Atlantic.net launches $0.99 SSD-based VPS servers - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/30/atlantic-net-launches-0-99month-ssd-based-vps-hosting-service/ <comment><USER4> So will I get a nastygram if I buy 10 of these and push the whole 1TB every month?

Edit:

So their AUP[1] is full of a lot of crappy policies. Not allowed to use all the RAM you're assigned. Not supposed to use all the bandwidth you're assigned. Not supposed to use all the CPU you're assigned. No crons or background services -- what the fuck? No IRC, TOR, or p2p activity. They have an obscenity/morality clause. Cannot do any webdev that uses custom headers -- would even suggest that running wget or curl with a --user-agent flag is in violation.

Edit2:

And they require a valid address and phone number to even register. Screw off.

        Please note that in order to protect the integrity of
        our cloud, Atlantic.Net verifies phone and other
        contact information prior to account activation. Please
        be certain to provide a working phone number where you
        can be reached in order to avoid delays in the account
        creation process.

No thank you.

[1]: [https://www.atlantic.net/support/acceptable-use- policy/](https://www.atlantic.net/support/acceptable-use-policy/)

<comment><USER5> Hi,

The spirit of this is to avoid abuse on our cloud. If you don't feel comfortable providing us with contact information, we're probably not the place for you. I'm working on the AUP tomorrow, the cron/background services doesn't make sense or the RAM.

<comment><USER4> So you tried to launch this with great fanfare and couldn't be bothered to review your AUP? Or the copy in most sections of your site (typos, unmatched tenses, random spaces or lack thereof)?

Why should I trust you with my information if you can't even handle your own?

What kind of abuse do you think it is preventing? How does it prevent abuse from anyone but the least motivated abuser? If I wanted to abuse your service, I could pay people $0.50 on mechanical turk to register accounts for me (indeed this is a fairly common low-skill-low-reward task on mturk).

I'm sorry but this plus the launch of your HIPAA hosting, which was also plagued by typos and wrong ToS, doesn't inspire any sort of confidence in your abilities at Atlantic.net.

<comment><USER6> > If I wanted to abuse your service, I could pay people $0.50 on mechanical > turk to register accounts for me

LOL. You want to use 1 petabyte for cheap?

<comment><USER7> They're offering a Terabyte for 0.99 cents. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to assume that they'd be most attractive to people who wanted lots of capacity for a low price.

If using the service that Atlantic is offering is going to somehow bankrupt them, then perhaps they shouldn't offer it.

<comment><USER8> Upload rate would probably be restricted making it unviable as say a download server

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi Everyone:

Thanks for the thumbs up on this.

Firstly, we are a 20-year old startup! Everyone laughed at us when we talked about doing the original Internet startup -- dialup Internet. Over time, we adapted and rode the booms and busts that went on in our industry, all the while staying cash flow positive and learning to GRIND.

We are thinking there is going to be a explosion in startups globally, that will lead to the next big things, not just in the web but material sciences, biotech, etc.

Our goal is to build out a global compute infrastructure and get it in the hands of tomorrows Einsteins.. wherever they are born. We want to see the future happen faster, and see more of it in our lifetimes. Thats not going to happen if we wait around for today's dominant players, who for whatever reason are moving extremely slow.

Thats our over-reaching goal. You can read about it here:

[https://www.atlantic.net/blog/2014/09/30/atlantic-net- launch...](https://www.atlantic.net/blog/2014/09/30/atlantic-net- launches-99-server-go-plan-to-push-the-advancement-of-startup-innovation/)

Doing a startup is really, really hard. We're trying to make it less so. We're also ready to provide an alternative narrative to AWS conquering the world -- but we have to be aggressive and go FAST!

So, bottom line is we're trying to do something new,take some risks,be bold, and take on the giants of the industry.

AWS's margin is our opportunity :)

Wish us luck! We're going for it!

<comment><USER9> This is great to hear, there's nothing ever wrong with more competition, but could you respond to the concerns in this thread with regards to your AUP? Your terms as currently written, are at the very least _extremely limiting_.

<comment><USER5> Hi, I'm going to work on the AUP tomorrow. The spirit of our AUP is to discourage antisocial behavior.

<comment><USER10> Great! Could you reply when the new version is up?

<comment><USER5> We're working on this now, should be up in a few hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's always surreal to me to see Atlantic.net in the news. I worked in their customer service department for over six years back when their primary product was still dialup internet. It was a pretty good job, for call center work. No scripts, no quotas - each MSR was trained and trusted to actually be able to solve customers' problems on their own.

I don't know if that's the case anymore. By 2007, dialup was dead and the company had pivoted to making most of its money from hosting. I left a few months prior, but still had friends working in the call center when they were all laid off. I don't know if they outsource their phone-based customer service now or if they set up a new call center in Orlando instead of Gainesville, but if it's the former, it's a shame.

<comment><USER5> Hello Atlantic.net alumni! We're still grinding it out and trying to change the world from here! Keep hope alive!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What boggles my mind about cheap hosts is how the IP addresses still seem to keep flowing. I thought we were close to exhausting them, and it's certainly tricky to get extra IPs on some hosts, yet you can pay relatively small sums to spin up VPSes all over the place, each with their own IP :-)

<comment><USER4> If you fill out a LIR application for ARIN or RIPE you're probably going to get repurposed AFRINIC or APNIC IPv4 IPs (anywhere from 20 /25's to a /22 to a /16 ). Globally Ipv4 is pretty much exhausted (no large blocks) but some regions have more and there's a black/grey market for IPs that all the large hosts are part of.

<comment><USER13> Has anyone written about this extensively?

<comment><USER4> On what, the IP blackmarket? I don't think so, but off the top of my head Microsoft (rather publicly) bought an entire /13 for several million a few years ago

<comment><USER13> Curious about the on-going IPv4 war in general I guess. Seems like there aren't many who have a good view of the situation though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Something is wrong with their pricing, since a server with twice the RAM, bandwidth, and disk is $5/mo. It's too bad you can't combine two or more of these $1 servers in order to get just the right amount of VPS.

This low price makes me wish that RAM and CPU could be added to cloud servers on an as-needed basis, i.e. hot-swappable RAM. That would be much more useful than autoscaling since it could react to traffic very quickly. You'd need live-migration behind the scenes to make it work, of course.

<comment><USER15> I would imagine that they are betting that most users will use this to host small static sites with negligible traffic, allowing them to benefit from payed for, but unused resources.

<comment><USER16> If that's the case then people could just use Amazon's S3. You can get a LOT of static site for 10c/month.

More likely scenario is a tiny PHP site with the database hosted elsewhere?

<comment><USER9> S3's the storage - you still have to run an httpd daemon somewhere, and even the smallest, cheapest EC2 instance will run you no less than $14 a month. (Notwithstanding the one-year-only free tier)

(Wow, I didn't know you could just serve content straight off the storage. I need to re-examine AWS.. thanks :D)

<comment><USER17> You can host static sites entirely on S3: [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHostin...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html)

<comment><USER18> Nice to know this. One major disadvantage is no https.

<comment><USER19> If you use Cloudfront you can: [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Developer...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/SecureConnections.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Atlantic.Net says it is targeting this service at _early-stage and > bootstrapped startups_ that want develop on a dependable cheap server.

They are doing no such thing.

At 99 cents per month, they are targeting people who want things for free, hoping that they can later up-sell, or convert them to a higher plan.

Don't know how well this is going to work in the hosting industry - <USER2> the lower the cost, the worse the customer is.

I'd like to say maybe as someone on the 99 cent plan sees that they need more resources, they could click a button and get on the $9.99 plan, but that might be wishful thinking, and they are just opening themselves up to an enormous drain on resources.

Either way, if there is any indication of people signing up for this, all the other hosting companies are going to match this plan within 24-48 hours, just like they did when everyone switched to "unlimited" offerings. It's a race to the bottom.

<comment><USER12> I'm not suggesting Atlantic are doing this, but back in the days when shared hosting was more popular and hosts more predatory, it was common to see hosts offer deals like paying $99 for a year of hosting, they'd give that straight to the affiliate who referred the sale, they'd put the prices up 2-3x in year two, and enough people would stick around to make it all pay off.

Such a strategy could work even better with a VPS since it's harder to migrate away due to the more complex things people tend to do with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There are lots of providers at or around this price point (check out lowendbox or [http://www.lowendstock.com/](http://www.lowendstock.com/)). It's generally accepted they're oversold, but that doesn't make them any less of a good deal.

For instance crissic.net (happy customer) offer 256MB ram and either 20GB SSD or 50GB spinning-rust for 15USD/year.

The only news here is that Linode and DO don't think they can be profitable at these price points (and it's probably not possible when using Xen/KVM that can't easily be overprovisioned).

</comment><comment><USER22> SSD performance data:

      dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test   conv=fdatasync
      1024+0 records in
      1024+0 records out
      1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 2.7785 s, 386 MB/s

      hdparm -tT /dev/disk/by-uuid/50543a27-2cb6-4d68-9ab4-e09493f946d5

      /dev/disk/by-uuid/50543a27-2cb6-4d68-9ab4-e09493f946d5:
      Timing cached reads:   14362 MB in  2.00 seconds = 7189.28 MB/sec
      Timing buffered disk reads: 1770 MB in  3.00 seconds = 589.21 MB/sec

really nice.

</comment><comment><USER23> There's a lot of ways to make a VPS suck, by not spending money where it's needed. An under-powered disk subsystem is probably going to contribute to these sucking (as Digital Ocean sucked in the beginning; not sure if they've fixed their disk bandwidth problems).

But, assuming they _aren 't_ horribly under-powered on any of the vectors that affect performance, this is a great deal. 256MB is just enough to run a reasonable web server on, even with a database-backed application. Two more servers for DNS, and one for SMTP, and you'd have a solid setup for a large variety of tasks for under 5 bucks, and you'd control all of your services and all of your data. You couldn't run a big community site with lots of users, but you could definitely run a blog (for potentially hundreds of thousands of visitors, depending on how you setup that blog) or simple site.

<comment><USER24> Sequential write on my $5/month DigitalOcean instance in NYC2 region:

        $ dd if=/dev/zero of=~/test.bin bs=1M count=1000
        1000+0 records in
        1000+0 records out
        1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 3.84267 s, 273 MB/s

It used to be about 80 MB/s last year, so it's gotten a lot better since.

<comment><USER25> Atlantic.Net 256mb VPS

        root@hackerboosblog:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=~/test.bin bs=1M count=1000
        1000+0 records in
        1000+0 records out
        1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 3.11193 s, 337 MB/s

<comment><USER23> And, for comparison, the latest server I installed in our colo on the host system (with Corsair M500 SSDs):

        [root@srv3 joe]# dd if=/dev/zero of=~/test.bin bs=1M  count=1000
        1000+0 records in
        1000+0 records out
        1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 0.310283 s, 3.4 GB/s

And, from within a VM on the same machine (running KVM with an LVM volume):

        [root@joe2 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=~/test.bin bs=1M count=1000
        1000+0 records in
        1000+0 records out
        1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 0.967834 s, 1.1 GB/s

So, Atlantic.net isn't too bad, I guess. My newest system isn't very heavily loaded yet; only has three VMs and a couple dozen websites on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Not to threadjack, but: what's a good alternative for the occasional high-ram, high-CPU-usage compute-intensive task? Say I wanted a machine to run some MCMC simulations, and needed 32GB RAM and a fast i7-class CPU. Where would I find one?

<comment><USER27> [http://ovh.com/us](http://ovh.com/us) is the best I found!

<comment><USER28> Just to put in endorsement: I've used OVH for years, and I love their service. Just this past week while upgrading a server I accidentally screwed up my GRUB configuration and couldn't boot back up.

However, they noticed the downtime problem and emailed me saying that a technician had been dispatched to look at the problem. Within 15 minutes, they fixed my GRUB configuration and had my server back up. _And_ , they didn't charge me any for the work the technician did.

It was awesome, and they immediately won my long-time business!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Registration is too complicated and cumbersome.

I gave up when they couldn't call me on my phone and requested a copy of my passport, driver's licence or a bank bill...

I'll just stick with DigitalOcean...

<comment><USER30> I'm actually waiting for their call right now.

That fact actually blindsided me since I already gave info and couldn't just login and start up the server.

I wish I'd have read stuff carefully before blindlessy jumping into a deal.

<comment><USER31> I waited about 10 minutes before hitting up their chat. They were able to finish the authentication process from there.

<comment><USER32> Thanks, I did this too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If I had caught the limit of just one per customer, I wouldn't have gone to the trouble of signing up. This would be useful to me, but I had plans that required 4-5 instances, and no desire for the more expensive offerings.

ramnode has a roughly equivalent offering for $2/mo (8/q)

<comment><USER5> We are limiting these to try to have enough capacity so everyone can get one. Its new!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm not a fan of these pricing models for VPSs. If you're fine with an oversubscribed OpenVZ VPS with minimal RAM/HDD then you might as well be on a shared virtual host. Even with an oversubscribed OpenVZ infrastructure, I can't imagine Atlantic.net makes a profit at this price point.I shudder to think where they're cutting corners. I can only assume the strategy is to get them (the customers) in the door at $0.99/mo. and hope they'll upgrade when they quickly outgrow their bare minimum VPS specs. But if I'm in that position, am I really going to stay with a OpenVZ provider instead of moving on to a KVM/Xen one where I know I'm getting what I paid for?

<comment><USER35> Are these OpenVZ? That's a shame.

Really, all I've ever wanted is an IaaS provider that gives me VMs in the shape of Heroku's instance partitions: a little bit of guaranteed CPU/memory/IOPS per dollar, with cheap/free low-jitter bandwidth thrown in, made specifically for allowing network-server applications that scale horizontally.

My 64MB-of-memory IO-bound Erlang chat server doesn't need a 4GB instance with eight cores. But it has to take that instance, because that's what you pay for in order to get a good uplink.

<comment><USER36> Now that you mention it, it seems odd that companies don't let you tweak specs individually. RAM, CPU, disk space, network speed, etc. are all independent variables. Why not have some pricing formula and then give us a slider for each dimension and let us choose what we want?

<comment><USER37> I suppose that's because in they end, they want to allocate all the RAM, CPU, and network link available on each physical host. If a host has a 1Gb uplink, 32 cores and 256GB of RAM, and someone takes 1Gb bandwidth, 1 cores and 1GB of RAM, all the other cores can't be sold any more. It's easier for them to just split each host server in n VMs than to do some fancy stuff to try to maximize allocation.

That being said, some providers let you tweak everything independently. I know Gandi does [1], there are probably others.

(I don't use them, no idea what their cloud service is worth, I'm just showing the sliders)

[1] [https://www.gandi.net/hosting/iaas/buy](https://www.gandi.net/hosting/iaas/buy)

<comment><USER38> I wonder if this is what contributes to the large price difference - <USER3> example, a 1Gb/1core Gandi instance is about 2x the price of the corresponding Linode plan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I find it interesting how the trend is moving towards charging less per unit resource on the low-end plans; digital ocean gives you more disk per dollar on the small plan, while these people give you dramatically better ram per dollar on the low-end plans.

The interesting part (and why the pricing scheme that I chose moves in the opposite direction, e.g. you get more resources per dollar as you buy more) - is that while the cost of hardware is pretty linear, there is certainly a support and abuse cost associated with every account, so the lower-end accounts cost the provider more per unit ram to provide.

<comment><USER40> I think what we're seeing is both: 1) more cut-throat competition to have the lowest advertised price (the ads just display the minimum available price, not the price of a service that actually meets a customer's need) AND 2) once you get a customer on your platform, they are likely to upgrade and/or add more services which will be at the higher price points.

<comment><USER39> yeah, I would assume that 1. would push the price down in general.

The trend to discount the smallest plans has got to be mostly 2.

It's an interesting strategy; if it works, it would imply that there is more sensitivity to price at the bottom of the market than there is at the top of the market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Didn't the 90s and early 2000s teach us all that "You get what you pay for" when it comes to hosting?

<comment><USER42> OTOH, Moore's Law says that at some point you should be able to get a decent amount of hardware for $1/month. No support, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's a pretty interesting case study of interface design that because DO's website looks so much nicer, their servers feel like a good deal, while Atlantic.net's old-fashioned branding makes it just feel fly by night, even though I'm sure they're objectively pretty similar.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the feedback. We have a new interface & website, but weren't able to get it up by launch time. I agree, DO's interface is prettier, as well as their website. They do a great job with the design over there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> LowEndSpirit offers SSD-based VPSes for €3 per year with a larger worldwide coverage. Downside is you only get a IPv6 address

[http://lowendspirit.com/locations.html](http://lowendspirit.com/locations.html)

<comment><USER25> I find hosting providers that use WHMCS tend to disappear after a few months and at these prices you can almost guarantee it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> While I'd give them a whirl on their lower tier, their pricing for their largest instance (16384 MB/4 vCPU/200 GB/7 TB, $160 for Linux) isn't that competitive.

(non-affiliated plug) I've been using [http://RunAbove.com](http://RunAbove.com) for something this large, and it's an absolute steal. They're backed by OVH.

Versus a similarly-specced DigitalOcean node for $240 (2.5x RunAbove the cost), we were seeing a performance increase of 35% on our high-volume API.

And that's on non-tuned Postgres/Rails4/Redis Docker containers.

<comment><USER46> For this price/ram/cpu needs, does it make more sense to do colo your own server? I see colo 1U server normally ~100 per month.

<comment><USER45> It would! However colocating requires money upfront to buy the hardware. It's a good long-term play but short-term you don't really see the benefits. There are other things to worry about too, such as remote hands, which we really don't want to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At the very least, it's a possible cheap VPN/cloud storage server. Is there an open source stack that would replace Google's solution to mail/calendar/cloud file storage and sync?

<comment><USER47> [https://owncloud.org/](https://owncloud.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's hard to be a web hosting company, and atlantic.net has been in the business since 1995. I am impressed that they are fighting to stay relevant, even if it is a race to the bottom.

The Registry database contains ONLY .COM, .NET, .EDU domains and Registrars. Domain Name: ATLANTIC.NET Registry Domain ID: 1092612_DOMAIN_NET-VRSN Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.tucows.com Registrar URL: [http://tucowsdomains.com](http://tucowsdomains.com) Updated Date: 2014-09-16 11:43:09 Creation Date: 1995-05-17 04:00:00

<comment><USER5> Thanks, its not easy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Couldn't find any uptime records kept by a third party, and their uptime SLAs don't seem to have much to do with uptime guarantees (as opposed to 'we will bring you back up in 30 minutes, etc.). [https://www.atlantic.net/support/cloud-service-level- guarant...](https://www.atlantic.net/support/cloud-service-level-guarantee/)

As a business owner, I wouldn't bet anything on that. For personal development stuff though maybe it's great.

</comment><comment><USER50> When I try to signup and I see that their "2GB RAM" plan @ $19.94 is their "Most Popular"...

<comment><USER51> Most websites that have a "Most Popular" tag on a plan are almost always lying I've noticed. In reality, its just the plan the company _wants_ you to get and has no reflection on actual sales volume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I want a hosted docker service which charges me based on the MB ram used per min

<comment><USER53> They are probably going to charge by CPU / minute instead of ram.

It's easy to make programs that run in 1mb of ram and use 100% cpu for example. Ram costs less to be full than CPU does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I just bought 2 and will be trying them out over the next bit. I think these boxes will be amazing to host my client static sites and basic CMS back-ends. At $1 a month I'd like to buy 20~ in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER55> The CPU performance is pretty good for a single core. [http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/932814](http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/932814)

</comment><comment><USER56> Revised AUP is up: [https://www.atlantic.net/support/acceptable-use- policy/](https://www.atlantic.net/support/acceptable-use-policy/)

</comment><comment><USER57> A real direct competitor in DO and Linode is Vultr.com

My experience with them has been positive. They have slightly higher specs and a good variety of locations.

<comment><USER58> Anecdotal web hosting recommendations are worse than useless and everyone seems to have one regardless of how qualified they are to give it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> So I just wasted a lot of time to find out they only accept credit cards? Not debit cards, not PayPal, nor anything else?

Wasted my time. GFY Atlantic.net

<comment><USER5> We accept debit cards & prepaid credit cards, too.

<comment><USER60> FWIW, outside of the US, debit cards are not always Visa and MasterCard branded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Reading the comments here really is funny. If you do not like their ToS, you are free to go somewhere else. Your money, your vote.

Personally i find their policy very understandable. Obviously you won't be able to host a TOR node on this thing or push tons of traffic over it. That's obviously not what it was made for. This $1 deal is perfect for hosting simple, static sites or just playing around with the OS. But some people will complain about anything.

<comment><USER62> It is quite reasonable to voice your disagreement with their policies _and_ take your money somewhere else.

Besides with that TOS it should have been part of the headline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I just signed up and was able to have my account validated through the chat - so far it seems pretty great!

</comment><comment><USER63> Love the price. Shame they haven't got an EU presence :(

<comment><USER64> Worth considering if you are in the EU:

[https://www.ultravps.eu/en/](https://www.ultravps.eu/en/)

I found them when I was looking for a provider that had Linux Arch images.

<comment><USER25> SATA storage...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Out of curiosity, what can you runon 256MB ram?

<comment><USER66> Quite a lot of stuff. A small dns server, email server, web server etc.

<comment><USER65> But the load factor? To run a http + db server?

<comment><USER66> Use a static site with nginx/thttpd/lighttpd, it will fly. Obviously there's a limit with what you can do with those resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> No European data centre option(s) available. ;(

</comment><comment><USER68> what would you guys use a $0.99 server for?

<comment><USER69> Monitoring, VPN, or maybe just a spare box to experiment with.

If you're outside of the United States, VPN on a tiny server is by far the cheapest way to access US-only content.

<comment><USER46> Any idea if the IP address in Alantic 's network is blocked in China?

<comment><USER69> You could try for yourself:

[http://www.blockedinchina.net/](http://www.blockedinchina.net/)

[http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/](http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/)

<comment><USER46> Very nice, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I signed up for a $.99 VPS some years ago; horrible service and downtime, so I wrote them to cancel. And wrote them and wrote them. And complained to their domain registrar, and stopped the auto-withdrawl of $.99 from paypal, and complained some more. To this day, I get a $.99 email bill with an invalid reply-to address, followed by a $.99 second notice bill. Every month... I'm sure there are people that have let their auto-pay accounts continue to feed whoever is at the back end of this. (vpstree.com)

<comment><USER71> So, you're complaining about a completely unrelated company... for what reason?

<comment><USER72> Yeah, for real - I'm sorry for your terrible experience, but surely it doesn't have much to do with atlantic.net...</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: PilarHQ, The Posterous of Customer Support - <AUTHOR> http://pilarhq.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> PilarHQ, is a product which I've been secretly building for my other projects. I wanted a "light-weight" customer support tool for startups and projects which I hack on. Zendesk is kinda complicated, as it requires some training. I wanted something really really simple - like posterous.

It works simply: You cc/forward any support you'd like to be published on your help page to email@example.com and we update your support page. If people come to your support/help page, search for an answer via our instant search and dont find an answer, they just have to leave their email and your entire support team is notified.

PilarHQ is lightweight because all you do is pretty much embed an iFrame to your site at pilar and you're set. Thats really all there is to it. You later on recieve emails from us and your customers, if you forward the ones you want to publish, we publish it to your cool support page.

</comment><comment><USER2> I don't understand, what is the _posterous of customer support_?

<comment><USER3> agree with the above,

it's unclear to me if i'm outsourcing support or if this is like an autoupdating FAQ page?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty much an autoupdating FAQ page.

I was planing on emailing you with a demo, but you don't have your email in your profile. Email me at email@example.com if you want a demo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it is better to build your own brand name rather than relying on another one. An 'autoupdating FAQ system' is a better description/tagline than calling it Posterous for customer support. Posterous is famous but what if a small online flower retailer wants to use your product and he has no idea what Posterous is? It is better to directly explain what your product does rather than relating it to another one.

On the other hand, if a tech blog writes PilarHQ is the posterous for customer support, that is well and good!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there. Thanks for your comment and to be honest, this is still a test whether or not I should release this to the public and build it into a product. That being said, I totally agree with ya. So many people want a posterous for support. An autoupdating faq system is slightly vague, a posterous for support is much more descriptive from my perspective.

<comment><USER5> I don't understand what "Posterous for support" means. Posterous is a blog, how can I use that for support? Also, how does this autoupdate? There's nothing on the front page about it :/

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. I made a bad decision using this way of explaining an idea. Sure wont do it again. Here's a simple flow from your customer's perspective.

\- goes to your website

\- Search's your help page, if cant find it, email you

\- You get an email, you respond to it, customer is notified

\- IF you forward that email to a special cool email which we give you, it's published on your support page(which is embeddable to your website).

\- Next person searching for this question doeesnt have to email you as they're problem's solved!

<comment><USER5> Ah, I see, thanks. That does sound handy!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lots of people not understanding what this is. Perhaps you could put up a help page.

<comment><AUTHOR> haha, good one. I should, right after I send out the emails with account details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like a great idea, but I'm always wary of businesses whose tagline is "Like X, but for Y".

Not going to start a business and say "Like LinkedIn, but for dental hygienists".

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely agree with you. I made a big mistake using this annotation for my idea, won't ever happen again, as it's really not that similar to posterous.

That being said, please look at my response to StavrosK for a quick overview of a simple user story ... just in case you're wondering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "By allowing you to forwarding all your support emails to a special address..."

By allowing you to _forward_

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, sorry for that, didn't notice it. Fixed it now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "By allowing you to forwarding all your support emails to a special address"

HRrrrk... grammar.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops, haha. I'm sorry for that, didn't see it. Fixed now.</comment></comment>


Putting together a Raspberry Pi Beowulf cluster - <AUTHOR> http://coen.boisestate.edu/ece/raspberry-pi/

<comment><USER2> I'd like to first point out that the name "Beowulf cluster" is pretty silly in general; allow me to enumerate the incredibly complicated setup procedure for a Beowulf cluster: 1) Install Linux on a bunch of networked computers, 2) "apt-get install mpi" on every one. That's it.

Here's something made at a national lab about 3 years ago: [http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3538/5702439502_b6448467b8_o.j...](http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3538/5702439502_b6448467b8_o.jpg)

I wonder if it inspired this project at all? The case, the fans, very similar looks.

The box has 7 Gumstix "Stagecoach" motherboards, each loaded with 7 Gumstix Overo boards for a total of 49 ARM processors in the box. There is an Ethernet switch mounted in the bottom and a power supply at the back. They made 4 of these and stacked them up for a total of 196 CPUs. You can check out some action shots in this video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPyn9krjIRc&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPyn9krjIRc&feature=youtu.be&t=50s)

<comment><USER3> Confirm, I don't think I've heard anyone even use the term "Beowulf cluster" since the late '90s/early '00s

<comment><USER2> Same here, aside from Slashdot and breathless Hackaday posts where someone has shoved 8 beagleboards into a suitcase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a BSU Alum and someone who cobbled together a cluster while studying parallel programming at BSU, awesome!

That's a beautiful build you have there. The custom power delivery with the pretty lights is such a nice touch. That looks like it was a lot of fun, and I'm sure you learned a lot.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen Or buy a GA144, with 144 incredibly tightly networked 700 MHz computers, for $20.

<comment><USER2> "The GA144 comes in an 88-pin QFN package and the 144 nodes — each core is a self-contained F18A Computer with 64 18-bit words each of ROM and RAM — are arranged in an 8x18 grid. Those around the edge of the grid are equipped with I/O ranging from asynchronous serial boot, GPIO and SPI flash, through to high-speed SERDES and analogue I/O."

It's cool tech, but you shouldn't pretend that you'll be running the same software or operating systems on the GA144.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The whole engineering server at Boise State seems to be down.

There is an 8 min video here demonstrating the system: <http://youtu.be/i_r3z1jYHAc></comment>


Code Climate is open sourcing a Community Edition of their app - <AUTHOR> http://blog.codeclimate.com/blog/2016/10/06/series-a-and-community-edition/ <comment><USER2> Congrats on the fundraise, awesome that you'll be creating a CE edition!</comment>


We Need Assurance (2005) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.acsac.org/2005/papers/Snow.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> The best quote illustrating why things are so difficult in OS security:

"The problem is innately difficult because from the beginning (ENIAC, 1944), due to the high cost of components, computers were built to share resources (memory, processors, buses, etc.). If you look for a one-word synopsis of computer design philosophy, it was and is SHARING. In the security realm, the one word synopsis is SEPARATION: keeping the bad guys away from the good guys' stuff!

So today, making a computer secure requires imposing a "separation paradigm" on top of an architecture built to share. That is tough! Even when partially successful, the residual problem is going to be covert channels. We really need to focus on making a secure computer, not on making a computer secure – the point of view changes your beginning assumptions and requirements! "

His 10 year predictions turned out right, too. Fortunately, we have groups such as CHERI producing secure CPU's with open hardware. The popularity of Rust, better automation for SPARK proofs, availability of tools such as Cap n' Proto, and increasing use of TLA+ is an improvement in others. Formal verification results in imperative and functional styles have also been pretty incredible. Also still a niche of people building higher quality or security software in both FOSS and commercial sectors.

Far from hope being lost point. Unless we're talking about what will get mass adoption. ;)</comment>


A brief history of battlefield boozing - <AUTHOR> https://life.spectator.co.uk/2017/11/a-brief-history-of-battlefield-boozing/ <comment><USER2> Article mentions that Hitler didn't drink alcohol, but he sure was a speed freak and took a lot of other drugs. Also worth mentioning that the Axis and Allied sides both utilized amphetamines heavily during the war.

I think that alcohol use on the battlefield has declined largely because in modern warfare, the kind of impairment that you get from alcohol is a huge liability, but the kind of edge that a driver or pilot can potentially get from a strong stimulant can really benefit the effort.

Edit: [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3bjp4y/total- intoxication...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3bjp4y/total-intoxication- nazi-use-of-meth-876)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2377281/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2377281/)

<comment><USER3> Never heard that the allied side also did that. All they tell you in Germany is that the Nazis did it. There are some documentaries on German public television about that.

<comment><USER4> Amphetamines were in common civil use, available over the counter and only restricted in the US in the 70s. They were in diet pills and pep pills etc. You grandparents may very well have taken amphetamines at some point in their lives.

But no, not commonly part of the narrative. Remember, drugs are literally Hitler.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_and_culture_of_subst...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_and_culture_of_substituted_amphetamines)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well ISIS fighters don't drink but apparently are fond of Captagon [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/11/19...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/11/19/the- tiny-pill-fueling-syrias-war-and-turning-fighters-into-super-human-soldiers/) which is a meth like drug developed in the 60's: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenethylline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenethylline)

</comment><comment><USER6> Alcohol in modern battlefield contexts is still a consideration. For Western military forces (especially American), alcohol is forbidden in warzones. It's considered contraband and is confiscated from inbound mail. But soldiers do _often_ buy alcohol from locals, get it smuggled in through the mail, or -- as I did once -- make it like prison pruno. In addition, some warzones are different than others. For example, since there aren't really any regular (American) Army units in the Philippines, only Special Forces (et al), there aren't restrictions on alcohol like there are in other places. Very interesting and unique being in a warzone where alcohol use was sanctioned by commanders. On the one hand I understand why it's restricted, but on the other hand, in my experience, most folks can handle some amount of alcohol in their lives on tour. I guess the military's playing a numbers game and they take zero chances. Officially, at least.

</comment><comment><USER7> Until fairly recently alcohol also helped with the problem of contaminated water causing massive casualties eg more died through disease during the napolionic wars than through firefights.

<comment><USER8> I've heard this several times, but have yet to see a credible source for the claim that 'everyone drank alcohol because it was safer than water.'

Alcohol is a diuretic, if that was all you drank, you'd succumb to dehydration.

<comment><USER9> I wish I could find the link now, but there was a very interesting (and, based on my admittedly rudimentary knowledge of history, high quality) thread on reddit's /r/askHistorians that dispelled this 'myth'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's strange that it doesn't mention alcohol's ability to lower inhibitions. Getting over people's natural reluctance to kill has been a serious issue for gun based combat, and alcohol is a cheap way to help with that. It's downturn is likely the lack of the draft and the military using people that already have lower inhibitions on the front lines.

<comment><USER11> Modern training techniques and technology also have a lot to do with lowered inhibitions to killing, at least as far as I understand after reading Grossman's "On Killing".

<comment><USER12> I disagree. To kill is natural. Basic training is just finishing school.

Just a few centuries ago beheadings, blood feuds, lynch mobs and such were commonplace.

<comment><USER13> Well, dying is natural too. Saying that something is natural doesn't make it desirable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you find this topic interesting, I suggest reading "Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol" by Iain Gately. It's a breezy history of western civilization through the lens of alcohol.

</comment><comment><USER15> Drinking fermented beverages is a sure way to avoid water borne disease, and keeping your forces healthy was _the_ determining factor in these historical contexts.

<comment><USER16> The only time alcohol was even remotely used to keep people healthy was when lime was in it. The "cleaner water" theory is bunk.

<comment><USER7> err no a quick google will find many military forces destroyed by disease in the pre modern era one of the sieges of Malta for example

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Mas Des Tourelles in Southern France makes 'Genuine Roman Wine' if anybody lives in the EU and is interested [http://tourelles.com/site-archeologique-et- cave-gallo-romain...](http://tourelles.com/site-archeologique-et-cave-gallo- romaine/) unsure if they ship to N. America.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder what would happen if you'd dump a billion shots of LSD onto a war zone. Would the fighting stop?

<comment><USER19> Apparently not. The US military investigated this pretty thoroughly, in fact!

</comment></comment><comment> duncan-donuts I don't have much to add other than I really enjoyed reading this.

<comment><USER20> Me neither, other than that I am very glad that the Spectator continues to survive

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice read but doesn't mention much about the modern decline of battlefield drinking. My understanding is that it's due to deployed women being at high risk of assault from a fellow soldier when alcohol is involved, but I've never really read a comprehensive analysis about it.

<comment><USER22> Or the modern instances of battlefield drinking - there's many tricks for circumventing the prohibition on alcohol in current warzones.

<comment><USER11> Sure, there's always mouthwash.

<comment><USER23> Haha, try engine degreaser.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Joosy, the rails-tied browser app framework - <AUTHOR> http://borisstaal.com/post/24401343976/joosy-alternative-approach-to-browser-frameworks

<comment><USER3> I didn't have the time to study the project in depth, but it looks very promising, well documented, and it also looks like an approach that I was looking for in other frameworks. Thanks!

Seeing the care you put into your website, I would suggest an addition. If you could create a video like the classic "a blog in 10 minutes" - or "a TODO list in 10 minutes", considering that that is the reference for js frameworks - <USER2> feature it in the home page I think it would really help. In my opinion you should give the demonstration of your benefits first, and the theory later ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. It's planned already in fact. Just need some more hours in a day :)

<comment><USER3> Perfect. Keep up with the great work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> On a completely different note, I think this looks fantastic. There are so many javascript frameworks out there but none of them have really approached the cleanliness and simplicity of rails so I've been reluctant to pick them up - this is definitely the closest I have seen. I will give it a shot for sure - props to the authors on good work!

<comment><USER5> I agree - none of the other frameworks I've tried have felt right, but this looks like a great fit with Rails - we'll see if I feel the same way after using it though :)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you don't, please take a moment to share your thoughts with me :)

<comment><USER5> One quick thing I noticed playing around creating a demo app - the generator seems to have generated some incorrect haml in the layout that it creates. First, it has "javascript:" instead of ":javascript" for the filter, and once that was fixed I noticed that I had to change 'window.preload' to 'window.joosy' to get things to work.

Other than that I'm liking what I see so far.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed! Thanks for the catch! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I dig this. I've been using Ember + Rails and it still feels like client-side frameworks are reinventing a lot of server-side wheels because you still need a server-side layer for security, optimization, etc. I've been adding a lot of shims to "just work" in the Rails-world, and having a tightly integrated JS framework for Rails seems like a fantastic idea.

Models on the client are likely to be slightly different (I wouldn't do image resizing on the client, for example) and so the one-size-fits-all approach (Node.js Models running on server OR client, magically) doesn't work either.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't get past this (let alone the why of another MV*) - Why sugar.js? 6731 lines of bloat. This is going to turn off a great number of developers out the gates.

<comment><AUTHOR> Take Ember for example. Joosy is only 2-3kb more including Sugar. Compare the profit. One framework can not (and should never try to) address everything. Sugar beats Underscore without a hope (<http://borisstaal.com/post/24270017179/please-use-sugar-js>). And you just can't live without both, raw JS is too poor.

<comment><USER7> I'm obviously opinionated on this point (backbone/underscore user), it just seems like it comes with so much i wont ever user - and could easily add via a mixin on a per project basis (in a nice functional manor). I also can't get over extending the native prototypes. Dealing with too many moving parts in modern web apps to go and start extending things that weren't built that way - maybe in the ruby world it just feels better to have it on the prototype directly. I suppose im getting off topic tho.

This lib (joosy) was built to satisfy your particular set of needs, and it seems that it does so well. Cheers to that.

<comment><USER8> " it just seems like it comes with so much i wont ever user - and could easily add via a mixin on a per project basis"

You could easily add the simple helpers in underscore too, they're not complex, but the idea is you use a library so you can work at a higher level of abstraction. Why write your own array intersection method? Why write your own camelcase function? Sugar opens a lot of doors that are just a little much effort to normally be bothered with (and underscore does too, but to a lesser degree).

"…start extending things that weren't built that way?"

It's ok to extend the prototypes, so long as a) you own the objects and b) you only extend the prototypes from a single module (e.g. sugar). c) Don't extend Object.prototype (unless you're really brave). [http://blip.tv/jsconf/jsconf2011-andrew-dupont-everything- is...](http://blip.tv/jsconf/jsconf2011-andrew-dupont-everything-is-permitted- extending-built-ins-5211542)

The major risk is in collisions, and if you follow those rules you reduce the chance of this occurring to a minimum. If you're worried about for-loops, the way sugar handles extending the object prototype makes this a non-issue. <http://sugarjs.com/native>

Please actually use a tool before you condemn it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You have several typos in the Joosy website (unless it's part of a joke I'm unaware of, as they repeat the same incorrect \n correct pattern).

        ack -l "Deterimes" | xargs perl -pi -E "s/Deterimes/Determines/g"

in your root if you don't want to search for them manually.

Note: requires ack installed (like grep, but typically much faster and nicer to use, for me at least).

<comment><AUTHOR> What a dumb joke it would be %). Fixed, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Congratulations on this. I love the idea of tying the back end and front end. I can't see a reason not to integrate with Rails! And it is awesome that you have the in depth guides, that is very refreshing! Will this work with Slim? I like using slim and not having to worry about the HAML % all over the place.

<comment><AUTHOR> It will work with any Rails JST binding. Just use .jst.slim instead of .jst.hamlc (remember to use JS version and not Ruby one :D). Everything that has a proper binding to Rails should work out of box.

For everything else, it has an abstraction layer so you can attach any template engine. We are woking on a guide that describes this process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm looking forward to trying this.

Also, happy to help w/ some quick copy editing. Is the joosy.ws site in github somewhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> The site itself (joosy.ws) is hosted on a company server. The repo is on github but it's private. However, Guides are in public repo (hosted at Github Pages).

Here they are: <https://github.com/roundlake/joosy-guides>

If you want to modify something at welcome page, I can share the repo. But it doesn't contain a lot actually. Just one page :).

<comment><USER11> Ok. I started with the Getting Started guide and just submitted a pull request. I'm sbc on GH.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Joosy seems to be missing real 2-way data binding of Angularjs/Knockout.js/Serenade.js/Batman.js, even if it can automatically re- render views. Looks like it still keeps the boilerplate to a minimum though and a great option for Rails devs though.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Joosy interface was designed to get best out of CoffeeScript."

I think you accidentally a word.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow - this looks really awesome. The ability to use haml is a nice touch too.

</comment><comment><USER14> yeah yeah, that's what javascript needs! let's make all your javascript code more non-reusable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Reusability is a thing that comes from your hands and not a framework. Of course, framework can influence it a bit. But we promote correct encapsulation at each layer. What exactly you think is wrong?

<comment><USER14> What the fuck is going to happen when I need to reuse my JavaScript code on a different platform e.g NodeJS, vert.x etc?

I'm sorry for negative comments but, what ruby and .net communities produce for JS is shit. It's even more harmful then IE6 for our future.

<comment><USER15> A couple of months ago GitHub released a coding guideline for Javascript. It has the first point: "Use CoffeeScript".

Except of using Coffee instead of JS your comment has no sense.

<comment><USER14> Github is not a rich web app for me. See Google Spreadsheets to figure out what a client-side framework should be helpful for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > On another hand, it makes your backend to have exactly one function – to be > a simple REST provider. That leads to easier development support and > _improves the scalability greatly._

It does? Hm, I guess Twitter is wrong then.</comment>


Qwiki wins Techcrunch Disrupt SF - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/qwiki-techcrunch-disrupt-winner/

<comment><USER3> Am I the only one skeptical about CloudFlare? I, for one, would not be comfortable changing my name servers to them. Shouldn't we actually find and patch security flaws instead of putting it behind some 'firewall in the cloud' (security through obscurity, anyone?) which can cease to exist any second?

And, why do they call themselves a CDN? I watched the video on their site and I still don't really understand how they work. Do they work like a reverse proxy? A reverse proxy would create an even greater security concern than what it tries to solve. An attacker would be able to deface thousands of sites by attacking just one of their proxy nodes.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm very skeptical about Qwiki. It's a text-to-speech Wikipedia/Flickr slideshow mashup. The most useful demonstration they gave was for a smart alarm clock. Not exactly a burning problem.

I'm surprised the judges were so easily impressed by this kind of flashy widget.

</comment><comment><USER5> I thought it would be fun to judge along with the real judges and this was my winner too, although it was tough. The strongest companies for me at first were pinger, cloudflare, and badgeville. I thought those companies just had tons of potential -- actually do have it -- but qwiki was stuck in the back of my mind. To force out a winner I asked which would be the one company, if none could exist except for choosing one, to win. I felt I could find alternatives/workarounds to all except qwiki, which was the one I still really wanted to exist (the morning automated info stream is compelling). All finalists were strong to tell the truth, a really impressive, disruptive field.

<comment><AUTHOR> The field was good this year. The only company I didn't really like/get out of the finalists was Badgeville.

My favorite was Cloudflare because I had a similar idea years ago that I was going to do as a startup, but chose another idea instead.

The tl;dr version of it is a forwarding proxy for your website that speeds up page delivery (gzip, etag etc), filters out vulnerability and exploit attempts, filters out spammers, filters out mis-behaving bots etc.

I am not sure if Cloudflare is application aware. The way that I was going to do it was to build modules for popular web applications and optimize based on that (eg. it would recognize Wordpress and compress the JS/CSS, sideload images, etc.)

Clickable link: <https://www.cloudflare.com/>

That is an impressive website (even with flash disabled) and a welcome change to the standard screenshot/header/sub-menus/links in footer boilerplate that we see too often.

(As an aside, the winner, Qwiki, is co-founded by Louis Monier - link for those who don't know him or don't recognize the name: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Monier>)

<comment><USER5> Badgeville is going to be huge. For some reason game mechanics really can affect user on-site behavior. For example, HN would still probably be just as awesome as it is without the karma counter, but there is something about having it there, even though it means absolutely nothing. I care way too much about it -- in a subconscious way. I don't let it affect my commenting, but I would be lying if I said I didn't glance at it, and wasn't aware of it in an almost hypnotic way. It's just there. Maybe it's growing up in the gamer generation that's permanently internalized any on screen score as being important. :) But, yeah, Badgeville has already signed up something like $50K (or was it 500K?) worth of new customer subscription revenues, including TechCrunch. They're just getting started.

<comment><USER6> You know what the sad thing is? I was going to apply for YC with this idea. Good thing I have backups..

<comment><USER7> There are at least five other companies, that I know of, all trying to do the same thing. Inevitably one or two companies will succeed in the e-wards market, while others will fail. At this point it is anybody's game - <USER2> yours.

TL;DR: Get going!

<comment><USER6> In truth, providing badge API's was corollary to my main idea, so it's not the end of it. Thanks for the pep-talk!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For anyone who's curious, like me, Qwiki (Query Wiki?) is auto generated "wiki" pages on subjects pulled from multiple data sources. I haven't been able to find a demonstration video, but this seems similar to DDG / Google / Bing zero click information, only with more pictures.

<comment><USER8> That makes it sound like Cuil. Is it?

<comment><USER9> It is.

One of the founders of Cuil decided that the final mystery-meat feature from Cuil (cpedia) needed to be its own company, plus automatic powerpoint creation with text-to-speech narration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The fact that I could sign up to CloudFlare's site and finish changing all my settings and nameservers before they even completed their presentation is a testament to their UI and ease of use. Their site went down for a few minutes a little bit later, which briefly caused some problems, but other than that I'm excited to see what results come from using their service. Oh, by the way, they had my vote for first.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Qwiki"?... That's a rather unfortunate name.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you check the length of the article before reading it? - <AUTHOR>

I find myself doing this a lot, I usually read articles that are short to moderately long ( less than 15 paragraphs )
I know judging the quality of an article with its size is stupid, but, I do it all the time.
What are your reading habits? <comment><USER2> I don't check how long an article is before I start reading it, but if it goes on for too long without getting anywhere I'll stop.</comment>


MypyC, native code Python compiler being developed by Dropbox - <AUTHOR> https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2018-August/154951.html <comment><USER2> > Cython is a relatively complex and still poorly documented language

Totally agree. I tried some time ago, was quite hard to setup. If they can mypyc just work out of the box, it would be really nice.

Compiling python to C not only has obvious performance advantages but also the fact that it will enable a Web Assembly compilation target to be a thing.</comment>


10k+ firearms have been bought by New Zealand's government in less than a month - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/12/new-zealand-gun-buyback-10000-firearms-returned-after-christchurch-attack <comment><USER2> They confiscated 10k of the 1.5 million firearms which is 0.6% ... and they're happy with the results?

<comment><AUTHOR> My understanding they're not trying to confiscate ALL of the firearms, just the most deadliest ones. And, well, they've just started.</comment></comment>


Truffle Debugging Demo: Debugging multi-language applications [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewdzDqPsn38 <comment><USER2> Truffle/Graal are both amazing technologies, I thought LLVM was amazing but Truffle blows my mind. You can write optimizing JIT compilers by actually just writing an interpreter in Java with some special tricks.

And Truffle can do some amazing things with cross-language that aren't related to debugging, see [http://chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/cext/](http://chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/cext/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I was even more impressed when I googled Truffle and Graal as I had not heard of them until this.

<comment><AUTHOR> They will be available for use in Java 9 without requiring any special JDK build.

<comment><USER4> Hidden behind an experimental command line flag and with caveats about performance since its intended for experimental JIT plugins, but yeah.

I think we will eventually end up with much of Java implemented in Java, and that will make for fantastic dynamic language support, but it's going to be a long road.</comment></comment></comment>


Fantastic Beauty from Code Galaxies Visualizer: Go Search, RubyGems, Homebrew - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX0jHaiC-88

<comment><USER2> nice!</comment>


D3 map scrollers - <AUTHOR> http://geoexamples.com/d3/2016/05/25/d3-map-scrollers.html <comment><USER2> I really think the power of D3.js is within the ability to do "view source" or "inspect element" and look into exactly how things are rendered and being able to change things dynamically to reproduce your needed behavior. You really don't have this power with other charting libraries/tools/frameworks.

You can't do this with <canvas /> and that's why I think it falls a bit short. With the virtual DOM it also gets harder "changing stuff from the console", but I guess there are extensions that allow you to do that as well.

But anyway, the DOM seems like a great abstraction, not just for doing UI, but also for building complex dataviz. But not because of performance, or because it's on "the Web". Simply because it's transparent and allows for copy-paste viral effect. We should keep this in mind when building future platforms.

<comment><USER3> Oops, meant to upvote, but ended clicking the wrong button...

Too bad you can't fix it as it is now, it'll be nice if somehow for a limited time you could revert your vote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Libraries for making D3 scrollers:

[https://github.com/1wheel/graph-scroll](https://github.com/1wheel/graph- scroll)

[https://github.com/WSJ/scroll-watcher](https://github.com/WSJ/scroll-watcher)

And the classic blog post:

[http://vallandingham.me/scroller.html](http://vallandingham.me/scroller.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems to work well only on chrome (issues with Safari, partially working on iPhone though). Similar issues with [1].

There's also some minor horizontal scroll which makes the experience slightly weird, but this can easily be fixed with overflow-x: hidden;

[1] [http://vallandingham.me/scroller.html](http://vallandingham.me/scroller.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> similar effects:

[https://codyhouse.co/demo/reading-progress- indicator/index.h...](https://codyhouse.co/demo/reading-progress- indicator/index.html)

[http://tympanus.net/Development/StorytellingMap/](http://tympanus.net/Development/StorytellingMap/)

<comment><USER7> After scrolling through the first one, I had to swipe left (gesture to go back on Mac) so many times to get back here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Being someone who has never used D3.js, every time I see a story about D3 I think of Blizzard's _Diablo 3_ title. My thought on this headline was "Hey, that's cool... Someone wrote a hack that allows you to scroll around D3 maps!" I was thoroughly disappointed. :(

<comment><USER9> As someone who work a lot with d3.js and is constantly getting search results relating to Diablo 3 I can appreciate your frustration.</comment></comment>


How do you TEST your start-up ideas? - <AUTHOR> http://smallbusiness.foxbusiness.com/entrepreneurs/2010/10/25/business-idea-test-cheap/#ixzz1evaNaSR7

<comment><AUTHOR> What is your quick and dirty method? (thanks for sharing!)

</comment><comment><USER2> Yeah I'm not visiting Fox Business.

<comment><AUTHOR> lol. I am not a fan of Fox either, but the article nicely summarizes what I think are great examples of low budget market tests.</comment></comment>


AngularJS 1.4 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

<comment><USER2> No blog post yet (should be at [http://angularjs.blogspot.ca/](http://angularjs.blogspot.ca/)), but you can read the changelog here:

* [https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/v1.4.0/CHANGELOG....](https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/v1.4.0/CHANGELOG.md)

<comment><USER3> Found the blog post on their google drive: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ma8baPpeS- MPgvaqybiPa-6b...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ma8baPpeS- MPgvaqybiPa-6b2HQMrGEzSb1wR0mpUDA/edit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Changelog - [https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/master/CHANGELOG....](https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md)

<comment><USER5> Purely because this tripped us up today:

There is a breaking change to how $cookies works, which is only listed under one of the RC releases in the change log: [https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/v1.4.0/CHANGELOG....](https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/v1.4.0/CHANGELOG.md#breaking- changes-2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's not on the CDN yet, and the blog post hasn't been released, so it's not official yet.

</comment><comment><USER7> as someone from the Czech Republic, I'm truly impressed by its codename (jaracimrman-existence). How did that happen?

<comment><USER8> What does it mean?

<comment><USER9> Jára Cimrman is a Czech fictional character of a national giant. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1ra_Cimrman](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1ra_Cimrman)

IMHO it wasn't auto-generated.

<comment><USER10> The names are generated by the community. [https://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=a62cb](https://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=a62cb)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> so does this mean Angular 1.4 is released? I still see RC2 version in homepage..

<comment><USER12> Yes; it's available here: [https://code.angularjs.org/1.4.0/](https://code.angularjs.org/1.4.0/)

I guess they're just finishing off the blog post/announcement before updating the main site.</comment></comment>


My autonomous Lego Rover at CeBIT 2014 in pictures - <AUTHOR> http://www.cubotix.com/2014/03/16/rover-at-cebit/

<comment><USER2> The robot is great but the article confusing: So is robot a product for sale (like for education) or "just" a nice toy to attract attention to something else the author sells?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello r3m6,

Would you be interested in buying one?

This robot will be on sale soon. I developed it for an Intel programming challenge and won an award. Have been showing it on trade fair shows for the last few weeks to get feedback.

I integrated most of my software from previous research work about localization and mapping and computer vision.

Are you a robotic enthusiast?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It'd be nice to see some detailed photos of the rover. I assume the laptop is part of the rover, but it would be great to see beneath the laptop.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey JazCE,

Thanks for your note! For a few pics check out my other video about the rover. At 1:29 you see some close-up pictures under the laptop. [http://youtu.be/IQVQTn1E3lY](http://youtu.be/IQVQTn1E3lY)

I intend to provide building instructions, soon.

Are you a robotic enthusiast?

Would you be interested in a software stack for localization, mapping and image processing?

<comment><USER3> Ahh awesome. I'm more a lego/technic enthusiast, but don't quite have the space for lego anymore, so I just enjoy reading the lego blogs and seeing other peoples creations.</comment></comment></comment>


Node.jsScan: A semantic aware static code analysis tool for Node.js applications - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ajinabraham/nodejsscan <comment><USER2> A quick summary of what exactly this scans for at the top of the README would be nice.

From the screenshots at the bottom, it looks like mainly SQL injection and outdated dependencies?

<comment><USER3> Probably JSON injection too. You can handle this in middleware, but I suspect lot of people don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://github.com/ajinabraham/njsscan/blob/master/njsscan/r...](https://github.com/ajinabraham/njsscan/blob/master/njsscan/rules/semantic_grep/crypto_node.yaml#L5)

Does this mean that if I use single quotes or add whitespace inside the parentheses the vulnerability will not be detected?

</comment><comment><USER5> Static analysis software is quite valuable if you can successfully sell it.

[https://github.blog/2019-09-18-github-welcomes- semmle/](https://github.blog/2019-09-18-github-welcomes-semmle/)</comment>


Microsoft's Three Browsers - <AUTHOR> https://textslashplain.com/2020/02/03/microsofts-three-browsers/ <comment><USER2> The world would have been a better place if Microsoft's latest move was to adopt Firefox instead of Webkit - it would have encouraged diversity in the browser ecosystem.

Unfortunately given the history of Microsoft & Firefox this was of course impossible due to Firefox being a derivative of Mozilla/Netscape - one of the biggest battles in technology history, which Microsoft won following a savage no-holds-barred battle. There would have been alot of people very unhappy if Microsoft has adopted Firefox - such a move would have been truly ironic.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft has never been shy about partnering with former enemies/competitors. We tend to forget Apple would probably be gone if Microsoft hadn't bailed them out in 97 (not out of altruism but because of antitrust). Linux is also first class on Azure. I don't think they would care about the Netscape thing.

<comment><USER4> _We tend to forget Apple would probably be gone if Microsoft hadn 't bailed them out in 97 (not out of altruism but because of antitrust)._

What "saved" Apple was the iMac in 1998, not Microsoft.

Microsoft bought $150 million in non-voting stock in Apple as a show of good faith. Apple made Internet Explorer the default browser for the Mac and Microsoft committed to Office for the Mac. At the time, Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac was the best browser on any platform.

After the 5 year period, Microsoft sold those shares, making a huge profit.

At the end of the 5-year agreement, Apple shipped Safari 1.0, based on the KHTML codebase and the rest, as they say, is history.

Ironically, Microsoft's browser is now based on a fork of the engine of the browser that replaced IE on the Mac back in the day.

<comment><USER5> >Microsoft bought $150 million in non-voting stock in Apple as a show of good faith.

Well there was the legal battle going on between the two as well. So you could think of IE, Office, 150M stock was part of the package.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Edge, as-is, seems to offer me no reason to prefer it over Chrome, beyond privacy concerns with Google - and I'm unfortunately just not knowledgeable enough to know if MS is any better.

I personally use Safari. Because I'm on MacOS, I find Safari to certainly be the most immediately responsive, UI/UX-wise, and that's pretty much what matters to be, since it's all WebKit under the hood.

I don't see the benefit of Edge beyond Windows users dealing with a less shitty browser out of the box.

<comment><USER7> I switched from Chrome to Edge because:

* No Google tracking.

* Blocks 3rd party trackers.

* Zoom/Scroll is smoother.

* Better optimized for touch screens.

* Longer battery life.

* Seems to use less RAM.

* All my Chrome extensions are compatible.

* I can watch Netflix in 4K. Can't do that on Chrome or on a Mac.

<comment><USER8> The battery performance of old Spartan edge was amazing, great for laptops/tablets. Have they managed to keep that kind of performance with their new chromium version? (I haven't updated yet)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Crazy thing is my home country bank website only works with IE. The incompetent f*cks have re-done the website 3 times in the last 4 or 5 years. They still require IE.

<comment><USER10> link?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> When is IE gonna die? I'd really like to use flexbox/grid and other css/js niceties, but we still have 16% of users on IE. I know Microsoft is planning on supporting forever, but does anyone know if they are trying to move people off of it?

<comment><USER12> At some point you have to determine your ROI on those 16% of users and determine if the extra effort to avoid modern tools is worth it. It's not Microsoft keeping IE on life support in 2020, it's all the vendors putting in a lot of work (or worse, putting in no work, as stagnancy is its own problem) to keep 16% (or less) of their users happy.

<comment><USER13> How do we convince hospitals and medical clinics to use Chrome, Firefox or the latest edge browser?

<comment><USER12> The same way we convince any other industry? Don't provide new features to old browsers. Include the costs of doing business with older browsers accurately enough in your support contracts (especially don't undervalue your time, workarounds, polyfills, etc). Find ways to help your clients with upgrade assistance (are there IT contractors you can recommend to your clients that they might hire for short term upgrade projects, such as maybe helping them upgrade vendors who are possibly even your competitors?). And so forth, anything to better help your clients understand (and incentivize) not just the obvious security risks but the economic trade-offs in supporting older tools/languishing in the supposed "easy" status quo.

I can't tell you where the magic ROI line is for you. Maybe you have to make the hard choices like "If we go this route [only evergreen browsers], we lose ~16% of our customers immediately, but we add X% feature/stability/maintenance improvements to our remaining ~84% customers, and hopefully one day we'll see at least some of those 16% come back to us the next time they get a chance to upgrade, likely in Y years." It's a business decision, and you don't always have to meet customers where "they are", you can make the tough calls and ask your customers to meet you in the middle. How angry that might make them, and how much business you might lose, is always going to be something you have to determine with your market in mind.

<comment><USER14> Its not just YOUR product though - its the entire suite of products that medical institutions use. Be it the EHR, the patient management, the radiology, the cardiology system - each one deals in IE11 instead of a more modern tech stack. So if you end up being the outlier your product is more than likely going to end up being cut in preference for something with fewer features even.

<comment><USER12> It's certainly not an easy bootstrap problem (by way of a mexican standoff). It's possible many of those projects individually are just waiting for the first to take the first risk and move forward so the rest can just claim to be following someone else's lead. To badly mix metaphors: a rising tide floats all boats, it's just sometimes you have to be the first to remove your finger from the dyke to raise the tide.

Like I said, it's always going to be a calculated risk, and I mentioned that losing customers is certainly a risk involved. Sometimes a small loss of customers is an acceptable risk.

There are mitigations for such risks such as making sure that "fewer features" alternative is your own (at the right maintenance costs), but also including taking things to standards/regulatory boards. Using out-of-date software is a HIPAA risk and an ethics risk. There are ways to convince HIPAA enforcement auditors and/or groups like the AMA that it is _too much_ of a risk, or too _unethical_ a risk and that some sort of upgrade horizon should be spread across the industry. That's not easy either, but it's not impossible, and it's probably a good idea in general in the long run (the regularity with which Day-0 vulnerabilities are disclosed would give a lot of weight to the risks of falling behind on software upgrades, for instance).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Silly question, but is there any sense in testing websites in new Edge in addition to Chrome? I presume, that if website works on Chrome, it will work on Edge the same. Are there any gotchas in new Edge to watch out for?

<comment><USER16> I'm sure there may be some small differences that may require some testing, but I am already starting to phase out some of my edge browser testing and looking forward to no longer supporting pre-chromium edge. We already don't support IE and haven't for 5 years.

Just testing for Firefox and chrome/edge will be nice.

<comment><USER17> > Just testing for Firefox and chrome/edge will be nice.

Thanks! Most thinks just work on Firefox but I also see a number of things not working because certain people just can't be bothered to:

a) learn to not use Chrome-specific hacks instead of the normal way

b) just test their sites with the second most used browser engine

<comment><USER18> Hello. Can you please give some examples of Chrome-specific hacks instead of the normal way, or some web references. I'm helping on development of a web UI framework and it would help. Thank you.

<comment><USER19> Sometimes it's where Firefox adheres to specifications, while Chrome doesn't.

As an example, [https://www.just-eat.no](https://www.just-eat.no)

Chrome treats the numeric box as text and accepts a postcode starting with 0. Firefox correctly implements the numeric type, which unfortunately makes the site unusable for all Firefox users in Oslo.

They get none of my business because I'm not willing to switch to Chrome just to order from them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The new Edge is excellent. Windows is evermore becoming a great digital home.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is Microsoft Edge Legacy still being maintained? I was under the impression Edgium is the maintenance per se, and would just be deployed through Windows Update to all Edge users.

If we're including unmaintained Microsoft browsers there's also the old Tasman-based IE for Mac. The Expression Web product also had an independent HTML rendering engine.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't see why they need a browser at all. Kill IE and Edge and be done with it. The integration was a ploy to fool regulators.

<comment><USER23> That ignores that - for at least the last 16 years - Windows has exposed a WebBrowser control which developers can use in their applications. MS could potentially remove the IE icon and some of the UI, but removing the core browser component and rendering code would break third-party applications, and Microsoft has historically been extremely unwilling to do that.

<comment><USER24> Unwillingly is an understatement. They are adamant on doing backward compatibility. Just ask Raymond Chen

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder why they (also Opera) couldn't keep up with the development of in- house engines.

</comment><comment><USER26> There is a fourth WebKit Safari for iOS. Marketed as Edge has bugs all it's own although more Safari then a separate browser.</comment>


10-year-old problem in theoretical computer science falls - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/interactive-proofs-work-even-if-quantum-information-is-used-0731.html <comment><USER2> To vastly (over?) simplify:

Interactive proofs can be used to prove you have a secret without divulging it (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_knowledge_proofs>) hence their mentioning of crypto.

These systems can be attacked in various ways, one of which is to use quantum entanglement. Edited to add: since the interactive proofs rely on probabilistically estimating the likelihood respondents can still be lying, quantum effects can be used to reduce the accuracy of these estimates. In this case, entanglement is used as a means of collusion between supposedly independent respondents.

What these researchers did was take an interactive proof that was already created to be resilient against these quantum attacks , and have demonstrated that it is in fact resilient against them.

</comment><comment><USER3> So me and my partner bust these two guys on a B&E on the wrong side of the train tracks and haul their butts downtown to get confessions.

We separate 'em into to different rooms and really put the screws to 'em. We musta questioned 'em for hours because the sludge coming out of the coffee pot started to taste more like 10w30 than Folgers.

So these perps have all the answers, and we can't figure out how, because we got a strong hunch we got these guys cold. So we figure they're using quantum entanglement to keep their answers lined up. Each perp has his entangled electron, spin it right for yes, left for no, and up for maybe. So we turn up the heat and drop a Multi-prover interactive proof in their laps, and all of a sudden their stories don't line up so well anymore.

Another hour of good-cop, bad-cop, and we get one perp to roll on the other. Wasn't long till they were both singing like canaries and my partner and I had a couple of fat collars.

A job well done.

</comment><comment><USER4> If someone could translate that into English, that'd be great. I know a lot about quantum physics, and a lot about computer science, but I still didn't really understand what that was about. Although I did get excited.

<comment><USER5> Have you tried looking up their paper? I normally can't glean very much from popular press releases about mathematics either.

<comment><USER6> The paper is in the sidebar: <http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1207.0550>

""" We prove a strong limitation on the ability of entangled provers to collude in a multiplayer game. Our main result is the first nontrivial lower bound on the class MIP* of languages having multi-prover interactive proofs with entangled provers; namely MIP* contains NEXP, the class of languages decidable in non-deterministic exponential time. While Babai, Fortnow, and Lund (Computational Complexity 1991) proved the celebrated equality MIP = NEXP in the absence of entanglement, ever since the introduction of the class MIP* it was open whether shared entanglement between the provers could weaken or strengthen the computational power of multi-prover interactive proofs. Our result shows that it does not weaken their computational power: MIP* contains MIP. At the heart of our result is a proof that Babai, Fortnow, and Lund's multilinearity test is sound even in the presence of entanglement between the provers, and our analysis of this test could be of independent interest. As a byproduct we show that the correlations produced by any entangled strategy which succeeds in the multilinearity test with high probability can always be closely approximated using shared randomness alone, and are thus restricted to being quasi-classical. """

(I have no idea what that means.)

<comment><USER7> I believe it says:

MIP = Multi-prover Interactive Proof, a class of languages, is known to be equivalent to NEXP, (the class containing all languages computable in exponential time by a machine operating in a non-deterministic fashion [eg. the ones you care about]).

MIP* is like MIP except the provers (the M) are allowed to communicate with each other using quantum entanglement. This type of communication would be undetectable by the questioner (the verifier) and thus allow a group of attackers to "cheat" various cryptographic protocols. However, it is found that MIP* contains MIP. Therefore, there are proof systems (and thus protocols) resistant to quantum communication of the provers.

Thus, zero-knowledge proofs and the like still work in with quantum entanglement powered assailants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This video has a very good introduction to the problem.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAiJocr6ZKg>

</comment><comment><USER9> I've studied computer science, but I don't recall this theoretical problem. Perhaps its just not as popular or well known as things like P vs NP?

</comment><comment><USER10> What are the implications of all this in other areas, fields and future of humanity in general?

<comment><USER11> It's an important result for post-quantum cryptography. If (when?) quantum computers are ever generally deployable, existing ZK protocols with multiple provers will need to be modified using this result. Besides, a theoretical result doesn't need immediate applicability to be important to humanity. The study of quadratic residues in Euler's time was a sort of mathematical recreation, but 300 years later it gave us the QR hardness assumption and the Goldwasser-Micali scheme and its derivatives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another triumph of mathematics over physics. /s</comment>


What do you think are the "real" values of the hottest web companies? - <AUTHOR> http://www.tbo.com/news/nationworld/MGBMKYZOKYE.html <comment><AUTHOR> In my opinion Facebook and Myspace are easily worth 5 billion each. Just because of the fact that if they were to significantly add features that would pave the way for future e-commerce and social bookmarking they could start with a tremendous amount of base users.

However, I feel that even the leaders Google, Facebook, Reddit/Digg, wikipedia etc. are extremely prone to "better" products being developed.

Friendster is the cliche. Myspace came out and simply by creating a move customizable and music - friendly layout, attracted musicians and most importantly (all their fans) I feel that even Google's adsense and search engine advertising is not the best.

The Internet allows for the most optimal ways sharing information as a species and we will continue to develop the web tools that are most important for the advancement of our cultures. This is where we will see true Internet Goliaths. I think in 5-10 years the largest internet company will be worth trillions, rather than billions.

Does anyone else agree that not only is technology increasing exponentially, but the price of the greatest Internet companies will also continue to increase exponentially? does anyone else think that there is is a website format that the world could use as its official database off information? I see it and hope it will lead to a new, and better age of human existence. Does anyone else?

JGR

</comment><comment><USER2> this is a duplicate submission</comment>


App gold rush is over - <AUTHOR> http://www.plattysoft.com/2013/05/09/app-gold-rush-the-gold-is-almost-over/

<comment><AUTHOR> i think the app store as a distribution mechanism just doesn't scale to the current number of apps. on the web we've seen the same with yahoo, dmoz etc. there is still a lot of potential in mobile app development. in fact i think it's in the early days and the big hits are yet to come. only over the past year or so is smartphone penetration really starting to pick up. the difference with the beginning is that you no longer can rely on the app store to drive traffic though. a few seconds ago · Like

</comment><comment><USER3> I disagree.

iOS (number of users) - rising Android (number of users) - <USER2>

That are the only two things you need to know - you have a terribly large market.

You can't make a living with a sh*t app anymore. No, people won't buy just any app just because it's .99 in the store.

But with the right approach and the right idea (and naturally, good execution), the outcome (revenue) will be at least the same as if you launched that same app some time ago.

I'll even go as far that good apps sell better today than a year or two back.</comment>


My old clothes don't fit - <AUTHOR> https://sivers.org/clothes <comment><USER2> Funny quote from Albert Einstein related to this topic:

 _— If they want to see me, here I am. If they want to see my clothes, open my closet._

 _Said to Elsa after she suggested he change his clothes before receiving a delegation of visitors from German president von Hindenburg, 1932. Quoted in Brian, Einstein, a Life, 235_

</comment><comment><USER3> "No one cuts up a fine silk scarf to patch old work clothes; you want fabrics that match. And you don't put your wine in cracked bottles."</comment>


Is WhatsApp down? - <AUTHOR> WhatsApp seems down for me and other family members. Messages are not delivered. We are in centrale Europe. <comment><USER2> yes we are having an outage. we are working on it.

<comment><USER3> Will you publish a post-mortem?

<comment><AUTHOR> Please do, I would really love to know the details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://thenextweb.com/2017/05/03/whatsapp-is- down/#.tnw_9iO...](https://thenextweb.com/2017/05/03/whatsapp-is- down/#.tnw_9iOjAHft)

</comment><comment><USER5> SoCal down. Also, neat website: [http://downdetector.com/status/whatsapp](http://downdetector.com/status/whatsapp)

</comment><comment><USER6> What seems to be the official whatsapp status on twitter is silent: [https://mobile.twitter.com/wa_status](https://mobile.twitter.com/wa_status)

Their subtitle "We are working very hard to make this twitter account irrelevant." is quite apropriate if they don't use it (;

Just kidding, I love Whatsapp and just saw the talk on Startup School and loved it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if WhatsApp's infrastructure is still built on Erlang.

[https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million- us...](https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million- users-50-engineers/)

<comment><USER8> It's impossible for them to migrate away from it today _silently_

The question is "What is their status with their setup today: Want to keep Erlang or migrate to Go/Java/Rust"

Anyway... Erlang is considered to be the/a main reason for their success bcs it keeps out the mediocre Java-Developers

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looking forward to the post-mortem on this one.

</comment><comment><USER10> Down in the UK

</comment><comment><USER11> It is coming back in Brazil, already.

Interestingly, their Status Twitter account says "We are working very hard to make this twitter account irrelevant.". As it has not been updated at all today, I'd say they have accomplished it.

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://www.thereportertimes.com/technology/whatsapp-down- br...](https://www.thereportertimes.com/technology/whatsapp-down-broken/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Bolivia, SA, down as well. Hope to read the postmortem soon. ^^

<comment><AUTHOR> They don't seem to have any sort of status page nor direct contact with their ops team.

<comment><USER14> In Settings - Help - System Status, you can check the status

<comment><USER14> For past one hr. It said everything is fine. Now it's saying there's a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not working here in South America either. Just check Twitter.

<comment><USER16> Is there an official WhatsApp status Twitter account? I cannot find one.

<comment><USER17> [https://twitter.com/wa_status](https://twitter.com/wa_status)

Last updated 2014.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like how it coincides with release of new features for Allo. :)

Signal user

</comment><comment><USER19> Back in Edinburgh, Scotland. But I still can't message a few people -- the messages leave my phone (single V).

</comment><comment><USER20> It's down for me in Berlin, Germany.

</comment><comment><USER21> Same in France (since about one hour)

</comment><comment><USER22> They have a Twitter account for outages that hasn't been used since 2014.

</comment><comment><USER19> Down in Edinburgh, Scotland.

</comment><comment><USER16> Down in The Netherlands.

</comment><comment><USER23> Back online in US (Bay Area). Waiting for the post-mortem now.

</comment><comment><USER21> Uh, Spotify down too in France. Looks like a bigger issue ?

</comment><comment><USER3> Has WhatsApp done post-mortems in the past?

</comment><comment><USER24> Down in Jamaica its Like an #alieninvasion

</comment><comment><USER25> Down in Bonn, Germany. Me and my friends

</comment><comment><USER26> Seems to be back up for me in AU.

</comment><comment><USER27> Back Up In Morocco For Now

</comment><comment><USER28> down in Portland, Oregon

</comment><comment><USER3> Down in the SF Bay Area

</comment><comment><USER6> Down in Spain

Edit: not it's back up

</comment><comment><USER29> Down in Montreal Canada

</comment><comment><USER27> Any Post-mortem Yet ?

</comment><comment><USER30> Back up now in Brazil

</comment><comment><USER31> Down in Puerto Rico

</comment><comment><USER14> Down in US-Detroit

</comment><comment><USER32> Down in Indonesia

</comment><comment><USER33> Down in Portugal.

</comment><comment><USER34> Down in Argentina

</comment><comment><USER35> Down in Nigeria

</comment><comment><USER27> Down In MOROCCO

</comment><comment><USER36> Down in Brazil.

</comment><comment><USER37> Down in Jamaica

</comment><comment><USER38> Down in Belgium

</comment><comment><USER39> Down in India.

</comment><comment><USER40> Down in US-PHX

</comment><comment><USER41> Down in Italy.

</comment><comment><USER42> Down in Boston

</comment><comment><USER43> Down in Italy

</comment><comment><USER44> Down in Peru

</comment><comment><USER45> Down in Peru

</comment><comment><USER46> Down in CA

</comment><comment><USER47> down at Bangalore, India.

</comment><comment><USER47> down in Bangalore, India.

</comment><comment><USER48> down in Monterrey Mexico

<comment><USER49> Chihuahua Mexico too

<comment><USER50> DF also

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> down in Switzerland

<comment><USER52> What really stands out during this outage is the excellent communications strategy to keep their user base informed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> down in CA

<comment><USER53> Down in Hull.

<comment><USER54> Down in Dunscroft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Account created a day ago. Is it really Jan Koum?

<comment><USER8> From what he says and from the karma going up the account seems legit

We can't expect him "to tweet his HN-Name" for verification. He could, though I expect him to have strong opinions on things in general (leading to quickly reject a lot of (wrong) paths)

<comment><USER23> My point was, the account was taken by someone a day ago. And I am pretty sure Jan Koum would not be commenting on HN article at the time of a massive outage in WhatsApp. It may be him, but very unlikely. My 2 cents.

<comment><USER8> He should be busily working on resolving it

Or doing the PR part

(Which is talking to ppl on HN ofc ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment>