Mt. Gox Files for Bankruptcy in U.S - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304250204579430990187908008?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304250204579430990187908008.html <comment><USER2> Article is behind a paywall.

        Mt. Gox, the struggling Japanese bitcoin exchange,
        has filed for bankruptcy protection in a U.S. court
        to stop customers from freezing any of the company's
        assets that are located on U.S. soil.

        Lawyers put MtGox Co. Ltd. into Chapter 15 protection
        in Texas on Sunday, stating that a potential
        class-action lawsuit in Illinois could get in the
        way of reorganization efforts that are taking place
        in the company's home country.

        Mt. Gox, an exchange for buyers and sellers of the
        digital currency known as bitcoin, halted customer
        withdrawals on Feb. 7, later stating that it lost
        almost 750,000 of its customers' bitcoins and around
        100,000 of its own.

        "This theft or disappearance is currently the subject
        of an intense investigation which required Mt. Gox
        to devote most of its resources," Mt. Gox lawyers wrote
        in court papers.

        In the potential class-action lawsuit, lawyers are
        trying to round up U.S. residents who paid a fee to
        Mt. Gox to buy, sell or trade bitcoin, according to
        court papers filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Dallas.
        As part of that lawsuit, lawyers are expected to ask
        Tuesday during a court hearing for the power to freeze
        any of Mt. Gox's U.S. assets, which include any servers
        or other computer equipment that stores customer
        information about bitcoins.

        It is unclear what assets—if any—Mt. Gox has in the U.S.
        Still, the U.S. bankruptcy halts existing lawsuits, at
        least temporarily.

        More specifically, Chapter 15 of the U.S. Bankruptcy
        Code is available to foreign companies that have sought
        protection of their home courts.

        Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan last
        month. Participating in the U.S. lawsuits at this
        point "would wastefully divert resources away from"
        the Japanese bankruptcy, Mt. Gox lawyers wrote in
        court papers.

        The company's lawyers said that Mt. Gox's debts
        totaled 6.5 billion yen ($63.9 million) versus
        assets of 3.84 billion yen.

        Mt. Gox hired the Baker & McKenzie law firm to
        represent it in bankruptcy. The company's case,
        numbered 14-31229, has been assigned to Judge
        Stacey G. Jernigan.

        —Jacqueline Palank contributed to this article.

        Write to Katy Stech at firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER3> That doesn't make it acceptable for you to completely ignore their copyright on that material.

<comment><USER4> I agree, it's not the paywall that makes it acceptable.

<comment><USER5> "Information wants to be free" doesn't justify that you should ignore their copyright just because you can easily ignore their paywall with little consequence to yourself.

<comment><USER4> I agree, the paywall being easy to ignore with little consequence to oneself is not what justifies ignoring their copyright.

<comment><USER5> Ah, is this one of those things were copyrights don't matter since you aren't a musician, director, writer, etc? And software should be paid for? Or if you open source your work then there is no problem me incorporating that into my closed source project, since copyright doesn't matter?

<comment><USER4> I don't want to pollute this thread with an offtopic discussion. If you want to talk about it feel free to send me an email, it's on my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Brings up an interesting point:

Is it possible and how would you freeze bitcoins owned by a person(or a specific wallet).

<comment><USER7> Hm... would it be possible to have a blacklist of bitcoin addresses and get a majority of miners to ignore transactions that involve these addresses?

<comment><USER8> You could have a blacklist.

You couldn't, as a practical matter, get the miners to agree on a blacklist. A partial attempt would segment the bitcoin protocol and so the miners would just avoid it completely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Any specific reason they would file in Texas?

<comment><USER10> Texas is known as a responsive district so they won't have to wait for a court date. That could be important if they thought an investor was going to move to quickly to foreclose on assets.

<comment><USER11> Doesn't the automatic stay kick in immediately upon filing? My understanding was that the ultimate court date (or initial meeting with the trustee) wasn't as big of a concern.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's a docket to follow the filings in the court for those curious: [https://www.inforuptcy.com/filings/txnbke_411806-3-14-bk-312...](https://www.inforuptcy.com/filings/txnbke_411806-3-14-bk-31229-mtgox- co-ltd-bankruptcy)</comment>


CurveBoards: Integrating Breadboards into Physical Objects - <AUTHOR> https://hcie.csail.mit.edu/research/curveboard/curveboard.html <comment><USER2> AT high school breadboards were one of the most hateful pieces of equipment i ever had to use. The problem was that there was almost always a non zero number of defective tracks... depending on the kind of circuit sometimes track resistance could be significant too.

Sometimes the time saved by using a breadboard was heavily offset by the time required to double check each connection with a multi-meter.

Hopefully breadboards these days are higher quality... (or perhaps my school just had very old and crappy ones :-)

<comment><USER3> Yes, 3M makes a fantastic breadboard with very low contact resistance ([https://www.digikey.com/en/product- highlight/3/3m/300-series...](https://www.digikey.com/en/product- highlight/3/3m/300-series-solderless-breadboards))

Get one, treat it well, and never look back.

As a student I would never have sprung for that price but as a professional it's a no brainer.

<comment><USER4> As a professional the price is nothing but the value proposition is questionable. We simply don't use our breadboards very often around here, and when we do it's never for sensitive work. Basically, I've never had a case when I've cared who made our random stock of breadboards. Either they're definitely good enough, or they're definitely bad enough that I need to prototype some other way. (It's common to find that the only circuits I am interested in derisking at the breadboard level are the ones that I _can 't_ prototype that way, due to parasitics.) But then, I consider an SOIC-8 package pretty big in our line of work, so what do I know....

<comment><USER5> It's not just you. I haven't seen a breadboard used in professional work in over 20 years.

90% of the time you're going to have to do a PCB layout anyway, so you might as well start there. Even more so since fewer and fewer devices are even made in DIP anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The 3D design tool workflow for adding channels in the video is really cool! The tools do a lot of the tedious work for you, while leaving the more creative or opinionated choices to the designer.

Filling with conductive silicon is clever too - I wasn't sure how they were going to add conductivity to a fully enclosed piece (no way to pop in metal bands).

I'm sure there are applications of this that make sense, and ones where this doesn't make sense due to one constraint or another. Still, this a cool combination of many systems and a creative idea.

</comment><comment><USER7> In my opinion breadboards can't die soon enough. Too many new engineers think they can use them for prototyping circuits where the parasitic of the breadboard make it entirely unsuitable. Low noise amplifiers, high speed designs, switching power supplies are all terrible applications for breadboard designs. And SMT is basically impractical on breadboards, which limits options far too much.

With the advent of cheap plot and go board shops about 20 years ago and the more recent explosion of unbelievably cheap Chinese vendors, there's just no reason to waste time between sim and layout. The era of the breadboard is over and has been for some time now.

I think there's still a little room for them in education and hobby design, but even there it should be a fleeting use as students learn the better way.

</comment><comment><USER8> I buy the premise of extending breadboards for actual applications apart from testing circuits.

I recently made a butt triggered pomodoro timer[1], where I had to keep a trigger under... my butt, after messing with velostat and its unreliable resistance; A simple momentary button on a 170 pin breadboard served the purpose! So breadboards of different form factors as physical objects would indeed help to accelerate prototyping.

[1][https://abishekmuthian.com/butt-pomodoro-a-butt-triggered- po...](https://abishekmuthian.com/butt-pomodoro-a-butt-triggered-pomodoro- timer/)

</comment><comment><USER9> That's cute. Not clear that a solderless breadboard wristband is useful, but it's cute.

A way to design flexible printed circuits, taking into account that the components are not flexible, would be more useful. Design to a minimum bending radius, and bond to something that enforces that minimum bending radius, like a watchband. Orient the longer components so that the long axis is the non- bending axis.

<comment><USER10> I could see a wrist-mounted breadboard for prototyping wearables. Jam in a battery and a few SOIC breakouts plus some patch leads, hack up a quick firmware to test out an idea, kind of thing.

<comment><USER5> I'm not seeing it. The device package sizes are often smaller than even the pin spacing on a breadboard. We generally start with a manufacturer dev board to write the firmware while the hardware is being designed and then manufactured at a prototype shop. The problem with trying to make "breakouts" on packages so small is that they are extremely fragile (if you can even solder to them by hand!) and the poor signal integrity of flying blue wires can often be enough to make the hardware completely unusable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Those images triggered my trypophobia mildly, even as someone who has worked with breadboards extensively.

</comment><comment><USER12> A solution in search of a problem.

<comment><USER13> Maybe helpful for test-fitting how non-flexible components will behave on a flexible PCB, whether they interfere with each other or something else in the case? Maybe? I imagine you'd just 3D model it though and be happy with that. But maybe if you already had the case.</comment></comment>


The Feminization of Science Fiction (and Fantasy) - <AUTHOR> http://www.the-spearhead.com/2009/10/19/the-feminization-of-science-fiction-and-fantasy/

<comment><USER2> For decades, hordes of awful sci-fi writers have succeeded through their ability to gratify male tastes. Hundreds of mediocre yet commercial successful sci-fi movies and thousands of mediocre yet commercially successful sci-fi books owe their existence to male readers' appetites for boyhood adventure and manly exploits. By "feminization" of science fiction, I suspect the critic means the emergence of a new category of mediocre sci-fi entertainment that flourishes by gratifying female tastes in the same way. So now women are getting in on the act -- is this bad news?

Five reasons why it isn't:

1\. "Guy" sci-fi continues to thrive. I just watched the movie _Banlieue 13_ , which is kind of sci-fi, and found it quite tolerable, even fun. I enjoyed it because I like guns, fighting, and cool parkour stunts. (Of course there was a "big idea" aspect, but it was embarrassingly thin and heavy-handed, and it should probably have been glossed over a little more lightly.)

2\. Women never had any shortage of "chick" entertainment, so this isn't a new thing that will warp them in new ways. "Guy" entertainment hasn't made me crash my car through a glass storefront or go on a violent vendetta against people I consider bad, and "chick" entertainment won't turn worthwhile girls and women into shallow, catty, cheating bitches. If anything, this will mean that more women will see sci-fi as just another genre instead of a marker of loserdom.

3\. "Feminization" happened long ago in the literary novel genre, and it wasn't the end of the world. Despite sales of literary novels being dominated by female consumers demanding stories of sex and shopping, to the point that novels in the "chick lit" genre don't bother pretending to be about anything else, it's still possible for writers like Chuck Palahniuk to become superstars.

4\. "Big idea" science fiction will not suffer from changes inside the sci-fi genre, because the worthwhile stuff transcends and escapes the genre. The stuff that doesn't -- the stuff that seemed tragically, unjustly, and arbitrarily confined to a sci-fi ghetto when you were a kid -- often turns out to be embarrassing bad when you reread it as an adult anyway. It's great for stimulating kids and getting them thinking about big issues. I'm convinced I'm much smarter because the sci-fi I read as a kid taught me to think ambitiously about important things. But most "big idea" sci-fi is psychologically tone- deaf to anyone who isn't a callow adolescent, and the really good stuff has a history of succeeding in the larger marketplace, where "feminization" happened long ago.

5\. "Big idea" science fiction will get better. "Big idea" doesn't have to mean big in scale. The personal is the political. Personal issues can be very big -- just think of society as a massively parallel machine solving billions of individual problems of love and survival. The OP's definition of "feminized" writing covers a lot of fertile ground. More "feminized" sci-fi ultimately means more _good_ "feminized" sci-fi, which means a wider variety of good sci-fi for _everybody_ to read.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a funny site:

 _Over the last few years, it has become increasingly obvious that American men — particularly those of the post-boomer generations — have fallen into a cultural gap. Our voice is barely a whisper in the traditional media, we are consistently portrayed as worthless buffoons and advertisers ignore us._

(Any guess on whether the phallic-symbol logo was a deliberate selection or not?)

Can you imagine a masculine man, in any era, actually voicing such a complaint? "Mommy mommy everyone's ignoring me and calling me names! I hate the girly and faggy tv all these women and faggots make but I can't stop watching it!"

Usually I associate masculinity with stoicism, quiet resolve, and a brave git- er-done approach; the masculine man would do his thing and not really worry about what the natterers were nattering about.

I think the one-sentence rebuttal is "videogames": the male demographic interested in manly tales of derring-do is really interested in obtaining experiences that approximate the male desire to actually go and do-derring; videogames -- being interactive -- are such better approximations to that experience that the demand for lesser such stimuli -- action sci-fi, comic books, etc. -- has substantially diminished.

Think of the Hardy Boys: every novel has a mystery that the boys solve along with their dad, usually with some fisticuffs and other feats of masculinity tossed in (breaking stuff; escaping from bandits; etc).

Now compare with a videogame (say, Halo): you have a guy put into a difficult military situation and _you_ have to fight your way out; success is not guaranteed, but you are given an obstacles to overcome and the tools to do so.

Which is a better simulacrum of adventure? Under what possible circumstances would a young boy trade a bunch of his adventure videogames for a cost- equivalent basket of books?

I'm pretty sure videogames have killed off an entire industry of young-male- fantasy; there are still huge nerds who read a lot and buy comic books and so on, but the much broader group of "casual readers" now play games instead of buy comics and so on (who might read a handful of non-assigned books between elementary school and high school graduation; think about the football and basketball teams).

For lightweight masculine entertainment sports of all kind fill out the rest of the gap.

The remainder has to do with differences in educational attainment and corresponding income differences; women on average have more education than men do on average, which translates into higher incomes (this _isn't_ a claim about salary disparity for doing the same job -- it's that more women are now in higher-paying jobs than men).

There's a legitimate issue underneath, there -- it's not like men are (or ought to be) guaranteed by birthright forms of employment that enjoy superior compensation to the work women do, but the fact of the matter is that as present trends continue the "skills" undereducated males possess don't have lots of market value. Not being as well-positioned (vis-a-vis les femmes) as providers means the balance of power shifts, which no one likes when it goes against their favor.

I think the educational system could be improved in ways that'd stop wasting as much educational potential on the part of males, but that's neither here nor there.

A final curiousity here is that the author's sense of historical norms (in terms of media targeting) is pretty far off the historical fact, but it's not like an accurate knowledge of the publishing market in the early 20th century is commonly possessed; it might've behooved the author to do some research but this is an amateur publication on the internet trolling for readership, not a serious attempt at peeling back the veil to get a good look at truth.

EG: in earlier eras a common complaint amongst the middle-class on upwards was that the stay-at-home wives would sit around filling their heads with garbage ideas from too many novels. Men, being busy with work and other responsibilities, had far less free time to dedicate to reading fiction for entertainment.

There were reams and reams and reams of crap fiction cranked out aimed at stay-at-home wives to pass the time -- and they would have _lots_ of time in that era; most of that fiction was utterly forgettable and is now mostly forgotten, out-of-print and only preserved in a handful of libraries for historians interested in the trash culture of the time.

As television became mainstreamed this industry died off a lot (less need for trash entertainment), and it died off further as women entered the workforce (less time spent at home).

The perceived more-masculine nature of historical media is thus a compounding of two bias-inducing dynamics:

\- the rise of tv and women in the workforce mean that the recent-history media landscape was quite different from its early situation (it's fair to go way back, since he's bringing in Jules Verne)

\- the fact that most trash culture isn't worth anyone's time to preserve leaves it mostly forgotten; a consequence of this is a historical filter that throws out most of what got made, leaving behind a biased sampling (eg: the average intellectual can maybe name <40 books from before 1800, most of which are classics; it's eminently not the case that all books published before 1800 were classics)

The most obvious change in mass-media content over the last 20 years has been moving away from explicit violence in tv and film (except in horror, which is actually a female-majority product these days, go figure!). If you watch an 80s era Arnold flick you'll see a lot more blood and dismemberment than is the norm today.

I see this as a shift in cultural mores and another case of videogames stealing the demand: cultural norms against explicit violence are if anything a positive development; once the tide has turned there's not much point putting it back in -- people will skip a movie if it's too violent but not that many people will skip a film b/c it lacks gore -- and for those who enjoy that kind of thing videos from Mortal Kombat onwards have catered to it.

If you want intelligent commentary on media and gender Camille Paglia should be your first stop; she's also a _markedly_ better writer than whiskey, who writes as his nom de plume suggests he might.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I don't think past generations of men worried about whether the _books_ their sons were reading were manly enough. If there is one thing that has been considered traditionally "feminine" (rightly or wrongly) it's _reading_.

The only thing to say to this author is, "dude, grow a pair."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh, come on. Are people really taking this article seriously? Look, it would be interesting to read an academic analysis of possible differences in how the sexes both produce and perceive entertainment. That is not what this article is. It is about pushing a gender war, where men are battling against a female gay alliance for control of the media.

From the article: Men, young and old, find gays and bisexuality (among men at least) about as attractive as a "fabulous" Broadway show followed by a viewing of all three of the "High School the Musical" movies. In fact, the more "gay" Broadway has become, (and the more technically excellent), the more repellent it has become to men and boys. Indeed, metal and rap's popularity stem from the hostility both have to gays, making male sexuality not "questionable" the way the love for Broadway showtunes would be.Women generally like gays, and find gay sex fascinating the way men do lesbian sex. However, men know well that most young women, if presented a magic button that would make most men (average joes) "gay" they'd break their fingers pushing it. The chief objective of attractive young women being turning off male desire of all but the most Alpha of men.

This is so wrong I don't know where to start. The author misrepresents men who like musicals, gay men, rap music, and women all in one paragraph. The article he is responding to, "The War on Science Fiction and Marvin Minsky" is just as bad.

As a final note, some of the recent television shows the author uses to support his conclusion that women are ruining science fiction are "Battlestar Galactica", the new "Dr. Who", "Buffy", and "Firefly". It has not been my experience that any of these shows have succeeded in repulsing a male audience, although perhaps that's just my group of friends.

<comment><USER6> The Spearhead is one of those bonkers "PUA" sites. Ironically in _The Game_ they go out wearing feather boas...

None of my male friends like the new Dr Who, but that's 'cos we're all old geezers who grew up in the days when Dr Who, you know, actually visited alien planets and travelled through time and stuff, instead of just hanging around on a housing estate in Wales trying to get laid. It's like _Eastenders_ now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know about _the fiction_ , but anything that might marginalize critics(?) like this one is an improvement.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wait now; there were a bunch of girls at comic-con and the guys were _complaining_?!

<comment><USER9> Twilight is that bad, apparently.

<comment><USER8> Still, it strikes me in the same way as "Carrie Fisher totally ruined that scene in _Return of the Jedi_ prancing around in that gold bikini" might sound at a Star Wars gathering...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think it's just women who are responsible for the rise of Extruded Fantasy Product.

</comment><comment><USER11> In a sentence, the OP is nuts.

The traits that it notes as the hallmark of feminine writing are really the signs of SF's maturation as a real literary form. The old days of pulp and space operas were, as noted, generally male-centered. They were almost entirely plot-driven, with tissue-thin characters.

Today's SF is a legitimate vehicle for the exploration not only of new worlds, but of philosophy and the human condition. This isn't because of females, but because the genre as a whole -- coming from writers of both genders -- have learned how to really create characters, and that lets us really explore their humanity.

For example, Orson Scott Card's second series of _Ender_ novels all retell the same story, just from the perspective of different characters (male and female). What could emphasize characters and their relationships more, and de- emphasize the plot itself, than this? (and yes, Card is male). Indeed, it seems to me that most of the SF I've read recently is like this to some extent, like the work of Robert Charles Wilson.

To the extent that being able to address the hard questions is a good thing (and I think it is), this is very good for science fiction.

And BTW, _Frankenstein_ is not horror, it's proper science fiction. Its theme deals with man's apparent mastery of nature, and how that becomes his folly. (More properly, horror should be considered a sub-genre of fantasy.)

And conversely, _The Hobbit_ and _Conan_ are _not_ science fiction, they are fantasy, in that they deal with man (or halfling, I suppose) at the mercy of forces beyond his comprehension, trying to make sense of those forces. Indeed, Tolkein's work is THE canonical fantasy.

</comment><comment><USER12> The "Big Idea" science fiction was never really about the technology. It's always been about the social implications and about exploring current situations but in a different way.

WTF, feminizing means nothing in that context.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sexist, homophobic. I'm surprised he didn't also include some comment on how "Adama's a spic when before he was white this is a catastrophy!". I'll take my captains latino, my fighter pilots chicks, and my immortal secret agents omnisexual, thanks.

Bigotted asshole.

</comment><comment><USER14> Pretend the con is Starfleet - full of weird people, with various degrees of alienness to you. Different groups have different cultural and emotional development. Try to understand them and get along with them, you'll be a better person for it.

<comment><USER15> There is a value to having like minded people gather together without too many distractions. I've got nothing against soccer players, but I'd still prefer that Lisp NYC not be overrun by hordes of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> yawn. dude confuses introvert/extrovert dichotomy with male/female dichotomy, complains about trashy pop-culture.

</comment><comment><USER4> This dude seems to have some issues with his sexuality.

</comment><comment><USER17> I read quite a few female writers and they're good and relevant. Bujold would be an obvious example, and much more local authors.

I'm going to visit a fantasy/role playing convention in two weeks, and I think female participants would account for more than half visitors.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why don't we just throw up some Council of Conservative Citizens links as well. Perhaps a link to Stormfront?

<comment><USER18> That would be a joke people. Spearhead is about as bigoted and ugly as you can get without broaching open hateful language.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you spend your workday doing? - <AUTHOR> Just curious on how the visitors of Hacker News use their time at work. I personally probably spend too much time on Hacker News...<p>Generally, I'd consider my workday breakdown as a senior engineer:<p>* 30% coding<p>* 25% mentoring (code reviews, peer programming, etc)<p>* 15% architecture discussions<p>* 10% customer interfacing<p>* 10% product discussions<p>* 10% bureaucratic maintenance <comment><USER2> Software engineer with 3 years of experience :

* 75% Coding * 10% HN and other tech news website * 10% Surfing the web for tutorial * 5% Chatting with coworkers

Chat also include technical discussion and other stuff, which are essential to me for a healthy professional life.</comment>


For High Tech Companies, Going Public Sucks - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/03/ff_facebookipo/

<comment><USER2> The increasing emphasis on the short term prospects of a publicly traded company is a problem. But is there anything here that's specific to software and web-focused companies? Others have been writing about this for years. John Bogle for example has argued that the increasing concentration of shares in a handful of pensions and mutual funds prevents the company's owners from acting like long-term owners.

<comment><USER3> There is something slightly more specific, which is that we have some technology-related _gris-gris_ [1]. The basic problem is that everyone feels more or less qualified to guide a company's technological progress. One very chilling story which exemplifies this comes from about 7-8 minutes into a Clojure talk:

        But really what this is is, "I'm afraid. Because I don't want to choose
        something that might put my job at risk, and so I will easily pick
        something that is less effective but more industry-accepted, rather than
        something riskier where I might risk really good success but also
        failure." ... I was literally in a meeting at one point with a CTO and
        he said, "We believe that the only way this project will ever be a
        success is if we pick Delphi, but we're picking PowerBuilder." Knowing
        that it's going to fail, but that's the safer choice politically because
        if they pick Delphi, they might win, but they might lose and if they
        lose and they picked something weird then they get fired.

So if you're a tech company and you go public, right, the salient fact is that your company is no longer self-valuing, but its value is being set by an (extremely meta) popularity contest: I think that this news will make others value you less, so I immediately sell a little cheaper than I think it's valued, thus driving the price down, and so forth. Normally you would say "who cares what someone says my value is?" but unfortunately the people who are playing this game ultimately _own the company_ , so it matters by fiat. They can and perhaps will fire people who don't make that stock price go up.

The _gris-gris_ enter in just about here. Some are owned by the market as a whole, and your owners will be anticipating them and responding to them. But the more dangerous _gris-gris_ will belong to your owners themselves, I suspect -- "You used Lisp? What the hell is that? You're fired."

So that's where I would focus the discussion. Random people on the stock market probably have just enough technical knowledge to think that they know much more than they know. That puts them in a dangerous position when they own your company. If Zuckerberg is careful to keep more than 50% of his company while going public and in doing so releases an open document saying essentially "Facebook is about hackers," I would understand him as trying to violate some taboo on the open market (where "hacker" is a bad word) as well as trying to make sure that people can never muscle out the hacker approach that, in his view, probably makes Facebook exactly what it is. He doesn't want the Ownership to start pressuring the Developers with technological misunderstandings.

[1] A _gris-gris_ (gree-gree) is a voodoo talisman. The key feature here is that it is unquestionably believed to work.

[2] Excerpted from [https://blip.tv/clojure/neal-ford-neal-s-master-plan-for- clo...](https://blip.tv/clojure/neal-ford-neal-s-master-plan-for-clojure- enterprise-mindshare-domination-5953926)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >That may sound like suicide, but a recent study showed that most fast-growing US companies take no venture funding at all.

Where can I read it? This sounds like a better story than the article itself.

There should be a rule that journalists have to cite the studies they cite...

</comment><comment><USER5> IPOs will continue to remain the preferred liquidity event until there is a better vehicle for fast-growing companies, particularly those who are growing fast but are not throwing off cash.

The spirit of going public has always been better liquidity, more transparency, and access to cheaper capital. That spirit hasn't changed so much as been polluted a bit by SarBox and short-sighted board members and investors. The solution isn't to stop going public; it's to fix SarBox and choose your board more wisely.

</comment><comment><USER6> For me the state of 'liquidity' events is a biproduct of our unsustainable consumption culture. Until people start 'thinking differently' about the type of people, and the type of world they want to be/create, we will continue to see liquidity events of this type.

IMO it became obvious after 2000 that the company cycle ( birth, growth, plataeu, decline, death ) for internet companies is much faster than the regulatory/financial cycle. For traditional 'technology' companies it still makes sense. You could see a hardware company do the whole cycle. But I don't think it works for internet companies. And it fundamentally destroys them, a la Yahoo and now Google.

</comment><comment><USER7> On that side note, does anyone know what ever happened to Goldman Sach's special vehicle for outside Facebook investments? I.e what stops companies from setting up their own vehicles for the stock options of their employee's to avoid the 500 rule?

<comment><USER8> Goldman only sold their Facebook shares to non-US clients, because in the US, the deal would violate other rules regarding the privacy of private offerings (essentially too many people knew that Goldman were offering Facebook shares and the offer ceased to be "private" enough for the SEC).

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870339660457608...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703396604576087941210274036.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _"Look at it this way: When Apple went public in 1980, it had 54.2 million shares outstanding. It has since split three times, so those original 54.2 million shares have now become 434 million shares. But in fact, Apple currently has 929 million shares outstanding. Many of the extra 495 million shares—worth well over $200 billion, at current valuations—were issued over the years to pay for companies or people. And Apple isn't even particularly acquisitive. All that equity has no value if there isn't some way to convert it into cash eventually."_

Surely AAPL with fewer shares would be worth a lot more per share. Markets pay keen attention to P/E.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why doesn't anyone mention the private option? Multi-Billion dollar operations like Koch Industries are private. You aren't forced to go public per se.

<comment><USER11> Did you read that article? Facebook more-or-less was forced to go public.

<comment><USER10> For posterity's sake let's make this clear: the SEC rule regarding 500 owners is as follows:

> Companies with more than $10 million in assets whose securities are held by > more than 500 owners must file annual and other periodic reports. These > reports are available to the public through the SEC's EDGAR database.

Source: Securities Act of 1934, paraphrased in <http://www.sec.gov/about/laws.shtml>

It requires firms to file special reports. The reason why people presume that it means that the firm must go public is simple: there are only a few additional requirements to go public, and the economic advantages in many cases outweigh the paltry effort.

For posterity's sake, this is worth repeating: THERE IS NOTHING FORCING A FIRM TO GO PUBLIC. NOTHING.

<comment><USER11> Right, besides the fact that they no longer have much to lose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> a million people who weren't smart enough to invent in the first place require that the few who DO invent, to do it in a way they understand and approve. where's the sense in that ? Asking high tech companies to 'drive' the economy as though they were bus drivers is like asking aviator-adventurists to fly passengers london-to-calais while filing daily status reports.

</comment><comment><USER13> But what about the pension funds etc. that finance seniors' retirements? There should be some way for them to get in on the action, otherwise seniors might end up putting even more strain on the social safety net. If pension funds were able to participate, then it would be a good thing. Does the model suggested in this article support such an investor?

</comment><comment><USER7> Liked the post a lot, there are a lot of things wrong with the investing and valuations frenzy these days. Personally, I was wondering whether a hybrid model is possible: while I do wanna grow organically from the profits of my company, I'm likely to need some initial funding usually in the seed range

<comment><USER14> I've heard of some angels accepting deals where they'd eventually get dividends.

<comment><USER10> I hope they are real dividends and not the 100M dividend associated with the BATS ipo ... (paid out the day before it tried to go public)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think Apple's performance in recent years must give some ammunition to execs who favor long-term goals over short-term goals. In addition Google has demonstrated that two-tier type stock voting schemes (like the one Facebook is going to use) can ameliorate many of the issues described.</comment>


Remote control a crane robot - <AUTHOR> http://crane.dnsalias.com/

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, this is about the same level of interestingness as Subservient Chicken to me. Now maybe if the robot was roaming the streets of Detroit..

<comment><USER3> The difference being that Subservient Chicken was prerecorded footage activated by keyword. In this case, you are actually teleoperating a small robot. Its _real_ , as opposed to Burger King's chicken, which is, you know, a chicken _simulation_. :)

I thinks its cool. Kudos.</comment></comment>


More than 1k people at Twitter had ability to aid hack of accounts - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-cyber-access-exclusive/exclusive-more-than-1000-people-at-twitter-had-ability-to-aid-hack-of-accounts-idUSKCN24O34E <comment><USER3> _accounts with more than 10,000 followers should at least need two people to change key settings_

For accounts that could start a war this might be necessary, but for celebrities with >10K followers this sounds expensive and unnecessary to me.

To me, it seems like you could instead ensure the admin view of every account has a timestamped log of recent settings changes, including changes done by admins, with a link to the profile of the admin responsible, and a button to suspend that admin account with one click.

This way, the security team could've seen that Elon Musk's account had just been reset by J. Random Employee minutes before tweeting the suspicious bitcoin tweet, messaged J. on Slack to be like "hey did you do that?", and suspended the compromised admin account within minutes.

Sure, some accounts might be briefly compromised initially, but it would be resolved in minutes and not the _hours_ that it took Twitter, right? That seems fine for what _should_ be a relatively low-likelihood, high-expense attack like compromised admin account (of course, you have to ensure that is the case).

<comment><USER4> 'Two people' misses the entire problem here.

If twitter 'verified' means anything, it means a chain of identity has been established between Twitter and the purported owner of that account. That chain should be documented somewhere - there must be some record in the 'verified account management' system that says something to the effect of 'after we gave this actual verified human this token, this email from this address arrived on this date containing that token, establishing that this person had control over that email address on that date'.

If random twitter admins can change the email address and disable 2fa on verified twitter accounts, and those accounts can still publish tweets without them going into a 'held pending verification that the blue check mark still applies to the person now in control of that account' queue, then twitter verification doesn't mean much.

Which might be of interest to organizations like the SEC who hold that communications over a verified twitter account count as official corporate notices, and various public safety organizations that have let it be known that messages on their twitter can be relied on as a source of official information during natural disasters...

Twitter needs to get serious about blue checks.

<comment><USER5> > If twitter 'verified' means anything, it means a chain of identity has been > established between Twitter and the purported owner of that account.

Not really, a blue checkmark is just a status symbol.

<comment><USER6> This is exactly the problem with the blue tick. It's basically meaningless other than as a budge of honour. It's also restricted to large companies and 'public' figures.

What I'd like to see is, the Blue Tick being restored to be an actual mark of Verification, and be something that _anyone_ can apply for with the appropriate identification documentation.

Additionally, there should then be a toggle switch, where only Verified accounts see tweets and replies from other Verified accounts[1]. This would effectively create two Twitters; one where every account is identifiable and accountable for what they tweet, and another that continues with the anarchic system they have now, where hate speech, racism and intolerance run rife[2].

\---

[1] I've heard rumours that this toggle switch already exists on Verified accounts - can anyone confirm ?

[2] Yes, free speech may be trapped here too, unless some sort of middle ground can be worked out.

<comment><USER7> Sounds just like the 'real names' policy that Google and Facebook have tried before. That never made any difference to hate speech, racism and intolerance, so why do you think it will magically make Twitter better?

<comment><USER8> I can imagine at minimum this would help with bots. Considering the problems you state are actual systematic issues we have in our society I would expect that the verification process should not be perceived as working towards solving those.

<comment><USER9> It would also exclude venerable people which is the problem with the real name idea

<comment><USER10> We can imagine a system where twitter checks that person is a real unique human but does not use their personal data for anything else.

<comment><USER11> Like when they used mobile phone numbers given for security purposes for marketing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For comparison, at Google in 2011, I was one of ~10 or so engineers that had the ability to view private Gmail or Gplus data (access that was heavily documented and audited).

That being said, Google did have to go through it's own public humiliation [1] to put a system like that in place.

[https://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked- te...](https://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied- on-chats)

<comment><USER13> I almost wonder if government officials should be outright banned from using any private messaging platform that isn't hosted by the government itself.

There is just too much power in information.

<comment><USER14> I believe to an extent they are: Hilary Clinton's hacked email was not the govt provided one, and most of the flack she received was for using personal email for gov stuff at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Kind of sensationalist. There's thousands of people that have the ability to drain your bank account right now. Your average call center employee wields immense power. The real story here is Twitter's lack of spear-phishing training for their support staff, not _support employees have access to support tools_.

<comment><USER16> It's not sensationalist when you realize it directly contradicts Twitter's prior statements from just last year about it:

> Twitter, in a statement, said it is aware that "bad actors" will try to > undermine its service and that the company "limits access to sensitive > account information to a limited group of trained and vetted employees."

[https://www.npr.org/2019/11/06/777098293/2-former-twitter- em...](https://www.npr.org/2019/11/06/777098293/2-former-twitter-employees- charged-with-spying-for-saudi-arabia)

1,000 people, including contractors outside the company, is not a "limited group of trained and vetted employees." It's news because they misled people about their security, again.

<comment><USER17> > 1,000 people, including contractors outside the company, is not a "limited > group of trained and vetted employees."

That's not necessarily true. 20% of the company could fairly reasonably be deemed "limited", and there being a thousand of them doesn't mean they're not trained on their tasks.

<comment><USER18> Today I learned that Twitter has 4,600 employees. What are they all doing?

<comment><USER19> They have 35 offices, I assume it adds up.

<comment><USER18> Oh, right. That makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I remember during my time with a large mobile carrier in UK I was told of a person in the company who could in theory read any SMS on the network. Mind you this was literally one person for over 30 million customers. He had a high security clearance, extensive security training and the powers vested in him were used mainly to identify scammers and other criminals.

Pretty sure this was a requirement set by law - we need someone to be able to do this, but lets make sure they know what they're doing. It is very weird we dont place the same requirements on social networks.

<comment><USER21> Social networks were never supposed to be important or serious in the same way as phone networks. I would argue they still aren't. At the bottom, they are just time waster websites. You wouldn't demand that level of security of a php forum would you?

<comment><USER20> At a certain threshold yes I would, if it served millions of people. A small ISP can get away with terrible security but once they start having millions of customers someone is going to sound an alarm. A forum, written in any language, should be no different. I realise there are challenges in making this happen but they are not unrealistic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I now understand why the bank I work for creates the separation of duties; the person who builds the system has no access to it, and the person with access has no idea how it works.

As a developer, it frustrates the shit of out me because I can't deploy fixes quickly or easily diagnose issues.

But yep, there are 3 people that have access to the production databases that hold account info and they aren't developers, just managers with no clue what to do once they log in.

I also worked for a company that sold software to lawyers. We had a feature that would alert the client any time a member of our company accessed their data. I think we called the feature something like "fire call", because if you tripped it without informing the client, you'd get a call informing you that you'd been fired.

<comment><USER23> > there are 3 people that have access to the production databases that hold > account info and they aren't developers, just managers with no clue what to > do once they log in.

Just for my curiosity is this your observation or is this a company assumption?

<comment><USER22> Hmm I think it's just our group, we have a Production support team that holds the keys, and there's only 3 of them that can access my app.

For example, if I want to change an environment variable, I can't just log into the cloud console or run a cli command. God no. That would be too easy. I have to write a script for this team to run. This script is entered into an authorization app where a few parties "sign off", at which point the prod support team can log in to the authorization app and click Deploy. This app then runs my deployment script against our app container to update the env variable.

Accessing and doing DB work follows a similar process.

<comment><USER24> Reading this makes me happy! Always good to see people taking security seriously.

<comment><USER25> Yep, this is how strict change control needs to work - if it can be streamlined, all well and good, but not by removing the checks and balances that can help prevent operational issues (not just fraud issues)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ha!

Did you see in that article that the head of cyber security for AT&T added his two cents in shaming Twitter?

AT&T was just in the news recently where employees were accepting bribes that allowed criminals to swap SIMs steal bitcoins from AT&T customers.

Unbelievable.

<comment><USER27> I have a lot of sympathy for the telcos on this.

They did not volunteer telephone numbers as universal proof of ID. So their threat model was proportional to their intended purpose of the identifier. If bad guys steal your phone number and run up $100 of calls, the phone company would eat the charges and get the number back. Of course nobody did that because it wasn't worth it.

Imagine you own a medium-sized residential building, maybe 20 households live there. You issue them all with front door keys. You use pretty good locks, from a no-duplicate series that isn't trivially picked by amateurs. You figure that picking the door or forging a key would be pretty hard so there's no way it's worth it when someone could just kick it down.

Then, to your astonishment, a local jewellery store announces that anyone who has one of your front door keys can now store up to $1M of valuables in safes they've made accessible from the street. "It's totally safe" they assure your residents, "because how could anybody else get one of these front door keys? That'd be impossible".

Um. What? Before you know what's happening, one of your residents is trying to sue you for a million dollars because they proudly used a safe to store their $1M of Bitcoins for some crazy reason and (duh) somebody just got a duplicate key easily enough for way less than $1M and stole them.

<comment><USER28> They not only "did not volunteer" to be a secure identity provider via SMS, they've been actively warning against it for almost a decade:

[https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telcos-declare-sms-unsafe- for...](https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telcos-declare-sms-unsafe-for-bank- transactions-322194)

Telcos declare SMS 'unsafe' for bank transactions

By Brett Winterford Nov 9 2012

Communications Alliance chief executive John Stanton, representing the interests of mobile providers Telstra, Optus and Vodafone, took the extraordinary step of of declaring the technology insecure in the wake of numerous reports of Australians being defrauded via a phone porting scam first uncovered in Secure Computing magazine.

"SMS is not designed to be a secure communications channel and should not be used by banks for electronic funds transfer authentication," Stanton told iTnews this week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is why internal tools that can modify account settings and such need to have audit trails.

<comment><USER17> It probably does, and it probably wouldn't have stopped this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I created a Twitter account close to a month ago and it was immediately suspended because it "appears to have exhibited automated behavior that violates the Twitter Rules". Well it did not really do anything yet, even less so anything against their rules. The account is still suspended despite multiple appeals and messages.

At the same time, dozens (hundreds?) of verified accounts get taken over. I think their fraud detection systems are total crap.

<comment><USER31> They do this for all new accounts. It's a way to harvest phone numbers from unsuspecting victims of this surveillance.

It doesn't matter from what ip, machine or whatever you register. It will automatically get suspended because I think they've realized it's easier to force people to enter their phone numbers in "protection" after they just created an account rather than to just ask for it during signup.

Less questions are asked. I wrote a blog post on my now deleted blog, but discussions on HN was here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19487304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19487304)

<comment><USER11> [https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/8/20905383/twitter-phone- nu...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/8/20905383/twitter-phone-numbers- email-addresses-targeted-advertising) Twitter caught using phone numbers for marketing purposes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> twitter, seems to have a cowboy engineering culture. that's why one of their exec's blamed rails for their failure to combat harassment[0]. n I bet now, if they still ran rails, it would've been blamed lol.

[0]: [https://char.gd/recharged/daily/twitter-blames-ruby-on- rails...](https://char.gd/recharged/daily/twitter-blames-ruby-on-rails-for- harassment)

<comment><USER33> "...a rudimentary web-application framework that made it nearly impossible to find a technical solution to the harassment problem"

To me, this is analogous to the perhaps undeserved "the internet is a series of tubes" lampooning, but I'm still chuckling how they managed to word that so poorly.

<comment><USER34> It sounds like a perfect answer to those claiming "harassement" is a technology problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Should there be citizenship requirements for access to customer data at that scale? Background checks? Security clearances?[1] When you have so much private data and the ability to put words into people's mouths, aren't you a national security asset at that point? Today it's some bitcoin scammers, tomorrow it's Russian or Chinese intelligence. If I was in charge of Russian or Chinese intelligence, I'd make sure that my citizens working inside these companies are using that data to my advantage, or are at least positioned to should an opportunity arise.

There is already tons of evidence of Chinese nationals coming to the US to work at these companies with the express purpose of stealing trade secrets and sending them back to China. Why would the Chinese government stop there? How about your personal emails, your Twitter DMs, etc.?

Citizenship is loyalty. That is what it means legally and what it has meant in practice. Especially if your family is still in your country of citizenship.

Yes, this would mean the international segmenting of the internet, at least in terms of which websites you plug your personal data into vs. "just browse". This strikes us nerds as awful. But perhaps anything else was just a naive fantasy. The last decade should have shattered our innocence. What happens online matters for great power politics, and great power politics matters a lot for ordinary people.

[1] The current security clearance process is at least partly a jobs programs for people with boring, unadventurous youths. I'm not advocating for that, just the principle of a security clearance.

<comment><USER36> You know, I used to think that locking down certain websites to citizens of the country the website resides in was a bad thing.

Now with the advent of all these apparent "bots", "state actors", etc. etc. I'm starting to think it might not be a bad idea.

There's a bunch of "what-ifs" however like "what if the government starts removing content it doesn't like", "should you be able to be banned from the platform?", etc.

<comment><USER35> At least within the US, I think sufficiently large platforms should not be allowed to censor on the basis of viewpoint. But that is exactly the kind of political question that nation states, not international forces, should be answering.

<comment><USER11> The biggest problem is we've allowed them to become so big they're capable of doing that. The rise of censor culture hasn't helped and is heaped on by advertisers and the media.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Right, thousands of people with admin access and nobody could help me reinstating my API access....

<comment><USER38> Apparently you gotta have that coveted Verified badge or be an influencer of some sort

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> There is all this talk from those successful companies about security and what you should do with your keys and they open source hardware secret stores and brag about it and they fail at the most basic security operations.

</comment><comment><USER40> I wonder if they automatically turned off log in with twitter to other websites. Seems like the bigger hole is that they can use these credentials for any people using twitter to log in using oauth.

</comment><comment><USER41> Worth mentioning only 5,000 people work at Twitter.

<comment><USER6> There are ~330 million active twitter users, which means 330,000 users per employee with access to admin accounts.

That ratio is massively high compared to a large corporate (i.e, a global bank). In a typical global bank lets says there are 100,000 employees, with about 25-50 IT people with the rights to admin accounts (from first line support to third line engineers) that's only 2,000-4,000 users per IT admin person.

Based on that, I'm surprised that it's only 1,000 staff members in Twitter with admin access, and not the whole company.

<comment><USER41> I am not sure why this bank example keeps coming up. Almost no twitter user tries to contact support like they contact their teller for their bank. It's really bad that 20% of the company had access to user data. No wonder it was abused in the past. [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how- saud...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-saudi-arabia- infiltrated-twitter)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This should be a wake up call. Thank god the malicious messaging was only limited to a tiny Bitcoin scam. Imagine if they had pulled this off on the accounts of national leaders to stir hostilities or violence.

What is the recourse for this kind of failure? I suspect there is none. Twitter is shielded from lawsuits for its content. If this is provably negligent behavior and resulted in actual physical harm it are we supposed to do nothing and simply hope it never happens again?

I cannot fathom what I would do if I were in the position of Timothy Klausutis: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/widower-of-late- joe-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/widower-of-late-joe- scarborough-staffer-seeks-removal-of-trump-tweets-that-promote-baseless- conspiracy-theory/2020/05/26/cf06257a-9f45-11ea-b5c9-570a91917d8d_story.html)

<comment><USER11> GDPR is "supposed" to hold companies responsible for breaches and bad access controls. This is a different beast than liability protection for content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Anyone watched Westworld? The whole enterprise is destroyed (almost) by 2 low level employees. It's either a complete blooper in the script or --after I read this article-- reflective of the real world that I don't know about. Your take?

</comment><comment><USER44> > implication that a hostile government might be able to cause even greater > havoc.

it is stuff like this that make me question the whole article. like yes, obviously this was no "hostile" government since they were just scamming for some pocket change. but also how exactly would this hostile government create havoc with twitter?

<comment><USER45> There are so many government officials on Twitter, and causing any number of them to tweet something plausible but untrue could be a _big_ deal - <USER2> moving markets to moving troops.

Just imagine if Donald Trump's account tweeted that Antifa should be shot on sight. I'm certain people would die because of that.

Or, perhaps _slightly_ less plausibly, that Boris Johnson tweeted that he's had enough and is abandoning negotiations with the EU. That would cause a frantic reaction from the markets before any official statement could be put out.

<comment><USER44> If people are taking Tweets as actual government announcements then they have too many screws loose. Dumb people do dumb shit, what else is new?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> well, I worked on a software house that makes software for industry automation. each user of the software has all their actions logged and time- stamped. if you edit something, give a big discount, granted permission, deleted something... it all goes into a different DB filled with just the logs. why doesn't Twitter have something like this? am I missing something?

<comment><USER11> If you're banning thousands of people, deleting thousands of tweets and updating thousands of people as routine (customer support), it might take time for someone to review what you're doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> "Only two people can launch a nuke, the president, and the engineer who installed the system."

</comment><comment><USER48> Title corrected : More than 1k people at Twitter had ability to aid hack and chose not to.

<comment><USER49> > Title corrected : More than 1k people at Twitter had ability to aid hack and > chose not to.

This is a stupid way of looking at it. Similarly:

\- X number of people owned guns but they chose not to go do a mass shooting.

\- X number of cops could kill a black person, they chose not to.

While it's a good thing that majority of the people know right from wrong, morality, etc, we still need to ensure one person can't do significant damage.

The fact that there are 1000s of individuals that could have hacked is not a good thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Interesting

</comment><comment><USER51> On a different note, online presence is becoming very important and with remote work culture gaining traction, having a good online presence has become a must have asset.

I bought a course on building Twitter audience and been able to improve my following significantly from past 2 months.

Twitter link: [https://twitter.com/sunilc_](https://twitter.com/sunilc_)

If you're looking to increase your social presence too, here's the course that I found very useful:

[https://gumroad.com/a/238777459/PBkrO](https://gumroad.com/a/238777459/PBkrO)

<comment><USER52> Spam motivational quotes and hope people retweet and like?</comment></comment>


Cost of 3G data in the US among highest in the world. - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/07/ipad-users-data-chart/ <comment><USER3> Cost of any cellular related thing in the US is among the highest in the world. I don't know of any other place where you pay to _receive_ calls and texts. Vendor lock-ins are rampant.

I was going to buy a smartphone but then decided against it because I figured out that the cost of the plan alone would set me back $40-$60 whereas I pay 25 dollars for approx 1.5 months on my prepaid plan.

<comment><USER4> Paying to receive calls is annoying at first blush, but it does have at least one benefit: you're far more callable. With other systems, low level employees at many businesses simply won't be able to. (I've seen this first hand in Australia and Mexico.) This is likely penny-wise, pound-foolish on the part of those businesses, but no less real for that.

Having to pay to receive SMSes, on the other hand, is hard to justify.

Just remember that complex systems emerge as often as they're created upfront, and you'll feel better about it all.

<comment><USER3> But the thing is, even with the receiver paying a fee, the caller portion of the price is still pretty high, which defeats the purpose of the idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Before the iPhone 3G came out, it was impossible to find reasonable data plans here in Canada. The only options were $30/50MB plans intended for Blackberries.

What a difference two years make. I picked up my iPhone 4 this morning - <USER2> GB, for $40 less than the same model in the US. (3 year plan, unfortunately, but eligible for full upgrades in < 2 years) The data plans provide 6 GB/month for $30, with tethering included free and a $10-20 option to share the quota with a 3G iPad.

What changed between 2008 and today is that the iPhone is now available from all three major Canadian telcos, whereas Americans are still stuck with AT&T.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sadly only data and no explanations. I would especially like to know why the price is so ridiculously high in France. From my very superficial knowledge about the French phone market I always assumed that it must be very similar to the German phone market (I'm from Germany) which has among the lowest prices.

My hypothesis for the low prices in Germany? Fierce competition.

<comment><USER7> Also, the HN title is somewhat misleading, as the report is not just about 3G data, but about 3G data plans for notebooks and tablet computers.

In many European countries, the 3G data plan one has in combination with a mobile voice subscription is a lot cheaper per gigabyte.

For instance: in The Netherlands, the cheapest iPhone plan includes 150 nationwide minutes for outgoing calls (all incoming calls are free), sending 150 text messages (receiving messages is free), and unlimited 3G data at 2 Mbit/s --- for only Euro 30 ($40).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> At first I thought that it was because of the extra demand in the US (being more developed that most of the world), but the same data being offered for as little as ~$0.50 just confounds me. It's probably just the effects of a monopoly at work, although it would be interesting to see more data and analysis.

<comment><USER7> I would think that regions that have the most mobile phone users per square mile and that are the closest to major Internet hubs would have the best rates. So to me, it would make sense for 3G data to be more expensive in rural Alaska than in Queens, NY.

Then again, it might have more to do with taxation and government subsidies, as is the case with the huge difference in the pricing of gasoline worldwide. In The Netherlands, you can expect to pay $7.52 for a gallon of gasoline, while in Venezuela it costs only $0.19.

<http://www.theoildrum.com/files/GasPrices.png>

<comment><USER9> I think you're onto something with the region idea. All the major carriers offer nationwide plans because people expect to be able to travel pretty much anywhere and still have their phones work. That means that we all foot the bill for putting towers all over our insanely-large country because one day we may run out of gas in the middle of Nebraska and need to make a call.

The European nations, Japan, etc. are all much smaller and more densely populated, so the cost of covering the countries with towers is lower per person.

If you're really just going to use your phone in Queens, NY (and other fairly populated areas), you can go with a discount carrier like Boost Mobile, but you'll curse your frugality when you do actually stray from cities because their coverage map looks like this: <http://www.boostmobile.com/coverage/> instead of this: [http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/CoverageLocatorController...](http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/CoverageLocatorController?requesttype=NEWREQUEST)

Also, as I said in another comment, that graphic makes the difference in cost look way bigger than it is.

<comment><USER10> Finland:

31$/mo. for iPhone4 + 13$/mo. (dur. 2 yrs) for unrestricted 3G data until 1 Gb transferred, after which the speed is capped to 64 kbit/s.

or

26$/mo. (dur. 2 yrs) for HTC Desire including unlimited 3G data with unrestricted speed, free phone calls within the same carrier (covers over 1/2 of all Finns) and 2400 min of free calls/mo. to other domestic carriers.

translates to

44$/mo. for iPhone4 with crappier plan vs. 26$/mo. for HTC Desire with fully loaded plan. The difference is gigantic, but iPhone still sells like hot cakes.

Text messages cost 0,13$ apiece (single unit price for the most expensive carrier, median is lower)

iPad is not available atm.

<comment><USER11> Phoneless deals in Finland: 1Mbps 10 eur ($13)/mo, unlimited speed 14 eur ($18)/mo. Both with no data caps. Phone calls 0.07 eur/min and SMS 0.06 eur apiece. Oh yeah, and you get multiple sim cards, eg for your phone and netbook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is pretty misleading. They assume that any unlimited plan = 30GB. It looks like most plans are still in the $20-$30 range, it's just that a lot of them are unlimited and counting as 30GB, or have an official cap so high that the carriers sell it knowing that on average <10% of the cap will be used.

For example, Drei in Austria is $1.31/GB. Great! Let's replace AT&T's plan for $2.62! ... Oh, that's only if we get a 15GB plan for $19.59? That's a little better, but way less better than the graph makes it appear.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think you mean _price_.

</comment><comment><USER13> Anyone know if there will be true compatibility of LTE hardware on the US networks? This would finally bring real competition and put an end to this problem.

</comment><comment><USER14> But wait, I'm still on the AT&T unlimited plan. Does this mean my 3G cost is <DIVIDE BY ZERO ERROR>?

<comment><USER15> cost/data, so surely you mean a <DIVIDE BY NAN ERROR> because data would be infinite?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Try 3G roaming in Europe if you want to see ridiculous rates. 3 euros / MB!

<comment><USER17> Roaming charges are ridiculous.

I was once at a sales presentation where someone borrowed my GSM modem and used it for less than an hour. He was just trying to load a web portal. Bill came up to $600. My carrier called me in the afternoon to make sure that was me.

<comment><USER18> There must be some kind of business opportunity here. The concept of virtual operators that have no hardware of their own, just a brand, can they not make deals with operators all through Europe and offer sensible data-rates everywhere?

<comment><USER19> The EU are trying to bring in legislation to force the phone companies to charge reasonable roaming costs I believe

<comment><USER16> The phone operators are scared shitless that people will run VOIP over their smartphones and so get to a much lower effective rate per minute than what the operators charge at the moment.

Typically a VOIP stream is between 2400 and 9600 baud, or 300 to 1200 bytes per second. At E0.25 cts per MB for instance that would make their voice tariffs look ridiculous and people would switch en-masse to VOIP.

They can't really win this one, either people will not use their data networks and they end up in front of the anti-competitive agencies (OPTA etc) or they lose a pile of money on their voice side.

Sucks to be them.

<comment><USER18> I have heard this presented as "telcom companies do not want to be reduced to be a bitpipe".

It is a fear I find to be mistaken. Even though a bit is a bit any way it is transferred, things like latency, jitter, guaranteed throughput, those are things that do make a difference to applications.

If I was a telcom company, I would start to write android applications that besides providing VOIP and streaming video, etc, also would set up these connections to use a QoS level that the subscriber would have as extra charge add-ons to their account. QoS might require lots of technology on the server side that isn't there yet.

If I was an evil telecom company, I might even introduce jitter on non QoS and make VoIP completely crappy quality. Making people that pick this route sound like real cheapskates. Aren't you glad I am not a telecom company?

<comment><USER16> You're not by any chance employed by KPN are you ?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


NIN Reaction to iPhone App Store Rejection - <AUTHOR> http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?9,651569,651569#msg-651569

<comment><AUTHOR> A better link:

<http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?9,651569,651569#msg-651569>

<comment><USER2> I was thinking the same thing especially with the tie in to walmart's music sales and the questionable safari application bundled with the iphone :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm never, _ever_ getting an iPhone.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure Apple will miss you terribly. An app was denied. Big deal. No great loss.

If you really want to run the app, jailbreak your phone and run it.

<comment><USER5> While I don't think it's a major reason not buy an iPhone, it is actually a fairly big problem. I know of at least 3 high profile apps that have been rejected due to "objectionable content" which was nothing more than a few swear words on content loaded from the web.

My problem, aside from the censorship in the first place, is that they don't follow the same standards in their own apps. Search the YouTube app for any swear word and it will happily give you all the swearing you can handle.

<comment><USER4> The web browser is un-censored. That's pretty much all that matters in this day+age.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but there's the argument that the browser doesn't directly help you discover content, whereas YouTube app does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think this is so bad really. Apple's brand is affected by the kind of material it sells and it wants to protect its brand.

It's just like Facebook has porn patrol.

Being a vendor of a product isn't just about moving product, it's about moving product in a direction that you believe makes the world a better place for you to live. Apple has the right to choose how to let people use their platform.

Imagine a world where you have no right who you can and cannot sell your hard work to. Those signs that say, "We have the right to refuse service to anyone" -- all those would have to come down, by law!

I think, right now, that I would prefer a world where a vendor of a service can decide who it does and does not provide that service to than a world where the builder of a product or provider of a service does not have that right.

<comment><USER7> You're missing the point. Apple sells The Downward Spiral in the iTunes store. Not allowing the same content in the App store is just absurd. In fact, the app doesn't even contain the content, it's just accessible through it.

<comment><USER8> I believe the reason for the apparent contradiction is this: Apple acts as a publicizer for the apps in the app store by letting them into the top-N lists and recent releases. When an "objectionable" app becomes popular, users hold Apple to account. They don't do this with the music store.

As the app store gets more and more crowded, Apple will most likely loosen up. Or maybe they will do the really intelligent thing: allow everything in, but only allow "non-objectionable" material into the top-N and recent releases sections.

<comment><USER9> Apple has a top-N list for songs, albums, audiobooks, movies, tv shows, etc. on the front page of the itunes store. How is advertising questionable material in those lists any different than advertising apps with questionable content?

<comment><USER10> With iTunes, Apple is a distributor. With the app store, it's a publisher. It's reasonable to assume that most people who are likely to get angry about content in a song/app recognise and understand the difference. And perhaps many of them don't understand that Apple is merely a publisher, and don't actually create most of the apps.

Creators and publishers are (usually) considered to have more responsibility than distributors when it comes to objectionable content. I think that's an important difference for Apple's image.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone chime in on the app store review procedure? Is each app assigned an individual review monkey, or is it passed through multiple hands? Methinks Apple needs better screening and performance evaluation of their app store employees. All it takes is a few jackasses in the mix for this to happen. Their rejection policy clearly leaves certain things open for interpretation.

<comment><USER8> Based on my server logs, it appears there are multiple levels of review. The pattern I usually see is a little interaction after a few days of submitting, then a little more interaction right before approval. In one case, my app got rejected for an interface issue, and it looked like more people were involved. So it seems to be a "red-flag" kind of system.

<comment><USER12> Yes, for some apps, the first-stage approval is clearly done by someone fairly non-technical, just reading from a list of things they need to deny apps for. I've had first-level reviewers deny apps for really silly things, in some cases where the problem was the reviewer's command of the english language, rather than the app itself. Resubmitted with no changes and it went through 6 days later.

Oh and there are no appeals at this stage. This isn't a democracy. Resubmit the binary and get to the back of the line, scruffy.

But if you do get forwarded on, it seems to take about 2x as long, and get you to someone inside Apple who knows a thing or two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's sad that Apple can get away with this. Somehow competition is not working like it should in this market.

<comment><USER14> That's how Apple has always set it out to be. They lock everything down so that competition _can't_ grow properly..

<comment><USER15> Yeah, but that was the other person's point. Apple is still successful. Therefore, competition is not the panacea to solve all the worlds ills, since Apple is behaving so poorly yet we all just pony up the cash for iPhones anyway. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Tinkering with electronics - <AUTHOR> https://www.thanassis.space/thebeast.html <comment><USER2> I design interfaces for a living, but tinkering with hardware is one of the most satisfying journeys I know. Every now and then, like OP, I play around with different hardware projects. It's amazing how, showing a half-baked hardware project to a friend gets them a lot more exciting than showing them a nicely designed software project. It feels like when you're tinkering with hardware a lot more parts of the brain are challenged and thus generate a more fulfilling experience. I highly recommend everyone who's into software or design but never did anything with hardware to spend some time this week building a simple blinking LED project with the Arduino. You'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

<comment><USER3> I couldn't agree more, but these days Arduinos are both limiting and expensive.

Consider checking out an ARM Cortex-M board - you can get an STM32F103 'blue pill'[1] with 20KB RAM, 64KB flash, external oscillators, and a 72MHz clock speed for $5. Plus, it has lots of extra peripherals like a realtime clock which can run off of backup power and periodically wake the chip up from sleep.

The future of embedded development is so bright, you gotta walk around with sunglasses on.

[1]: [http://wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Blue_Pill](http://wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Blue_Pill)

<comment><USER4> My current favorite arm cortex are cypress's psoc. They're basically cortex m0/m3 + embedded cpld that has a direct interconnect to cpu reg/interrupts.

<comment><USER3> How's the open toolchain support with those chips?

I've also heard good things about NXP's Cortex-M chips - apparently they let you map peripherals to whatever pins you want, which sounds neat. And TI's MSP432 chips apparently have fantastically low power consumption for their performance. Atmel's SAM chips look less promising, with minimal peripherals besides a weird common communication bus that seems to handle things like I2C/SPI/etc, if I'm reading the datasheets right.

Does that sound right? It'd be nice to learn about all of them, but there are only so many hours in a day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Welcome to my weekend!

[https://imgur.com/a/XxMUY](https://imgur.com/a/XxMUY)

This is an AVR-based pong video game (Grant Searle), modified to work with BBC micro:bits as digital paddles - also operatable from phones via Bluetooth!

This is for a STEM/Code Club event at a local school, for a bit of retro- meets-contemporary fun, and a paddle programming challenge - let's try using the micro:bit accelerometers.

The breadboarded circuit will be made up on stripboard, but I'll take along the prototype.

[https://github.com/linker3000/Microbit- TVPong](https://github.com/linker3000/Microbit-TVPong)

</comment><comment><USER6> If you want to get into electronic tinkering the Kris Cochrane youtube channel is a good palce to start. He only uses hobbyist kit (so really cheap from AliExpress) and he'll teach simple soldering and surface mount soldering. He also walks through building reallly cheap chinese electronic kits.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh8JiW2G9yR2v7TwUm04m_g](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh8JiW2G9yR2v7TwUm04m_g)

</comment><comment><USER7> Great projects!

I got an Arduino recently and it's the best £6 I've spent in ages. My pet project is building a synth driven from the midi output of my keyboard.

As a software person, "real" electronics felt hard to grok. The Arduino has been a dream. You have to learn loads along the way. How do I get audio out? Oh right, what's PWM? Oh ok, how do these timer things work? But it's soooo satisfying.

Highly recommended!

<comment><USER8> Would love to read more about that synth project. I'm just embarking on a similar project myself, using a little Cypress PSoC that a friend gave me. I'd like to make something glitchy and lo-fi - halfway between a Monotron Duo and an Atari Punk Console.

<comment><USER9> Checkout [https://github.com/BleepLabs/Nebulophone](https://github.com/BleepLabs/Nebulophone)

It's not to hard to build and not a bad place to start. The code could be better, some variables are poorly named and has some minor bugs (off-by-one on the wave table lookup?). I did start to clean it up but never got to submitting a pull request before moving onto other projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just found this YouTube playlist on electronics basics on YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAA9B0175C3E15B47](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAA9B0175C3E15B47) the videos from the usaf training are particularly good. Person who made this playlist has a lot of other good ones too.

</comment><comment><USER11> After building some electronics [1] I kind of think it's a pain. It took me seven tries to get the switching power supply working right. Can't do that on a prototyping board; layout matters, and all the parts are surface mount. LTSpice simulations get you close, but not quite there. Then I had to learn to surface mount solder, which means working with tweezers under a microscope. I'm not that good at it.

People like that design. Others have built more of them. Someone in Australia plans to manufacture a hundred or so. There's enough interest for hobbyists to build it, but not enough for a real production run.

[1] [https://github.com/John-Nagle/ttyloopdriver](https://github.com/John- Nagle/ttyloopdriver) (USB interface for old Teletype machines, models from 1910 to 1960).

</comment><comment><USER12> I love tinkering with hardware. I just hate the debugging because now you have both physical on top of code debugging you have to deal with in order to find out where things go wrong.

<comment><USER13> Typically on a new hardware design I'll write throwaway code that exercises all outputs. You use this to verify the schematic.

Maybe half the time that code evolves into an API/HAL that the final application will use. Many times it also becomes code for manufacturing test (burn in with the test code, then reflash with final production firmware right before boxing)

Starting out with application code on top of a brand new design will lead to madness. Take it in smaller steps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would love to see what tinkering could be done with low-power, minimal or "self-sufficient" location-placement of sensors to gather data and report data using Lora, cdma, or HF for long range. Why? Because electronics are small and there should be interesting ways to exploit the difference between this smallness and full blown CPUs operating on the grid.

But I have a hard time generating good ideas. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER15> take a look at the feather m0 from Adafruit - I have a few deployed where wifi is quite a ways away, gathering data for me and sending to another one acting as a base station.

I haven't added solar, as these are inside, near power, but have some solar panels and hardware waiting for me to deploy out in the field (literally). so far, it's been my lack of good waterproof enclosures that has slowed me down. I wonder if there'd be a good opportunity for someone in that space.

<comment><USER16> Put it in one of those sealable jars with hinges - stuff a few packets of dessicant inside to stop condensation and you're done. If you need to pass through wires score a v-shape into the seal and make sure they get squeezed tight when you close the jar. Something like [http://img4.foodservicewarehouse.com/Prd/1900SQ/AmericanMeta...](http://img4.foodservicewarehouse.com/Prd/1900SQ/AmericanMetalcraft_HMJ5.jpg) make sure to get some extra sealing rings if you do passthroughs as it's hard to get the scoring right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This blog is excellent, and has a good "what to buy" and some similar projects eg [http://www.technoblogy.com/show?WNM](http://www.technoblogy.com/show?WNM)

The ATtiny85 costs around $1 - it's amazing what you can do with it. I've made / adapted quite a few projects from there and other blogs

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know what kind of circuit would be able to convert 12VDC (e.g. from a small lead acid gel. cell battery) to 20VDC (which my Lenovo E470's DC charging voltage)? The E470 is my work computer and does not have an easily swappable battery, so I wanted to experiment with some kind of external charging system I can use when working remote at sites without accessible outlets.

<comment><USER19> If you want a near turn-key solution, there is this: [http://www.mini- box.com/DCDC-USB?sc=8&category=1264](http://www.mini-box.com/DCDC- USB?sc=8&category=1264)

Mini-box has a number of dc-dc converters and battery charging systems for gel-cell and other batteries. I do not have personal experience with their products, but I'd try them first if I wanted something other than a hack.

For hacks there are tons of boost converter boards on eBay/aliexpress, but these typically don't have chargers, short protection, or other features you might want if you need more robustness

<comment><USER18> Thanks @vibrolax, that does look ideal. I was going to muck around and design the circuit myself (hopefully based off a solid reference design), but the COTS setup you listed above looks just like what I need, so I think I'll go ahead and get it once funds allow :) Thanks again for the tip.

<comment><USER19> You're welcome. Another possible solution for you is a dc-dc laptop brick like these: [https://www.powerstream.com/ADC-p006.htm](https://www.powerstream.com/ADC-p006.htm).

Fit your gel cell with an auto accessory socket, then plug in the power supply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Armbian sounds like a version of ambian</comment>


Being Featured on the App Store - <AUTHOR> http://blog.anylistapp.com/2012/08/app-store/

<comment><USER2> My app has been featured three times now by Apple (TextPics) www.textpicsapp.com. The first time, in early 2011, it spent around two weeks at around the #3 Top Paid app position, the second time (late 2011) it made it to #8 I believe and the third time it was a lesser feature in a subsection specific to valentines apps but still did top 25.

I've spent a LOT of time thinking about how to get featured and how the whole mess works, and as for my experience, my first feature was simply based on being a new idea (TextPics was the first app for ASCII art texting - before I experienced Attack of the Chinese Clones) with excellent growth, lots of updates, and a positive rating. These three points were actually laid out on Apple's developer portal and TextPics satisfied all the points and was lucky enough to be chosen.

The second time around I specifically made a move with the aim of getting featured - I made a Christmas edition update. I changed the icon (put a Santa hat on the bunny), the loading screen, and new content was almost exclusively holiday pics. Apple appears to put Christmas features on the main feature page, rather than a sub-page like our Valentines edition. Lucky me, my plan actually worked.

And although it did not matter for us from a server standpoint, Apple did actually contact us before the first featuring asking for artwork and assets. I assume we were in line to be one of the few apps featured so prominently in the hero section, but that did not end up happening.

Every feature for us started on a Thursday, lasted one week, and then moved to the What Hot section for another week.

Between being featured multiple times and being at the top of the app store multiple times I learned a hell of a lot about app store customers, apps store sales dynamics, ratings, and everything else App Store related, though beyond "make a great app and update it often" I can't think of what else can help other apps get featured.

I'd be happy to answer any questions anyone has, as I know first hand what a mystery the whole process can be.

      (\(\ TextPics :)
      ( -.-)
      o_(")(")

</comment><comment><USER3> My understanding is that there is an editorial meeting once a week in which Apple decides which apps to feature. I'm assuming that bigger companies have contacts in the editorial group. Can anyone speak to this?

<comment><USER4> This is true. They will contact you if they need "brick" sized art for the horizontal auto-scroll headline apps. They also may contact you if your app is in "hold for developer release" while they're making their decision. If you are in contact with them, I advise against releasing an update during the process. It muddies the waters with the editorial team and you really just want to make their decision simple.

Featuring changes every thursday. The week after featuring you end up in the "new and noteworthy" section which is like getting 1/2 to 2/3rds of a featuring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good blog post, we have a similar one we're posting shortly about our experience with App of the Week. And sharks. :)

We're a small company and our app Opuss (opuss.com) was app of the week for UK/Ireland. While we were contacted in regards to "brick" sized artwork, we had no such expectation and just dutifully provided what they requested.

For the next 4 weeks we got a nervous twitch each Thursday around 5PM GMT (about an hour before 10am Cupertino) as it can also set a precedent for other stores. (In our case the Nordics and Germany as well). If your server logs look fishy around this time and you have EC2 or equivalent, fire up a few extra servers for those few hours. Trust me.

</comment><comment><USER6> From what I have worked out I believe the "What's Hot" section may be automatic based on current download trends. The fact that most apps from the New and Noteworthy section end up in there is because they are suddenly getting a lot of downloads.

</comment><comment><USER7> > responding to a constant stream of incoming user feedback and support > requests via email (we make it really easy for our users to contact us > within the app.

Best tip of them all. Deal with user support requests trough email so they won't get back at you with bad reviews. Seems obvious, but lots of devs don't do it.

</comment><comment><USER8> >> we make it really easy for our users to contact us within the app

Care to elaborate on the details?

Are you using someone else's service or you built your own?

Why did you decide to provide 2 feeback mechanisms - email _and_ in-app?

I see the value of user feeback, but isn't it quite burdensome?

</comment><comment><USER9> "Architectural performance problems" in a grocery list app. I feel like I'm in bizarro world.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was referring to some decisions we made in our server implementation. A big part of our app is the ability to share your lists with other people and see changes in real-time, which is mediated by our servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We had a similar new and noteworthy experience with our app (labelbox) in spring 2011. We were asked a couple of days before to provide artwork and assets. The app got featured and we got similar results. We peaked out at 100K downloads in one of those days, enough to get us just inside the top 25 in the US charts.

We've also had an experience were we were asked to provide assets and graphics 'incase' we were featured that week, but ended up not being featured at all (phototreats). The process is a mystery, but one thing that seems common is that almost all apps that are featured have great beautiful, easy to use design.

</comment><comment><USER11> Producing an interesting, well-functioning, nicely-designed app is the best way to improve your chances of getting featured. There's no guarantee, but half the battle is really just standing out from the incredible amount of crap apps released on a daily basis.

My first app, Foodmatic, actually got featured in New & Noteworthy as well when it launched. Unfortunately, sales fell off as soon as the feature ended and the app was kind of a failure haha. But no doubt getting featured can be a huge factor in the success of an app.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting,both of these cofounders worked at Apple for 6 years and they still ask readers to "privately" send them a contact address for getting featured on iTunes if there exists one.

</comment><comment><USER13> Congrats, it looks very polished. Couple of questions - How many months and how many developers did it take to build this? And how do you plan to monetize this?

<comment><AUTHOR> The path to creating AnyList was long and winding, so it's hard to say exactly. It wasn't always going to be a standalone app, and we built some stuff that we ended up not using as a result. We've been working on the app since last fall, but we weren't always working on it 100% of the time.

See: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/17/19-months-and-1-pivot- later...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/17/19-months-and-1-pivot-later- anyleaf-relaunches-as-anylist-to-build-a-better-grocery-list-app/)

The company is just me and my co-founder right now, but we also hired some outside graphic design help.

We aren't ready to discuss monetization plans, stay tuned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> the two founders were Apple employees before.... and i think that helped too..

</comment><comment><USER15> Really appreciate you sharing this so openly. Excellent stats for the community to leverage.

</comment><comment><USER16> The name of your app is not ideal. Googling it seems to produce lots of irrelevant results. Otherwise well done on getting featured!

<comment><USER17> 7 out of 10 results on <https://www.google.com/search?q=anylist> are for the app itself, including the top 5 results. Maybe you searched for "Any List" instead of "AnyList"?

<comment><USER18> Maybe that is his point. Good product names with two words must be able to rank high for both "twowords" and "two words"(with space).</comment></comment></comment>


7x7: My new game for Android Downloaded and commented to help us to improve. - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smallthinggame.settepersette

<comment><USER2> Cooooool!</comment>