UK Needs An Acquisition Culture To Have a Sustainable Startup Culture - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/08/the-uk-needs-an-acquisition-culture-if-its-to-have-a-sustainable-startup-culture/

<comment><USER4> The "successful exit" to me seems the antithesis of what the UK needs.

Instead of flushing money down the pan on non-sustainable startups, we need people to build viable long-term businesses. Too often we see a hype-cycle in action as people build something with a slight spin on existing tech and/or services, hype it until it seems like its worth something then cash out.

Half the time the acquiring company seems to immediately shelve the service, if not they spend a few years trying to monetise it then give up.

I'm sorry if the Shoreditch crowd aren't attracting as many 'angels' as they'd like. I can only think this is a sign of healthy scepticism on the part of UK investors.

<comment><USER5> If by "viable long-term businesses" you mean ordinary slow-growing ones, people already do start lots of those in the UK.

But if you're talking about startups, meaning super fast growing companies like Google, Facebook, etc, what you seem to be claiming implicitly here is that there is a way for the UK to become like Silicon Valley in the sense of becoming a place where such companies are started, without also acquiring other qualities of Silicon Valley that you seem to dislike, like early acquisitions.

That seems pretty unlikely. Any other city that evolves into a big startup hub will have its own personality to some extent (e.g. NYC might be more focused on retail), but it seems unlikely that a new startup hub would be structurally different.

<comment><USER6> The trouble so many have with the Valley isn't early acquisitions per se, it's that so many companies are basically fake. As you yourself explain, in "Hiring is Obsolete", many companies wind up being something the founders do to prove their worth as big company employees, rather than something that might someday make money. A huge fraction of acquisitions are shut down afterwards - <USER2> conclusive proof the "company" (the software, product, business model and sales channels) has negligible value.

Of course, as you've also pointed out, such "HR exits" are a small fraction of your and other VCs' returns. However, if they predominate numerically - <USER3> 80%, say, of YC companies are "acquihired" \- this will inevitably affect the character of both YC and its applicants, making it more similar to just another recruiting agency. When our brains assess the character of a place, they weight by "number of people I've talked to", not "market value at exit".

<comment><USER5> Actually very few startups are fake. Companies look fake in retrospect if they make something that flops and then get HR acquired, but very few founders I encounter are deliberately aiming for that path.

What I suggested in "Hiring is Obsolete" is not that founders build something random to get the attention of acquirers, but that they build the product the acquirer should have built. I'm advocating founders aim for product acquisitions, not HR acquisitions.

And no proportion of HR acquisitions would be enough to affect the character of YC. Not only are we not interested intellectually in funding companies that fail, we probably net lose money on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm sorry, but being bought out as your only goal is not a business plan. I work in VFX so I see lots of startup companies.

They start up to make a profit, not tread water until they are bought by a bigger company.

The majority of the inhabitants of "silicon roundabout" are carbon copies of whats been before. whats more the service they provide is usually free. So there is no hope of long term success without a buyout.

In short, the very definition of a startup is unsustainable.

<comment><USER8> I get these sense that the UK has a startup culture, but Silicon Roundabout isn't it.

Several major exchanges (in energy, commodities) are recently ex-startups, and there is an ecosystem of innovative, fast growing companies servicing the city. Because finance is what London does.

Outside Central London, often clustered around universities (Cambridge, Surrey, and the Thames Valley) are interesting non-internet start-ups. Chip design startups, making IP they hope will be acquired by ARM or Qualcom. Startups creating software for the UKs huge, NHS motivated big pharma presence. These are B2B companies that you don't hear about unless you are involved, so I'm sure there are plenty popular niche I'm unaware of.

But Silicon Roundabout, or UK web service companies? I've looked at the companies there, hoping for one that looks interesting enough to grow, interesting enough to join. Nothing caught my eye. Datasift maybe.

<comment><USER9> Which shows how much you know about the area. Datasift is not even based in London, it's in Reading. Here's a list for you to peruse [http://www.builtinlondon.co/](http://www.builtinlondon.co/)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, they are based in Reading, on the UoR campus, which is in the Thames Valley area I mentioned. I though they were exciting, and considered using them for a project.

I guess my comment was a bit negative. I wish good luck to anyone trying to make it. You'll have the last laugh when you cash out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My belief is that the focus on exits in startups is an American effect in nature - because it matches the VCs business model. Why not just building sustainable businesses and make VCs do with dividends on them? That will be way more beneficial to the economy than building Zynga-style bubbles.

<comment><USER5> That is a common misconception, but it's usually founders who are eager to sell, not VCs. There is a power law distribution of outcomes in startups. The big successes are so big that that's where all the returns are for investors.

VCs routinely reject startups because they worry that the founders are only interested in selling the company. We tell founders who are about to present to VCs never even to use the word "exit."

<comment><USER10> I think in part this is because the founders reach the point where they feel it's 'enough' way before VCs do, because VCs are risk hungry (distributing their risk across dozens of deals makes that easy) and want to roll the dice again and again. In the end, i believe that timeline of the VC's fund existence preclude them from meeting their return goals otherwise than through exits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article should have been called "The UK Needs An Acquisition Culture If It's To Have a Sustainable Venture Capitalist Culture"

+1 to what anovikov and KaiserPro have said already -- If these founders are building things they love, to solve real problems, they should be building sustainable businesses and doing what they set out to do, not waiting on a VC to buy them out.

<comment><USER9> Thats fine for some. Run on revues and retire in 40 years satisfied. But sometimes other founders need financing to build the things they love, and that require capital. European banks are not good at risk capital. So you're going to have to get it from somewhere. If eventually a founder has a big exit, maybe they can finance their OWN NEXT STARTUP? How about that for you?

<comment><USER11> Without being combative, who, exactly needs the financing that badly? Certainly not the large percentage of social startups, right?

And also, if they need the capital to enable/manage growth, a reasonable business model should get them SOMEWHERE close to sustainability. What I mean to say is that if people are falling themselves to use your creation (so much so that you must expand infrastructure significantly -- keep this in mind that many of the open source software that is available these days "scales" to thousands if not millions of users without much more than one guy sitting behind a computer) it should not be difficult to get some portion of people to PAY for the service.

Now, of course, this is very different when it comes to something like a manufacturing-based startup, in which someone is looking to achieve mass- production from the get go (which I don't even think is a reasonable approach) -- or break into some sort of heavily "regulated" area and needs money for patents/licenses/whatever. But even to that, I'd say more introspection is needed -- VCs are not just looking to hand out money without prototypes, and if you have prototypes that are good, and work, and show that you know what you're doing, even regular banks can give loans with a good enough business plan (especially with all that internet money everyone's been trying to get a hold of recently.

Also, I think that maybe this ultra-transient mentality to startups might be wrong, unless you are in the business of incubating. You don't often enter relationships with the mindset of gathering experience for the next one right? Most people would like to think that people enter relationships with the intention to make them successful. I think startups are the same way, especially given how people think about them on sites like these and others.

Also, keep in mind that building something you love and making money from it instead of taking VC cash doesn't mean you'll be poor by a long shot, it's very possible (and I'd like to say probable, but I don't have a link to an article posted on here last week about non-VC exits being generally worth more to the founder). If your idea really is good, then it will make you a LOT of cash, even if you collect $10 from 1000 people on a yearly basis, you'd only need 3000 people to think your app is useful to make somewhere close to min wage in the US (which is higher than many around the world are paid)

But anyway, that's just my opinion

[EDIT] - Also, another point worth thinking about here -- what about your users? These are the people that subscribed to you, your methodology, your culture. I think there's more than enough proof out there to show that users don't get quite treated the same after acquisitions (to put it mildly)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I read the title and immediately thought to myself "What about a startup that just becomes a successful business, does that need an acquisition to breed more startups?"

<comment><USER13> Those businesses are awesome and I think more people should build them.

The point I wanted to make in the article is that most startups are a high- risk experiment. A side effect of that is that most of them will fail and you need a lot of liquidity to fund that failure-level.

I wish more developers would just create 1-5 man businesses that make $100k-$2M/year. It's exactly the right thing to do as an individual but it doesn't sustain a startup culture it just sustains a set of solid, long-term businesses.

<comment><USER14> > but it doesn't sustain a startup culture it just sustains a set of solid, > long-term businesses.

Who is that a bad thing for? Small, solid businesses sounds like a better option for customers and the country as a whole than frenetically building new things knowing most of them will fold. It doesn't give the founders the same chance at celebrity, but they get to do something reliable and potentially fulfilling.

I guess I'm not convinced that the UK wants a 'startup culture' at all. I'd like to think people could focus on building stuff that's useful or entertaining, rather than what sounds like desperate attempts to become a millionaire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article is UK-specific, but I'm personally concerned about the same problem in the US. There's a limit to how many great startups can be built if they are dependent on M&A for exits/liquidity events, and the larger companies don't start buying more startups. Also, competition on the M&A end will lead to lower exit pricing, which will eventually impact valuation and early stage investment.

The improvements in early stage investment in recent years may just wind up throwing other parts of the system out of balance.

</comment><comment><USER16> You need successful exits for a startup culture, you don't necessarily need acquisitions and therefore tax breaks for acquisitions would be a mistake

What about the other path - why don't successful UK startups go public on the AIM? In the UK, companies can go public for much smaller market caps than they ever would in the US.

The UK is not burdened with the bureaucracy of Sarbanes–Oxley, so the UK doesn't necessarily need to adopt the US' cultural shift to stay private as long as possible.

</comment><comment><USER17> Acquisitions are often seen as a route to value destruction in the UK - that's received wisdom and I suspect it will take a lot for startups to challenge the thinking.

</comment><comment><USER9> Everyone here is welcome to look at a good selection of "Silicon Roundabout Web companies" and realise that there is a huge diversity, far beyond the stupid characterisation that they are built-to-flip app/web crap: [http://www.builtinlondon.co/](http://www.builtinlondon.co/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I think the issue is that a larger number of people are becoming involuntary entrepreneurs. They don't want the long-term "lifestyle" business that delivers a high-but-not-stratospheric income for 20 years, because they actually aren't cut out for running businesses (or very interested in it). They want the 5-year plan to exit-- because they're not really entrepreneurs, but either (a) want to be rich, or (b) want autonomy that no longer exists in any corporate job-- not even R&D. They're involved in these red-ocean VC- funded get-big-or-die gambits because those are the only game in town for them.

In 2006, class (a) was working on Wall Street; but the pool of get-rich opportunities has dwindled. In 1975, class (b) was working in R&D labs on basic research. However, those options have dwindled too. As the few buttresses preventing the corporate world from falling under the weight of its own mediocrity give way, it's forcing a lot of the best people into one narrowly-defined class of entrepreneurship: VC-funded turn-the-crank franchise bids with a bit (ok, a lot) of random risk thrown in. It ends up requiring long hours, alternating unhealthfully between being over- and under-funded (relative to one's scope) and is generally unsustainable. Many of these people can't hack it for more than a couple years; that's why the acq-hires are so necessary-- turn the business over to something that can use it prophylactically before the founders burn out.

</comment><comment><USER19> Amusing that Autonomy is listed as an acquirer, given how desperately they had to be acquired themselves.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wow that link to the Internet Peeps article brings back so many memories. It's true, the whole scene was basically one room full of people.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great post Nixey!

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a case where the TechCrunch headline is a lot more reasonable than the HN one. I read "You need an acquisition culture to sustain a startup culture" and thought it was going to be an article about how a business's culture should be primarily about acquisition, which was a little more outlandish.

<comment><USER13> It's actually just a case of Techcrunch allowing more characters than HN. Unfortunately the full (and I agree very good one) didn't fit in.

<comment><USER22> "You need" -> "UK needs" would work I think</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter, Foursquare, and Instagram started by Google alumns - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeffreytalajic.com/2011/04/twitter4sqinstgrm

<comment><USER2> Insert a smug remark regarding the doing of proper research prior to positing such theories.</comment>


Dollar Seen Losing Global Reserve Status - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/#q=site%3Aft.com+%22Dollar+seen+losing+global+reserve+status%22&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=ivnsu&source=univ&tbm=nws&tbo=u&sa=X&ei=OoIJTofmMMOutweCople&ved=0CCkQqAI&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=f8568ea5fb71ba27&biw=1842&bih=1133

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about the news.google link, but it's the easiest way to get non- subscribers past the paywall i.e. you gotta go via Google.

</comment><comment><USER2> ...over the next 25 years - big whoop. We nee to make changes in our economy but there are long-term shifts in the competitive landscape that suggest the dollar probably shouldn't be the exclusive reserve currency anyway; attempts to maintain it as such may even be inflationary to some extent. The long post- war boom has been over for several decades now, and the future is currency baskets, SDRs, currency blocs, and eventually a universal currency.

</comment><comment><USER3> They've been saying this for as long as I can remember reading the news.

Never actually happens, but they never stop saying it.</comment>


Does morality require treating all human beings equally? Perhaps not. - <AUTHOR> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/pinker-on-reason-and-morality/

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting argument that logic alone cannot be used as a basis for morality.

Can I propose instead, the _computational_ basis for morality: simplifying, this would entail creating different population models with different morality codes and then running them to see which model creates the most stable model.</comment>


Delta launches free in-flight messaging - <AUTHOR> https://www.delta.com/content/www/en_US/traveling-with-us/onboard-services/delta-studio/in-flight-wi-fi.html <comment><USER2> If WhatsApp traffic is encrypted end to end...how can Delta detect the contents of the message I'm sending, size?</comment>


They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/science/10quant.html?_r=1&hp

<comment><USER2> > Long Term Capital Management, a highly leveraged hedge fund whose directors > included the two Nobelists, collapsed and had to be bailed out to the tune > of $3.65 billion by a group of banks.

$3.65 billion? that seems rather quaint these days.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. In retrospect, it's somewhat ironic that the group of banks that bailed out LTCM included Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and AIG. The "bailers" became the "bailees".

<comment><USER4> You know who didn't bail out LTCM? Bear Stearns - the first to fall. They wouldn't play ball and it's widely assumed that the other banks saw a chance to make them pay.

<comment><USER5> Maybe. But the banks have a _relentlessly resourceful_ profit motive. More likely, the regulators were more keen to hang them out to dry for not cooperating with LTCM.

Also, Bear Stearns always was a much smaller and weaker institution. Maybe they simply couldn't afford the risk then and now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Exactly. If you want to be good in options trading, be good at physics. Acceleration and deceleration of options values are very interesting (and very valuable) in volatile markets. And as the article states there is no _Pi_ solution. It's simply fun to apply physics to financial markets when applicable.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you don't subscribe to NYTimes, you can read the article at: <http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/10/business/10quant.php></comment>


Ask HN: Review Debate-Zone.com - <AUTHOR>

For the past year and a half, I've been working on a simple online debating site on and off. I was really inspired by all the new web startups when I first started, so I bought a few books on Ruby on Rails, and taught myself the framework by making the first buggy version of the site. Now that I'm in college, I haven't had any time to work on the project, but I was able to fix most bugs, make the design more purty, and put ads on the site over winter break (about a month ago). I tried seeding some initial content with mechanical turk, but the quality of the posts were extremely poor. So, I'm basically at the stage where I'm trying to get users now. Any tips or feedback would be greatly appreciated.
http://debate-zone.com
Thanks for reading! <comment><USER2> Clickable <http://debate-zone.com></comment>


Apple is reportedly putting Mac development on the back burner - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2016/12/20/apple-mac-development-on-the-back-burner/ <comment><USER2> I've long said that if Apple would allow MacOS to be installed on desktop computers made by anyone, but being certified - then it would boost their market share exponentially and in turn boost iPhone and iPad sales even more.

It would attract more developers and in turn better quality software and more software means more customers.

<comment><USER3> Apple allowed other companies to produce computers running the Macintosh OS from 1995-1997. Steve Jobs ended the program when he returned with Apple's acquisition of NeXT.

The program was generally not well received: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone)

<comment><USER4> Those weren't really so much clones as Macs in non-Apple cases and assembled in non-Apple factories. The licensed clone makers had to use Apple-approved motherboard designs, and Apple would not approve designs other than those that were very similar to Apple's.

Power Computing demonstrated prototypes that would take the Mac into new markets that Apple's designs didn't fit well in, and publicly begged Apple to allow them to sell them, but Apple refused.

The result was that the pseudo-clones competed directly for the same customers Apple was going for, and so of course the program was a failure. A successful authorized clone program needs to grow the market, not merely redistribute it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a long time fan of my Macbooks, I'm really excited about this. This could finally kick one of the other manufacturers hard enough (Lenovo, Dell, HP) to make a seriously good device. The MS Surface Pro series is already pretty solid, but Windows is just not there yet. I don't think it will be Ubuntu taking the cake, but with some better software, I'd happily switch away from macOS.</comment>


The Lightning Field - <AUTHOR> https://www.diaart.org/visit/visit/walter-de-maria-the-lightning-field/ <comment><USER2> There's a Geoff Dyer piece about visiting the Lightning Field which is worth a read if you're curious: [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/18/poles- apart](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/18/poles-apart)

</comment><comment><USER3> > A full experience of The Lightning Field does not depend upon the occurrence > of lightning, and visitors are encouraged to spend as much time as possible > in the field, especially during sunset and sunrise.

So it has nothing to do with lightnings, or does it? And if it's independent of lightning activity, what else is it about?

A bit more explanation would be helpful.

<comment><USER4> I guess "explaining" art is cheating, although I agree that it would be interesting to get to know more about the ideas behind the piece.

I guess (I tried some quick calculations but it's far from my field) that a bolt of lightning would happily vaporize the steel if it hit directly? On the other hand they're more massive than typical lightning rod cables seem to be, so perhaps they're able to safely conduct the current to ground without vaporizing. Anyone?

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't chance it. Rather be near something less conductive when lightning strikes..

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I always like to be the most conductive thing around in a lightning storm. Keeps life exciting. Doesn't resistance translate to heat and explosions? Besides, one in 7 million and all.

[https://xkcd.com/795/](https://xkcd.com/795/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ironically, I'd expect the steel posts to actually reduce the occurrence of lightning in the area in much the same way as a lightning rod does, by dissipating charge gradually and thus making the area less attractive to lightning strikes.

</comment><comment><USER8> Plugging my own site, but here's a collection of poems Kim Addonizio put together after visiting The Lightning Field: [https://verse.press/playlist/into-the- desert-223272706940846...](https://verse.press/playlist/into-the- desert-2232727069408468455)</comment>


Three leaders from Latin America call for decriminalizing drug use - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0311-presidents-drug-war-fail-20160311-story.html <comment><USER2> Decriminalization of consumption seems to be the worst of all worlds for countries that are struggling with violence associated with the drug trade. Decriminalization generally removes (limited) controls on market demand, while continuing to criminalize the distribution. If you're going to decriminalize the consumption, there needs to be some mechanism of legal distribution.</comment>


NeoCities - <AUTHOR> http://neocities.org <comment><USER4> Don't use this for anything you view as important. I just checked and there is no collision detection for usernames. You can signup for an account using any name and your account will seemingly just replace the previous created account. That is a big enough and obvious enough flaw that it also makes we wonder if this is just a phishing expedition or a way to mine email addresses.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just fixed it. It was a change I did last night to fix a save bug. My apologies about that, it wasn't a good bug, but hopefully it's the last security-related one. Probably goes without saying, but this is definitely a beta project. I'm doing a lot of other things to protect this kind of attack (filename scrubbing, bcrypt passwords), so I'm pretty red in the face about how dumb this one was.

If you find any other bad bugs, please let me know (@kyledrake on Twitter) instead of, you know, trashing other people's work. I'm finding the duplicate sites right now and taking care of it. Thanks, and again my apologies.

This is not an email phishing expedition. I don't even require you to enter your email address to make a site.

<comment><USER4> You are right, I should have reached out to you directly with this issue. I took the easy route and didn't put in any effort to track you down, for that I am sorry. However, I take exception to you categorizing my post as "trashing other people's work."

I feel that I also have a responsibility to publicize such a glaring security hole in your site. This is the number 1 link on HN at the moment. Thousands of people are going to be signing up. I think they have the right to know that a bug like this exists. Like I said in my initial post, a bug this big seemed to be a sign of a bigger problems. I had suspicions the site was malicious and at that point my priority was to point out those suspicions to the HN community.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here, I'll do one better: If anyone is concerned about the nature/security of the site, here is the source code to NeoCities, ready for anyone to do a full security audit: [https://github.com/kyledrake/neocities- web](https://github.com/kyledrake/neocities-web)

Pull requests welcome!

<comment><USER5> Why did you choose Ruby as the language?

<comment><USER6> I think it's a pure joy to read the ruby source. Allthough ruby is not fast, it's got some of the simplest most elegant frameworks out there. Sinatra is not much more than a router config file with some logic. Sequel is the simplest database orm and migration tool around. And slim makes very readable templates. All frameworks perfect for the first minimum viable product. If this site takes off, I would perhaps pay someone to rewrite some bottlenecks of it in java.

<comment><USER5> > it's a pure joy to read the ruby source

If you like it so much, here's a copy-paste from the project for your edification [1]:

      def new_tags=(tags_string)
        tags_string.gsub! /[^a-zA-Z0-9, ]/, ''
        tags = tags_string.split ','
        tags.collect! {|c| (c.match(/^\w+\s\w+/) || c.match(/^\w+/)).to_s }
        @new_tag_strings = tags
      end

I don't mean to pick on this project in particular. In fact, this project as a whole is quite possibly the _cleanest_ Ruby code I've ever seen.

That being said, Ruby's syntax makes me want to gouge my eyes out. There's equal signs, unquoted regular expressions, exclamation points, absolute value bars, and at signs all over the above code. You can't even sort-of follow what this code is doing without searching through the manual every third character. Ruby syntax is worse than C++ and almost as bad as Perl.

Someone tried to explain Ruby syntax to me last week [2], and I'm not sure if I understood it more, or less, as a result, because my conclusion was that _Ruby 's syntax is so bad, the language shouldn't even be able to exist!_ I.e., there are a large number of syntactical ambiguities, so writing a parser for it should be completely impossible!

[1] [https://github.com/kyledrake/neocities- web/blob/933c3549264e...](https://github.com/kyledrake/neocities- web/blob/933c3549264ee809c0e09f0af73cdd2f2236a63d/models/site.rb#L53)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872899](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872899)

<comment><USER7> Ruby's syntax is beautiful once you've realized two things:

1\. How blocks work, and how their minimalist syntax is beautiful. You see absolute value bars but believe me, getting used to that barebones function syntax is a gift. (No other programming language that I know of has an absolute value operator with vertical bars so it is not as hard as you think.)

2\. Every time you see a dot, do NOT think attribute access. Think message sending a la Smalltalk.

Suddenly then, things like the tags.collect! line become pretty for encapsulating a callback on one line unlike the ugly function() {} crud of JavaScript, and things like defining a newtags= method become sensible, because _everything_ including traditional attribute getting and setting reduces to message passing.

<comment><USER8> > Every time you see a dot, do NOT think attribute access. Think message > sending a la Smalltalk.

Huh. You just rekindled my interest in learning Ruby. Learning Smalltalk was pretty mind-expanding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hi, Hax0r N3ws!

Check out my all-new website showing some _oldskool JScripting skillz_ at [http://cd.neocities.org/](http://cd.neocities.org/). You can trick your friends by directing them there.

P.S.: Just checked and it actually works with _Internet Exploder 6.0_ in an _M$ Windoze 98_ VM, which I had running in VMWare Player 5.0.2 with my PC's physical DVD drive connected. Should work as long as your Win9x or pre-SP2 XP has WMP 7 installed.

P.P.S.: Do post here if it works for you!

</comment><comment><USER10> PEOPLE. This is clearly not intended as a business. Stop asking about the "business model." It strikes me as just being a cool side project that enables people to make websites. That's it.

Yeesh.

<comment><USER11> I'm pretty sure that's exactly what it is. This is just for fun, I don't think they are looking for VC money or anything crazy.

<comment><USER12> As someone who has a 1gb/s flat rate at home, I have thought about doing something similar. It really isn't that expensive to have a bit of network and a server that gives out static content.

<comment><USER13> Til someone puts something copyright or worse on it.

<comment><USER12> We were talking about the expenses of running the service, and not the legal space around hosting user generated content.

The legal questions are interesting, through it highly depend on the country and political tendencies from one year to the next. In theory, I could run this kind of service in Sweden, and only remove content on order by a judge. In theory. In practice, there might not be any difference between hosting user generated content and simply having a website up hosting in ones own name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> workhere-io HN is supposed to be (partly) about the joy of building stuff, and yet this entire thread is all about people pointing out flaws, missing features and minor annoyances instead of saying, "Good job!".

Give the guy a break and a chance to get the project off the ground.

</comment><comment><USER14> I just had to do it:

[http://jstalin.neocities.org/index.html](http://jstalin.neocities.org/index.html)

It's going to play audio if you clink the link, unless you're using click to play

<comment><USER15> Also, backstory: [http://mike.winterdiamond.com/history.php](http://mike.winterdiamond.com/history.php)

<comment><USER16> You'd think he'd have learned his lesson about god-awful site design.

<comment><USER17> You'd think people would have learned that the internet is all about me, and that I prefer content over packaging :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Oh man, I'm sorry for OP because of all the negativity in this thread.

I think his service is kinda cool in a twisted way and I can totally see me building a little 'old school' homepage on it.

/edit: I did build a homepage: [http://kybernetyk.neocities.org](http://kybernetyk.neocities.org) I feel better now ;)

<comment><USER19> I wonder whether this 'negativity' is really negativity, or just well-meant criticism, testing and validating the idea, maybe even playing advocate of the devil. From what I've seen in the past years, the HN community is unlikely to produce a page with tons of similar 'Nice job!' postings.

<comment><USER20> Well the top post about a security flaw and the creator's superb response was what I was looking for to confirm some kind of semi-legitimacy before I post a link to facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think people are aiming to create the original geocities experience too: Examples:

[http://poeks.neocities.org/](http://poeks.neocities.org/)

[http://skry.neocities.org/](http://skry.neocities.org/)

[http://jeremy.neocities.org/](http://jeremy.neocities.org/)

<comment><USER22> Haha, wow. It's like going to a civil war reenactment where everyone adhere strictly to period customs and vernacular.

Unfortunately they forgot center tags and to capitalize all of their HTML. I was going to say it's missing a table-based layout, but then I recalled that the height of geocities' popularity was earlier than I remember seeing table- based layouts everywhere.

It's really not very assuring when they state on the front page that they "hope" they can get enough money each month so they can pay the server bills.

<comment><AUTHOR> The site will very easily pay for itself with donations. It's not that expensive to serve static HTML, especially when you are using Nginx and sendfile.

<comment><USER22> That wasn't really my point. It doesn't inspire confidence when the host says "hey! put your stuff here! I'm not sure that I can pay the bills each month but I sure hope we can. Oh--and I have no idea how this will scale."

It's all understandable. But even if it's free and even if my content is stupid, I'd still feel a little uncomfortable because of how much doubt _the owner_ expresses over the viability of the service.

<comment><USER23> Really, that's what all startups are doing. At least he's being honest about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> GeoCities clipart backgrounds still available!

[http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/backgrounds/](http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/backgrounds/)

<comment><USER25> Holy nostalgia trip

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've hacked a little script together[1] for uploading all the files in a directory into NeoCities. Handy if you are working on your site and want to upload everything in one go.

Set your username and password at the beginning of the script and run it with the path to the directory as an argument:

./neocities-uploader.php /path/to/my/site

[1] [https://github.com/pwlin/neocities- uploader](https://github.com/pwlin/neocities-uploader)

</comment><comment><USER27> More fun: [http://login.neocities.org/](http://login.neocities.org/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Let's say I like cats: [http://egeninwebsayfasi.neocities.org/](http://egeninwebsayfasi.neocities.org/)

</comment><comment><USER29> I think its a nice website, don't be discouraged by the comments you get here. HN can be awful with this, but if you parse through all the bad mouthers you may find some gold :)

</comment><comment><USER30> It is very refreshing that a side project/start-up related post has made it to number 1 spot on HN. And this is coming from someone who posted a Bee article that made it to the front page today.

kyledrake if any negativity on this thread gets to you, something tells me it will not, just ask yourself how many others have posted their side project on HN that made it to #1, I know I have not and that is why I created this account to begin with - to share my start-up with a start-up community.

</comment><comment><USER31> Add a premium tier, even something as simple as integrated web analytics. Donations are charity. If you want this to be a sustainable business, ask for people to pay for value.

<comment><USER22> I was thinking about this too. I agree that counting on donations in sufficient quantity and regularity is like buying lotto tickets to pay your electric bill.

And if they add a premium tier... well then that kind of kills their differentiation, doesn't it? They're aiming for the niche of free, modest, simple, laissez faire vis-a-vis content. When you take 'free' out of the mix then you're in the arena of commoditized cheap hosting; inertia would be the only reason for someone to upgrade their free account to a premium plan.

<comment><USER32> Yep, services that are about uncensorship generally don't do paid tiers. See: 4chan, Rizon, groups that release pirated videos, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> guys i just made mine here [http://rozap.neocities.org/index.html](http://rozap.neocities.org/index.html) and it is best so you all can stop making them because it will fail to surpass my creation.

</comment><comment><USER11> [http://nick.neocities.org/](http://nick.neocities.org/)

Already worth the price of admission. This is a really fun idea.

</comment><comment><USER34> Oh man, it _is_ just like the 90's: unicode usernames are not allowed. Welcome to the past!

<comment><USER35> I can't even put a unicode bullet on the page. Maybe I should be using double tildes or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's never too early for scams.

[http://secure.neocities.org/](http://secure.neocities.org/)

"Security page. Please enter your password here."

<comment><USER37> I see login.neocities.org is taken as well.

<comment><USER38> [http://signin.neocities.org/](http://signin.neocities.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I love the browser editor you made. Very easy to get up and running fast. It'll be a useful tool for teaching, and also for small js projects. Fun project- Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER40> It's definitely an awesome project, but I just don't see the advantage of NeoCities over hosting a website on Github or BitBucket yet, especially since those sites offer unlimited space and store all the old versions of your website for you. Some differentiation with those services is needed - <USER2> example, a privacy policy guaranteeing true anonymity (no IP address stored, no cookies) or a more layperson-accessible website creator.

<comment><USER41> Those have significant learning curves to people who don't speak web-l337 yet. Remember before you knew how to code? What version control was, and documentation was scary? Angelfire & GeoCities is where I learned to code HTML

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wanted to share this with a co-worker. Asked him, "you remember geocities?". He didn't. Because it was probably before he was born. I'm so old.

</comment><comment><USER43> Ah, this site was fun while it lasted [http://fuckthensa.neocities.org/](http://fuckthensa.neocities.org/)

</comment><comment><USER44> Don't show this one to grandma: [http://payment.neocities.org/](http://payment.neocities.org/)

</comment><comment><USER45> [http://remy.neocities.org](http://remy.neocities.org) Don't forget the hot- linked images.

<comment><USER46> awesome! This century penguin gifs replace dancing hamsters!

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Great news! [http://420.neocities.org/](http://420.neocities.org/)

<comment><USER47> Hmmm... Even though index.html page was overwritten, it still displays the old index page.

Here is an updated version.

[http://420.neocities.org/index.html](http://420.neocities.org/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> What's with all the FBI seizure images?

<comment><USER49> I noticed that too haha. What's nick been up to?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> How do you plan on keeping out spam?

<comment><USER51> Ya, looks like most of the pages are garbage right now.

<comment><USER52> Don't worry, Dade Murphy will clean up.

      Next, enter a password. This will be used to allow you to login. Minimum 5 characters. If you don't make it a good password, Dade Murphy from the movie Hackers will come in and steal your "garbage files".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> "We've come full circle"

I love getting old and seeing technology continually reinvent itself.

</comment><comment> m-r-a-m I think I captured the essence of my geocities/tripod/etc experience... [http://ramige.neocities.org](http://ramige.neocities.org)

I really like this and I'll probably use it for something real.

</comment><comment><USER54> "uncensored"

Good luck with that.

<comment><USER55> Just make sure you don't sleep with a girl without wearing a condom and you should be fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> How are you moderating the content? Are you doing it yourself? Are you putting together a flagging system? Do you need help? I am looking for another side project to work on.

<comment><USER57> "uncensored"

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I wonder how long it'll take for Yahoo to send a C&D...

<comment><USER59> For what?

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I'm guessing pointing a CNAME to this is not supported?

</comment><comment><USER61> The sad thing is that now there are lots of squatters creating "under construction" pages and the like instead of actually putting content. Trying to emulate Geocities without actually doing so (a lot of them did have those banners, but they also had content).

Oh well.

Here's mine : [http://eksith.neocities.org](http://eksith.neocities.org) (Also people are forgetting, it's .org _not_ .com)

</comment><comment><USER62> My three quick contributions:

[http://qz.neocities.com/](http://qz.neocities.com/)

[http://scientists.neocities.com/](http://scientists.neocities.com/) (Back to the Future)

[http://fometer.neocities.org/](http://fometer.neocities.org/)

I've had issues uploading CSS, JS and manifest (for offline) files - <USER3> else?

</comment><comment><USER63> > The file uploader will automatically scrub any characters not matching: a-z > A-Z 0-9 _ - .

What about '<>/{};:[]=+~' ?

All of which are useful in html/css

</comment><comment><USER64> There is a bug on your dashboard; the html for viewing a page is:

        View

Unfortunately, this means that I cannot click with the middle mouse button to bring up the page in a new tab. Please remove the extraneous target="_blank" code.

<comment><USER65> What browser? Middle mouse click works fine on links regardless of target in most browsers I'm used to (certainly in FF, Chrome, IE on Windows).

<comment><USER64> Firefox 21 on xubuntu 12.04

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Good luck with the project!

I hope we will soon see these pathetic Facebook like buttons replaced with good old JavaScript guest counters (only half-joking).

</comment><comment><USER67> Also please send an email once the account has been made... I know i made a page... but never received anything about it...

</comment><comment><USER67> Need a Password retrieval system and the sign up page needs a verify password field... I already lost my password...

</comment><comment><USER68> I like the idea, but GeoCities left a bad taste in my mouth. What makes this site any more maintainable than GeoCities was? The fact that it's donation based and not at the whims of a corporate entity is reassuring, but other than that it seems as if the footing would be even less stable. Am I wrong?

</comment><comment><USER69> stevejobs.neocities.org

</comment><comment><USER41> I am interested to see where this goes!

</comment><comment><USER68> I like looking through the "Browse Existing Sites" and looking at all the emerging sites. I especially like the ambiguous "enter credit card and expiration date" sites that are nothing but a form and submission button.

</comment><comment><USER70> Decided to create something from scratch in the text editor. I must say I like the editor. Had to include a slight ode to the fallen geo(.*)

[http://jneal.neocities.org/](http://jneal.neocities.org/)

</comment><comment><USER71> Hosted in the US. At least geocities didn't live long enough to make it into prism

</comment><comment><USER72> Good luck with this. Just a minor comment on your animated favicon.ico icon ... it would look a lot better if you used a transparent colour for the outside of the globe. Currently its white, which looks a little bit crappy.

</comment><comment><USER73> Has anyone actually had success maintaining a business with the donation model?

<comment><USER34> Hi,

You may be interested to learn about non-profits organizations, many of which have donations as their primary source of income.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Since this takes me back to the good old days of marquee tags, I made this fine work of art. [http://hello.neocities.org/](http://hello.neocities.org/)

</comment><comment><USER75> Hah! I've been playing with Jekyll and Pelican and other static site generators, and one of the thoughts I had was "if Geocities were still around, I could host pages there."

</comment><comment><USER76> Plays nice with [http://divshot.github.io/geo- bootstrap/](http://divshot.github.io/geo-bootstrap/)

</comment><comment><USER77> Reading the comments you can see instant cybersquatting.

Man i hate that -.-

</comment><comment><USER78> Not neocities, but a friend recently put this geocities-esque page up:

[http://cats4gold.net/](http://cats4gold.net/)

</comment><comment><USER79> Love this. Its geocities 2.0. Now, where do I find old gifs?

 _Edit_

Found them. Check out mah page.

[http://notme.neocities.org](http://notme.neocities.org)

</comment><comment><USER80> This is adorable!!!!

</comment><comment><USER81> This is incredible! Here's my site: [http://andy.neocities.org](http://andy.neocities.org)

</comment><comment><USER82> This is so awesome.

</comment><comment><USER83> That's funny. I searched that domain name on domize around a month ago too. Though mine was going to be S3 and Route53 using boto.

</comment><comment><USER84> This is really cool. What's your tech stack look like? Are you using Nginx to serve up the static files?

</comment><comment><USER85> [http://timnova.neocities.org](http://timnova.neocities.org)

</comment><comment><USER86> How can I upload my files with CuteFTP?

</comment><comment><USER87> Kind of funny. Looks like the first site on their examples page was seized by the FBI.

</comment><comment><USER88> wow! This is super simple to use! 10 minutes into it, I now have a splash page of myself! [http://songz.neocities.org/](http://songz.neocities.org/)

</comment><comment><USER89> Can you add a akismet style spam filtering to kill spammy pages?

</comment><comment><USER64> Will it be possible to upload websites using rsync?

</comment><comment><USER90> No censoring? So what about child abuse images?

<comment><USER91> What _about_ child abuse images?

No censorship means no censorship.

It doesn't mean the provider of neocities couldn't be ordered to remove the illegal content and hand over all details about the person who uploaded it.

"No censorship" doesn't mean criminals will be protected by neocities. It doesn't mean that child abuse images can't be dealt with in accordance with the law.

Remember that the internet is not classified like movies and TV. There is no requirement to put "Rated R18+" on a website. As it should be.

All he is saying is that Neocities basically has the same censorship rules as the internet itself. In other words, no censorship.

A murderer can turn their PC into a server and self-publish images of his victims for all to see. They will get caught, and the server shut down, but the point is he didn't need to go through a censorship body to get the images published. Exactly how it should be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> No API? Sigh. It could be a nice backing host for a through-the-browser CMS – a little OAuth, a little CORS, and it could work pretty nicely.

<comment><USER10> Maybe there will be an API. The project is one month old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> export function ? Given the fate of the original geocities, it would seem to be very helpful...

<comment><USER94> File → Save Page As.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> How do you pay without adverts?

<comment><USER96> [http://www.textfiles.com/thoughts/advertising.html](http://www.textfiles.com/thoughts/advertising.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> -1 for not re-implementing <blink> tag

</comment><comment><USER98> Just use github pages.

<comment><USER56> But there is no browsing feature which is pretty entertaining. I love seeing all the designs and creativity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> This thread is hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER100> this reminds me GeoCities :')

</comment><comment><USER101> _sigh_

<comment><USER102> cool idea, but seems the server has some problems uploading (2-8kb) files? or is that the heavy traffic? anyway, get some error messages, but files are uploaded. savings seem to take a while...better keep your code in another editor, too

edit: ps: internal server error

<comment><USER103> Same here. Internal Server Error. That's a huge nostalgia strike ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> _There are 61054 web site spaces remaining. After that, we need your help to get another server._

Does that mean he's running 61k sites on a single server? Even if each site gets one single visitor per day, that 61k visitors for the Server. There is no way the server can manage that traffic.

Sorry, but do you really want a static site? Just pay for a good one.

<comment><USER105> A $20/month Linode can handle 4k static pages per second on Nginx. I've heard tell of people pumping the cheap Linode server up to 30k views/second, but I haven't been able to break 4k.

Assuming text pages, the full 61k sites could be accessed every 15 seconds. If the pages have nontrivial graphics, then you're (as others have mentioned) far more likely to be bandwidth-limited. If the site has an unmetered 10Mbps connection, then it could serve 1Mbyte per second: If each of those 61k pages contained 1MB of data, then it would STILL be able to serve (at most) 86k pages per day.

It's likely that most of the pages hosted will be accessed less than once a day, though. Power law distribution of the long tail [1] and all that. And a megabyte is a lot of data for a single web page; I would imagine that with a 10Mb limit on the entire site, it's not going to be a place to host sites with tons of images.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail)</comment></comment>


5 Entrepreneurial Lessons from guess who, Justin Bieber - <AUTHOR> http://www.pixelonomics.com/justin-bieber-entrepreneurial-lessons/

<comment><USER2> Never looked at bieber from this perspective. Great article.</comment>


Calling all hackers: let's fix homework - <AUTHOR> http://hworks.org

<comment><USER2> Sounds like a plan - def. think gamification and mobile friendly (ipad/ipod) tools for students are more important not that more students have their own devices.

I would be more than happy to help out with some dev work - also keep in mind NYC has a contest going on ([http://nycschools.challengepost.com/details/about_innovate_n...](http://nycschools.challengepost.com/details/about_innovate_nyc)) to help with this.</comment>


Airbnb's ads make them fools in national news - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfexaminer.com/airbnbs-ads-make-them-fools-in-national-news/ <comment><USER2> What were they even trying to accomplish? I can't even figure out a way to look at these ads that could explain how they would possibly result in any positive result for AirBnB.

</comment><comment><USER3> They focused on themselves (what the city could do with their money) rather than the people voting and what mattered to the voters. Really terrible ad fail. Worst this year.

</comment><comment><USER4> Jesus christ, what a bunch of self-absorbed assholes at the top vetting something like this.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone have a guess as to how they hoped people would read this?

Surely they imagined it communicating something other than "we're mad we had to pay our taxes".

<comment><USER6> I guess it was just supposed to tap into general anti-tax (or anti-government) sentiment. I think you were supposed to read it as, "these tax dollars aren't going to benefit you directly" or "the government is going to waste the windfall from this tax so they don't deserve it."

Hard to say for sure. It's a pretty terrible ad on many levels. Even if I were sympathetic to the message, it seems like it would be a bad idea to remind me about the tax-funded things I enjoy when I'm deciding on a tax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would not say fools.

This is actually great for them they didn't actually do anything bad(like dumping oil or stuff like that), so people wont care in a month or so and the news media gives them a toon of publicity.

AKA all publicity is good publicity.

<comment><USER8> It probably cost them prop F though.

<comment><USER9> Yep. This was astonishingly dumb. As an acquaintance (I live in San Francisco) said, "Any time a corporation dumps that much money into a local issue, I'm voting against them." I think a lot of people are coming to that viewpoint now.

Which, whatever one thinks of AirBnB, not terribly great. The proposition, ISTM, has problems that are likely to have unpleasant repercussions mostly unrelated to the company/service/local housing issues.

<comment><USER10> > "Any time a corporation dumps that much money into a local issue, I'm voting > against them." I think a lot of people are coming to that viewpoint now.

If a critical mass of people come to this point of view, that will be the end of corporate lobbying on these type of issues. However, most issues have different corporations dumping money on each side of the issue which makes that theory hard to follow.

Also, I really don't have a problem with companies dumping money into an issue that they feel is a threat to their future existence. If they didn't try to persuade people on the issue, they would be doing a disservice to their employees and investors.

<comment><USER9> I wasn't asserting a value judgement on the viewpoint, only noting the seeming popularity of it.

Yes, narrowly construed, corporate officers have obligations that look a something like that. I look at it as an activity that takes place in the broader world of policy making. Personally, I think to judge the cost or benefit of corporate lobbying as a driver of policy requires substantially more investigation than simply whether or not they are properly representing their stakeholders.

"For all lawful purposes" covers a range of behaviours that many folks have a problem with, those employees and investors also have voices, votes and the ability to spend money whether or not the corporation does, the supposed alignment of interested between corporate officers, investors and employees really isn't there in many cases of corporate lobbying (unions exist for a reason, for instance, and so to shareholder lawsuits), game theoretic concerns about what it does to democracy, and on and on.

None of which really matters to the analysis that AirBnB really comes off like a nest of entitled jackasses with this ad and turned off a lot of people who may well have been otherwise sympathetic to the notion that this proposition has some really bad provisions. If I were a stakeholder, I'd likely be thinking that the officers did me a disservice by spending a ton of money to convince lots of people vote against my hypothetical interests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Have we verified that it was actually AirBnb who posted these ads? There's information floating around which indicates that the ad creators were actually an anti-AirBnb party and were well aware of how offensive and tone deaf the advertisements were/are. [1]

However, it's hard to tell if that's just AirBnb covering itself in light of the negative public reception.

[1]: [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100700506082939&se...](https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100700506082939&set=a.626401026109.2203111.94803916&type=3&theater)

EDIT: after poking around a bit more, looks like it is AirBnb. There are a few quotes about the advertisements from a spokesperson here: [http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-takes-down-san- francis...](http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-takes-down-san-francisco- ads-2015-10)

<comment><USER12> The fact that so many people thought is was a hoax is an amazing illustration of how terrible these ads were.

<comment><USER13> _> "What a colossal mistake," Ross said. "I think it's one of those things that reinforces everything bad about the tech industry, and about Airbnb, that people feel."_

And when tech people respond by thinking this must be an anti-tech conspiracy, they're further reinforcing the feeling.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Termbox – Launch a Linux terminal with two clicks - <AUTHOR> https://termbox.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Termbox is somewhat similar to the recently announced dply.co, but I think our approach is much better for the following reasons:

* The interface is super streamlined. Open the page, confirm captcha, click launch - boom, you got a terminal. The planned SSH support will be similar to that - no web page, just do ssh email@example.com and you get logged in to a Ubuntu box.

* We use VM based containers (hypercontainer.io) and not full VMs, so startup is very fast and instances are super cheap. 2 hours of the 512MB DigitalOcean server cost $0.014, 2 hours of a 512MB Termbox instance currently cost us around $0.0001

* Because our instances are so cheap, we do not impose any limits on the amount of boxes you can create. Just leave them behind, they will be cleaned up automatically.

<comment><USER2> What is the difference begeeen docker, a traditional VM and hypercontainer? And what are the trade off of hypercontainer?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a comparison table here: [https://hypercontainer.io/why- hyper.html](https://hypercontainer.io/why-hyper.html)

<comment><USER3> Makes for a suspicious comparison when both the two other options, have no features that hyper doesn't or is better. I understand that this comparison comes from you, and it's not easy being completely fair when doing a comparison, but I can't find anywhere anything against using Hyper or even any tradeoffs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not involved with Hyper/HyperContainer, I'm just a user and recently started contributing. I've had hyperd silently crashing once, and the API and tooling is a bit rough, but these things can be fixed. No complaints so far from a purely architectural viewpoint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> FYI: This has a name clash with a fairly popular TUI library: [https://github.com/nsf/termbox](https://github.com/nsf/termbox)

<comment><USER5> Which is a really good, actively maintained library. Shameless plug for the game engine I wrote using it: [https://github.com/JoelOtter/termloop](https://github.com/JoelOtter/termloop)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Captcha doesn't reset after first error message about server capacity, so when you click launch again it says captcha is wrong.

</comment><comment><USER7> Stupid question maybe, but what would the use case for something like this be? Can I run a server on it?

<comment><USER8> I'm curious too. I can't think of any reason I would use this. Maybe to use during an online course or something, but most of them offer a way to do that already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> After getting an over capacity error, you always get a captcha verification error and have to reload the page

<comment><USER10> I also got this error: [http://i.imgur.com/yIj1Zvm.png](http://i.imgur.com/yIj1Zvm.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Slightly off-topic but kind of not. Through the website, I found [https://hypercontainer.io/](https://hypercontainer.io/) which seems to fit really good for a use-case of mine.

However, it's the first time I see HyperContainer. Anyone have anything good/bad to say about it? The value proposition seems really attractive "Fast as Container" \+ "Isolated by VM" but can't find anything about the tradeoffs so would love someone who tried it to write about their experience.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The server has limited resources of 32GB RAM, so sorry if you're not getting in. The good news is that you can install it on your own hardware, it's all open source: [https://github.com/termbox/termbox](https://github.com/termbox/termbox)

<comment><USER11> Does it really have to be 777?

        chmod 777 /var/run/hyper.sock

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably not, but I haven't really bothered to look into that, it should really be using HTTP instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if this can be used to hide malicious activity or even as a form of honeypot. Its simple to create such service then post/advertise on reddit, and simply monitor all commands the users execute. Soon you will have a trove of all sort of malicious scripts used for crawling, automated purchasing, phishing, spamming etc. You can also use the service yourself to get lost in the crowd.

</comment><comment><USER13> It was working for a bit, and then the terminal went blank with:

        lost server

Edit: a refresh fixed it, but I lost my current shell session

</comment><comment><USER14> over capacity and I get a captcha error when trying to select a different server. I have to reload the page -- never got to a terminal.

</comment><comment><USER15> [ 0.182343] smpboot: CPU0: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C2750 @ 2.40GHz (family: 0x6, model: 0x4d, stepping: 0x8)

Neat to see one of these connected to the internet serving a production service! I also have a C2750 system.

</comment><comment><USER16> This seems cool, but I don't know what to do with it, apart from sshing into my own server if I'm on a PC that doesn't have a ssh client on it. Just remember to use 2FA.

</comment><comment><USER17> It may be the HN effect, but after opening an Ubuntu session and a vi console, it started refreshing constantly and telling me:

STATUS Reconnecting

Will need to try again when the traffic slows down...

</comment><comment><USER18> Seems to be no way to go back up the terminal, so if you run something like grep --help, you only get the bottom portion of the help section rather then the whole thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> It uses tmux for session management, so you can press Ctrl+b and [ to scroll with the arrow keys and page up/down. But this is definitely something I will try to fix soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Probably want to disable the tmux keybinding for detach

</comment><comment><USER20> I actually like it. I think it is well implemented and can be used to play around on command line with different flavors of linux. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER21> Considering the captcha it actually takes 3 clicks to launch

<comment><USER22> > Considering the captcha it actually takes 3 clicks to launch

More like ten.

Six for the captcha choices, one to submit the captcha, one to pick the server type, one to submit and get a " _Server capacity reached, please try again later_ ", and finally one to close the browser tab.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not going to rent a $500 server just to handle the HN traffic spike, sorry. Capacity will be expanded over time, but only after the service pays for itself (either through ads or paid features).

<comment><USER22> No worries. I'm looking forward to trying it out again after things quiet down a bit.

Fyi, it doesn't have to be a $500/mo server permanently either. Depending on where your hosting the backend, you could scale it up temporarily and then scale it back down when things quiet down. $500/mo is approx $16/day which could be well worth it for a day while enjoying an HN-driven bump.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you do

ctrl-b d

to disconnect from tmux, it pretty much leaves the server useless.

</comment><comment><USER24> over capacity. anyone have a screenshot for what the terminal looks like? Is there a countdown timer?

<comment><AUTHOR> Welp, I've temporarily reduced the duration to 1h, should free up some slots.

Here's a screenshot: [http://i.imgur.com/UsRgXhD.png](http://i.imgur.com/UsRgXhD.png)

<comment><USER25> After I got past the "over capacity" error I got to a screen like the above, but without the terminal.

Javascript error:

        index.js:2371 Uncaught TypeError: this.base.append is not a function

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, what browser and OS are you using?

<comment><USER26> Same here. Chromium: "Version 53.0.2785.143 built on Debian stretch/sid, running on Debian stretch/sid (64-bit)"

<comment><AUTHOR> That's odd, probably a bug in preact but I can't reproduce it. I've deployed a fix nonetheless.

<comment><USER25> index.js:2371 Uncaught TypeError: a.base.append is not a function

Still getting an error. As before, only header and footer visible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> do you plan to have an API to create boxes and to run some predefined scripts on launch?

</comment><comment><USER28> terminal.com all over again?

Great idea, closed in 6 months.

</comment><comment><USER29> uhhhhhh

I can launch a Linux terminal with Super+Enter. (I run i3)

<comment><USER30> did you even click the link?</comment></comment>


No email confirmation received from GE Predix development registration - <AUTHOR> No email confirmation received from GE Predix development registration.<p>Myself and Our team had signup for Predix Developer Account with all the required details and we got confirmation page. But it's been 3 days where we haven't received any email with login details for our Predix account. Did anybody experinced the same? <comment><USER2> Hi sorry to hear. Fastest way to resolve is by visiting [https://www.predix.io/support/](https://www.predix.io/support/) >> "Sign Up/ Sign In Help". If all else fails though, ping me firstname.lastname@example.com. Hope to see ya soon on Predix! Lothar, Predix Dev Rel

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi Lothar, Appreciate your quick response. I will reach on given email.

</comment><comment><USER3> I got access to my Account, Thanks once again Lothar.</comment>


Essential Rust Tools - <AUTHOR> https://www.ultrasaurus.com/2019/06/essential-rust-tools/ <comment><USER2> Too scarce. Obviously missing rustfmt, clippy, and many others. See Development Tools[1] section on Awesome Rust. I would add also a C to Rust conversion tool - c2rust[2]. I hope also Java to Rust converter[3] would become comparable too.

[1] [https://github.com/rust-unofficial/awesome- rust#development-...](https://github.com/rust-unofficial/awesome- rust#development-tools)

[2] [https://github.com/immunant/c2rust](https://github.com/immunant/c2rust)

[3] [https://github.com/aschoerk/converter- page](https://github.com/aschoerk/converter-page)

</comment><comment><USER3> To add to the list, my favorites are:

* cargo-expand [0]: dumps the expansion of troublesome macros

* cargo-bloat [1]: explains why a package is so huge

* ripgrep [2]: RIP grep

* llvm-tools-preview (via [3]): the LLVM tools with which Rust was compiled (because LLVM versions sometimes don't interoperate)

[0] [https://crates.io/crates/cargo-expand](https://crates.io/crates/cargo- expand) [1] [https://crates.io/crates/cargo- bloat](https://crates.io/crates/cargo-bloat) [2] [https://crates.io/crates/ripgrep](https://crates.io/crates/ripgrep) [3] [https://crates.io/crates/cargo-binutils](https://crates.io/crates/cargo- binutils)

<comment><USER4> I'll add to this cargo-edit [0] which lets you add, remove and update dependencies from terminal. Small additions to cargo but huge timesavers.

[0] [https://github.com/killercup/cargo- edit](https://github.com/killercup/cargo-edit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> To add my own two favourites:

* cargo-outdated which shows you which crates can be updated with a major update

* cargo-tree which shows your entire dependency tree (actually it's a DAG) nicely rendered in the terminal.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Essential Rust Tool" surely - unless I'm missing something this list only has one item?

Anyway here's one I found recently that lets you build application bundles easily on MacOS: [https://github.com/burtonageo/cargo- bundle](https://github.com/burtonageo/cargo-bundle)</comment>


The iPhone killed my inner nerd - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/29/15892222/i-miss-the-days-of-hacking-things-before-the-iphone-first-click <comment><USER2> There's precious little contemplation in this piece. It's like things are just happening to the author, like waves crashing over his head. Really what he's saying is that his "inner nerd" (I'll never get used to (give in to) the enthusiastic adoption of nerd and geek etc) never really had much interest in technology beneath the level of practical communications for home/hobby use. His interest in those things never made him go lower down. But there's always going to be a layer you can go to where tinkering and fiddling are still required.

So his point is taken: for people whose main interest in technology was effectively for personal organisation and home entertainment there is no longer much need, or use, for technical knowledge. Perhaps that will close one pathway into technology. Others will open up.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if this will have an effect on how kids get into programming. Back when I was a kid we had MS-DOS, my primary motivation was to install and play games, but there was this easy built-in pathway of: Hey, you can do a lot more with this machine if you want, including making your own games.

Nowadays consuming and developing are so disconnected, it seems almost impossible for the younger generations to just stumble upon it like many people did back then.

<comment><USER4> I would like to think that the industry learned the error of its ways.

The 1980s and 1990s were prime times for kids getting into programming. Early personal computers came with BASIC. Early HTML and JavaScript were simple enough for a child to get into. That seemed to fall apart in the 2000s when programming languages did not come standard with personal computers and the growing complexity of web development made it increasingly difficult to create anything exciting by the standards of the day. Those were also the times when programming books geared towards kids seemed to disappear.

Of course many of the modern efforts are much more artificial since they rely upon programming languages geared towards kids. Yet that is the price of complexity. Regardless of what the article's author argues, modern devices are much more complex under the hood. Much of that complexity bleeds into the tools that would appeal to the inner nerd. Languages geared towards kids both reduce that complexity and add to the excitement of creating more sophisticated programs. Children who learn them will have the basics to leap into "real" programming languages.

The other thing that we have witnessed over the past few years is a renewed interest in books geared towards children of most ages. For a while the best that I saw were titles geared towards teens and determined tweens. Now it is possible to find Python (and Ruby) books that mirror some of the BASIC books that were written for children in the early 1980s.

Things are getting better, even if walled gardens are leading some people to claim otherwise.

<comment><USER5> For me I found it way harder to get into programing in the 90's, as a kid in this decade I really wanted to make my own games and software but being on a Mac I couldn't find how to cross the gap, you didn't have BASIC like before with the Apple II or MSDOS, it was full-featured GUI with expensive compilers or nothing. Now any kid can open the dev console in a browser and write javascript, or even create basic HTML files. Maybe we should encourage more quick and dirty approach and avoid recommending frameworks and complex build processes for hobbyist projects.

<comment><USER6> What about HyperCard?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Also, modern cars with their proverbial weld-shut hoods have killed my inner mechanical engineer.

<comment><USER8> Can you be a little more specific? I find modern cars to be funnier just because of the closed source stuff. It's more rewarding (for me, at least) when i figure out a can bus message or how to flash my ECU with diy adapters.

<comment><USER7> That sounds more like IT-work than mechanical engineering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > I'd sit smugly reading my emails on a train with my iPAQ or one of the > original HTC Pocket PC devices with a stylus. I couldn't download apps from > an app store for these phones because those stores didn't even exist yet.

This killed me- I used to run a 'App Store'-like site for Pocket PC around this time which allowed installing apps OTA- usually this required running the installer on your Desktop PC and syncing to device. I knew lots of people wanted this but didn't know how to let them know about my site. Web archive has a copy, but only the home page :(

[http://web.archive.org/web/20051201023911/http://www.cabfile...](http://web.archive.org/web/20051201023911/http://www.cabfiles.net:80/)

<comment><USER10> I recognize the domain, I'm pretty sure I used your site all the time.

I usually got there from a search after looking for something specific though.

<comment><USER9> Awesome :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Now I've grown up and free time has become scarce, I tinker a lot less than I used to but I recently enjoyed a weekend burst of the "old times" when I offered to build a hackintosh for a friend.

I'm a linux and windows guy and the last time I used a mac was pre-OSX days so I knew nothing about modern Macs, the ecosystem, what the 'go to' apps were for it or even how to use one (thank god it has a terminal and a semblance of linux underneath!).

Anyway, my friend's a designer and he needed a new mac but didn't have the cash on hand to buy one. I offered one evening to google around and see what options there were for building your own machine and sticking OSX on it. From that, I discovered the hackintosh scene, did some reading up and decided to have a go.

I researched parts for his budget (~€800 with monitor), he bought them off Amazon and then I set about getting it working one weekend (side note: amazing how cheap hardware is these days - managed to get 16GB RAM, a 500GB SSD and a 24" monitor in there for that price!).

Turned out to be a lot of fun, doubly so with the constraint that I didn't have a mac on hand to bootstrap with (virtualbox to the rescue!).

It was a nice little nerdy project. Didn't take too long to do, provided a few interesting things to learn/geek out on, gave me some sweaty moments fighting with clover configs and kex files and yielded a happy, tangible result at the end.

So Apple managed to re-kindle my inner nerd for a weekend at least :)

</comment><comment><USER12> > Windows 8... probably wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the iPhone.

I highly doubt Microsoft would have given up on new versions of Windows if iphone hadn't been released.

<comment><USER13> I suspect he means that without of the success of the iPhone and then the iPad the emphasis in Windows 8 of having a "touch" interface might not have been there.

<comment><USER14> Yes and no, I guess. Yes: iPhone/iPad showed what to do properly with a touch screen on a phone or some other portable device. No: if they wouldn't have done it, I am fairly - if not 100% - sure somebody else would have done it. I had an industrial touch screen PC more than 10 years before iPhone existed. Even then, using it with a non-touch aware OS, I reckoned there was future in it: that thing, but smaller and flatter and faster and fitting into your pocket wasn't too hard to imagine. I'm by far not the most creative and definitely not alone on the planet so if even I could imagine something like my TI calculator but with a touch screen and a mail reader and my GameBoy games, others could as well, and better. So that's what happened, and Apple was basically first. And immediately spot on.

<comment><USER15> This - so much this.

Touch-screen tech was coming along nicely before the iphone. I worked in a call center around 99 or 2000. We were using something that seemed to be a very powerful, blackberry reminiscent, touch-screen powered computer. Most of the time these were used to grade the rep's phone calls, adding notes as necessary. Smart phones seem like a natural outgrowth of this sort of technology merging with something folks were already beginning to carry with them - mobile phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Apple's iPhone has been on the market for 10 years now, and it hasn't experienced a single instance of a mass malware attack like we've seen twice in the past month on Windows PCs.

>Sure, there have been vulnerabilities, bugs, and near misses, but nobody has been forced to pay $300 to unlock their iPhone after a huge malware attack.

I feel the article is disingenuous by comparing a phone to a PC.

<comment><USER17> I dunno - your average iPhone is a powerful PC running a complex OS with a (largely) permanent network connection and the owner almost certainly will cough up $100 to unlock given how much people rely on their phones these days. That sounds like a perfect target for hackers to me.

<comment><USER18> If all the data on the phone is in the cloud (as it is for most users), unlocking would just be a factory reset of the device.

Also, while it is indeed a powerful networked computer, it does a lot less stuff in the background than a PC (and does no "legacy" stuff at all). Unlike a PC, where a thing like SMB is expected to work (even though it's old and buggy).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I stopped tinkering when I grew up, which just coincided with when the iPhone became usable.

</comment><comment><USER20> Well, not a single reference to Linux in the article. It bugs me because one of the reasons I use it as my primary OS is that it keeps my "inner nerd" alive. I believe similar essay could be written with the software in mind. Apps like Whatsapp/WeChat are reducing the pressure we used to feel to find a solution to a given problem via a specific tool. These apps are hammers we use for anything, even for fixing screws on the wall.

<comment><USER21> Why would he reference Linux? His point was that his needs are met without having to tinker.

His needs drove his inner nerd. Introducing Linux into his environment so that he would be forced to tinker would be backwards.

<comment><USER20> So maybe I didn't get his point at all. I thought that he was upset with the fact that new gadgets would be turning him into a plain user (and a consumer...) and reducing the tinker inner nerd facet of his life. If he is pleased that now he doesn't need to build/keep those 5 boxes in his room and just have an iPhone in his pocket, well, then I missed the point badly.

<comment><USER21> I read it as just a fact-of-life statement about how the iPhone has obviated his need to tinker. He may feel nostalgic about it, but I didn't read "upset" in there... certainly not that he's looking for ways to make his life more nerdy by contriving reasons to tinker.

<comment><USER20> Ok, fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I get it. I only started programming precisely when the first iphone came out, and I started tinkering a few years before. Even so I long for this sense of wonder that existed when everything was hard, or at least required some thought and ingenuity.

I know the raspberry pie and stuff are a way to do that, but it feels so artificial and fake.

(No, this comment really has no other point but to evoke diffuse nostalgic feelings.)

<comment><USER23> Raspberry pi and similar are not fake if you actually want something of this form factor (not full PC size, and not a smartphone you would build into the wall...) to run some particular job in your house or elsewhere.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but it might feel fake if you just download a bunch of libraries, install them and call it a day.

<comment><USER24> On one hand you could take advantage of available tools to make your job easier. On the other you could do everything from scratch for personal satisfaction. Neither option discounts the other but I think the author comes off as whiny when he clearly chose the former over latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yeah cause having an IA always on, connected to you entire house, to turn off the light is definitely easier than a switch.

<comment><USER26> Honestly, this recent nerd obsession with using hideously complex technology to control your home lighting is _extremely_ funny.

It's the idea of going to all this effort just to be able to do some not-very- useful things. You're running an entire embedded computer to control a single light bulb. Just hilarious.

<comment><USER4> Similar arguments can be made for most new technologies. When the critique isn't over utility, it is almost certainly over disproportionately high costs. The important things are to understand why things are done the way they are and how it will progress in the future.

I suspect that the long term utility for home automation is for managing energy use, rather than the gimmicky stuff that we are being sold on today. The reason for cramming a microcontroller into it probably has a lot to do with cost. Dealing with automation from top to bottom centrally would mean rewiring buildings and dealing with mains. Dealing with automation at the appliance level means that you can tailor the design to the requirements (e.g. cheaper components that handle less power if the device needs less power). Having a microcontroller means that you can use off-the-shelf components for networking.

<comment><USER25> It's like the bip-bop phones vs the iphone.

I get that you want the iphone now. I didn't get why would you buy the bip-bop phone then.

Yet you need people that does by the unpractical, expensive, mostly useless, polluting first versions of a concept for it to develop into something society needs.

My first comment still stand though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Author realizes he can't do anything worthwhile with his technical skills that isn't provided by the market (reading emails on phones). The market is working, but you lose that sense of elite-ness and accomplishment.

I'll bet that many people who used to get excited about building Linux based home media servers are now satisfied with Netflix or Prime.

</comment><comment><USER28> Another thing not mentioned in the article or comments is the great Apple SDK APIs. Those "ruined" development for me, in the sense that most else looks terrible in comparison. (I was not familiar with macOS development before iPhone OS).

</comment><comment><USER29> "have been impacted by the iPhone. Chromebooks are locked down with an app store". Windows 10S apparently as well. The damage done by Apple making this acceptable is huge.

</comment><comment><USER30> This author is the founder of winrumors.

While he was running an exchange server, I was learning to program because I couldn't afford server software. I wanted to be the guy running an exchange server too. I wanted to run all sorts of stuff I couldn't afford. But I got my hands on visual studio 97 instead.

I home schooled, and worked as a tech at a sort of server junk shop in Dallas (what many may not know about Dallas is that it's city built on telecom). They would purchase computers from companies going out of business, refurbish, and resell them. I was 14, and paid in cash or store credit. My room was also full of servers and networking equipment. I bought as many of the servers that weren't selling as I could.

My friends and I watched the 1995 film "hackers" on repeat as if it were a new religion. We had LAN parties most weekends, and a lot of my equipment became "mobile". At any one time, I always had a "best" server that was stripped down for transport (which changed every time I could get my hands on something more powerful) and a bucket of switches and ethernet cables. Reminiscing is fun.

By the time the iPhone released, I was 7 years into my professional programming career writing desktop and server software. I completely ignored the iPhone. The idea was cool, it certainly looked cool, but the system itself was an appliance. I didn't believe in computing appliances. I still have little to no interest in mobile as it currently exists, and I don't regret it.

In my opinion, Apple's innovation wasn't the iPhone. It wasn't the app store. It was getting carriers to subsidize a $1,000 pocket computer and call it a phone. It makes sense, if you were building a $1k computer (that is actually worth a grand) to fit in consumer's pockets that you'd want to build in a store so you can make your money back. This business model already existed in gaming consoles (in consoles a majority of their money is made in licensing software). It was obvious it was going to sell like hotcakes. Unfortunately, this cemented the iPhone's appliance nature. They HAVE to be accessible. They HAVE to be secure. They HAVE to have long battery life. Those elements can only be maintained if they are viciously protected. I can get my windows machine to do whatever I want. The limit is physics and my imagination. I can get an iPhone to do what apple approves.

From a consumer perspective I understand that mobile is awesome. Everything is bite-sized and convenient. From a programmer's perspective, I can't help but see your phone as a toy computer, and "apps" as software appetizers. That may change, and I would welcome the change. As it stands, the walled garden, battery life, and touch inputs keep it at toy status for me.

I'm 34 now. When I started my career, the young programmers were 34. I was mentored by greybeards in their 40's and 50's. Now 34 is the beginning of being old. I don't meet many programmers over 40 anymore. I do the work the "young" guys are afraid of. I write the heavy math. I do the memory optimization. I do the complex multi-threading. I build the novel features. I write the code you can't copy and paste from stack overflow. I fix the fuck- ups. Maybe that's because the iPhone never killed my inner nerd.

When I was young I programmed because I couldn't afford the real stuff. Now when I program (outside of paid work) it's because the next real stuff doesn't exist yet.

I'll be really sad if the future truly is your phone as an interface streaming data to and from cloud processing. I can't help but feel like it's a step back.</comment>