USER4> Of course Travis still thinks that, he is the founder. He cares about the long term survival of Uber, not about an exit event. Uber is in a complicated industry, in complicated times with very aggressive competitors. It just takes time, but somebody is unwilling to wait anymore.

The bird cannot fly, we already know that. They are crashing Uber against a wall and they just don't care. Do you know what's going to be the next word coming out of the new CEO? It's going to be "layoff". Whatever it takes to fix the books. And then what?

Then maybe Travis comes back to right the ship if it's not too late.

<comment><USER5> But that doesn't really answer my question, which is what can delaying IPO actually do for them? I agree that the bird can't fly but I don't see how it's going to fly in 18 months or 80 months and I don't see a way around that. Uber exists in a market with no barriers to entry (it destroyed them) and it can't run a profit. Kalanick himself has said Uber needs self-driving but I'm a skeptic on that as well. It's 20+ years before there's going to be real, safe cars without drivers. Kalanick is delaying the inevitable, investors are trying to cash out before the public realizes self-driving is vaporware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Guys this is somewhat fake news. The question was what his thoughts were on IPO. He basically said it's up to the board, but 18 to 36 months seemed reasonable. It wasn't like he's actually planning on IPOing in 18 months, it was an off-the-cuff response and gave a ballpark figure. That's all, don't read too much into it he hasn't even officially started yet.

<comment><USER7> The real news is this is precisely why TK was ousted. He was categorically opposed to taking Uber public, and that went against the wishes of big investors who want an IPO payday.

<comment><USER8> Profitability is usually a good idea before you IPO.

<comment><USER9> Why do you need to raise money if you are profitable?

<comment><USER8> Employee & investor liquidity, who are the majority stockholders of these kinds of companies. And the value of a stock does far better when something is profitable vs not. Past history shows it's usually a bad idea to be a public company and be in the red for many quarters.

<comment><USER9> If you're profitable you can disburse dividends to all of the non public shareholders on a regular or irregular basis.

Going public is a really expensive way to do that with a profitable company (why spotify is trying to do it in an irregular way)

> Past history shows it's usually a bad idea to be a public company and be in > the red for many quarters.

Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Marc Benioff would strongly disagree.

Under this reasoning if you're profitable, you may not want to go public. Now you have to worry about public perception and hostile outlets affecting a major asset.

<comment><USER8> Most shareholders don't like dividends because of the tax treatment compared to stock buybacks. It's still less liquid than a public market.

As far as those other examples, I don't know their full histories. From my memory amazon has had a break-even policy on purpose which investors are ok with. FB was profitable for about a year before IPO and its stock went to half of IPO for a year because people were worried about it's numbers until they got a lot of a money through mobile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What a surprise.

Can we break down the numbers on how much they'd likely receive from an IPO vs their burn rate? It's hard to imagine that an IPO would deal with most of their problems.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15116399](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15116399) is a good analysis.

Also, non-paywalled article: [http://archive.is/hOt4v](http://archive.is/hOt4v) (Thanks to philippnagel for pointing out this trick.)

</comment><comment><USER11> When it comes to Uber's future, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that none of the "scandals" we've heard so much about matter. Not the culture, not the lawsuits, not even the firing of the CEO. None of those things would be able to sink the company, assuming that the company has a strong business model. And that's where we get to the bad news: Uber doesn't HAVE a business model.

Nothing about Uber makes hired car rides fundamentally cheaper than anything before it. Cars still cost the same amount of money to buy/rent and operate. That cost hasn't gone away, even in the iPhone era. If Uber is not paying those costs directly, then someone is. In the Uber model, it's just been transferred to the driver, for whom driving is as a result less profitable. So much for the car. The other component of a ride service is the driver himself. A driver's undivided time costs the same, whether he's driving for Uber or for an Uber clone or for a local taxi company. Human labor hasn't suddenly gotten cheaper just because you can hail them on your iPhone. And you don't even want the cheapest possible labor here, for the sake of your own safety.

Oh, but you say, if the drivers were to be entirely replaced with self-driving cars, then Uber's margins would be amazing right? Yes, they would be. But self-driving cars are not coming anytime soon. Just ask the people most invested in Uber: the investors. They want you to wait for self-driving cars to fix Uber's non-existent business model, while they themselves can't wait to cash out as soon as possible.

Even if it does happen many years from now, it doesn't put Uber in a good position. The self-driving car technology will be a commodity. There will be no barrier preventing anyone else from launching their own fleets. Uber's product also has no network effect and is not sticky. Its customers are not buying an experience, they are buying a utility (a ride from point A to point B at the lowest possible cost). As a result, customers have zero loyalty and are happy to switch to the lowest cost competitor.

Uber has hugely impressive numbers though right? Yes, tons of revenue and no profits. Because who would pass up a private car ride from San Francisco to Palo Alto for $45 when a taxi would cost $125? As long as VC's subsidize rides, customers will continue to buy them.

<comment><USER12> Uber (in the past) made hired car rides fundamentally cheaper than _everything_ before it by bullying local monopolies into bankruptcy. I know your post is evaluating Uber's future, not past, but past successes may color our judgment of their future potential.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/15/uber-lyft-take-down-not- just...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/15/uber-lyft-take-down-not-just-cab- drivers-but-also-lenders.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are hundreds of startups planning to IPO in 18 months. Many have held steady with this plan for 5 years or more. For as long as four years they've been saying, "but this time, really, 18 months"

</comment><comment><USER14> It's about time their investors get a massive liquidity event. I tend to think the lack of an near term exit strategy was one of many reasons Travis got the boot.

<comment><USER15> 18 months isn't much time to present financials that would support a high IPO price though, is it?

I assume the current financials still show pretty big losses due to the subsidized pricing.

<comment><USER16> [https://www.axios.com/exclusive-uber- financials-2475912645.h...](https://www.axios.com/exclusive-uber- financials-2475912645.html)

<comment><USER15> Right, so rosy language, but still $500 to $600 million of loss per quarter, presumably from subsidies. I guess you have to believe either in self driving cars happening somewhat soon, or cutting subsidies doesn't cut demand too much.

<comment><USER16> From the article: "Uber's global ride-share business was margin positive last quarter"

<comment><USER15> Also from the article: _" Adjusted net loss fell almost 9% quarter-over- quarter to $645 million"_

So they probably mean gross margin. They did reduce the losses as a qoq comparison. But, it's still $645M lost in a quarter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is wonderful news. This is how capitalism is supposed to work. I wonder if the recent uproar around uber could have mitigated by publicizing this earlier.

<comment><USER5> Capitalism is supposed to work this way? VCs investing billions of dollars in an unprofitable company which continues to be unprofitable for years after the fact. A company which has two real paths to profitability: (1) achieving autonomous vehicles and ending the jobs of tens of thousands of people or (2) obtaining enough market power to raise prices from their current, subsidized level. A company which only exists in the first place because they trampled all over local laws.

This is a fun-house mirror version of capitalism.

<comment><USER12> Disagreeing with capitalism is different from disagreeing about what it is.

If autonomous vehicles are within the realm of possibility, they are going to be enormously successful and beneficial to humanity. Well functioning capitalism is about giving everybody a chance to participate (or not) in a piece of the new pie.

<comment><USER5> No, actually some of the biggest free marketers possible don't agree that predatory pricing is possible under capitalism. Google predatory pricing friedman (you won't get a quote from friedman but his name gets all the good stuff) and you'll find lots of people arguing that predatory pricing is a myth. You can also google friedman monopoly and find huge proponents of capitalism arguing that monopolies are only possible through state intervention.

>Well functioning capitalism is about giving everybody a chance to participate (or not) in a piece of the new pie.

Maybe... but everyone disagrees on what well functioning actually means.

<comment><USER12> We are talking past each other. I think that autonomous cars are a great idea and would like to invest in autonomous car companies more directly than is currently possible. I gather from reading about predatory pricing and your prior comment that you think Ubers' business model is a dud and that automating these jobs is bad.

This variance is the essence of capitalism though. In a well functioning capitalist society I am free to make a stupid investment in Uber and you are free to wisely not. Its about having a degree of private wealth ownership and freedom and choice in your investments. This is what I meant by well functioning: the choice of investing directly in Waymo, Uber, etc is not really there yet for average citizens.

> Capitalism is supposed to work this way? VCs investing billions of dollars > in an unprofitable company which continues to be unprofitable for years > after the fact. [...] (1) achieving autonomous vehicles and ending the jobs > of tens of thousands of people [...] A company which only exists in the > first place because they trampled all over local laws.

Yes the freedom to make dumb investments...yes replacing error prone human labor with safe, tireless machines using greed and ambition as motivation...yes the freedom to open a business without bribing government officials. Yes, these are all basic tenets of capitalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Uber ICO? Please speculate on possibilities and help the press to collect data points so they can mash together 2 of their favorite narratives. Bonus points for looping in autonomous vehicles.

</comment><comment><USER18> IPO would really just be a way to cash out investors with no real return on the horizon for the new shareholders?

Speaking from their current burn rate, lawsuit, potential new technology/driverless cars.

<comment><USER19> At much as you may hate Uber it is an unstoppable juggernaut. Being profitable is not impossible and settling everything is just a question of money, and fairly small sums at that. It may not be worth $100B, but it is going to be worth a ton.

<comment><USER20> It's far from unstoppable. They might have market share in the US because of their first mover advantage, but they ceded to Didi in China and to Yandex in Russia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That was the plan all along. Travis didn't want to IPO so soon.

</comment><comment><USER21> Do not invest in Uber. It would be downright stupid to do so. What is their product? Providing rides? No, that's what drivers do. Ubers product is running a bunch of servers, a mobile app, and bearing the first-mover disadvantage of fighting with all the regulators about ridesharing. The problem with this is that those servers and that app? The thing that collects the money for Uber? No one needs Uber for that. Tomorrow someone could launch a fully peer to peer version of the software that runs in distributed fashion across all devices it gets installed upon, cutting them completely out of the loop, making rides cheaper and making drivers more money.

And if Uber perfects self-driving cars if they are deluded enough to think they can replace their human drivers with a roving fleet of such... oh how childish and stupid that would be. I would give it 10 days before someone would introduce GUber which lets individuals with self-driving cars to time share them out when not in use via an app, destroying Uber swiftly and making every self-driving car they own (and maintain) a liability.

The only way I could see them remaining interesting for more than a couple more years would be if they developed an awesome self-driving car - and gave it away for free. With anyone who accepted one obligated to permit the thing to be time-shared out by Uber to provide rides when its not being used with X number of hours of availability given per month. That would be hard to compete with, whether through peer to peer or individuals renting their self-driving cars...

<comment><USER22> > Ubers product is running a bunch of servers, a mobile app, and bearing the > first-mover disadvantage of fighting with all the regulators about > ridesharing.

So if we /s/ridesharing/home renting/ then we shouldn't invest in AirBnB either?

<comment><USER7> You shouldn't invest in AirBNB because cities can't withstand inflated housing prices forever and will eventually crack down on "home sharing" aka real estate arbitrage in the short term rental market.</comment></comment></comment>


Golden tea is full of anti-oxidants - <AUTHOR> https://blog.usejournal.com/turn-up-the-turmeric-cdbe7cdcc3d0 <comment><USER2> Anti-oxidants turn out not to be as beneficial as they have been advertised to be.

In particular, if excess amounts are not kept out of cells, they interfere with signaling systems within the cell that tell it to kill itself ("apoptosis") because it has begun doing wrong things. An example of cells that do not kill themselves when they should is cancer.

People were just sure that large amounts of vitamin E would be good for us, but very large and carefully controlled studies showed that vitamin E supplements correlated with higher mortality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you are right. This is really interesting thing to study. Everything in moderation is good. Excess or too less does more harm than good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Impressive technical article packed with facts, very good! Only thing is perhaps the tone is just a tad bit too seo-ish or how you would put it. Point in case, "Curcumin has received worldwide attention for its multiple health benefits"... The parts in the article are stellar, I just find something in my heart regarding how it binds it all together.

If that can be adjusted, I'd definitely see this being published in eg. NYT.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for your feedback. I have started publishing recently and I am learning a lot of new ways of writing and marketing, hence the SEO-ish tone. But you are right, my main aim is to share knowledge.</comment></comment>


A New 'Star Trek' TV Series Will Debut in 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/arts/television/a-new-star-trek-tv-series-will-debut-in-2017.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur <comment><USER2> Produced by Alex Kurtzman who was also the producer of Michael Bay's Transformers , Star Trek remakes which are basically the lowest common denominator action movies, and Scorpion the series about incredibly incorrect portrayal of hacking and hackers.

This is going to be action schlock, a series like TNG will never be made again.

I don't want too sound too depressing, just letting you know to adjust your expectations.

<comment><USER3> I'll be the contrarian optimist: Star Trek movies are, on average, bad. Compare Star Trek: Nemesis to an episode of TNG - it's guilty of everything you attribute to the new Star Trek movies. The only reason it got a pass was because of the goodwill that the TNG show garnered for its characters.

So I choose to believe/hope that a TV show isn't doomed to have the same outlook as the movie. I expect I may well be wrong, but...

<comment><USER4> Nemesis was rather poorly received among fans of the series. Though honestly, so were most of the other Star Trek films.

Out of the pre-Abrams Star Trek films, four were generally well received (2, 4, 6, 8). The first and third films have a few people who like them, but are broadly disliked. The fifth, seventh, ninth, and tenth are almost universally disliked.

Even among the four generally well received films, only #2 (The Wrath of Khan) and #4 (The Voyage Home) are generally considered as good as the best television episodes from the first two series. Maybe #6 fits in there -- that one's actually my favorite, though I might be biased because it's the only TOS one I've seen in theaters.

<comment><USER5> Not the first time I've heard this odd vs even thing. Was The Voyage Home the one with the whales? That premise was a bit silly although the film had its moments. Which number was First Contact? I always thought that was way better than the others.

<comment><USER4> Since it was apparently a little confusing:

      1) The Motion Picture: The one with V'Ger
      2) The Wrath of Khan: The one with Khan
      3) The Search For Spock: The one that fixed the problem caused by #2
      4) The Voyage Home: The one with the whales
      5) The Final Frontier: The one of which will not be spoken
      6) The Undiscovered Country: The one with the Khitomer Accords
      7) Generations: The one with both Kirk and Picard
      8) First Contact: The one with the Borg
      9) Insurrection: The one where Picard openly rebels against the exact thing he did in that one episode
     10) Nemesis: The Wrath of Khan with TNG characters, by someone who didn't understand why The Wrath of Khan was good

<comment><USER6> Insurrection is underrated. It's by far the best TNG movie as far as pacing goes. First Contact feels like it is stuttering and I think people like it mostly because the Borg are always a hot topic for Trekkies.

<comment><USER4> I don't _hate_ Insurrection. It's totally watchable, which is more than I can say for Generations or Nemesis. It definitely has its positives. It has by far the best writing of Data in any of the movies. Picard's love story is pretty well done. I just don't find it quite rises to the level of the four "actually good" movies. The plot only makes sense if you squint really hard.

First Contact did have its fair share of stupid (Borg queen, UGH). I just thought the plot made way more sense than any of the other TNG movies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am only somewhat familiar with Star Trek (mostly by way of TNG), but I think it would be cool to see a conflict with a re-imagined version of the Ferengi.

I never heard any exposition on the details, but the Federation is supposedly an essentially egalitarian post-scarcity economy with a religion of space exploration. In contrast, the Ferengi always seemed much closer to our own society: they are cold blooded capitalists with misogynistic tendencies, but still manage to maintain a vibrant civilization in space, in which they uphold contracts and maintain infrastructure. And so it would seem that at the hypothetical interface between the Ferengi and the Federation there would be not just a huge culture clash, but moral and political scandals of the highest order, mostly concentrated around (1) the exploitation of Federation members by Ferengi (2) incidental macroeconomic chaos within Ferengi society due to the Federation sending free aid, setting artificial price restrictions within their markets, etc.

If one redesigned the Ferengi with a non-goofy appearance and a cool demeanor they could be made relatable, in the same way that one can relate to the various capitalist villain archetypes: wall street narcissists, oil tycoons, drug kingpins and so on.

<comment><USER8> I think it's star trek canon that the Ferengi never had any internal problems with slavery (of other Ferengi) or genocide.

I think it would be much more interesting to explore the creepier side of this supposedly egalitarian post-scarcity economy... I mean think of how wierd it is that a military organization is in charge of scientific exploration, that all the individuals on the starship are tracked at all times, etc...

<comment><USER7> Yeah a look into the Federation society could be interesting.

One thing that always bothered me was why people weren't basically just spending their time hanging around the food replicators and fornicating in the hologram machine. I can buy that the crew of a starship would be chosen for a strange combination of discipline and risk-aversion (not to mention Starfleet adding something to the water), but it seemed to me that there would have to be all kinds of exotic hedonism, resource intensive "art" projects and crazy philosophies on the surface of the planets.

<comment><USER9> If you haven't read it, this might be relevant to your interests: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series)

I thought it had some interesting "Okay, so no more scarcity, now what?" plots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A similar story like this one was posted this morning. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10492824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10492824)

Within one hour it had nearly 200 up-votes, and over 120 comments. Then, suddenly, it was flagged and buried into the archives of Hacker News.

While this may not be "Hacker News" it is obviously content that resonates with a large percentage of the HN community. I hope the mods just let it be this time.

<comment><AUTHOR> They didn't; it dropped from #2 to out of the top 200 or so instantly. I emailed the mods to ask if I had done something wrong, and was informed that this post was "off-topic", because it was not "deeply interesing" and/or did not satisfy intellectual curiosity.

Very aggressive modding, and very silly modding.

<comment><USER11> The truth is, the only intellects that matter here are those of the mods. If they don't find a subject interesting, it's objectively uninteresting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Am I the only one who doesn't like those links to the NYTimes requiring registration or social login? Here's the news from another source [http://www.startrek.com/article/new-star-trek-series- premier...](http://www.startrek.com/article/new-star-trek-series-premieres- january-2017) (courtesy of the other thread)

<comment><AUTHOR> Easy to dodge the paywall:

1) copy the part of the url containing the story's title 2) paste just that part into the URL bar (to do a Google search) 3) the story will come up as the first hit, click on it, boom, no more paywall

This works for quite a few major sites. (WSJ, New Yorker, etc.)

<comment><USER13> Or, just click the link that says "web" for the story, then click the top link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> other thread fell off the frontpage already? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10492824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10492824)

<comment><USER15> Someone killed it. Don't want hn to become slashdot /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Didn't think it would happen, but in private conversation I've been hoping/advocating for giving Whedon and his associates the opportunity to do the next series, if he/they were interested.

It would probably be a bit different -- I don't know where he would take it -- but there would likely be interesting characters and character development.

As it is, I want something that returns to the kind of quality I found in the middle and later seasons of TNG, once it really caught its stride.

I also thought some of the Voyager episodes were quite engaging, particularly those involving Seven of Nine and some of the other... "trans"-human characters.

Star Trek, whatever series, has always been particularly good when it comes to exploring what it means to be... "sentient", to choose a word perhaps less open to misinterpretation that "human", though I would choose to define "human" as something other than our specific species. And characters at the boundary of "human" (I guess that _is_ the word that really speaks to me) have often been very interesting and effective vehicles in this regard.

P.S. Perhaps it is in part that some of the other series became more interesting to me when some of the TNG writers migrated to them. I don't or no longer know the series timelines (in this world, as television shows) sufficiently to consider this more closely, off the cuff.

</comment><comment><USER17> After the last decade of TV, what a lot of people refer to as the Golden Age of Television, I'm not placing my hope in something that CBS is producing. I have a feeling it'll be a dash of the Abrams-verse, mixed in with Voyager and Enterprise writing and style. I'm hoping that's not the case, but I worry that whatever debuts on CBS will appear incredibly underwhelming compared to the last 10 years or so of television drama.

</comment><comment><USER18> The "dark" fetish in television, particularly in sci-fi, is growing increasingly tired. Shows like TNG, which would take one on a voyage to a positive, better future, are being replaced by blue-tinted melodramas filled with beige characters. Trek's downward spiral began with DS9, and the trip to the future has gotten progressively dingier with every subsequent effort.

I'll be hoping for a Trek with new worlds filled with new solutions to current problems, but expecting another dreary Breaking Bad tinged with Walking Dead, this time--yawn--amidst the stars.

</comment><comment><USER19> Another three seasoner? This time written for action where the only "moral" around is "death to the terrorists". I hope not, but I do worry.

</comment><comment><USER13> No thanks, I'll pass.

I adore Star Trek, but this ain't it. It's just action crap dressed up in Star Trek's clothes. Which is a shame because too much of Sci-Fi on television and in the theater is just action, we need more thoughtful and interesting science fiction, the sort of stuff that made Star Trek a cult hit and transformed it into a cultural phenomenon despite running for less than three seasons originally.

<comment><USER20> Wow, it was nice of them to send you a review copy of season 1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If only we could have Bryan Fuller as show-runner, with Mads Mikkelsen as Captain.

<comment><USER22> Officer's mess would be interesting.

<comment><USER21> :)

Lets get some Rick and Morty writers in there too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's just an announcement - it's way too early to tell how the series is going to turn out. That being said, I would be surprised if the reboot becomes a cultural landmark like TOS. I just hope it's at least good, compelling television. At best I hope it captures the genius of good Star Trek: exploring new ideas, concepts, and perspectives, with clever & humane writing, capable acting, and good special effects.

I hope it's not too heavy on the action/drama, like _The Walking Dead_ or _Game of Thrones_. These are both excellent series that are highly entertaining to watch. But they make me _feel_ first and _think_ second.

Good Star Trek episodes are like puzzles. You're thinking "what the heck is going on?", "what strange phenomena is this?", etc. The best ones draw you in and then delight you with the reveal. They almost have a Twilight Zone quality to them.

</comment><comment><USER24> Strange that CBS is going to be putting this only on streaming (CBS All Access). I'm not sure if that's a brilliant bet on the future or a foolhardy miscalculation.

<comment><USER25> You wouldn't like Star Trek on CBS proper. Shows on TV need to be mainstream to work, given how advertisement works. By putting it online, they're changing the expectations: it doesn't have to appeal to everyone. Rather, it can be made for a niche audience, which is good for Star Trek.

That's why Arrested Development (in theory) can work on Netflix but not FOX.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, I don't think Star Trek meshes with CBS demographics right now. They'd likely end up with NCIS: Star Trek Edition. That said, I probably wouldn't mind a young adult soap opera Star Trek for the CW network.

The issue with CBS' digital efforts is that they are a strange island unto themselves and Star Trek alone is unlikely to get too many more visitors to their island. They really need to consider a partnership with Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, or something left field like Vudu or HBO Now. But of course they are stubborn and probably won't.

(Does it make financial sense to anyone right now to spend $5/month on just CBS shows when the same could go to most of a Netflix or Hulu subscription with a much broader content base?)

<comment><USER26> What's with all the downvotes? Was it the CW comment? If so, are the downvoters not currently watching CW's Flash? That sort of light-hearted, inter-personal drama-fueled show would work for Star Trek, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Chiming in with a slightly relevant blog post from Peter Watts about a re- imagined "Spock's Brain": [http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=4335](http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=4335)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've just heard from the HN powers that be that this post was flagged for being "off-topic".

That's right: Star Trek is off-topic in a techie geek forum.

I have officially seen everything.

I'd be very mildly ticked about this, if it weren't so amusing. :)

</comment><comment><USER28> Silicon Valley's productivity will fall by a few percentage points during that week. So excited :P</comment>


Protect your privacy with Krypton Anonymous - <AUTHOR> https://kr36.co/krypton-anonymous

<comment><USER2> I've been using this a while now, all the controls are on the bottom, making it easy easier for me to reach.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using this as my regular browser for over a month and it's been fantastic

</comment><comment><USER4> They open sourced their core module. I consider this a good start. :P</comment>