Ask HN: Seeking a technical 'relief pitcher' (yesDater.com) - <AUTHOR>

Note: I hope this sort of post is on the up-and-up on HN.  I don't see anything relevant in the posting guidelines.  If against policy, we will take down
My co-founder and I have been working on yesDater.com for some time now. yesDater is complete refresh of the online dating space; It is not yet another plentyoffish or eHarmony (yes, this is intentionally very vague).
Unfortunately, unforeseen personal circumstances have sidelined my co-founder.  This is made all the more painful because we have made such great progress and my co-founder happens to be the technical lead.  We are approximately 50-75% done in terms of getting a MVP launched.
We are eager to maintain forward progress and not let unexpected circumstance stall our project.  To that end, we are looking to bring in a technical resource to complete the remaining code and get us to launch (and beyond?)
Details:
Technical skills required:
      o	RoR
      o	CSS
      o	JQuery/JavaScript
      o	Understanding of SQL
Design / CSS skills are very important to us at our current stage of development (and because this is a particular skill gap for us)
We are based in Chicago and New York.  Local applicants are preferred
Compensation will be in the form of founder's equity (potentially a considerable portion)
About us:  We are two Kellogg MBA alums with combined technology/management consultancy, Computer Science, and successful startup backgrounds
Please inquire to email@example.com
Thanks all! <comment><USER2> Good luck, and please keep us posted on your success!

I don't have the time to invest. But I wanted to say this -- to a programmer, someone saying the MVP is "50-75% done" really sounds like, "you are going to do way more work than you think. And we will think you only did 25-50% of the work, so you will get screwed on equity."

All programmers are bad at project estimation. Asserting that you are that far along sounds like you're starting the negotiations with, "we have done over half the work, so don't expect tons of equity."

Just my thoughts. Best of luck to you guys.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can respect that perception but it doesn't match the reality in this case. My 50-75% estimate is probably on the conservative side. 4+ months have been spent on the site - it is functional and only requires approximately another 4 weeks worth of works to improve the UI and bug-fix.

In terms of equity: there will be no 'screwing' going on :).

Good to get that feedback though on how this posting can be misinterpreted. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Improving Coding Standards and Quality - <AUTHOR> https://www.gdcorner.com/2019/11/18/ImprovingCodingStandards.html <comment><USER2> How to improve your coding standards and quality: Don't code in Python.</comment>


Stock Options Boost Company Performance only when given to Executives - <AUTHOR> http://www.stanford.edu/group/knowledgebase/cgi-bin/2010/07/16/executive-stock-options-boost-company-performance-but-options-to-rank-and-file-workers-show-minimal-effect/

<comment><USER2> Did they consider that options are pretty complex and for many people, with the amounts offered, they are barely worth the effort. Other than the questionable methodology of the study options are annoying, especially in the small amounts offered to most low-level employees (in the offers that I have received previously and that I've tried to help friends understand). Also, there is the issue that they are only options (usually non-transferable) so you also have to exercise them (that is, pay for them). I've met more than a few people who just haven't had the cash handy to exercise options before they expired. Then there is tax which can take lots of time and money to sort out if you work for a multinational. Perhaps they should have considered that no net gain does not provide an incentive. Unless you work for a company that is going through record growth or you have the personal resources to capitalize on stock (no debts or other things that need cash more urgently) then stock options are practically worthless.

</comment><comment><USER3> So... They use stock price as an indicator of performance, and stock price goes up when options are awarded to executives.

Brillant deduction.

Why don't they look at other factors like production volume or quality, or at indicators like profit-to-cost or overhead, or at long-term markers like workforce and pay growth? After all, these factors affect the economy. Stock price only indicates investor confidence.

... Or is this study meant to benefit only investors and not the workers?

<comment><USER4> I have been saying that stock price based compensation is fundamentally flawed for a while now.

<comment><USER5> So... you were doing 'before it was cool' then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The findings make perfect sense if you re-interpret them as

      Stock Options Boost Company Performance ONLY when given to KEY INDIVIDUALS

In large public companies in most cases only senior executives are able to make an impact measurable enough to move the needle for the entire business. Therefore they are the ones you have to incentivize to make any kind of impact.

In startups a few early employees can make a tremendous contribution or sink the business. Therefore giving them incentives makes a lot of sense. As a startup grows and the impact of specific individuals becomes diluted the stock grants naturally shrink.

Do not forget non-US markets where employees often do not understand stock options at all and therefore have trouble getting excited about them as much as if you simply offer bonuses based on project completion.

All of this may seem unfair to quite a few people, but guess what life is unfair. Get on with it. People do what they are incentivized to do.

</comment><comment><USER7> The study seems to be based on public (i.e. large and mature) companies, which are most likely to have 17 layer deep bureaucracies, and nobody actually listens to suggestions from below the top 2 layers. And top executives tend towards sociopathy.

Conceivably this last characteristic leads to an additional confounding factor - those executives generally have influence over when and how many options to be granted, and would be best positioned to use insider information to put as many of their options in the money as possible. A good example would be the whole options-backdating scandal a while back.

The conclusion seems valid, but just reflects the reality of large public companies.

</comment><comment><USER8> This seems like a good place to pose a question I've been thinking a lot about recently:

What would be wrong with getting rid of options for employees, and just paying market salaries and cash incentives like profit-sharing or bonuses?

HN has been replete lately with stories of early employees getting screwed because they got too little cash and not enough equity. I completely get wanting to let your employees share in the financial success of your business. That's only fair. But equity isn't just about sharing in the financial success, it's also about control. But unless I'm wrong, the 20% option pool for employees is there for financial incentive, not to give employees a vote in the election of the board or something.

So why not just skip the equity mess and reward people with the cash they're trying to use equity as a proxy for?

Of course, this presumes that startups CAN pay people market salaries and HAVE profits, both of which may be pipe dreams. Is that the only reason though? If you started a really profitable company and never gave employees equity, but were very generous with salaries, perks, bonuses, etc., would that dissuade the best from working for you?

<comment><USER9> My preferred solution is consistent market salaries (a la Joel), annual profit sharing (pro rata based on salaries, applies to management too in lieu of bonuses), and a 10% employee bonus pool a la 37 Signals in the case of liquidation.

This essentially gives employees regular shares of the annual windfall and a way to share in any ultimate windfall.

I'd rather my employees get rewarded for their participation in company success regularly, rather than asking them to wait for a sale that may never come. And if an exit materializes, they should get something too.

Then again, my opinions on this may change as I gain more experience as an entrepreneur.

<comment><USER10> " Then again, my opinions on this may change as I gain more experience as an entrepreneur. "

Translation: as I turn in to the typical greedy startup founder shyster

<comment><USER9> Meh, I doubt it. My opinions will change if the approach I am taking now result in significant failures to hire attract desired talent.

My current hypothesis is that potential hires will consider good compensation, regular profit-sharing with the company, and significant upside in the case of an "exit" competitive with (and hopefully much better than) the "normal" offers.

if my hypothesis is disproven, I will need to revisit things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Let me reword that for you: Stock options are more effective when given to people who can actually manipulate the stock price.

</comment><comment><USER12> I can't tell from the article if they adjusted for quantity. Certainly stock options have a larger incentive when you own more of them, which is typical for executives.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why is this not surprising? Who has the power / responsibility to affect things? A lowly poor programmer / line engineer / worker have power only to meet their deadlines. Who can change things? The executives. So providing them with options will make a difference as the incentives are aligned towards people who can make a difference. But the biggest problem of the study? The value of company performance is setup against stock values, which miss the real performance metric: Revenue generation.

</comment><comment><USER14> How much of the stock performance could be accounts from buybacks?

</comment><comment><USER15> Isn't it obvious that bottom line need cash (not options) to meet their needs?</comment>


Auto-generate a quiz from any content using AI - <AUTHOR> https://www.quillionz.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Seems a way off but an intriguing start, managed to create a half decent quiz on plants...potential game changer once its been refined.</comment>


Tim Berners-Lee calls for joint fight against disinformation - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/12/marking-30-years-of-the-web-tim-berners-lee-calls-for-a-joint-fight-against-disinformation/ <comment><USER2> I bought the domain rational.app and secured the name "Rational" app on iOS and Android, in order to do exactly this.

I believe a lot can be done. But there has to be one place where people can come and have structured debate about each claim - news, politics, religion. Today everyone has phones and can be citizen journalists. We just have to make a site where each specific claim has its own page with arguments for an against, listed once and upvoted, and each argument links to one or more claims. The tough part is that this is a centralized honeypot for altering "the truth", and so there need to be high-stakes games for challenging things, where you lose a large % of the karma you accumulated painstakingly and so on. Where someone can vandalize it but it will be quickly reverted by the crowd. At the end of the day, though, it's hard to have the crowd determine the truth in esoteric subjects. Wikipedia has to recruit editors.

Planning to launch it around May 2019. If you're interested in working together on this, contact me, with the name greg, at the domain qbix.com</comment>


Show HN: LoadJS – A tiny async loader for modern browsers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/muicss/loadjs?a=1

<comment><USER2> Very nice! It reminds me of these two loader experiments: [https://curiosity- driven.org/amd-loader-with-promises](https://curiosity-driven.org/amd-loader- with-promises) [https://curiosity-driven.org/minimal- loader](https://curiosity-driven.org/minimal-loader)

But for production builds I highly recommend Almond: [https://github.com/jrburke/almond](https://github.com/jrburke/almond)

<comment><USER3> There's also [https://github.com/systemjs/systemjs](https://github.com/systemjs/systemjs) which aims to implement the ES6 Module Loader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems like just a reimplementation of AMD, a baby RequireJS

<comment><USER5> I find myself using scriptjs (on which this is based) to download browserify bundles for libraries which we don't want on every page load and also to load external API libraries which we want to fetch directly from their publisher (e.g. Mozilla Persona.)

It looks like webpack solves the first problem ([http://webpack.github.io/docs/code- splitting.html](http://webpack.github.io/docs/code-splitting.html)) but for external unmanaged libraries they recommend scriptjs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd been using $script for quite a while until I noticed that it was executing callbacks even when the dependency didn't load. After looking at the source code, I realized that it's because it was designed to work with legacy browsers that don't have onerror callbacks. Since I'm only focused on modern browsers and $script isn't maintained anymore, I wrote LoadJS to add success/fail callback support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://github.com/bricss/dope](https://github.com/bricss/dope)</comment>


Can't Knock The Hustle: Job Search 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://tdevane.tumblr.com/post/1719760087/cant-knock-the-hustle-job-search-2010

<comment><AUTHOR> For all the students searching for a post-graduation job or all the laid off workers, this article by Tim Devane is a great read for anyone beaten down by the job search.</comment>


The Hunt for the Fastest Zero - <AUTHOR> https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/01/20/zero.html <comment><USER2> Duplicated at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22104576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22104576) .

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd use std::memset and have something that works without needing a benchmark to detect obscure template quirks.

<comment><USER4> I agree. Why go through the extra loops? Keep it simple.

<comment><USER5> std::memset only works for sequential and contiguous memory. std::fill works on pretty much anything that has std::begin() and std::end().

As the conclusion of the article says I would use the idiomatic way first, then and only if I have performance issues, actually force it to memset.

The only bad thing here is that, gcc only do the reasonable optimization on '-O3'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, if it's optimised out at "-O3", I usually don't care. If you have some numerical code you can optimise further (even though you're using "-O3" or "-ffast-math"), things become interesting!</comment>


Princeton study: American government doesn't look like democracy for a long time - <AUTHOR> https://mic.com/articles/87719/princeton-concludes-what-kind-of-government-america-really-has-and-it-s-not-a-democracy <comment><USER2> The people with the real power (Senate, Supreme Court, Federal Reserve) are not elected. Vote != Power. The more concentrated power is, the more likely you are to have a really favorable or really unfavorable opinion of The Boss.

A dictator you agree with is so much better than democracy. The thing is that a dictator you do not agree with is much, much worse than democracy. When things are bad, you are arguably better off with someone who will force the right decisions.

Imagine if a dictator outlawed non-renewable sources of energy overnight. Significant short term pain, with (likely) tremendous long term gain for society. Instead, we all come to the consensus that everything is okay in moderation (gas, coal, etc.).

Now, no one person has the power to fix our hardest problems. And democracy seems to breed zero-sum thinking with a focus on competition among political parties. Why not try to work together to solve the problems we face?

</comment><comment><USER3> > The people with the real power (Senate, Supreme Court, Federal Reserve) are > not elected.

My brain is in a slow mode today. Are Senators not elected?

<comment><USER4> Senators have been elected since ratification of the 17th amendment in 1913.</comment></comment>


Are college towns pits of income inequality? - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/inequality-in-college-towns/ <comment><AUTHOR> source: [https://twitter.com/FiveThirtyEight/status/80338926299332198...](https://twitter.com/FiveThirtyEight/status/803389262993321984)</comment>


Show HN: Crushing Our Crowdfunding Campaign (The Love Game) - <AUTHOR>

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/a-game-for-falling-in-love/x/571421
This project got it's start on HackerNews a little over a month ago and has gone on to be featured by TechCrunch, Forbes, ABC, CBS, even "Liked" by Mark Zuckerberg..
The Love Game™ app is now a print BOOK in the Amazon store as well as a card game we are fundraising for on indiegogo.
We were at about 60% of our goal this AM, and then indiegogo featured us in their daily email and the backers have been pouring in since. We are now at 143% of our goal and they keep coming.
Thinking for any HACKERNEWS backers I'll host a private ~1-2 hour google hangout, break down the entire story from idea to posting on hacker news, to the crazy press, to the physical product, to the book, etc. and answer any questions people have and help you all in anyway I can. If you back the project, just let me know you want the HACKERNEWS deal.
Thanks again for the inspiration and support!
Links...
The Love Game™ - Card Game Crowdfund: http://bit.ly/thelovegame
The Love Game™ - Book: http://bit.ly/lovegamebook
Forbes: http://bit.ly/lovegameforbes
TechCrunch: http://bit.ly/lovegametc
Original HN Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8869305
The Original Love Game App: LoveActualized.com
With Deep Love & Infinite Gratitude, Anthony David Adams <comment><USER2> Great play here. Why did you choose Indiegogo over kickstarter?

<comment><AUTHOR> I had a previous relationship with the founder and thought kronism would help.. It didn't. But by the grace of God we were able to build enough momentum over 2 weeks to hit the indiegogo newsletter, which brought us about $5k in 36 hours. We are now at about $8k with 10 days to go.

Also, the flexible funding gave me some sense of sanity as I knew I could produce the product at lower quantities, just wouldn't make any profit.</comment></comment>


Will reading and writing remain important? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=11392128

<comment><USER2> #$%^ you, economist, for thinking we here at YC are stupid enough to fall for such obvious bait.</comment>


Can I download GitHub repos and have user search the code over the web? - <AUTHOR> I am unable to find any code search engine on the web. I tried searchcode.com and all I get is some json that says it didn't find my search terms even though I used simple terms including their examples.<p>I was thinking of creating my own online code search free service by downloading repos from Github and indexing the code. Anyone knows if this not illegal? <comment><USER2> What's wrong with [https://github.com/search](https://github.com/search)? After you search on the left there's a link that says "Code".

<comment><AUTHOR> The other filters don't work. I can select stars or sort by stars.</comment></comment>


SearchableGrailsDomainClassCompassClassMapperFactoryFactory - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gpc/searchable/pull/3

<comment><USER2> OK, so I get that this patch is a joke, but I don't use Grails (or Ruby, or Groovy, or Rails) so I can't tell if this entire project is supposed to be a joke or not. It was merged in, and there was already a SearchableGrailsDomainClassCompassClassMapperFactory in the codebase, so I'm guessing yes? But a lot of the commits don't really seem like jokes...

<comment><USER3> The SearchableGrailsDomainClassCompassClassMapperFactory doesn't look like a joke, only the ...FactoryFactory. I'm guessing this class was chosen because it's the longest name in the Grails codebase. In fact, if you prepend the package name, you get:

grails.plugin.searchable.internal.compass.mapping.SearchableGrailsDomainClassCompassClassMapperFactory

which is even more ridiculously lengthy.

The generated comment "graemerocher merged 1 commit into gpc:master from CounterPillow:factoryfactory 7 hours ago" probably reveals that the nominal project manager just merges in everything without checking it properly, relying on his underlings to do all the real work. The real purpose of the request could have been to expose this.

> I don't use Grails (or Ruby, or Groovy, or Rails) so I can't tell if this > entire project is supposed to be a joke or not

I don't think Grails was intended to be a joke project, but a real way to skim consulting fees away from Rails development. Recently, VMWare retrenched all its 6 programmers working on Groovy and Grails development, not even selling the business so I guess they valued it all as a cost center. So far 4 Grails developers have formed a consultancy at OCI, all strictly consulting only, with no probono work on improving the product. It could be the Grails project manager arranged a backroom deal between VMWare and OCI for transfer of the Grails consultants, with the retrenchment being a smokescreen to ditch the Groovy maintenance programmers -- I wouldn't put something like that past them based on their past behavior.</comment></comment>


Project Euler Humble Return - <AUTHOR> https://projecteuler.net/news <comment><USER2> You can list what problems you've solved by showing an image generated for you.

Ex) [https://projecteuler.net/profile/daguava.png](https://projecteuler.net/profile/daguava.png)

But you can also use this to quickly test the status of accounts.

For example, I was able to find Euler is an admin account by trying

[https://projecteuler.net/profile/euler.png](https://projecteuler.net/profile/euler.png)

It tells you it's admin in the image, why?

Edit: Wonder if they're exposing some vulnerability with the HTTP 300 Multiple Files they're returning.

If you try something like this: [https://projecteuler.net/profile/.wat](https://projecteuler.net/profile/.wat)

the page confirms a .htaccess file exists at [https://projecteuler.net/profile/.htaccess](https://projecteuler.net/profile/.htaccess) we also find one at [https://projecteuler.net/.htaccess](https://projecteuler.net/.htaccess)

While currently inaccessible, this is significant information leak

All directories allow this, so you can do some digging to find what files exist.

Edit 2:while logged in, you can enumerate all usernames with a skill level attached by using URLs like

[https://projecteuler.net/level=1](https://projecteuler.net/level=1)

If you try changing the level to a period, the page conveniently tells you there are over 118k users in total (listing the first 10k), and MAY even show accounts without levels, but I'm not sure.

Combine this with the profile image URLs above and you may be able to find more admin account usernames if they have levels associated with them.

<comment><USER3> So basically, by telling us this, you're completely contravening the request they made that security vulnerabilities be disclosed privately?

Kind of a jerk move.

<comment><USER2> While I am kind of a jerk, I haven't made a vulnerability of it yet, just an info leak that may help someone here complete the puzzle.

<comment><USER4> I think you're confusing "exploit" and vulnerability. An info leak _is_ a vulnerability. Period.

And yes. You completely went around their request, and made this info public without their consent.

Actions like this are _THE_ reason the relationship between vendors and security researchers is strained.

There's a _SPECIFIC_ reason it's considered common courtesy to wait until a vulnerability is patched before public disclosure.

IANAL, but you also violated their ToS by doing this, and if you did this to a site I owned, _especially_ without my consent, I'd be very motivated to contact the proper authorities and pursue civil remedies.

<comment><USER5> _> if you did this to a site I owned, especially without my consent, I'd be very motivated to contact the proper authorities and pursue civil remedies._

Actions like this are _THE_ reason the relationship between vendors and security researchers is strained.

<comment><USER6> Good grief, Americans and threatening to sue anything that moves.

<comment><USER4> First of all, how do you even know I'm an American? Nothing in my post, my bio, or anything mentions that, so that's quite a sweeping generalization, and baseless assumption.

Secondly, why are "non-americans" cool with breaking other peoples shit without permission?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Open source that site. Vet a few devs to have access to the source to begin with then opensource it. Or even better, let the community rewrite the source from scratch. How hard can it be? and there are often a lot of people willing to contribute to open-source projects.

<comment><USER8> "How hard can it be?" <\--- yeah, that's how you end up with vulnerable sites.

<comment><USER9> Not if you make security your number one goal from the beginning. But "letting the community rewrite the site" would be very complicated, especially on a niche website such as Project Euler, where a lot of its users are opinionated and would probably take a long time to reach consensus on anything.

<comment><USER10> If security were really your "number one goal", then you would not create a site at all.

<comment><USER11> Number two after availability, then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> OK, well, here's an initial observation:

1\. Your login page leaks information, as it returns "username not found" if you enter an invalid username. This is a bad idea. Better to simply say "login failed" in any case. Now, thanks to a few minutes of playing around, I have a fairly good idea that "admin" is a valid username on projecteuler.net. For the sake of argument, let's assume that's a real account, and actually has some administrative access... that's a bad idea. "Security through obscurity" is oft derided, but no sense making it easy for the bad guys. Make your admin username "flummoxedrabbit" or something that nobody bothers trying. As it is, I'm hoping this "admin" account is a dummy or a honeypot or something, but if it isn't, I definitely encourage you to change that and quit leaking username validity information.

2\. From the limited testing I did, it doesn't appear that you limit the number of failed login attempts. Or if you do, the login limit is awfully high. I tried logging in 10 times and as far as I can tell, I could have kept going. If there really is no limit, it's probably not that hard to brute force your password. There are plenty of scripts and browser plugins to sit there and try to login repeatedly, trying to brute force forms like that.

3\. In addition to limiting the number of login attempts, it's possibly a good idea to add a steadily increasing delay before accepting another login try from the same IP address, after each failed login. This will slow down at least some attempts to brute force your password.

4\. You could consider some sort of Multi-Factor Authentication setup.

5\. You could also consider adding code to do something similar to what fail2ban does, and automatically block connections from an IP where more than _X_ failed logins originate in some period of time.

<comment><USER13> Regarding #1, telling the user that their login failed doesn't eliminate their ability to enumerate existing usernames. All they have to do instead is attempt to register a new account with the username they're testing. At some point, the site will have to tell them that the username already exists.

#2-#5 are all good points, though, and would help prevent username enumeration as well.

<comment><USER12> _Regarding #1, telling the user that their login failed doesn 't eliminate their ability to enumerate existing usernames. All they have to do instead is attempt to register a new account with the username they're testing. At some point, the site will have to tell them that the username already exists._

Agreed, but I would lean towards giving the bad guys as few tools as possible. If you require a captcha to register, and if you limit the number of registration attempts, you can also cut down on that channel.

That's not to say that this stuff is the be all / end all of course. It would probably be better to eliminate username/password combos altogether and do everything with keypairs, but until that day comes...

<comment><USER14> Except you aren't really limiting the tools available to the bad guys, you are just making the UX worse. I find this 'best practice' annoying design and doubt that it has mitigated any attacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It would be nice if source were provided, so that we can do a whitebox analysis. I don't have confidence that there is one single point of failure here, given that the site has already been compromised multiple times.

<comment><USER16> Especially since PE is such a technically simple site. It's login/logout, listing of problems, and confirmation/logging of problem success. It's simpler than the apps that beginning web framework tutorials show how to make.

<comment><USER17> We see lots of projects on HN that get open sourced. It's surprising nobody has made one yet. I've even seen clones to HackerNews open sourced here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Part of me learning to code was by going through the challenges on Project Euler and I always get a sense of nostalgia when reading about it.

It is a pity it keeps getting hacked. I think that the site owners are more interested in algorithms and mathematics than mundane engineering. It would probably be a good idea to open source the site.

<comment><USER19> I can't imagine the rationale for hacking projecteuler in the first place. Always a favorite place of mine as well and I still bring newbies to the scene there when I attempt to show them the basics of programming. I guess there's just an asshole for everything when you have hundreds of millions of people online these days. Sucks a bit doesn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Despite the whole situation being rather embarrassing, it seems like they're handling this quite well. Whitehat to the rescue!

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't get it why someone would hack project euler.

<comment><USER22> [http://www.hackthissite.org/](http://www.hackthissite.org/) lists "hack project euler" as the final challenge

<comment><USER23> For some reason, I have little desire to follow that link.

<comment><USER24> Do you know who Jeremy Hammond is?

<comment><USER25> Is that the guy from Top Gear?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The ultimate project euler challenge!

</comment><comment><USER27> Cue thousands of determined hackers descending on Project Euler! It would be great if the community could find the exploit and save the site.

<comment><USER28> Finding _an_ exploit doesn't necessarily mean they've found _the_ exploit, unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I can't wait for someone to figure out the exploit. Very excited. Go crowdsourcing!

</comment><comment><USER30> I am unable to login to my account, so I'm not able to test this. But if I remember correctly this site used a poor captcha. There has been a lot of advancement at captcha breaking software in recent years. If they used some kind of custom captcha to prevent password guessing, then it's not extremely secure.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone know how Project Euler was storing the passwords?

<comment><USER32>
        Usernames cannot contain more than 32 characters
        and they may only contain upper/lower case
        alphanumeric characters (A-Z, a-z, 0-9), dot (.),
        hyphen (-), and underscore (_).
        Passwords must contain between 8 and 32 characters.

My money is on "ineptly."

<comment><USER33> There's really not much rational for capping passwords at anything beneath 256 characters.

256 characters makes for a fairly sizable passphrase, and doesn't represent a substantial hit on storage space. In reality, even if they were stored as encrypted binary/base64 in a nosql file system of structured data files, 4096 is pretty much the de-facto floor for disk space occupied by non-zero-byte individual files on most modern file systems.

...variable data size being a concern in cases where the transformed value is encrypted rather than hashed.

<comment><USER34> > 256 characters makes for a fairly sizable passphrase, and doesn't represent > a substantial hit on storage space.

They shouldn't be storing passwords at all so storage space should be a non- issue. My 20 meg password should hash down to the same small(er) value as your 15 character one.

<comment><USER35> When there will be multiple shorter passwords that hash to the same value, is there a point to a 20mb pass?

<comment><USER23> Depends. Can you guess them?

<comment><USER35> If I'm an attacker who is running through hashes...yes. Faster than the 20mb one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Haven't they been wrecked once before this most recent incident?

I find it concerning that folks are so eager to rush back into a warzone when they know it's not safe. Piling onto a recovering website after a cyberattack is akin to running back into a field where landmines were found. Maybe somebody was able to remove a landmine or two, but wouldn't it be wiser to just walk around it?

<comment><USER37> Except that as long as you use a unique password, and don't give any details that you don't mind falling into the wrong hands, there is absolutely _no risk_.

Unlike, for example, actual mines.

<comment><USER38> There is a lot of risk going to a compromised website. You are basically inputting potential malware onto your computer, and, if there are zero-days present on your system, handing control of your computer over to a malware author.

<comment><USER39> Yes, I'm pretty worried about browsing a website with no ads using Chrome on my Linux machine with uBlock origin and Flash disabled.

I think I take greater risks going for a walk in the evening.

<comment><USER38> A random website? Absolutely, 99.999% of the Web is safe. But we're talking about a site which is specifically compromised with malware.

With that said - "Linux" is safe by being such a tiny population of the community that browser malware generally isn't written for it. In general, I take it as a given that people have deleted/disabled flash and java plugins a long, long time ago.

<comment><USER40> > A random website? Absolutely, 99.999% of the Web is safe. But we're talking > about a site which is specifically compromised with malware.

Well, we don't know that, actually. The info given on the PE site say that the attacker gained access to the server and modified the database. Do you have proof that it's serving up malware to visitors?

In any case, it's an odd situation and an odd response from Project Euler. It doesn't seem like a complicated enough site to get hacked in a mysterious undetermined way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I checked the license. It appears that the content is licensed under creative common attribution non-commercial.

I haven't found any indication that the website behind Project Euler is open source or follow open source development processes.

<comment><USER42> So?

<comment><USER43> So, it's much harder for the community to find and report security bugs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It's a shame the maintainer of the site is going to let it fall into obscurity instead of just adopting more modern development practices.

edit. Such as allowing people to audit the source of the site as opposed to requesting pentesting.

<comment><USER45> Please don't post backhanded swipes like this, or outright insults like "This guy is a moron." [1] The idea on HN is to comment civilly and substantively [2], or not at all.

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10023513](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10023513)

2\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER44> Fair enough, just frustrated with the overwhelming number of "the modern internet is broken!!" posts that have been clogging up the front page lately. That also happened to be one particularly light on content.

<comment><USER23> the modern internet _is_ broken

(not to mention interfaces, languages, security, identity, manufacture, physics and pop-tarts)

and if you get upset at people pointing out how much nicer things could be, then things probably wont

<comment><USER44> Again, I understand there are issues with the modern internet, but that article was unironically calling for the return of geocities. It's a hyperbolic clickbait title that has no place in a reasonable discussion about the actual issues that we're dealing with. Beyond that, I even quoted the passage I took issue with.

> In 2015, becoming a Web developer is all about learning Ruby or figuring out > Node.js, not just building cool things you like.

This is patently wrong. Maybe it was harsh to call him a moron but the content was very weak in that particular piece.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Why is project euler not on github? Yeah..no one's gonna help unless you open- source your project buddy.

<comment><USER45> That's not nice. It's also plainly false. Lots of people love Project Euler.

<comment><USER21> Like me. And I would like to help but I know almost nothing about penetration testing. :(

<comment><USER46> Exactly. Source code would help a lot. It's an education site that's extremely amateur in nature. It belongs as open source.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Ameelio.org – Free Prison Communication Platform - <AUTHOR> https://ameelio.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Lead developer here. Ameelio is a non-profit that's building free technology to transform corrections and criminal justice. We've recently launched Letters, our first application that lets loved-ones of incarcerated individuals send physical mail for free. Currently, the situation is that two corporations own communication throughout the prisons and jails in the U.S (Global Tel Link and Securus). They charge ridiculous amounts of money just so that you can stay in contact with your loved-ones. We're hoping to change that.

I actually discovered Ameelio last year through a Hacker News post ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21129557](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21129557)) that didn't gain much attention. Zo, the founder, had reached out looking for support and contributors through a hiring post. When I read the post, I decided to look more into the project. My first thought was just "Wow!". I really vibed with the concept because it's something that hits really close to home.

I've had friends and family that were incarcerated before so I know exactly what it's like dealing with the struggles that come from that experience. When someone is incarcerated, it's not just a punishment for them. It's an attack on their families, as well. In my experience, poverty is oftentimes a direct cause for incarceration. Mistakes are made and you get put into a situation, a system, that doesn't value reformation, but instead looks to profit. To communicate with a loved-one on the inside means spending money that you don't have. If your family is struggling financially, it means that you're out of luck. This shouldn't be the case.

I believe that a system focused on reformation would be much better for our society than a system based on profit. Why should a corporation be able to take control of communication between an incarcerated individual and their loved-ones meahwhile charging high prices knowing that it's their only option? Why have we allowed that to happen? Being a part of this project is my way of stepping up and making sure we can deliver an alternative option for those families that are struggling.

I've received amazing support from this community before and thanks to you guys I've been able to focus my efforts on projects like this. Any and all feedback is welcome. If you're interested in using our app then feel free to check it out. It's free and we'll do all that we can to keep it that way.

<comment><USER2> "Currently, the situation is that two corporations own communication throughout the prisons and jails in the U.S (JPay and Securus)."

Did you experience any issues trying to get into this space? Any push back from the companies mentioned or from any of the state prison systems?

What a great idea! That testimonial from the blind person on your home page is very moving.

<comment><AUTHOR> First I'd like to thank you for the comment. You made me realize a mistake I made in mentioning JPay and Securus when I meant to say Global Tel Link and Securus.

As far as pushback from other companies, we haven't received any so far. There's nothing they can really do besides make their services more appealing. Currently, with Letters (our first app), it allows users to sign up, add their contacts (inmates), and then type out a letter and also are given the option to attach an image. Then we use a third party service, Lob, to print off the letter and send it. Given that we're just working with physical mail, there's absolutely nothing they can do to stop us.

One type of pushback we _can_ receive is from facilities themselves. One facility returned one of our letters and said that you can't have anything in the letter that could be some form of encrypted message or symbol. In our case, that happened to be the bar code used by the third party service to manage their letters.

In the future, we'd like to also offer services like free video chat/messaging. In my opinion, we're not far from being able to offer those kinds of services. I can definitely imagine some sort of pushback happening in that space, but what kind specifically is TBD. I'm excited though, because if we can get to that point, we'll be literally transforming the system.

<comment><USER3> Honest question, because I have no idea how this all works: if people can just send letters for the cost of a stamp then why do they use Global Tel Link or Securus?

Really great thing you're doing here, I hope it all works out.

<comment><USER4> If you think the letter prices are bad, try:

\- $3.15/15 mins for a domestic phone call

\- $15/20 mins video call/teleconference if your jail/prison has them and you/someone else are willing to fork out that much (You may be there a while and so have to stretch whatever money you have left as far as possible)

\- I don't even want to know how much for an international call

\- $1 for a single pack of ramen

\- $5 for a 5oz bag of freeze-dried coffee

And even if you have the money, you'd better hope someone picks up when you get your phonecall and/or that you know people's addresses or phone-numbers offhand.

US Justice system is a nightmare.

Gotta love JPay, Bob Barker, and Aramark.

<comment><USER5> >US Justice system is a nightmare.

I would stop calling it a justice system, we have a legal system for which any "justice" is by pure coincidence

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My name is Gabe and I am one of the co-founders of Ameelio. Though we only launched 4 weeks ago, we have over 1,250 users that collectively sent >3,000 letters across the entire country.

While it's free for us to videoconference on Zoom and Facetime during quarantine, it can cost up to $25 to make a 15-minute phone call to an incarcerated person.

Some of you might be thinking: "Is it just a letter mailing service?" Though for many stamps might not seem expensive, costs add up. Many of the families lost their jobs during the crisis. One in three families with incarcerated loved ones is forced into debt by the cost of visits and exorbitantly priced calls.

In the past weeks, we've learned first-hand from our users about the challenges of staying connected.

* Carol is completely blind and finds it too difficult to send physical mail but has now been able to connect with her incarcerated nephew using Ameelio

* Ellie is stuck in Norway and mail would normally take weeks to send to her incarcerated husband Kasey who is in the US, but with Ameelio she can send mail in 4-6 business days

* Nikki explained to us it is much more meaningful to "read and hold" a letter "close to them" than to send a text message or scanned letter - her husband calls Ameelio letters "little treasures"

* Samantha shared with us that she cannot afford stamps to talk to her husband

Our vision is to keep reconnecting those that are impacted by incarceration through free technology.

<comment><USER7> How does your company handle the costs of mailing or delivering the letters?

<comment><USER8> My name is Zo, I'm one of the co-founders of Ameelio. We are completely self- funded at the moment, so we need all the help we can get! We were recently accepted into one of Mozilla's accelerators, so this will provide us some additional funding. As a 501c3 we're eligible to receive grants and donations, so we're furiously applying to grants and reaching out to foundations. 34% of families with a loved one in prison fall into debt trying to pay for phone calls and visits alone ([https://bit.ly/2YrmyPV](https://bit.ly/2YrmyPV)), so we're committed to keeping our services 100% free.

<comment><USER9> Are you looking for a contributor? I would be happy to volunteer my time. I'm a software developer and am pumped about your mission.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'd love to have some help with development. Please reach out to us. firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER10> My college (Macalester) will definitely have some cs majors willing to volunteer. I suppose you can have them work on some minor/nonurgent tasks. Is this something you'd be open to?

<comment><USER6> For sure! Shoot us a message at firstname.lastname@example.com We really appreciate your help :)

-Gabe

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is already a similar service but it costs (very little) money called jmail.cc that I've been using that prints out letters and photos and mail them for you.

As an ex US federal prisoner (long story, teenager, petty financial hacking crime, extradited from a foreign country years ago) I am intimately aware of the terribad state of Jpay and corrlinks and all the other overpriced communciations methods for prisoners. What I do now is whenever I want to buy a new technical book I usually send it to a random prisoner not incarcerated for something heinous and do it with them via letters, it's good motivation because once a guy in jail for cheque kiting absolutely slayed a vector calculus book I was trying to do and I had to pick up the pace in order to keep up with him.

HN has their list of 'request for startups' and one of them is employ over 1 million ppl and I've always thought that the perfect situation for this is prisoners if you can somehow navigate the political arena to make it happen. There's just tons of people there willing to work and do anything to improve their situation, as long as you aren't Ikea maximum profiteering off convicts and help them as much as you help yourself everything should be cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've seriously enjoyed reading your comments. Would love to get in touch sometime and discuss some ideas. I think the book idea you do is awesome. My email is in my profile. Please reach out if you see this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hi I'm Kiran, the finance manager for Ameelio. We are 100% committed to keeping our tools free for users - they're some of the most vulnerable in society and it is a tragedy that they are getting fleeced by predatory companies.

As our founder said, we're completely self-funded and all volunteers right now. That's to say - we really need $$ to keep sending letters. If you have spare resources during these times, we would really appreciate it if you could help us out and donate! Here's a link: [https://www.aplos.com/aws/give/ameelio/general](https://www.aplos.com/aws/give/ameelio/general)

<comment><USER13> > We are 100% committed to keeping our tools free for users

> Website: "All our users can send unlimited free letters"

But then in your landing page screenshot:

> To celebrate Ameelio's launch, you have unlimited letters! As our community > grows, you'll have access to 4 free letters a month.

So which one is it? To say it's a "free communication platform" with "unlimited free letters" but then to limit it to 4 letters/mo as your "community grows" is disingenuous.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest the 4 letter cap comment is just in case we run out of funding and is subject to change depending on the situation. This isn't some free trial exploit. Nothing we do is disingenuous. We are 100% committed to keeping our tools free for users. I know the world is filled with businessmen trying to take your money, but that's not us. But thank you very much for pointing this out. We need to make sure we're more clear in the future.

<comment><USER13> That's good to hear. I think if you made it clear that the level of service you can provide is proportional to the funding you receive, it would both fix this misunderstanding and serve as an incentive for people to donate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This project makes my heart so full. Thanks for your team's hard work, meaningful and necessary work.

Y'all need to apply for YC's non profit program (edit: I see you're already in Mozilla's accelerator, equally good!). I hope you can scale up to audio and videoconferencing with more resources and backing (donated compute, open source tooling like Jitsi Meet or similar) and chip away at the for profits in the space taking advantage of the families and loved ones of the incarcerated.

<comment><USER6> Thank you so much for your support! This is totally what we envision the next steps to be. Today we had a meeting with Rep. Josh Elliot who's pushing for the free phone call bill here in CT to talk exactly about that.

And thanks for the advice! We'll try to apply for YC's next batch :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's sad that as a society we've allowed those who are serving their time to be exploited, but this is a good way to fight back, and hopefully make exploitation of the imprisoned a less lucrative market for unscrupulous actors.

<comment><USER16> Exactly my thoughts! Really, we shouldn't have prisons at all, or any against- one's-will system. Just take a look at Chicago. With the new attorney general, they've made it a policy to "go easy" on the violent crimes. The bottom line is: no one should be in prison, regardless of the "crime".

<comment><USER17> >Really, we shouldn't have prisons at all, or any against-one's-will system

Then what do you suggest we do with people who are harming people or their property? Speak firmly at them? For pretty much all of human history you have had three options for those who damage peace and society ... death, exile, and jail.

Exile isn't really an option anymore so that leaves death and jail...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I just want to say good luck. There's so much that can be done that isn't. Part of that is the system. Part of that is Securus. Part of that is lobbying. Part of that is just plain lack of innovation.

There's room here to innovate. I had a product that effectively allowed inmates to have a Soundcloud from the prison phone. It pissed off a few people.

<comment><USER19> Could you elaborate on what your experience was and the pushback you received? It would also be interesting to hear a bit more about what you built!

<comment><USER20> Many states ban any kind of social media access by inmates, even through a third party

[https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2017/may/5/texas- prison...](https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2017/may/5/texas-prison- system-bans-social-media-prisoners/)

Obviously there's some nuance as to whether Soundcloud is social media, but the bigger point is that prisons want to control inmates' ability to communicate

<comment><USER21> >the bigger point is that prisons want to control inmates' ability to communicate

For good reason. Uncontrolled inmate communications result in things like murder:

"The complaint alleges that Corbett planned several killings with Ronald Dean Yandell, aka Renegade, an Aryan Brotherhood leader who prosecutors say sits on the three-man commission that runs the gang. Corbett and Yandell were incarcerated 220 miles apart from one another, but regularly communicated through contraband prison cell phones, prosecutors say." [https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/02/01/ca-inmate-was- killed-...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/02/01/ca-inmate-was-killed- minutes-after-prison-gave-him-aryan-brotherhood-associate-as-new-cellmate- lawsuit-says/)

"Consider the case of a, a 38-year-old Maryland resident who had the bad luck to witness a street murder in Baltimore and the rare courage to agree to testify against the accused killer, Patrick Byers. According to prosecutors, Byers acquired a phone while awaiting trial in Baltimore's City Detention Center. He obtained Lackl's name, address, and phone number and allegedly texted that information to a friend on the outside, along with an offer of $2,500 to get rid of Lackl. On July 2, 2007, the friend rounded up a couple of thugs and drove out to Lackl's modest suburban home, where authorities say the crew blasted him to death with a .44 Magnum." [https://www.wired.com/2009/05/ff- prisonphones/](https://www.wired.com/2009/05/ff-prisonphones/)

"While authorities say Johnson is the first corrections officer in the U.S. harmed by a hit ordered from inmate's cell phone, other people have been targets. In 2005, a New Jersey inmate serving time for shooting at two police officers used a smuggled phone to order a fatal attack on his girlfriend, who had given authorities information leading to his arrest." [https://newsone.com/753345/prisoner-ordered-hit-outside- of-p...](https://newsone.com/753345/prisoner-ordered-hit-outside-of-prison- with-smuggled-cell-phone/)

There are more examples, but I think these illustrate that it's a very good idea to have control over inmate communications.

<comment><USER22> We don't need to restrict inmates free speech as conspiring to murder someone is already illegal.

<comment><USER21> You probably want to at least monitor their communications though; there is essentially no right to privacy for prisoners unless they are communicating with counsel. That means restricting the types of communication they can use (if only for practical reasons).

I think most people would agree we all want to avoid scenarios like this:

"Inside rolls of razor-wire fence, behind a network of heavy metal doors, locked alone in a North Carolina prison cell for 23 hours every day, a high- ranking gang leader directed accomplices in Georgia to carry out a contract killing. Step by step over a smuggled cellphone, the prisoner instructed gang members in chilling detail: "Gag him real tight. Put something in his mouth. Put something over his head." The plot, to kill a prosecutor's father, was foiled in April 2014. The inmate – a founder of the United Blood Nation – was sentenced in November to life plus 84 months on kidnapping and related charges." [https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/crime/article15...](https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/crime/article152334207.html)

<comment><USER23> It seems your fundamental premise that is that since a few prisoners are very risky, we should impose extremely harsh measures on all of them regardless of what got them in there the first place. Is that right?

That's a problematic viewpoint because the same argument can apply to any free person today: "some people in this neighborhood committed some crimes a while ago so let's keep an extra eye on those in the zipcode. Maybe wiretap their houses and restrict communication."

Will that sit well with you?

Those who profit off the prison industrial complex and those who simply hate certain populations want you to believe that our prisons are full of extremely violent people who should be dehumanizing and taken from society as punishment. A lot of people are there because they had the wrong skin color, got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, are truly innocent, got thrown in jail for a harmless "crime" like having weed, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This looks fantastic. One bit of feedback: the lack of a Paypal option for donating almost stopped me from donating. The fees might be worth the security guarantee.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll get that fixed ASAP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Do you need volunteer developers or other types of professionals?

<comment><AUTHOR> We could use all the help we can get. If you'd like, just reach out to our email with what you're interested in helping with or any skills you may have. I'm sure we can figure out something and I'm thankful you're interested in helping us!

email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a really wonderful thing you're doing. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER27> Are you all working with

[https://www.flikshop.com/](https://www.flikshop.com/)

?

If not, I'm happy to put you in contact.

Do you have any (formerly?) incarcerated members on your leadership team?

</comment><comment><USER28> Are your products open source so volunteers can contribute?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm really glad you asked. Initially, the plan was to open source all of our tools. However, we decided to hold off on that until we pick an appropriate license for each project and do some more planning. We're looking for volunteers though and I would love to work with you on this. Feel free to contact us. firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is a good cause, but the headline given to this post threw me.

Clearly, it's meant as "make communication between prisoners and their loved ones outside of prison free of cost"

But because of the phrasing, I read it as "make prison communication-free" or "make it be such that prisons are free from communication" which is a scary draconian dystopia that I can sadly imagine happening in my and many other parts of the world.

</comment><comment><USER30> > Nearly one in two Americans has a family member who is either currently or > formerly incarcerated. > 34% of families with a loved one in prison are sent > into debt by the cost of maintaining contact.

Can you add links to the sources for these stats? They just sound unreal and I'd like to understand better how the cost of maintaining contact becomes so high.

<comment><USER8> Hi, this is Zo (co-founder).

"Nearly one in two Americans has a family member who is either currently or formerly incarcerated."

Source: Cornell University & Fwd.us study

[https://www.fwd.us/news/groundbreaking-report-half-of- all-u-...](https://www.fwd.us/news/groundbreaking-report-half-of-all-u-s- adults-have-immediate-family-member-currently-or-previously-incarcerated/)

"34% of families with a loved one in prison are sent into debt by the cost of maintaining contact."

Sources: [https://nyti.ms/35qNlNZ;](https://nyti.ms/35qNlNZ;) [http://whopaysreport.org/executive- summary/](http://whopaysreport.org/executive-summary/)

Here are some additional sources on the exorbitant costs loved ones of the incarcerated face:

NYTimes: [https://nyti.ms/3aVrqzD](https://nyti.ms/3aVrqzD) Marshall Project: [https://bit.ly/2y95Avf](https://bit.ly/2y95Avf) Wired: [https://bit.ly/2xsGRBJ](https://bit.ly/2xsGRBJ) Prison Policy Initiative: [https://bit.ly/3d3DtMw](https://bit.ly/3d3DtMw)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Awesome mission, wishing you guys all the best.

But Ameelio sounds like Emilio. Using latino men's names is probably not the most appropriate idea for this

</comment><comment><USER32> Seems like a worthy goal. Hoping for your success.

Some sour negativity for good balance, from someone unfamiliar with criminal systems :

Are there mechanisms in place for verification of the sender and some potential criminal misuse of your platform?

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm Jenny, and I am currently the Growth and Social Media Manager in Ameelio. We've been working hard to reach out to different organizations that work with incarcerated people and immigration detention centers to further spread the influence we can have, alleviating burdens - financial, emotional, and physical - that family members feel.

The Ameelio Ambassadors has been a great help towards spreading the word. They are a group of people who are passionate about bringing a change to the current communication system in prisons and detention centers, volunteering to increase awareness about the service we provide. Together with their help and the support we are receiving from organizations that responded to our outreach, I believe that Ameelio will able to bring tangible changes to the current communication system, envisioning a legislative change in the future that would provide the people with their basic needs: communicating with their loved ones with no burden.

<comment><USER34> You should get in touch with Unloop in Seattle - they teach programming in prison and have a small freelance dev shop staffed by people who went through their program. [https://www.un-loop.org/](https://www.un-loop.org/)

<comment><USER8> Zo (co-founder). Thanks for sharing, we will definitely reach out to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Awesome work, looking forward to seeing this really take hold. This can be such a blessing to families and the mental health of inmates. Too many times have friends and family in lockup gone long times without hearing from loved ones because of the costs involved. Keep up the great work for a great cause.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is truly an amazing cause! Incarcerated people and their families deserve better, and Ameelio's organization and outreach is going to provide an incredible impact. I cannot wait to watch this organization grow!

<comment><USER8> Thanks so much! Really appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I read this headline as "Making Prison Communication-Free" and thought it was some sort of cruel experiment

<comment><USER38> If there's a better wording, we can change it.

Edit: I've changed it to the HTML doc title for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Just a tip upon first glance...

You might want to make the homepage a bit more politically correct by changing up the first (and only?) two incarcerated ethnicities from being Black and Hispanic.

I am aware they make up the majority of the American prison population, but they really shouldn't.

Seems like a worthwhile project though. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER40> is Gil Amelio involved in this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope! The name is inspired from the word "Ameliorate", meaning "to make better".

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is just Zoom. The partners and sponsors almost all conspicuously mention Zoom meetings and Zoom Celebrations on their websites. Especially because of the major WSJ story today on Zoom and the origins of the Coronavirus, it seems very implausible that anyone mentions Zoom anymore overtly without having an agenda.

The co-founders are all from Yale, and have the best of intentions, but don't realize they have to some extent been manipulated.

I think this phrase was a little concerning as well. There is a decent historical record that has been built up over the last 10 years of stuff like this being abused: "We also use machine learning tools to make predictions". What are they trying to forecast? When did talking and letter writing necessarily need machine learning? I'm not at all saying it is dumb...but we should approach all of this with caution and hesitancy.

<comment><USER8> Hi, I'm Zo (co-founder). We have no affiliation with Zoom. But given the fortune they've made recently, we would certainly appreciate it if they donated ([https://bit.ly/2z7J4CP](https://bit.ly/2z7J4CP)).

While many of us are Yale students, we come varying backgrounds. I'm a Nigerian-American (born in Chicago, spent my early childhood in Nigeria, and now live in CT). Gabe is Brazilian, Jesse is from Iowa, etc. We all connected on this project because we are committed to social innovation and want to do all we can to stop the exploitation of loved ones of incarcerated people, who are disproportionately low-income.

Re data and prediction: scholars of incarceration lament the dearth of data on the criminal justice system.

NYTimes- "Missing: Criminal Justice Data" ([https://nyti.ms/2FUEkDq)—](https://nyti.ms/2FUEkDq\)—) "Criminal justice data in this country is hard to come by. It can be messy and difficult to understand. And in many cases, the data doesn't exist at all...Missing data is at the core of a national crisis."

John Pfaff- Locked In ([https://amzn.to/3aZYB5X)—](https://amzn.to/3aZYB5X\)—) "Perhaps even more troubling, there are some issues where we simply have no data, where almost nothing at all is gathered."

Elected officials are creating criminal justice policies, that impact millions, with limited information. We want to inform better policymaking using data analytics. The folks are Measure of Justice ([https://measuresforjustice.org/about/overview](https://measuresforjustice.org/about/overview)) are leading way, and we want to help where we can.

Scholars of algorithmic bias have convinced me that algorithmic risk assessment has disparate impact on minority groups, so I'm personally not in favor of these tools ([https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/1/eaao5580;](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/1/eaao5580;) [https://ssrn.com/abstract=3257004](https://ssrn.com/abstract=3257004)). We will not be doing any risk assessment etc. Using past data to better understand and predict how the state prison populations might change in the future could yield insightful information.

In my home state of CT, "between 2008 and 2018, the state prison population has fallen by 30 percent, and the minority prison population has dropped by 32 percent" ([https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2019/02/13/ct-prison- populati...](https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2019/02/13/ct-prison-population- on-the-decline/)). The article also notes:

"Marc Pelka, undersecretary of the Connecticut Office of Policy and Management's Criminal Justice Policy and Planning Division, told the News that while it is "hard to pinpoint a single policy or trend," he named a few reasons for the decline in state prison population."

Understanding why states like CT have been effective in reducing their prison population could help other states do the same. I really appreciate the feedback, we will make our language around data analytics more clear. Please keep the comments coming!

Zo</comment></comment>


Kiss of Death – Contract Provisions Entrepreneurs Should Avoid at All Costs - <AUTHOR> http://www.infochachkie.com/?p=225

<comment><USER2> Good article. I think it's a great to point out these points of agreements, show who's interest they serve, how & why you should avoid them. I wouldn't be surprised if author agrees with me but...

 _never agree to any of the following Kiss of Death Provisions_

is a bit strong. Sure it's important to understand that these are potential problems, disadvantages or lost opportunities but I imagine there are many agreements including these clauses that are better then no deal.

Take the famous Microsoft/IBM deal. Sure, young Gates made history by keeping control of everything that mattered & cutting IBM out of the game. But what if IBM had been as smart as hindsight? Depending on available OS alternatives, IBM probably had enough leverage to get pretty much all of those provisions. It still would have been a big deal (for Microsoft) to get that deal done. It still would have probably been the deal that shaped the company.

It may have in itself pushed them comfortably into the 11 digit sales, put them in a good position to develop applications & be a successful (but normal) software company. so basically still a deal worth taking.

Again with hindsight, it would have been an opportunity missed. A big one worth (if you can handle huge gambles) endangering the deal altogether.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe the best thing I've ever read here. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah - that site has quite infrequent posts, but most of what I've read there is good stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> kind of long, but a good read. Thanks

</comment><comment><USER5> That was really good! Thanks!</comment>


Open-source your product - <AUTHOR> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=364526

<comment><USER2> _The product is valuable because of the thousands of small decisions you made as you were developing the product. The source code is just the manifestation of those decisions. In other words, the product is valuable because of its design, not because of the source code that describes that design. Just because someone has access to a product's source code doesn't mean they can make valuable decisions about it._

That's the key insight of Peter Naur's classic article "Programming as Theory Building". (That's Naur as in BNF.) He starts with the question: why is it that code, even well-written code and even well- _documented_ code (rare as that is) isn't sufficient to allow a new team to effectively take over development of a system? His answer: the program is not the source code, but rather a shared mental construct (he says "theory", you said "design") that lives in the minds of the people who made it. Source code is a textual representation of that construct, but it's a lossy one. So if you lose all the original people, it's hard to reconstruct the program.

Edit: I posted the article to YC ages ago but that link is broken. You can get it here: [http://web.archive.org/web/20080209152318/http://www.zafar.s...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080209152318/http://www.zafar.se/bkz/Articles/NaurProgrammingTheory)

<comment><USER3> Fascinating! Thanks for making the connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I write a small Mac shareware program. Perhaps the suggestion isn't aimed at me, but if I open sourced the whole thing, one person with enough knowledge could compile it and distribute to everyone else for free. I have little doubt that sales would be hit very hard.

Web apps might be a bit more suited to it once they have momentum and users. If Facebook released its source code (security issues aside), it wouldn't make a difference to them -- people join and use Facebook because all of their friends use it, and that's got nothing to do with the source code.

</comment><comment><USER2> One thing you didn't really address is what the benefits of open-sourcing your product would be. Unless I missed something, the discussion so far has only been about the (real or imagined) downside.

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=364703>

<comment><USER2> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm confused - are we meant to comment on this or the comment it links to?

Not sure why this was posted as a top level story. Make it into an Ask HN or something at least.

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted it as a toplevel so that the idea would gain more exposure. (I certainly don't care about karma -- it's meaningless.) I'm genuinely interested to know what people think about the idea of open-sourcing their product at launch. And the more people who give their opinion, the better.

Feel free to leave a comment here or in the other thread.

<comment><USER5> Well I'm probably just being a stick in the mud - but that seems like a bad idea. If everyone posted comments as threads the top page would be a cluttered mess.

<comment><AUTHOR> Only if everyone made insightful or otherwise useful comments, which the community then upvoted. That would be a good thing, not a bad thing.

Also please consider that I spent a good deal of time on crafting my reply, in the spirit of hopefully helping someone (and not to read myself talk). Also, my reply was about a totally different topic than the thread it was inspired by.

<comment><USER6> Your post definitely was worth submitting as a topic, agreed. I don't think that it's worthwhile too often, but in this case it's thoughtful, well- written, and interesting. Better than most blog posts I've read recently.

I had a comment of mine submitted as a post a while back, and I was very grateful - I thought the comment was worth a post. If comments are valuable stories, then, I don't see a problem at all with your self-submitting this one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Only think of this:

Our personal thinking is never 'Open Source', we always keep some more-or-less decisive part secret (read: protected!), and this for good reasons.

To open-source everything would be very similar to showing yourself naked everywhere...

But I agree that commonly used libraries should be open source (the ones I use are _all_ open source).</comment>


Invoice Bubble: Please review and let me know your thoughts - <AUTHOR> https://invoicebubble.com

<comment><USER2> I am not a native English speaker, I might not get the feel of your domain name right. Having the word bubble in your name doesn't really convey trust to me. Do native speakers feel the same?

<comment><USER3> It doesn't really have any connotations for me in this context. Obviously, if it were to do with investments, 'bubble' would be an odd choice. In the context of invoices I don't think it really means anything.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, I thought this would be a cool css / js tooltip effect or something.

<comment><USER5> I thought it would be some article about the difference between cash and accrual accounting, and how temporary differences in these numbers can cause (short-term, but potentially fatal) problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> :) sorry to disappoint! sounds like a good idea for an article.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure I'm disappointed, really; just slightly surprised.

Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very nice design. A few thoughts:

1\. Your testimonials would be better with names, I think.

2\. I would like to see some data-export options, just so I know that I wouldn't have to start again entirely if I stopped liking your product.

3\. Your pricing page says "We offer a free plan to get you started, then a paid plan that has all the features and no limitations for a tiny $5 per month". This is a little confusing, because you're also offering me a free trial to get me started. Your free version distracts a little from your paid product, which is already very good value. Do you need a free version? Consider dropping the free version entirely, or dropping it from the signup options, so that I get started on a free trial of the full product, but can switch down to the free one if I like. I'm guessing it'll be easier to get people to pay to keep using features than to pay to use ones they haven't used yet and don't know they need (which would happen on the free plan route).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks. 1) Yup, ok will put those in. 2) There is already data export for everything. 3) You are 100% right and I need to sort this out.

Thanks for your helpful feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Site looks lovely. If you can work out how to tell when an invoice is paid through the system (without trusting the user to tick off the invoice as paid) I would suggest offering the service with no sign-up cost and charge a % of the paid invoices.

There's a reason most every payment site does it this way :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey. Yeah that's an option. Last month we helped our users create over $50,000 in invoices (thats invoices that were paid), so a percentage would be an interesting idea. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if invoicing alone is worth paying for...

Although I know my feelings are inaccurate, I've never minded invoicing because I am asking for money. I actually somewhat enjoy it. It equates to income.

By the time invoicing becomes a serious drain on productivity, I'm already doing well enough to have that function covered either via an accountant or just an accounting software system.

So yes, you are solving a problem -- but a pretty darn minor one... will people really pay for that?

</comment><comment><USER8> I like it a lot! My only nitpick is on the pricing page: "yearly price." I prefer using "annual" instead of "yearly," but I don't know if that's a cultural thing ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, where are you from?

<comment><USER8> England originally, and now in Poland, which has done nothing but utterly confuse my English ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks good.

I think it would be a good to put the "pricing" button after "take a tour" and "try it free". Right now you need to look hard to find it. :)

</comment><comment><USER10> It's good but I'm not sure on the pricing. (Incidentally why is this "hidden" at the bottom of the front page?)

I'm comparing it to Google Checkout as it's what I currently use to take payments. How does it compare?

The first thing is that I don't know how you're taking money from the clients or prompting them to pay. Do they pay via PayPal or Google Checkout or do they have options? "get paid online through PayPal" would suggest they do.

If so, how do you make money? What's your secret to getting such a low price? I think I'm paying Google several hundred each month to process my payments (PayPal would be the same) so are there hidden charges?

Is there an API? It's nice (and crucial for me being able to scale) not having to process all my clients manually.

Please correct me if I've completely gone off the plot but this is my stream of consciousness. I do like the front page!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey. API is in development yes. Yes well Paypal will take their 3.4% off you, we are literally just storing your invoices and connecting your clients with Paypal. We don't take any payments from your client - it goes direct through to Paypal. Feel free to contact me if you want to talk more about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This instantly reminded me of BillMeBob.com

However, BillmeBob does nothing but create an invoice. You beat them here by integrating with paypal, but why pay you AND paypal to get paid?

You are basically a "value add provider" so make sure your pricing points are right. The "Project Bubble" page does a better job of pricing comparisons.

To me, both "Project" and "Bubble" are offputting. When it comes to getting paid, people may not want to use a product called "Project" as it could convey unreliability. You obviously have some affinity for the word "Bubble," so maybe try to find another phrase that more accurately describes your business and is catchy.

Otherwise great work on the software, look, and feel!

Maybe "PayBubble" or something?

</comment><comment><USER12> The site looks nice: clean lines, etc. - but I'm left wondering why I would use your service over Freshbooks, which seems to have more features (all be it only 3 free clients to your 5).

I think your "tour" needs to have a lot more information: you show a tiny piece of an invoice, how about a sample PDF? A video intro to the creation of an invoice would be great.

Lastly, while live help is always appreciated as an _option_ , I would definitely stray from sending messages to online users in that live help popup without them asking for it... kind of creepy.

</comment><comment><USER13> Design looks great, though on the home page your two buttons are competing for attention. Ideally, have just a single button there. Or make one larger than the other. I think the homepage is too _light_ to excite a potential customer. Also, somehow I have hard time distinguishing it from other invoicing apps. Maybe you would want to answer why is it different?

A small typo in your testimonial. Spelling of definitely here -> "definately switching to this"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, I'll fix the typo. Let me know if you think that Project Bubble's home page is any more exciting. I have spent a lot longer on that one (from a marketing angle): <http://projectbubble.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of the clearest landing pages I've ever seen. The green color gives me associations to safety -- something I'd want in a service which handles my payments.

</comment><comment><USER15> This site is great, I plan to use it soon.

I wish it said something about paypal more clearly on the home page. Finding out whether or not you provide payment processing options took some looking. Overall it looks great.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just put a LiveHelp thing in, so if you want to talk to me about Invoice Bubble you can on the site. I also disabled Forced SSL, so it should be faster now - thanks for your feedback everyone.

<comment><USER16> BTW going to a page with SSL (like "Try for Free") makes the chat area show "Olark: Upgrade your account". Could be a bit confusing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As of the writing of this post your site is impossibly slow or dead.

<comment><USER13> It is on HTTPS, maybe that is why?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh yes... the whole site is on HTTPS.

I'm not sure what the best approach is for the SSL. It looks good when people go to the site and see the seal, they know its a secure site. But it can slow things down. I could make it so that only the actual logged in interface, and the signup page are secure. What do you think?

<comment><USER18> SSL is very resource intensive. I can understand wanting to show security on the homepage but you should definitely turn it off for the site tour and other pages like TOS.

<comment><USER19> That site even use https to serve images. Btw, Ask HN: I'm planning to setup a site hosted in linode540/slicehost512 and serve all but images/css/js in https, and expecting about 5k-10k page views a day. Will that slicehost/linode instance be enough?

<comment><USER20> You can't really serve all but images in SSL as unfortunately browsers complain about this. We tried it but people constantly ask us why they get alerts (IE) and there is a "caveat" to the lock in Firefox. Sad but true.

<comment><USER19> Ouch! I use my own generated ssl certificate for development and doesn't realize this. Now, seeing where all https domains serve their image, I see that you are right. It saddens me, but thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Shouldn't SSL be part of the basic package? Having to pay for it seems a bit off, especially for something high in personal data, like invoicing.

Edit: looks good, btw

</comment><comment><USER22> Beautiful site. How do you provide subscription based payments?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for the comments. So Paypal handle the payments at the moment. Not ideal - but 1) people trust and recognise the Paypal brand 2) it's great for startups because there isn't any investment needed to set it up or integrate it. But you lose out when it comes to the 3.9% they take on the payments. Long term I will probably end up using CheddarGetter or similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks very interesting. I am (slowly!) building a site on the weekends in a similar (non-competitive) area. Do you plan to develop an API?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, building the API and the iPhone app at the moment. Should be ready soon.</comment></comment>


Best Books for Python Programming - <AUTHOR>

Okay, I am not new to programing, and I know the basics of python. I am looking for a great book to teach me python on the summer. I want to know the basics as well as the more advanced features, or at least have them all available.<p>Any recommendations? <comment><USER2> Once you learn the basics, try just reading through your favorite open source project. I find it to be most helpful to read other people's code to get better at understanding the innards of a language.

Also, make changes, rework it, add debugging info, go nuts! Reading and especially editing the code of others is a great way to learn a language, imho.

Just pick something that people accept as well-engineered or at least popular enough such that enough developers saw the code to make it correct and 'pythonic'.

</comment><comment><USER3> Free books:

<http://diveintopython.org/>

<http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/> (txt processing)

<http://www.swaroopch.com/byteofpython/>

<http://homepage.mac.com/s_lott/books/python.html>

<http://homepage.mac.com/s_lott/books/oodesign.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm kind of in the same boat, but I think we should define what we want better.

The first thing you are going to want is a learning-python type book. Don't expect this to be a good desk reference. After you've "learned" python you're going to want a desk reference for use while making your app.

I don't know which book you should get... but I could use a programming-python book for experienced programmers... If I find I want to use it for a project (which is likely) I could use a python reference.

Any suggestions for alexnb185 and me?

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always liked: <http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Dive into Python is a good book. Its available online.</comment>


Original Star Wars Concept Art Illustrations by Ralph McQuarrie - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/danieldalton/stunning-star-wars-concept-art-ralph-mcquarrie

<comment><USER2> Fantastic! Every single one of the illustrations are worthy of being hanged on a wall!</comment>


Every Clojure Talk Ever - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlPaby7suOc <comment><USER2> The gist for those wondering if they should watch this half an hour long talk: it's meant to be funny. You'll probably learn nothing about Clojure or any other technology.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if nothing is the word. I never used Clojure before and just noticed the REPL takes 5 seconds to start here ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did anyone else find the macro at 13:05 kind of enticing? Obviously the name is tongue-in-cheek, but it felt eerily like something I'd be happy using.</comment>


"Eternal" solar airplane flies for 2 weeks, breaks records - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12074162

<comment><USER2> If produced in mass numbers, these things could replace satellites for most communication tasks.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps not completely replace, but the article does mention providing/improving communications in areas of rough terrain where line-of- sight may be difficult to achieve with an orbiting satellite.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you backup your DB? - <AUTHOR> Feel free to include where your db is stored (bare metal, cloud, managed), how often, how you do it and a short story about recovering your db. <comment><USER2> 1\. mysqldump.... > $curr_date/backup.sql

2\. aws s3 sync $curr_date s3://mybucket

The 2 steps above go into a crontab.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hosting on digital ocean, backup on S3 Amazon, hourly database backup.

</comment><comment><USER4> Rackspace cloud, backed up via CodeGuard to Amazon S3 daily.</comment>


Amazon Is So Nice It Makes Your Personnel Information Public If You Criticize It - <AUTHOR> http://www.seattleweekly.com/home/961299-129/amazon-is-so-nice-to-employees <comment><USER2> Amazon PR guy's behavior is debatable and has been debated, but this article and its misleading title do not improve the debate. HN itself is host to dozens of Amazon employee/critics that have not seen personnel info leaked. also, "criminal activity" is a bit beyond "personnel info". Am I leaking personnel info when I tell someone about a coworker who scammed a customer?

<comment><USER3> It you're the employer making the allegation, you can be sued.</comment></comment>


Show HN: 4snakes – a classic Snake game but with 4 snakes - <AUTHOR> https://xojoc.pw/games2d/4snakes/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone! I wanted to learn Typescript and experiment with PWAs[1] so I decided to create these little games. In fact if you go to [https://xojoc.pw/games2d/](https://xojoc.pw/games2d/) in some mobile browsers you'll receive a prompt to install the games. They should work offline too.

You can find the code on my GitHub: [https://github.com/xojoc/games2d](https://github.com/xojoc/games2d)

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps)

<comment><USER2> Mate, this is sick! Incredible job!

You should totally publish this to Google Play! (it's very little effort)

See the guide from Google [https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/02/using- twa](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/02/using-twa)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately it looks like the game fails with an error in Safari if you eat food :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, unfortunately I cannot test on Safari. Could you send me a screenshot of the console/error? Thank you!

<comment><USER4> Not OP, but this is the error I'm getting in Safari: [https://imgur.com/a/bIHP8I5](https://imgur.com/a/bIHP8I5)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I opened an issue: [https://github.com/xojoc/games2d/issues/10](https://github.com/xojoc/games2d/issues/10)

I'll try to find out the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I get 4 snakes, can control one, the rest remain stationary. It will then also show circle-food thingies that jump around, but always of a color that's not mine.

I suspect that's not how it is supposed to play, no? Using Mobile Safari.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi eps, you're supposed to control only one snake at a time. When the snake eats some food (i.e. the circles) the snake of the corresponding color starts to move.

Sorry for the confusion... btw, under the game there's a short description of the game.

<comment><USER6> I don't see it worked like that. After eating a food no snake moves. I'm on mobile safari.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ops, there's a bug with Safari: [https://github.com/xojoc/games2d/issues/10](https://github.com/xojoc/games2d/issues/10)

Sorry for the confusion!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This makes me want to try a version where you control two snakes at once.

The steering interface is much harder than the traditional 4-direction version. (Not saying that's good or bad, just saying it.)

<comment><USER8> I wrote a simultaneous control version a long time ago (very naive game implementation, please forgive the code): [https://github.com/J-Swift/clj- multi-snake](https://github.com/J-Swift/clj-multi-snake)

Its pretty difficult to play actually. I find the best method is to control one in a circle while capturing with the other.

<comment><USER7> Interesting. Now I"m wondering how to motivate someone to use both of them. Maybe two different kinds of food, specific to each snake?

<comment><USER8> It has that feature already : )

3/4 of the food are for either snake, 1/4 is for a particular snake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Neat little game, but the controls suck.

I think it'd be a lot easier to control the snake if you had the turning radius start wider and decrease over dozens of frames of constant turning before clamping to the tight one you currently use initially. That way the player could modulate turning a bit to maintain a larger turning radius, as well as make subtle corrections with small taps.

</comment><comment><USER10> The game is lots of fun and a creative take on snake. The sound effect is very loud though. Cool work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! In the upper left corner you can lower the volume. I should probably make it lower by default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I also was confused by the 4 snakes concept. I think perhaps it could have been solved by putting a different color food in front of the snake when the board is initialized. This way the "time to snake change" is reduced drastically.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi sc9311, I like the idea, thanks!

(I opened an issue to track it: [https://github.com/xojoc/games2d/issues/11](https://github.com/xojoc/games2d/issues/11))

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I officially suck at this game, but it is pretty cool :-)

</comment><comment><USER13> this is a great game, I only with it had less degrees of freedom (I.e. only 4/8 directions), it's super difficult to control while also thinking for me :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi riffraff, 4 directions always felt "artificial" to me, maybe with 8 it could work!

Thank you for trying the game :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Game halts on iPhone 6 safari in food eat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, seems to be a problem with Phaser in Safari when playing a sound: [https://github.com/xojoc/games2d/issues/10](https://github.com/xojoc/games2d/issues/10)</comment></comment>