Pilot who refused body scan at Memphis International blasts TSA security - <AUTHOR> http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2010/oct/20/pilot-who-refused-body-scan-blasts-tsa/

<comment><USER2> Bruce Schneier said recently that he's been "recognized" by TSA service members when flying in recent months, and that they have been complimentary and not confrontational. It certainly _is_ security theater, so it's nice to see someone on the inside call it like it is.

It will be interesting to see what action the TSA takes regarding this pilot. If they really force the issue, it may actually start a legitimate dialogue on actual security vs. what the TSA has been doing for the last many years.

<comment><USER3> But security theater actually does solve a real problem.

I read many times that one of the goals of terrorists is to panic and freeze the citizens out of fear of an attack. And this fear is worse than an attack itself.

The security theater solves this problem - people are no longer afraid.

BTW: I am not advocating theater instead of security, I'm just saying it does have some value.

<comment><USER2> Real security solves that problem. Security theater only works until everyone realizes that it's fake and isn't working. We've seen for years now, journalists writing about how easy it is to get on planes with supposedly banned materials.

I don't know about other folks, but I'm more disturbed by the number of resources devoted to this security theater, than comforted by it. I'd much rather see a focus on better inter-bureau communication and intelligence gathering.

Raising the "threat level" to "Orange" for political purposes, as we saw during the last presidential term can't possibly solve any real problems.

<comment><USER3> And yet, for all that they've been writing for years most people still don't realize it's theater.

Real security is not really possible anyway - not without profiling, which people won't accept and not without spending far more resources on security - and if you are disturbed now, imagine if spending goes up tenfold.

I agree the "threat level" is a joke though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> -He called TSA a "make-work" jobs program combined with a feel-good effort "to give us a false sense of security to let us believe the folks in Washington are keeping us safe."-

A reminder. Your safety is all in your head. This kind of procedure and abuse of procedure exists only so the government can make you feel safer. The only way to make it better, is for the whole (or at least the majority) of the American population to stand up and declare that it is not afraid. The fear surrounding airports is an example of how by declaring our war on Terror, we have submitted to it.

</comment><comment><USER5> The pilot has written up his own account, on a bulletin board, which I saw sometime in the last day or two. I don't recall whether it was posted here.

Ah, someone did provide a link to that -- in the 50th comment:

[http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-safety- security/113715...](http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-safety- security/1137159-today-day-michael-roberts-expressjet-story.html)

From recollection and skimming the parent's posted article, I think the latter mis-characterizes his attitude a bit, particularly via the quotes cited from another pilot.

Aways into his recounting, Roberts mentions to one of the people he's dealing with that he's actually taught the TSA mandated security portion of his airline's training program.

<comment><USER6> _The pilot has written up his own account, on a bulletin board, which I saw sometime in the last day or two. I don't recall whether it was posted here._

Yeah, I posted it to HN on the day the pilot published his own account cos I thought it would be of interest to this crowd...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1801369> \- sadly it didn't get any up- votes :/

<comment><USER5> Sorry I didn't turn that up before posting my comment. I'll see if I can change my URL to that.

Edit: Unfortunately, it looks dead, now, so I guess changing to it wouldn't be useful at this point.

P.S. I _did_ find it interesting, and read the entire thing. I probably found it via your post, so thanks! I normally would have voted up something I found that interesting. My apology (again) if I missed doing so.</comment></comment></comment>


Mike Guss designer of Metro on 'M' - <AUTHOR> http://mikeguss.com/M

<comment><USER3> Just because I think it's the first time it's come up in an article here, Monocle magazine is an amazing publication. Profitable, growing, and a loyal audience paying through the nose for a subscription (I am one ;-)) - <USER2> many magazines nowadays. Their approach to magazine publishing is pretty novel - a lot of interesting advertising/editorial crossover, their own radio station, their own real world stores.. (Fanboy mode over.)

<comment><USER4> I tried to get into Monocle, and while I acknowledge that it's very well designed, the yuppiness was overwhelming.

Imagine Vice turned into an ad for J. Crew.

<comment><USER3> I might think the same but I'm probably unusual among geeks by being into high end fashion, haute couture and urban planning, and digging the Japan-meets- Scandinavia culture montage Monocle almost exclusively focuses on. There's certainly an air of well meaning but unspoken pretention about it.

All that aside, though, if you skip the fashion and 'the third world's problems can all be fixed using the Scandinavian approach' stuff, there's a lot of great business reading in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> People seem to like to write long articles about why design matters, but fail to show it. It's nice to read an article like this where the significance of the design work can be judged by something out in the wild. I'm neither here nor there on the specifics of Metro, but I think the success of a system of design (something not in the hands of any one designer) is something to get excited about.

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://mikeguss.com/Windows>

Top right of the screen is the cover of the New Order album _Power, Corruption & Lies_.

I take the joke about the redaction of all mentions of Metro, but why the names as well?

</comment><comment><USER7> I guess I don't get the point of the faux-censorship here. Anyone care to help a clueless newbie out?

<comment><USER8> This is an article about Microsoft's "Metro" design language, so named until a couple of weeks ago, when a large Microsoft retail partner (Metro AG) asked Microsoft to rename it.

It has since been renamed "Windows 8-style UI".

I hoped this post meant it had been renamed "M". "M-style" flows off the tongue far easier than "Windows-8-style-UI"..

<comment><USER9> While this has been in the news everywhere, Microsoft itself hasn't mentioned anything about this. In fact, they still use 'Metro' on <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/apps> and their various Windows 8-related blogs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Apparently, a lot of additional knowledge about what is behind the redacted text is needed to make the article valuable.

Could somebody re-post the article here with all the blackened out text replaced by a best guess? Would make it much more informative.

<comment> simba-hiiipower 90% of the redactions are of the word 'Metro' (i think it's sort of a joke given that Microsoft decided to axe the term and has informed all related parties to do the same without providing a clear alternative). other than that, the remainder appears to be names of colleagues and specific individuals at the company (usually followed by their titles, so it's kind of obvious)..

here's one part I can help with; beginning of the last paragraph:

 _In spring of 2012 [STEVE] [BALLMER] shouted out "[METRO], [METRO], [METRO]!" at a conference, and that is the moment that Microsoft's "new look" have been said to have gone mainstream._

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "In spring of 2012 XXXXX XXXXXXX shouted out "XXXXX, XXXXX, XXXXX!" at a conference,"

Why would he blank that part out if it was said publicly at a conference?

(also have to say, this is one of the more annoying interfaces on a website I've seen. Single clicking your mouse anywhere outside the main paragraph navigates you back to the index?!"

<comment><USER12> XXXXX = Metro :-)

I hope the blanking makes more sense to you now (I WTFed at first too.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Today I received an email with promo codes for several certifications:

71-481: Essentials of Developing Windows XXXXX style Apps using HTML5 and JavaScript 71-482: Advanced XXXXX style App Development using HTML5 and JavaScript 71-484: Essentials of Developing Windows XXXXX style Apps using C# 71-485: Advanced XXXXX style App Development using C#

</comment><comment><USER14> A rare glimpse into what successful design means at a company where designers don't have decision making power: guerrilla warfare. The incredible thing is that the team behind "M" or "Metro"(or whatever Microsoft plans on calling it tomorrow) was able to perfect this recipe of 2 parts politics, 1 part propaganda, and just a tiny dash of fundamental design principles that have been recognized for centuries, in order to win support for their project.

<comment><USER15> now it is: 'modern'

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> All over this article - all too often people think 'minimal design' is 'using Helvetica and getting rid of the gradients and drop shadows'.

There's a whole lot more to it than that, and it all goes back to studying Müller-Brockmann and embracing minimalism as a school of thought rather than an aesthetic.

</comment><comment><USER17> This might be NSFW due to the images. It is for me.

<comment><USER18> quit

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Extremely iPhone-hostile site, sadly. Can only read like two paragraphs before it cuts me off. Too bad, it started good.

Edit: The reader button did the trick.

<comment><USER20> It didn't even show up on my Windows Phone device - just a single black 'M'.

<comment><USER21> Microsoft is all about reducing itself to the essentials these days.</comment></comment></comment>


Keep Freelancing - <AUTHOR> http://jdbentley.com/keep-freelancing <comment><USER2> There comes a point where the tax advantages of forming a company outweigh doing a sole proprietorship. Based on my circumstances, my accountant informed me that that number was less than 100k of taxable income. Certainly this is in the range of a reasonable freelance salary in my area (because it's in the range of a reasonable developer salary).

Dissolving your LLC and going to a sole proprietorship could end up costing you a lot of money and doing so without consulting an accountant would be foolish.

...and that's not even talking about liability issues (which your LLC may or may not protect you against), so it's best to talk to a lawyer too. Both will pay for themselves.</comment>


Why We Cant Solve Big Problems:MIT Tech Review - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/429690/why-we-cant-solve-big-problems/ <comment><USER2> A better name for the article: "How to justify industrial regulations and carbon tax with references to Apollo program".</comment>


Facebook building crypto payment system - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-building-cryptocurrency-based-payments-system-11556837547 <comment><USER2> Please call it Facebucks Please call it Facebucks Please call it Facebucks Please call it Facebucks Please call it Facebucks Please call it Facebucks Please call it Facebucks Please call it Facebucks Please call it Facebucks

<comment><USER3> Instead of Zuckbucks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not a WSJ subscriber, but from the Ars Technica writeup[1]:

> The Journal says that paying users would "reward the kind of genuine > interaction that Facebook, beset by bots and hate speech, has been trying to > encourage." But it's not clear how these payments would discourage bots or > hate speech. To the contrary, botmakers would inevitably ramp up their > efforts to generate fake traffic with bots in order to earn Facebook's > cryptocurrency.

So they're either lying or stupid; probably the former, since they're an ad company, and have years of experience with "click fraud."

Then one is left to wonder why it makes sense to have a centralized cryptocurrency, instead of just a database. I imagine there are tax and regulatory advantages versus just being honest and becoming a payment processor. No chargebacks, for example.

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/report- facebook-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/report-facebook- looking-to-disrupt-credit-cards-with-cryptocurrency/)

</comment><comment><USER5> fbcoin.com goes to a Chinese site.</comment>


Apple's stagnant product lines mostly reflect the state of the computer industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/233058-apples-stagnant-product-lines-mostly-reflect-the-state-of-the-computer-industry <comment><USER2> But Joel Hruska ignores the fact that Byford's original article was not about technology:

 _" But there's no excuse for selling four-year-old hardware for $1,099. (Yes, Apple charitably dropped the price by one hundred whole dollars two years ago.) The 2012 MacBook Pro still runs okay today, but not that okay."_

Furthermore, despite Joels claim the PC industry has done great improvements in the last 2-3 years: we now have significantly better graphics, battery life and security in addition to touch support and all that in low and mid-end segments.

</comment><comment><USER3> GPUs are still subject to Moore's law; CPUs, while not getting much faster are becoming more energy efficient; SSD price per gigabyte goes down and down...

It's not the state of the computer industry, it's Apple and the people willing to buy anything with its logo on it and justify it with "it's good enough". You know what's good enough? An 8 year old thinkpad with an SSD in it and maybe some extra RAM. And that one doesn't set you down 1100 USD.

<comment><USER4> The fact that you say that a thinkpad with an 8-year old cpu suffices only proves the author's point. Why is it a bad thing when this is good enough for Apple users, but a good thing for you?

<comment><USER5> Because they are selling components inside as new (+ Apple tax) and not per market value.

<comment><USER6> One of the points the article makes is that the newer components (mind you the parts inside are new, just not from the latest generation) don't have performance improvements that warrant the retooling and update.

At least for me, Apple doesn't sell the fastest computers. It sells well built computers with a polished OS. With all the stories about malware built into Thinkpads, I am somewhat relieved there is someone building malware free solid and reliable computers I can expect to use for many years.

<comment><USER2> I think what parent is trying to say is that Apple charges $1100 for 4 year old technology, something no other company is able to do.

I recently paid $90 for a six year old ThinkPad and it works flawlessly. If we are going to settle for old technology (which both you, OP and the author claim is good enough), then why not also pay less?

<comment><USER5> Precisely. Apple just realized it can sell whatever they want at high margins and get away with it.

<comment><USER2> I don't think Apple needs to "realize" anything. They will try to sell hardware with huge profit margins and unless people stop buying them there is really no reason for Apple to change.

This was what the Verge articles was trying to highlight, which in turn was what the author here was trying to criticize (?!).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the Browser Distribution for your site? - <AUTHOR> My site is Launchset.com. According to Google Analytics, here's the breakdown of browsers used by my users.
1. Chrome 37.50%
2. Firefox 34.53%
3. Safari 22.50%
4. Internet Explorer 3.59%
5. Mozilla 1.09%
6. Opera 0.31%
7. Camino 0.16%
8. Konqueror 0.16%
9. Mozilla Compatible Agent 0.16 <comment><USER2> <http://jquery.com/>

3.3mil visitors / 1.57mil uniques (for this last 30 days)

        Firefox	61.51%
        IE		15.60%
        Safari	10.89%
        Chrome	7.56%
        Opera	3.15%
        Mozilla	1.02%

All else less than 0.06%

<comment><USER3> What's the breakdown of IE usage?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.deviantart.com/>

      Firefox           50.29%
      Internet Explorer 32.74%
        7.0      74.10%
        6.0      14.93%
        8.0      10.92%
      Safari             8.05%
      Chrome             4.40%
      Opera              3.53%

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://arstechnica.com> (or A.R.T.S Technical, if you're our ad ops people)

      Firefox   43.97%
      IE        23.83%
      Safari    21.43%
      Chrome    5.95%
      Opera     2.03%
      Camino    0.18%
      Konqueror 0.10%

Safari on the iPhone accounts for 1.8% of our traffic.

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://www.asap.org/>

These are mostly non-technical, often physically handicapped people. This sample accounts for 19,536 visits in the past month:

       Internet Explorer 14,174 	72.55%
          7.0                                7,549 	53.26%
          6.0                                3,445 	24.31%
          8.0                                3,179 	22.43%
       Firefox            3,420 	17.51%
       Safari             1,412 	7.23%
       Chrome               331 	1.69%
       Opera                 72 	0.37%

</comment><comment><USER7> Please include user counts to assure us of statistical significance :-)

</comment><comment><USER8> <http://greekcook.gr>

It's a Greek site with recipes with ~100k visits (last 30 days)

      Internet Explorer 61.20%
        7.0    46.78%
        6.0    28.36%
        8.0    24.74%
      Firefox           33.35%
      Chrome             2.33%
      Safari             1.59%
      Opera              1.20%
      Mozilla            0.13%

<comment><USER9> Okay, sorry to hijack the topic, but I'm curious to know how many hits you get from *.gr versus from the rest of the world, if you are bothering to track geolocation that is.

<comment><USER8>
      Greece         92.95%
      Cyprus          3.36%
      Germany         0.80%
      United Kingdom  0.62%
      United States   0.38%
      Netherlands     0.23%
      France          0.19%
      Italy           0.19%
      Sweden          0.13%
      Belgium         0.12%

<comment><USER9> That's really interesting. Give the enormous size of the Greek expatriate population, I would have expected stronger showings from some of the countries with immigrant Greeks (eg. Australia - cue the joke about Melbourne being the second largest Greek city in the world), especially since they would have less access to traditional forms of recipe sharing (such as cookbooks, friends).

Assuming you are interested in attracting more traffic (which granted you may not be), you might want to look at targeting some of those communities via some well placed advertising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the past 30 days on our hip-hop record label site, <http://QN5.com>

      Firefox: 56%
      IE: 20.7% (IE 6: 2.9%)
      Safari: 11.9%
      Chrome: 5.6%
      Opera: 2.7%
      Mobile: 2% (mostly iPhones)
      Mozilla: 1%
      Playstation, Wii, etc: 0.1%

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://subaru.co.uk> (horribly put together site, we didnt make it!)

1\. Internet Explorer 80.59% 7 - 55.17% 8 - 26.13% 6 - 18.68% 2\. Firefox 15.08% 3\. Chrome 2.41% 4\. Safari 1.16% 5\. Opera 0.36%

<http://tinyjs.com>

1\. Firefox 65.83% 2\. Internet Explorer 12.21% 7 - 49.58% 8 - 38.48% 6 - 11.86% 3\. Safari 9.79% 4\. Chrome 8.09% 5\. Opera 3.02%

</comment><comment><USER12> <http://codepad.org/>

      Firefox       55.28%
      IE            17.05%
        7.0  38.08%
        6.0  34.21%
        8.0  27.77%
      Chrome         7.51%
      Safari         7.46%
      Opera          5.53%
      Mozilla        5.34%
      Konqueror      0.95%

</comment><comment><USER13> <http://www.railsforum.com/>

      1. Firefox - 65.33%
      2. Safari - 16.56%
      3. IE - 7.84%
      	7.0 - 46.53%
      	8.0 - 28.97%
      	6.0 - 23.69%
      4. Chrome - 5.42%
      5. Mozilla - 2.36%
      6. Opera - 2.06%

<comment><AUTHOR> Not surprised that Rails guys use Firefox and Safari.

catone: How do I get in touch with you? This is about that beta management system thread you posted months ago. I actually built one. email me at danny - at - launchset.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The last 500 visitors to my blog ( <http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/> ), batched by major version:

28.80% Firefox 3.5.X

24.00% Firefox 3.0.X

11.60% Chrome 0.2

9.80% Safari 1.2

7.60% Mozilla 5.0

7.20% Opera 9.X

3.80% MSIE 7.0

3.00% MSIE 8.0

2.60% MSIE 6.0

0.40% Konqueror 4.2

0.40% Firefox 1.5.0

0.40% Firefox 2.0.0

0.20% Opera 5.02

0.20% Opera 4.2.1

Speaking of which, I should probably upgrade from the crappy stat counter thing I'm using to Google Analytics (edit: and done).

<comment><USER15> Safari 1.2??

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> <http://www.apartmenttherapy.com>

        6/2009 - 4.3m visits / 2.3m uniques
        Firefox  42.52%
        IE       33.59%
        Safari   19.44%
        Chrome   3.07%

        All others under 1% each

</comment><comment><USER17>
        1. Firefox 438,766  65.61%
        2. IE      191,652  28.66%
        3. Chrome   19,911   2.98%
        4. Opera    10,686   1.60%
        5. Safari    4,979   0.74%

This is not a tech-oriented site; but it is mainly aimed at young people (15-25).

<comment><AUTHOR> This is interesting.

I would think there would be more Safari than Chrome. A lot of young people use Macs. It's possible they chose to use Firefox instead.

<comment><USER17> The site is very locally oriented (it's a community site featuring news/events/discussions/image galleries for a small city) and the only "Macs" we're seeing around here are iPods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> <http://www.carbonmade.com>

1\. Firefox 48.11%

2\. Internet Explorer 25.20%

3\. Safari 20.09%

4\. Chrome 4.28%

5\. Opera 1.89%

Our users are very design centric, so IE being at only 25% makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER19> <http://www.genlighten.com>

A genealogy-oriented site with a decidedly older target demographic. Monthly uniques only around 1-3k.

1\. Firefox 52.31%

2\. Internet Explorer 37.00%

         7.0	20.86%

         8.0	9.66%

         6.0	6.47%

3\. Safari 7.19%

4\. Chrome 2.47%

5\. Camino 0.41%

6\. Opera 0.31%

7\. Mozilla 0.21%

8\. Konqueror 0.10%

</comment><comment><USER20> Looks like not just geeks, but young people in general, use Firefox. As hoped, Chrome tends to take market share from IE, not Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER21> Justin.TV:

Internet Explorer 56.97%

Firefox 32.17%

Chrome 4.78%

Safari 3.84%

Opera 1.54%

Playstation 0.42%

Mozilla 0.15%

SeaMonkey 0.02%

Mozilla Compatible Agent 0.02%

Camino 0.02%

<comment><USER22> Why are such a high percentage of your users using Internet Explorer? And Playstation? What?

<comment><USER23> My guess is that it's because Justin.TV appeals to the mainstream, unlike a lot of the technical sites that are putting their numbers up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> <http://ifdefined.com>. This is a Microsoft oriented site, the home of "BugTracker.NET", so you'd expect it to skew a little towards IE. For the last 30 days, about 22,000 visits:

      IE      45%
      Firefox 41%
      Chrome   8%
      Safari   3%
      Opera    2%

</comment><comment><USER25> You have an extraordinarily high proportion of Chrome users.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do. I just launched last week and I kind of launched here on Hacker News.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm interested in seeing mobile stats (iPhone vs. the rest?) of some sites. Anyone care to share those numbers? More particularly: is the 70% iPhone number I get from my stats realistic and how does that breakdown change once a mobile-specific site is launched?

</comment><comment><USER27> <http://www.devhub.com>

Last 30 days

1\. Firefox 54.62%

2\. Internet Explorer 30.14%

3\. Chrome 6.85%

4\. Safari 6.26%

5\. Opera 1.17%

6\. Mozilla 0.42%

7\. Mozilla Compatible Agent 0.23%

8\. Opera Mini 0.11%

9\. SeaMonkey 0.06%

10\. Netscape 0.02%

</comment><comment><USER28> <http://www.virtualmin.com>; our audience is heavily Open Source oriented, and it obviously skews results heavily. This represents roughly 60,000 visitors.

1\. Firefox 64.45%

2\. Internet Explorer 17.22%

3\. Safari 6.95%

4\. Chrome 4.94%

5\. Opera 3.37%

6\. Mozilla 2.35%

7\. Konqueror 0.30%

8\. SeaMonkey 0.17%

9\. Camino 0.11%

10\. Opera Mini 0.03%

</comment><comment><USER29> Month to date:

      MSIE:    4,140,805    69.22%
      Firefox: 1,182,624    19.77%
      Safari:    437,645     7.32%
      Chrome:    153,782     2.57%
      Opera:      29,303     0.49%

MSIE Breakdown:

      7.0    2,865,786    69.21%
      6.0      893,234    21.57%
      8.0      379,935     9.18%

FF Breakdown:

      3.0.11    934,749    79.04%
      3.5        61,143     5.17%
      3.0.10     41,954     3.55%
      18.104.22.168   34,118     2.88%

Not a tech site ;)

</comment><comment><USER30> TweetingTooHard.com (last 30 days) 66k uniques

      Firefox	 	48.37%
      Safari	 	25.52%
      Internet Explorer 	17.52%
      	7.0	58.8%
      	8.0	22.8%
      	6.0	18.4%
      Chrome	 	5.82%

</comment><comment><USER31> Mainstream video site. Around 52 million unique visitors per month.

IE: 66.17% 7: 56.03% 6: 35.73% 8: 8.19% Firefox: 25.45% Chrome: 3.19% Safari: 3.04% Opera: 1.54%

<comment><USER32>
      user:	BlueLove
      created:	3 hours ago
      karma:	1

You made your account just for this? What's the video site?

<comment><USER31> It's not that hard to create an account here, with OpenID and all. Not sure if I should say what site it is - not sure how public is that information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Extended Info (Facebook application, so you'd think a little more mainstream than a tech site, although Facebook has problems with IE6 so it may drive that number way down)

25.5k uniques (last 30 days)

      Firefox		50.49%
      	3.x	96.4%
      	2.x	3.5%
      Internet Explorer	31.25%
      	7.0	77.4%
      	8.0	12.0%
      	6.0	19.5%
      Safari		12.63%
      Chrome		5.01%
      Opera			0.36%

</comment><comment><USER33> Jeez, I would kill for a site with 3% IE. For a site targeting enterprise users, we've got got 30% using just IE _SIX_

</comment><comment><USER34> <http://flooha.com>

Firefox 66.64%

Chrome 11.28%

Safari 10.99%

Internet Explorer 6.56%

Opera 2.10%

Mozilla 1.56%

Mozilla Compatible Agent 0.36%

Camino 0.18%

Konqueror 0.11%

Opera Mini 0.07%

SeaMonkey 0.07%

(not set) 0.04%

webkit 0.04%

</comment><comment><USER35> We launched one of the projects recently and ran a short campaign on StumbleUpon. This generated ~1500 uniques out of 2000 we had so far. Respective browser distribution is as follows:

      82%  	Firefox
      9% 	Internet Explorer
      4% 	Safari
      2% 	Opera
      1% 	Mozilla
      1% 	Chrome
      ..

</comment><comment><USER36> <http://dustincurtis.com/>

113,242 visits (past 2 days)

1\. Firefox 58.40%

2\. Safari 18.82%

3\. Internet Explorer 8.93%

4\. Chrome 8.76%

5\. Opera 1.94%

6\. Mozilla Compatible Agent 1.68%

7\. Mozilla 1.05%

8\. Camino 0.17%

<comment><USER37> Dude, that's a lot of visits for 2 days!

For comparison: [http://siteanalytics.compete.com/kanyewest.com+dustincurtis....](http://siteanalytics.compete.com/kanyewest.com+dustincurtis.com/)

<comment><USER38> Apparently, ~1500 people a month Google "whois 126.96.36.199" and find your website...

[http://searchanalytics.compete.com/keyword_destination/whois...](http://searchanalytics.compete.com/keyword_destination/whois%2067.222.141.120/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> My site, <http://www.mobilitea.com/blog/> is geared towards both software developers and BlackBerry users!

1\. Firefox: 46.74% 2\. Internet Explorer: 35.35% 3\. Chrome: 7.23% 4\. Safari: 6.04% 5\. BlackBerry 9530: 2.01% 6\. Opera: 1.01%

</comment><comment><USER40> Looking at some of the statistics one can conjecture that if your users are more technically inclined it is more probable that they will use firefox. They will use IE if your userbase is less technically inclined.

</comment><comment><USER41> <http://ajaxtrans.com/>

1\. Internet Explorer 55.06%

2\. Firefox 33.91%

3\. Chrome 4.97%

4\. Safari 3.66%

</comment><comment><USER42> wwiaircombat.com (WWI flight sims) (June 18-July 18, 2009) Firefox: 45.89% IE (overall): 41.99% IE 8: 45.64% IE 7: 37.78% IE 6: 16.54% Opera: 5.38% Chrome: 3.51% Safari: 2.81%

The large percentage dedicated to Opera is likely due to the fact that my site's been covering a WWI Flight sim developed in Russia, and Russia has a huge Opera user base: <http://yuiblog.com/blog/2009/07/02/gbs- update-20090702/>

</comment><comment><USER43> <http://WoodySchneider.com> 1\. Firefox 54.48% 2\. Internet Explorer 27.59% 3\. Safari 16.55% 4\. Opera 1.38%

</comment><comment><USER44> For the past year at <http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com>

Firefox 64% IE 20% Safari 7% Chrome 4% Opera 3% Mozilla 2%

</comment><comment><USER45> From my social skydiving blog (<http://socialskydivingwithjustin.posterous.com>)

Firefox: 58.7%

Safari: 17.67%

Chrome: 8.95%

IE: 7.73%

Opera: 3.25%

Mozilla: 1.94%

Mozilla Compatible: .87%

The rest add up to less than 1%

EDIT: Thanks!

<comment><USER46> > _How the hell do I new line?_

You need to put a blank line in between the lines you want to separate

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Large Australian Educational Website: Internet Explorer 66.21% Firefox 24.90% Safari 5.76% Chrome 2.25%

The IE breakdown is 7.0 51.99% 6.0 27.02% 8.0 20.99%

</comment><comment><USER37> <http://limitemagazine.com>

1\. Firefox 49.65%

2\. Internet Explorer 26.99%

3\. Safari 16.47%

4\. Chrome 4.08%

5\. Opera 1.44%

6\. Mozilla 0.42%

7\. Playstation 3 0.19%

8\. Opera Mini 0.16%

9\. Mozilla Compatible Agent 0.14%

10\. Camino 0.09%

</comment><comment><USER48> <http://www.vivapixel.com> \- Photo and video hosting site.

For June 2009.

Firefox 82.4 %

MS Internet Explorer 12.4 %

Safari 3.7 %

Mozilla 0.5 %

Opera 0.3 %

</comment><comment><USER49> I run a small web development blog. Most are using Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER50> Internet Explorer 62.19%

Firefox 28.18%

Safari 4.77%

Chrome 2.48%

Opera 1.98%

Mozilla 0.11%

Camino 0.06%

Opera Mini 0.06%

Mozilla Compatible Agent 0.05%

Netscape 0.04%

</comment><comment><USER51> uw.ru

MSIE 44.3 % Mozilla 25.9 % Opera 22.5 % Safari 2.6 %

<comment><USER52> why is opera so popular in russia?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Why do you want to know anyway?

</comment><comment><USER50> Wow, internet explorer 3.59%? Your site must be targeted at techno geeks?

</comment><comment><USER53> Firefox 100% (It's not live yet, I'm the only user :-)</comment>


Congrats Dropbox - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/congratsdropbox/ <comment><USER3> Thank you Paul and Jessica for taking a chance on us — we wouldn't be here without you and YC :)

And thank you HN — I'm pretty sure the upvotes on the original screencast helped us get into YC and on Paul & Jessica's radar to begin with!

Even you BrandonM — [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224) — my favorite HN comment thread of all time :)

<comment><USER4> It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the way users and engineers see software"!

I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel vision. Looking back, though, I still think that thread was a reasonable exchange. My 2nd and 3rd points were fair, and I conceded much of point 1 to you after your reply (which was very high quality).

Obviously, we have the benefit of hindsight now in seeing how well you were able to execute. Kudos on that!

Congrats on your success! I wish you nothing but the best going forward!

<comment><USER5> Well put.

Also, one thing I think people ignore is that BrandonM's comment was notable _because it was voted to the top_.

Which means that the people reading and voting on the thread, at the time, thought it was the best reply. But no one will ever point a finger at them, because they're anonymous. They also have less chance for self-reflection - who remembers an upvote?

<comment><USER6> I also think people might overlook BrandonM's follow-up reply to dhouston's reply on April 6th - "All of your feedback was well-thought-out and appreciated; I only hope that I was able to give you a sneak preview of some of the potential criticisms you may receive. Best of luck to you!"

<comment><USER5> Yup. It's really only the first part of the comment which had tunnel vision.

(Which does of course raise the question: were people upvoting for that part, or despite it? We'll never know)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> By the way Jessica, you told me that year that if one of us went public you'd do a keg stand. Just let me know in advance when that's going to happen so I can book a flight :)

<comment><USER8> Oh shit.

<comment><USER9> There should be a video of this with Jessica, Drew, Arash, and preferably BrandonM. :)

<comment><USER4> You can count me in! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Incidentally, Drew's relationship with the HN community is even older than his relationship with Y Combinator. Two weeks before we interviewed Drew and Arash, Drew posted Dropbox to HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

<comment><USER10> With the requisite "why would you do this? it's trivial to <insert something incredibly time consuming, annoying, and non-trivial> instead!"

<comment><USER11> Classic "less space than a Nomad, lame". That post did not age well. Even today there's nothing I can deploy on my own server that would be anywhere near as good.

<comment><USER12> I think there's another point to be learned from both the Dropbox comment and CmdrTaco's original infamous iPod take. And that's the importance of a really well-designed product that's simple and easy to use. Both Dropbox and the iPod weren't the first to try to solve the problems they were addressing, but they were the most elegant, intuitive solution. Both implementations effectively got out of the way of their users and exposed the underlying function with a little impedance as possible. It's always important to remember that the goal isn't for users to use your product. The goal is for users to get the value your product delivers. That sounds obvious, but a lot of product development teams forget that. Both Dropbox and the original iPod seem to embody that distinction.

As for your "nothing I can deploy on my own server" comment, checkout syncthing or Resilio. Both take a bit more doing than a simple Dropbox install, but I've found syncthing to be pretty bulletproof once it's configured and I've heard a lot of people prefer Resilio.

<comment><USER13> There was nothing intuitive about the iPod click-wheel interface; in casual use of other people's iPods I never did determine how to use it before it was superseded by touchscreens.

<comment><USER14> I don't believe you. firstly rotate the wheel to adjust a level (i.e. level of menu selection highlight) is literally how volume knobs have always worked. secondly clickwheel was in the iPod for 5 years? 8 years? in all the time you never figured out how to use it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's me in the bottom right in the striped shirt! Congratulations Drew, I am in awe.

I first met Drew at MIT, and first saw Dropbox when he was showing off what he was hacking on on his Windows laptop in a coffee shop in Cambridge at the start of the summer. My user id is 88, haha. The batch was tiny by today's standards (what was it, 20 companies? less?). YC invested $5k plus $5k per founder, for food and rent and servers for three months, in exchange for 2-10% of your company. You could have office hours with Paul every week if you wanted. At the end of the summer, a bunch of us moved out west and lived in Crystal Tower in SF. When Drew raised $1m from Sequoia, I was shocked! YC founders at the beginning of the summer were generally two guys with an idea (if that), so raising VC out of the gate was rare. AppJet was another favorite of the batch, and we raised $90k from several angels to keep going. YC had already had its first acquisitions, like Zenter (presentation software acquired by Google).

In those days, the entire YC community was smaller than one batch today.

It is amazing to me to see start-ups I remember from back then still going, and even become household names. AirBnB (2008). Weebly (2006) is even older than Dropbox.

Way to change the world, PG and Jessica. And of course Drew and Arash!

</comment><comment><USER16> My favorite part of Jessica's memory:

"he suggested Drew delete his Demo Day presentation in the middle of giving it, and then recover it from Dropbox and keep going. Usually we don't suggest gags like this during pitches, but this one made people pay attention."

<comment><USER17> Did it sync? She delivered a joke without the punchline.

<comment><USER16> I assume it did :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Dropbox is on my list of reasons why I no longer naysay anything run by technical founders with some product sense. I remember hearing they were just essentially re-selling AWS storage back in the day (before they started building their own data centers). I thought 'why would anyone want to buy marked up AWS storage'. Then a few years later I learned to stop doubting great product focused entrepreneurs ever.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Pictures of the actual checks :) [https://twitter.com/sama/status/977215073386053632](https://twitter.com/sama/status/977215073386053632)

<comment><USER19> ok, I'll be the one to ask. How much is this check worth now?

<comment><USER20> Probably 3,000$ and 12,000$ respectively?

<comment><USER21> 2007 Dollars != 2018 Dollars.

<comment><USER22> Assuming that's what was meant, and not what the other comments did:

$3000 -> $3614.05 according to [https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm](https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I remember seeing the release of DB on HN and immediately had a "holy shit" moment, I was literally carrying a portable shuttle computer back and forth to the office before DropBox - congrats to the entire team and thank you for a product I've used daily for 10+ years!

And this is yet another good lesson for would be angel investors AND startup employees - DropBox to me was one of the most obvious product-market-fit startups with a great, competent founding team, A+ quality investors etc and it still took them 13 YEARS to go public and drive liquidity for founders, early employees, etc.

<comment><USER24> Is there any talk about how late stage employees have done? I suppose they'll be in the waiting game as their lockup progresses.

<comment><USER25> Stock is up beyond the last valuation in 2014. Assuming the stock holds its value for he 6 month lockup, they'll get at least what they signed up for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Drew Houston was rejected by YC when they interviewed him for his previous idea. When they attempted to judge him as a founder, prior to any success, they completely failed to identify one of the best candidates they had ever seen.

After another attempt at getting YC's attention, Drew Houston even got shooed out of YC's offices and went home feeling rejected and having "sour grapes" about the situation.

He only got into YC because he created a demo video that HN loved. And that HN post easily could have been buried by a bigger story or whatever. A quantum of luck was involved.

This should have permanently disproven the entire concept of judging a founder's potential in interviews. Unfortunately, people love the feeling of being a judge. Deciding the fate of other people, however incompetently, is an irresistible joy for many.

Paul Graham talked (in his speech at Stanford) about his own inability to correctly judge founders after a decade of trying. Calling it guesswork. Too bad that he retired and it went unfixed at YC, but something crowdfunding-ICOs may be the ultimate fix anyway.

Thanks to decentralization, we can (hopefully) look forward to an accelerating number of companies as good as Dropbox.

<comment><USER27> You invest your money, you get to decide, it's that simple.

<comment><USER28> I don't think anyone suggested otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I just wanted to point out that it took 13 years to reach IPO. Hard work, dedication, but most importantly time. Lots of founders nowadays forget that "Rome wasn't built in a day." Congratulations to team Dropbox and team YCombinator.

</comment><comment><USER30> What's with the Boston VC's? The minute I saw the original Dropbox video here on HN it looked like a can't miss product. I told all my friends about it. Heck not only did Sequoia invest, but Steve Jobs tried early to buy the entire company.

There are some companies where it's easy to see why they were missed. I never saw the point of AirBnB, never would use the service myself. But DropBox had almost universal appeal.

<comment><USER29> I agree totaly with your comment. I also miss the point with airbnb and dont use it but I know a lot of people who do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've said it before and I'll say it again: Dropbox is the first app I'll install on any new device. It works on all relevant platforms and is getting more and more integrated with other platforms (Google Docs, Office) all while remaining platform agnostic. Once I reach my free limit (roughly 7 GB) I will gladly pay for their service.

Congrats to Drew, Arash, and the Dropbox team!

<comment><USER32> I'm already paying for it. Partly because I can't be bothered to clean up the clutter I keep on it, which would easily get me back down to free tier - <USER2> partly because I got so much value from using Dropbox that it's only fair to give back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Connections connections connections - that is what it is all about

       We'd met Drew the year before. [...]
       Adam Smith's big brother in MIT's
       Phi Delta Theta fraternity.
       He came to the afterparty at our house
       [...] I remember him being likeable,
       earnest, and very energetic.

</comment><comment><USER34> dhouston, what ever happened to the option of "an additional passphrase (or private key) when installing in order to encrypt your data before it leaves your computer."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8889](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8889)

<comment><USER35> Spideroak is what you're looking for, I use it and I'm happy with it.

<comment><USER36> I'm still looking for such a solution that works well on mobile. Spideroak's iOS app is _very_ rudimentary compared to Dropbox.

Cryptomator is headed in the right direction (and open source!), but they have not yet implemented iOS 11 Files integration. Boxcryptor has, and it actually works OK, but desktop performance is poor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I like Dropbox and YCombinator, but this line near the end was odd: "Today is a big milestone for YC. When we launched 13 years ago, we never imagined that a company that we'd funded would one day go public."

Really? What were they doing funding it, then? I hadn't realized that wasn't the original idea at YCombinator.

<comment><USER38> You don't need to have an IPO to be a successful venture??

<comment><USER39> Some ventures get acquired. That can be a path to success, too.

Bacardi does revenues of 5 billion plus and they're private. I'd say that's a successful business.

<comment><USER40> Samsung is privately held as well.

~$300bn revenue.

<comment><USER41> Samsung isn't privately held. It's listed in the Seoul market as KRX:005930

<comment><USER42> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_private_non- go...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_private_non- governmental_companies_by_revenue)

See reference at the bottom:

"Samsung is not to be confused with its publicly traded subsidiary Samsung Electronics"

<comment><USER41> Thanks. I also found this: "the Samsung Group comprised 59 unlisted companies and 19 listed companies"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Congrats to the Dropbox team.

Apologies if this is a naive question but I haven't had much success Googling.

I've never heard of a company going public without an investment bank's support. I assume there was a law to require this.

When did that happen?

<comment><USER44> >I've never heard of a company going public without an investment bank's support. I assume there was a law to require this.

Dropbox had the support of lots of investment banks[0]. Even Spotify is hiring banks to advise it in its direct listing, even if the banks aren't underwriting [1]. If you want to read about the roles of investment banks and other financial institutions in IPOs and the existence and history of alternatives, you might want to read some of the news coverage surrounding Spotify's choice to use a direct listing.

[0] [https://www.reuters.com/article/brief-dropbox-inc-files- for-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/brief-dropbox-inc-files-for-ipo-of- up-to/brief-dropbox-inc-files-for-ipo-of-up-to-500-mln-idUSEMN3U4XPL) lists about a dozen investment banks involved in the underwriting

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-16/spotify-w...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-16/spotify- will-pay-banks-to-cut-out-the-banks)

<comment><USER43> Thank you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Congratulations! What a consistent drama free run. Also, resisted an acquisition offer from Steve Jobs!

<comment><USER46> How was it drama-free? There was a #DeleteDropbox campaign after they hired Condoleezza Rice, widely considered to be a war criminal (especially outside US conservative circles) and definitely a proponent of domestic spying programs.

<comment><USER39> > widely

I'm not sure you'll find much well-reasoned support for this notion outside of California and college campuses.

<comment><USER47> > I'm not sure you'll find much well-reasoned support for this notion outside > of California and college campuses.

Contemporary events for another notion you wouldn't find "outside California and college campuses" succeed in toppling Brendan Eich at Mozilla. The only difference I could tell then was that the Dropbox board put its foot down in support of Ms Rice and Mozilla's board folded.

<comment><USER48> As far as I know they both had support from their respective boards. But Rice was 'only' up for the position as board member. Eich was to be the highest public and private facing position of the company. The controversy surrounding him, unfairly or not, also affected people personally. Basically Rice only needed the trust of the rest of the board, while Eich would have had to fight to run or represent the company. Your own comment being an example of how the Internet doesn't easily forget things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Remember when people used two floppy disks to save files so if one floppy break you have a backup one?

I remember the first day I heard about Dropbox and I was amazed by it, it made perfect sense. Since then I'm a client and as an entrepreneur, it's a company I always looked up to.

<comment><USER50> I remember the first day I used Rsync (developed by famous reverse engineer Andrew Tridgell of Samba fame [1]) and the first day I used WebDAV and later on WebDAVFS. Nowadays, I use TransIP STACK (1 TB free) and Google Drive (15 GB) plus public key cryptography.

Dropbox might've been the first in the field, but it has no selling point above STACK for me since it doesn't implement public key cryptography just like the other providers. Google's sell point is that compressed photos are free storage (although -obviously- unencrypted).

Which suggests, to me, that they're accessing the data or perhaps saving a few GBs with say ZFS dedup (ultimately not a trade-off in the interest of the user). Because otherwise, the lag would be client-side only (after all, the clients employ the cryptography).

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> So in those 11 years, did YCombinater make any money on Dropbox? Or is incubating more of a 'long term' investment?

<comment><USER52> "When we launched 13 years ago, we never imagined that a company that we'd funded would one day go public."

That statement suggests YC was looking more for buyouts than IPO's, which isn't necessarily wrong, but it wasn't a quote I'd have anticipated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Up 47% at the moment.

[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/dbx](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/dbx)

<comment><USER54> looks like they mispriced. Most of those gains are accruing to underwriters and speculators rather than the company. Same thing happened to eToys.

<comment><USER55> people always say this during IPO... you need to take volume into account.

What is the volume trading at 44% above the opening price?

When you put $700mm of securities on the market you need to price them low enough so that investors hold.

<comment><USER39> 18 million shares traded on the open at $29, and since then 23 million shares have traded between $28.80 and $31.60. Safe to say there's a healthy bid at $29.

<comment><USER55> Right. But who were the buyers? Would the same buyers have bought 10 million shares at $29? Or was it thousands of smaller sized investors paying a premium? You need whales to keep the market stable and I don't think the whales would have bought at $29 ... look at the volume over time post IPO, not just day of. The big investors who came in cheap will buy back shares if the price dips... right now they are profiting off the pop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Am I correct that if there were stock options granted to the first employees of Dropbox in 2007 then they expired in 2017?

<comment><USER57> There were several opportunities for liquidity for people with options prior to this point (not to mention extremely early employees should have had an extremely low strike price and should have been able to afford exercising prior to this point with relatively little risk)

I was at Dropbox from 2012 to 2016 and (while I'll lose out, relatively speaking, on taxes due to having a lot in RSUs, and I've mentioned on HN before being frustrated with the illiquidity of RSUs) people in my employee "cohort" should be fine as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Congrats to dropbox and YC as well.

Side note: what does Dropbox use to build the UI for their desktop app? I think it's written in python no? so what UI do they use?

<comment><USER59> The core UI is Qt 5.5.[1] When I started, it was still wxWidgets (shudder). We take a GTK dependency on Linux for some desktop integration in GNOME.

There's a bit of webviews these days, although there are Qt fallbacks or handoffs to actual browsers for everything important, for both compatibility and accessibility. Screen readers and QTWebViews did not play nice together when we implemented it.

(I work at Dropbox, although not on the client team, I had built some infrastructure that supported client webviews.)

[1]: [https://www.dropbox.com/help/desktop-web/system- requirements](https://www.dropbox.com/help/desktop-web/system-requirements)

<comment><USER58> Thank you! I should have thought about the system reqs to see hints as to how it was built

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Overwhelmingly excited for Dropbox IPO, it's truly both inspiring and has huge utility.. phuck GoogleDrive and lolwut iCloud Drive. Dropbox also proved regardless of how small you may be, if you do it right in a way humans will like it., you can always stay ahead of the competition.. I meant Google Drive was a pretty rad competition but they didn't even get the sync icon right .. too ugly for my taste.

<comment><USER61> I use all three - Google Drive, Dropbox and iCloud and I don't see a meaningful difference between them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'm super curious, how much was the original investment YC made (i assume 50k?) and what is that share worth today as they IPO?

</comment><comment><USER63> I was one of the evaluation team members at a large management consulting firm during their review of file sharing services. I got a look at all of them about 3 years ago and it was easy to see that Dropbox's engineers were leading in the space. The company I was at did not select Dropbox, but they had my vote.

</comment><comment><USER64> Honest question: What about Sean Ellis? Maybe I am mis-remembering, but wasn't he the person behind the "invite for more storage" growth marketing effort that really helped propel Dropbox to mainstream use?

<comment><USER65> What exactly is your question? He, like other early employees, is probably sitting on a nice bundle of common stock that he will be able to sell X months after the IPO.

<comment><USER64> I guess I expected a mention since his work was a huge part of making Dropbox successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I made my account around Fall 2007 as a high school student. It completely changed how I did things and I'm still a happy user all these years later (and still have access to my poorly-written high school papers!).

Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER26> Congratulations to dhouston for being a great example of a startup founder, and for creating a very successful company.

</comment><comment><USER67> Surveillance partner for NSA PRISM program, with Condoleeza Rice on its board.

Stopped using DropBox due to ethical concerns years ago.

<comment><USER68> Me too. The product was great but it was too much to take in. They didn't just learn anything from the Snowden revelations but instead put people from the government in the board. I'd rather prefer to keep using my pendrive, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> sh __I had the same idea around this time and implemented something similar (different but similar), and I was that crowd was coming in and needed such a thing. I was too young to think that this is an opportunity and just dropped it, continued with my day job etc.

</comment><comment><USER70> >When we launched 13 years ago, we never imagined that a company that we'd funded would one day go public.

What does that mean?

</comment><comment><USER71> BIG congratulations! What an amazing journey and I look forward to tracking Dropbox and its impact!

</comment><comment><USER72> Dropbox is a software I really like to use. Very well polished.

</comment><comment><USER73> Do they still have Condoleeza Rice on their board?

</comment><comment><USER74> Closed lower...

<comment><USER75> It closed at $28.42, more than 35% above the offer price of $21. In comparison, the S&P tech index was down nearly 3%.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dropbox-ipo/dropbox- share...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dropbox-ipo/dropbox-shares-close- up-35-percent-in-biggest-tech-debut-since-snap-idUSKBN1GZ1NG)

<comment><USER74> Open for mortals was $29.00

[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DBX?p=DBX](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DBX?p=DBX)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Well done!

</comment><comment><USER77> Edit: Removing comment.

<comment><USER78> There's something really odd to me about describing a $100MM acquisition as "middling"; wouldn't that almost guarantee multi-million paydays for the founders?

Yeah, way below Dropbox's valuation, but still significantly more money than I expect to ever be a party to.

<comment><USER77> I said less than $100m. I don't know how much the acquisition was for, but I know it's less than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Oh come on Drew, after ringing that bell I want to see a cool "hi" by dhouston as the top comment.

</comment><comment><USER80> I think the caption "The Summer 2017 Y Combinator Batch – Jessica Sitting with Dropbox Cofounder, Arash" for the image should be 2007? Or am I wrong?

<comment><USER81> Thanks! Let's see if we can get it updated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> lol, I was just 'asking HN' why the DropBox IPO was not #1 on HN. It wasn't even on the front page 5 minutes ago. Thankfully, I decided to check before posting.

Congratulations all around, and we finally get to see whether DropBox is actually minting money or not.

Good Luck!

</comment><comment><USER83> Is Dropbox a buy right now at ~$30? What do you think.

<comment><USER84> Trading at what 10 x sales ? That's a rich valuation. They've gotta show some impressive growth and get more to the bottom line or its coming back to earth.

<comment><USER83> Isn't 10x sales pretty decent compared to the 100x, 200x we seem to see?

<comment><USER85> They had valued themselves at <10bn. That has doubled in 24 hours, thats definitely not positive, if not an ipo strategy

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> cheque

</comment><comment><USER87> I'd suggest Drew now to delete his facebook account like just Elon Mask did.

</comment><comment><USER88> not the best time to go public :) the stock market is about to take a serious hit.

<comment><USER89> Wouldn't that be the best time to go public? Before valuations drop?

Usually you don't want to sell your stock to the public after it's crashed.

<comment><USER88> Sure, we call it pump and dump. Awesome for insiders but terrible for investors. I'm talking from an investor perspective. By going public today it might only benefit a few early birds such as founders, angels, founding team, etc. If the market crashes it's terrible for new investors, anyone who bought the IPO. If you IPO after a storm your stock can only go up from the bottom.

<comment><USER90> That's not what pump and dump means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> Eh they should have stayed private. Private companies have more control over their future. Public companies move to a quarter by quarter cycle and innovation goes at a snail's pace as marketing and bean counters take over.

</comment><comment><USER92> this company has no future. Amazon and Google can kill it easily when they want.

<comment><USER93> They both have competing products (Amazon Drive and Google Drive) and yet Dropbox lives on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> This is nice from a business-perspective.

But, stepping back ... I'm sure that a lot of the folks here would agree that something as basic as file-sync should be a standard part of any OS, and follow a non-proprietary protocol.

So whereas they have turned something that should have been a commodity into a profitable business, I'm not sure what we have achieved here.

<comment><USER95> Drew and Arash went to MIT, where their everyday computing environment was UNIX systems with home directories on AFS. For those who haven't used it, AFS is a networked filesystem sort of like NFS, except with a better authentication model and the ability to support failover on the server side.

AFS, NFS, Coda, 9P, WebDAV, SMB/CIFS, FTP, Windows roaming profiles, AFP, etc. were all around and (to varying levels) built into OSes well before Dropbox. Dropbox was a fundamentally different model: files stay on your local machine and get synchronized, instead of living on the network. The entire idea that live synchronization is the correct approach is almost entirely due to Dropbox's success; any OS designer before 2007 would have said "Yes, we have something as basic as a networked filesystem."

If you're objecting to the fact that it takes a commercial venture to explore and develop these sorts of ideas, I too dislike that we're in that place. But it's _true_. We haven't achieved a way to develop standard computer infrastructure without capitalism, yes; but we've certainly achieved meaningful technology that did not previously exist that's actually working for people.

(And, also, almost all of those protocols I mentioned were developed by profitable businesses like Sun or Transarc or Apple or whomever, and only made non-proprietary at great effort. The ones that started off with public specs, like WebDAV and FTP, were the worst.)

<comment><USER50> "Dropbox was a fundamentally different model"

You mention a bunch of filesystems (some of which with much better scalability than Dropbox), but omit Rsync. Rsync works with any of these filesystems.

The most successful data distribution systems which predate these are from the '90s and before Usenet (esp volume with the binaries) and scene (or FXP). However, the former is mostly public data and the latter is inherently insecure.

Dropbox was nothing special. It was just the first popular one who had a GUI on top of Rsync, and who sold data storage within a package. Its essentially a lucky shot.

WebDAV works great for client-server, but it has a disadvantage: locking works terrible. OwnCloud/NextCloud uses WebDAV, btw.

<comment><USER96> Dropbox is a lot more than a GUI on top of rsync. Even purely from an engineering standpoint (ignoring product & design) that's incorrect.

You might enjoy this talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE4gwstWhmc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE4gwstWhmc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> Surprise surprise. Far-right billionaire factory congratulates employer of war criminals. War makes great business.

</comment><comment><USER98> Let's celebrate AFTER we see what Dropbox does with the IPO proceeds. Here's a to-do list:

1\. Resurrect drop.io product killed by FB.

2\. Acquire HelloSign or build it internally.

3\. Acquire and fix Scribd, and restore document publishing capabilities; or Zoho.

4\. Acquire Zapier or one of their competitors (eg. Integromat).

5\. Acquire Canva, ASCIIflow and PandaDocs.

Thus leaving Box.net in your dust and await acquisition by Salesforce.

<comment><USER99> .. and give us back Mailbox!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Potential customer asked about corporate accounts. What to do?  - <AUTHOR>

I started a "startup" 3 months ago and I've been plugging away at coding and marketing it on the side. I've got a couple of paying customers but things are still pretty raw.
Today a person reached out to me to ask who to contact about corporate accounts. I feel like I need to take advantage of this small opportunity but I'm not really sure how.
It would take me 2 to 4 weeks to have the app ready for enterprise use (as I imagine it) at even the most basic level.
What's my play? <comment><USER2> it could take them that long to sign a contract anyway.</comment>


Cryptanalysis with Reasoning Systems - <AUTHOR> https://chriskohlhepp.wordpress.com/reasoning-systems/gchq-2015-crypto-puzzle-full-analysis/ <comment><AUTHOR> If you want to try solving the puzzle on your own, here's how to get started.

___

(1) Download the single image for the puzzle: [https://www.gchq.gov.uk/sites/default/files/grid-shading- puz...](https://www.gchq.gov.uk/sites/default/files/grid-shading-puzzle.jpg)

(2) Read: In this type of grid-shading puzzle, each square is either black or white. Some of the black squares have already been filled in for you. Each row or column is labelled with a string of numbers. The numbers indicate the length of all consecutive runs of black squares, and are displayed in the order that the runs appear in that line. For example, a label "2 1 6" indicates sets of two, one and six black squares, each of which will have at least one white square separating them.

___

Source: "A Christmas card with a cryptographic twist for charity" (2015)

[https://www.gchq.gov.uk/news-article/christmas-card- cryptogr...](https://www.gchq.gov.uk/news-article/christmas-card- cryptographic-twist-charity)

___

SPOILER-1: The above puzzle links to other puzzles, which maybe found here:

[https://www.gchq.gov.uk/puzz](https://www.gchq.gov.uk/puzz)

SPOILER-2: GCHQ's solutions to all of the puzzles is here: [https://www.gchq.gov.uk/directors-christmas-puzzle- answers](https://www.gchq.gov.uk/directors-christmas-puzzle-answers)

</comment><comment><USER2> This is somewhat interesting, but some of the terminology is idiosyncratic ("lambda closures") to the point of being downright confusing ("attack vector").

The pre-analysis in the _derive-known-plaintext_ is particularly interesting because it's the key to making this tractable. But pieces are missing... Does anyone understand this well enough to explain what _known-plaintext_ and _matrix-match_ would be? I can't even work out their types with confidence.

<comment><USER2> OK, I took what I understood the idea of this preprocessing to be and implemented it in Prolog (257 lines including data and comments, maybe 100 lines of "real" code): [http://pastebin.com/fLXKRKQ6](http://pastebin.com/fLXKRKQ6)

Some findings:

\- I was wondering why the linked blog post didn't show the results of _derive-known-plaintext_ (what I call "preprocessing"). It turns out, this may be because this forward propagation solves the puzzle completely. There is no need for backtracking search, so there is no need for the whole fancy Screamer framework.

\- Since preprocessing solves the problem completely, applying the constraints to its result to "finalize" the solution is instantaneous in Prolog. With Screamer this takes 3 seconds. Screamer doesn't seem to be all _that_ impressive... At least not for this particular problem.

\- In the case where there are no initial marks on the board, after preprocessing having marked almost everything, Prolog finds the four possible solutions in 0.037 seconds on my 2015 laptop. Preprocessing takes a second.

Let me know if you have questions!

<comment><USER3> Author here again: and thank you Tom for your feedback. I'm not the author of Screamer so am not going to defend it's runtime properties. These were not of interest to me and yes I could recode much of what I did in C++ which I am more familiar with than Prolog. I work in low latency trading, so I am happy to take any challenge from Prolog in C++. Bummer would be that I could not publish my solution. The reason Screamer is in there is to allow the problem to be expressed declaratively in terms of universal quantification. See also

[https://chriskohlhepp.wordpress.com/reasoning- systems/specif...](https://chriskohlhepp.wordpress.com/reasoning- systems/specification-driven-programming-in-common-lisp/)

<comment><USER2> > The reason Screamer is in there is to allow the problem to be expressed > declaratively in terms of universal quantification.

Sure, though this particular example doesn't show its strengths very well. Your pre-analysis is so powerful that even in the case where you start with the empty board, any hand-written primitive brute force enumeration technique should be blazingly fast.

> I work in low latency trading, so I am happy to take any challenge from > Prolog in C++.

I'm not saying Prolog is always faster than C++ or Common Lisp :-) I guess I'm saying that every embedding of a Prolog-like system in some other language I have seen so far was less powerful, less elegant, and much less performant than Prolog. This is only partly gloating from a Prolog fan. Another part of me would very much like to have better such systems integrated with other languages.

One drawback of Prolog, of course, is that Prolog can be a bit painful to interface with the rest of your application. Unless, of course, you write everything in Prolog...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most interesting read I had on HN this week. I suggest reading it end to end!

<comment><USER5> that's a great IDEA

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's a great example of using a problem solver system to solve a constraint satisfaction problem! It was a fun read.

One nit to pick with the terminology though: solving a cryptogram puzzle is _not the same thing_ as doing cryptanalysis, eg to determine what constitutes a weak DES key. Not even the same ballpark. ;)

<comment><USER3> Author here: Hello 60654, I fully understand the difference between cracking a run length encoding problem and finding weaknesses in DES. There are many tools at the disposal of a security analyst. Another would be CSP and FDR: [https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http...](https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/courses/cs6431/lowe.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwjSq9Xhu7TRAhWGmZQKHUWjDt8QFggZMAA&usg=AFQjCNGxf3ifVB- gnMR0CieJkcesGsyOow&sig2=05lPggciu8183tXLldnLqA). However, that article, like mine, goes to show how logic programming can very well be used to mount cryptanalytic attacks. It differs from quantitative statistical methods as these exploit different weaknesses. Qualitative vs quantitative. Most of the people with skills in the latter work in quantitative trading and hedge funds - including yours truly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know what the name of the color scheme the author is using in their terminal?

<comment><USER8> That's the default emacs color scheme. The terminal is just SLIME.

[https://common-lisp.net/project/slime/](https://common- lisp.net/project/slime/)

<comment><USER7> thank you!</comment></comment></comment>


A list of books recommended by Adam Robinson - <AUTHOR> https://www.mostrecommendedbooks.com/recommender/Adam%20Robinson <comment><USER2> Just another collection of Amazon affiliate links with no added content (tag=mostrecommendedbooks-20).</comment>