Source: Microsoft mulled an $8B bid for Slack, will focus on Skype instead - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/04/source-microsoft-mulled-an-8-billion-bid-for-slack-will-focus-on-skype-instead/ <comment><USER2> We initially used Skype on our team to communicate with others. However, the software was horribly buggy on OSX. Slack has become part of our main toolchain. It works, has the basic features you need and doesn't get in our way. The integrations are great and we'll continue to use them.

Unless Microsoft rebuilds Skype for the ground up, I don't see us leaving Slack for it. They had their chance, and they dropped the ball.

<comment><USER3> "Unless Microsoft rebuilds Skype for the ground up"

This. This exactly. Is it really unbelievable to assume Microsoft wouldn't attempt to build their own IRC+ clone and save a few billion while they are at it?

I do agree with you, Slack is much better than Skype, but I would add that Lync is just as good. I went from Lync to Slack (after changing jobs) and I would say that Lync not only works just as well but has more features a team would find useful. For instance, multi-user video+voice chat w/ great screensharing/presentation functionality.

Edit: Should mention I was using Lync in a Windows shop and now Slack in OSX. In Windows it worked perfectly but I could be convinced it had issues in OSX.

<comment><USER4> When I was forced to use Lync (due to an acquisition) in 2014 it was absolutely fucking terrible. The OS X client failed to report online status correctly, couldn't participate in most group chats or video or audio calls, and crashed regularly. Also weirdly non-native UI. And, no linux client to speak of - for a startup like the one I worked for where many devs used linux, that was a nonstarter. Has the story improved since then? (Thankfully no longer have to deal with it since I quit that job a half year later)

<comment><USER5> LOL, "lync.exe" a.k.a. "Skype for Business".

1\. The worst brand management this side of 1984. "Skype for Business" has nothing to do with Skype and the .exe is still called "lync.exe"

2\. SDK: Trying to use the C# SDK for even simple tasks leaves your app deadlocking or spinning 100% CPU in threads you didn't create or throwing native exceptions that doesn't make any sense as they are referencing raw hex 0x12345678 pointers or COM objects you never even touched. And if you try to watchdog all that have fun with 5 orphaned lync.exe's claiming your USB audio/video device.

<comment><USER6> Microsoft products are filled with references left behind by what I can only assume to be developers who were just hoping to get on a different product team after their next review.

SharePoint's virtual path for its SOAP services is "_vti_bin". VTI = Vermeer Technologies Incorporated, the makers of FrontPage and the FrontPage Server Extensions.

Then there was Groove (brought in Ray Ozzie's luggage) that was renamed SharePoint Workspace (groove.exe).

SharePoint Designer (which didn't actually have a visual designer in the 2013, and final, release) crashes when performing some operations in source files ... With an exception in the FPEDITAX.DLL (FrontPage Editor ActiveX).

Those can all almost be forgiven - they are like vestigial organs after each product evolved into something else.

Until you get to OneDrive. _smh_

<comment><USER7> I knew OneDrive was going to be the punchline -_- So much wasted time.

<comment><USER8> Can you or the GP explain?

<comment><USER7> OneDrive For Business is pretty much unusable:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2ex10y/onedrive_f...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2ex10y/onedrive_for_business_rant/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if the outcome would have been different if Slack was incorporated outside of the US where Microsoft could use some of its non domiciled cash on the acquisition?

[http://www.ibtimes.com/microsoft-admits- keeping-92-billion-o...](http://www.ibtimes.com/microsoft-admits- keeping-92-billion-offshore-avoid-paying-29-billion-us-taxes-1665938)

Also interesting to think that Slack could be worth so much. Look at ICQ, Microsoft instant messenger, etc.

It seems as though slack like tools get eclipsed every 5-10 years as a new generation comes along with a new favorite tool.

I'd be interested in hearing from someone who would argue that slack will be a dominate communication tool in 5-8 years time and still exist in a meaningful way in 10 years time.

<comment><USER10> > It seems as though slack like tools get eclipsed every 5-10 years as a new > generation comes along with a new favorite tool.

You've definitely got a point there. Although I do want to mention that part of the reason Slack eclipsed other tools was, in part, its Websocket based protocol. They have created a fairly complete unified messaging application because of it (IMO).

They were the first movers in the area. I don't know if I would provide much of a meaningful discussion regarding the longer term viability of Slack, but I think they have a chance to be meaningful, maybe even dominate in 10 years time.

They are already Websocket based and they are moving towards WebRTC support...if they take that direction and add P2P support to provide truly secure encrypted communications where certificates are negotiated P2P, then I think they will explode to even greater heights than they have already achieved. Of course, this is not a simple task, but the business implications of truly secure communications channels would be compelling for most corporate enterprises.

Now this is not the same as 100% secure endpoints, but it would be a massive step in the right direction.

Edit: Forgot to add P2P link... [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Guide/API/WebRT...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Guide/API/WebRTC/Peer-to-peer_communications_with_WebRTC)

<comment><USER11> IRC Cloud's web client uses WebSockets.

<comment><USER10> I don't think that IRC Cloud was originally based on websocket...I think it used 'keep-alive' but I could be wrong. Although it still has documentation on how to use HTTPS for stream end-points ([https://github.com/irccloud/irccloud- tools/wiki/API-Overview](https://github.com/irccloud/irccloud-tools/wiki/API- Overview)).

Also can't find much information about WebRTC support for IRC Cloud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Satya Nadella were among those > unconvinced by the idea, with Gates pushing instead to add more features > into Skype to make it more competitive with Slack in the business market, > our source says.

I'd say fix it first.

Somehow the Skype name has gone from being an asset to being a liability to the point where I cannot understand why they renamed Lync to "Skype for business".

<comment><USER13> Agree. Especially when you actually open "Skype for Business" it says "Microsoft Lync" at the top. It's a mess.

<comment><USER14> They've finally fixed this with the last update to the Skype for Business client.

It's still a huge clusterfuck of a rebranding. The two clients are just barely compatible, and it's a huge mess when you're building a Skype for Business tool, and the users think they can use regular Skype to do anything with it.

Hopefully "investing in Skype" is a code word for building out an API for Office 365 Skype integrations that actually works. They've only been promising it for two or three years.

<comment><USER15> They have regularly bought out companies in that space (last one was Ray Ozzie's Talko, in December, and they specifically said "Talko was acquired to help fuel future innovation in Skype and Skype for Business. As part of the Skype team, we'll leverage Talko's technology and the many things we've learned during its design and development.").

Let's hope they actually benefit from those.

[http://betanews.com/2015/12/21/microsoft-cops-talko-for- skyp...](http://betanews.com/2015/12/21/microsoft-cops-talko-for-skype-stuff/)

<comment><USER15> I think the meaning got lost here :( . I was genuinely hoping for Skype & Microsoft to benefit, it was not sarcastic or anything, and I thought it was relevant information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Skype is horrible. I'm sorry but it is such an awful tool. It crashes, it loses my old conversations, group calls never work. It is truly horrible, the codebase is a rotting pile of garbage that will never be fixed.

I am glad that Slack will not be eaten by Microsoft. I hope they really do implement voice soon.

<comment><USER17> > I hope they really do implement voice soon.

They have! It's in beta, but we've been using it at my workplace for 2 days now. Audio only so far. Better audio quality than anything else we use (appear.in, lync, hangouts, among others).

Integrated into slack, so you click a button in a channel to start a call anyone in the channel can join. Nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sad thing is that Slack would be a _far_ better fit for Microsoft, given that it's primarily business-focused. I've used Skype for work but only because it's the only option we've had, not because anyone actually wants to use it. Hangouts and Slack are so much more business-friendly.

That said, I think MS made the right call given that they already own Skype. It could be good - great, even - if they actually _tried_. They don't need a Slack acquisition for that, but they probably could do with rebuilding every native app they have from the ground up, every single one is awful.

<comment><USER19> I don't understand why Skype is so crappy. Most Microsoft software is at the very least average, with several products being industry standards. Why is Skype so different?

<comment><USER18> I've always assumed that the acquisition failed horribly. The apps are still the same code as pre-acquisition, and I'll bet a lot of the original developers left pretty sharpish. It's quite possible that the original codebase is an absolute train wreck, it's not as if it was _ever_ an amazing app, after all.

I wonder if MS acquired Skype today (i.e. "The New Microsoft") whether they'd have been more successful.

<comment><USER20> Skype has a ton of legacy (just look at this list: [http://www.skype.com/en/download-skype/skype-for- computer/](http://www.skype.com/en/download-skype/skype-for-computer/)) - supporting that can't be easy.

WhatsApp will probably face similar problems in 5-10 years, if they want to maintain compatibility with the myriad of clients they have in the wild.

<comment><USER21> > WhatsApp will probably face similar problems in 5-10 years, if they want to > maintain compatibility with the myriad of clients they have in the wild.

They don't. They just announced dropping support for Blackberry and S60.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Really glad MS didn't buy Slack. I think they're going to be an amazing big business that will generate a lot of cash and opportunity.

Most acquisitions by big businesses, either early or late stage, destroy value. Big biz thinks they can innovate by buying. Smaller biz wants an exit. The innovation exits on acquisition and after earn-out. Both suffer and we all lose what could have been the next Google.

<comment><USER23> I think it depends on the level where the business acts on.

If you have a real low level technology, an acquisition can be a good thing, because the big corp could integrate it some of their products and increase the spreading.

But yeah, if we look at Skype and WhatsApp, it's probably good that Slack didn't get acquired.

<comment><USER24> Weren't both of these somewhat successful acquisitions? i.e. Would Skype have been better today without the acquisions, and did WhatsApp suffer product-wise as a result of being part of FB?

<comment><USER25> I think Skype suffered from their first acquisition and Microsoft never got it back on to its original trajectory when they bought it.

Skype still has a lot of consumer good will and a strong brand. Amongst my peers online video calling is called Skype notater what platform we use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Slack would have been a great investment for Microsoft.

Still, I look at Skype and realize that Slack would have probably declined in quality after an acquisition. Kind of glad it didn't pan out.

</comment><comment><USER27> Even more focus on Skype? Great, maybe they can break it even more. Every chat client, developed by 2 guys in their free time works far better the skype chat. Message not delivered, hundrets of new messages when a new client logs in, annyoing link replacment with pictures, group chats not working, adding people to calls not working and so much more.

Fucking horrorshow

</comment><comment><USER28> Here's a list of Microsoft's announced acquisitions:

[https://www.microsoft.com/investor/Stock/AcquisitonHistory/A...](https://www.microsoft.com/investor/Stock/AcquisitonHistory/All/default.aspx) (warning, asked for an MS Login first)

From their results from previous acquisitions, I don't understand what they think they would get by purchasing Slack (unless it is a purely defensive move against Slack developing an in-house document collaboration service, Office 365/Google Docs style).

<comment><USER29> > against Slack developing an in-house document collaboration service, Office > 365/Google Docs style

One can only dream …

<comment><USER28> Bringing document collaboration side-by-side with team communication could have a positive effect on productivity, and Slack could roll it into the per user pricing they already have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What amazes me is just how bad the politics in MS must be to not swat Slack aside like a fly.

Slack is basically an IRC server with bots. Office communicator / Msn messenger/ whatever it is now / is installed on every Windows / office machine and ties into the moat used apps in the world.

MS-Slack ought to have "Mary just updated the Walmart contract" messages flinging around every marketing department in the world.

The fact it does not is testament to how far Giants can fall (in the 80s and 90s Microsoft would have already danced on Slacks grave).

Larry And Sergey need to study Microsoft a lot more carefully than "it was Ballmers fault" to try and avoid the same fate.

</comment><comment><USER31> slack needs to sell asap.

edit: to expand. Slack has 0 technology moat. The reason Github has been so successful and has gone many years without significant competition, is that it is an open platform _in the sense_ that I have my personal, work, and private repos there. Many open source stuff is up there, and the platform allows me to contribute to my private repos, public repos and quickly download software.

To some extent slack has this idea where you can have 3 or 4 organizations in the app, but user to user seems to not be implemented, or at least non- obvious. Everything is siloed in an org.

lots of companies and apps are working on chat and are substitutes for pieces. It was not obvioius Github could make money or was significant for a long time. Professional chat is the opposite.

* Low barrier to entry

* high competition

* limited revenue/margin

* open source alternatives

* largely based on users/social proof. e.g. could get myspaced.

* competing in a space that is "hot" and many larger companies are moving in, already poised to take this.

<comment><USER32> I'm not really bullish on Slack as a product, but I don't think Slack as a business is so bad. I think Slack is trying to be the Yammer of IRC: you get it in through a couple of people using it, and all of a sudden you convert the entire enterprise, hence the focus on marketing.

Hipchat/Flowdock/probably others existed before Slack, and are still largely interchangeable at this point, but they're not investing so heavily in marketing.

I think a direct comparison to MySpace is inaccurate since neither they nor their competitors are directly viral (yet?), but they could certainly be replaced.

The question is: who would want to spend a pile of money trying to outmarket Slack? It's hard to tell what their sales figures are, but if they get lodged in the public's view as the company that does this, it will take concerted, capital-intensive effort to dislodge them, and why would you go to that effort for a low margin space?

Open Source is really not relevant in this space since the price is cheap and you're paying for convenience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Skype reliability has deteriorated considerably over the years. We have switched over to Google Hangouts which is more reliable and has better video quality.

<comment><USER34> Can second this. Switched recently after bandwidth issues made Skype unusable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Has it even recovered $1 billion in profit from the $8.5 billion it paid for Skype itself _5 years ago_? And Skype's best days may be behind it. I wonder if they'll do another big write-off in 3 years like they did for aQuantive and Nokia.

</comment><comment><USER36> Did they forgot Yammer?

<comment><USER11> Yammer does seem like a better fit, branding and technology wise, for a Slack- like service than Skype. Microsoft has overextended the Skype brand. The new Skype services are so notoriously crappy that they are a liability to the name. Let the Skype brand focus exclusively on real-time video/multimedia communication. Let the Yammer brand focus on asynchronous, web-based communication for enterprises.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> How about they start by focusing on better linux and OSX compatibility. Skype is horribly broken right now. Linux client hasn't been updated in 3 years:

[http://community.skype.com/t5/Linux/Why-is-Skype-on-Linux- st...](http://community.skype.com/t5/Linux/Why-is-Skype-on-Linux-still-so- grossly-out-of-date/m-p/4314193)

[http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software- compan...](http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software- companies/skype-linux-breaks-people-blame-microsoft-are-we-surprise)

Also, I added $10 skype credit a while back when I needed to make few international phone calls. I used about $3 of it. The rest $7 was in my account for a while and then it disappeared. What's the reasoning behind that? It's totally unacceptable to have credits disappear like that. In that same period I added $10 to Viber as well and I still have $8 remaining on it even after 1.5 years.

</comment><comment><USER38> Switched from Skype to Discord for gaming. No regrets.

<comment> Syrup-tan The unofficial API community is also really great, and there are a plethora of libraries to choose from to get something working quickly.

[https://blog.discordapp.com/the-robot-revolution-has- unoffic...](https://blog.discordapp.com/the-robot-revolution-has-unofficially- begun/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Small anecdote about Skype specifically as an instant messenger.

When eBay acquired Skype there was little willing adoption of it for IMs at eBay corporate. AIM (through whatever client) was the de facto standard. Management didn't like this but also didn't have the courage to say, "Skype is what you're using now."

So there was an embarrassingly transparent mandate from "IT" that AIM was disallowed due to a vague (but critical) "security" concern. That somehow persisted across versions and years.

This was sort of my experience of working at eBay and my impression of its management in a nutshell.

Skype may be good for voice/video, I don't know. It's a terrible instant messenger. The only one I ever used where I had to worry about it swallowing messages and couldn't just assume the recipient got them.

</comment><comment><USER40> If slack is worth $8 billion.... Sorry, There's no way to complete that sentence. How about, Slack is worth about as much as Basecamp.

</comment><comment><USER41> Skype has dropped linux. SKype is now dead to me and those I work with. Dustbin of history.

</comment><comment><USER42> All my enterprise clients are MSFT shops. They will make due with whatever collaboration tools that MSFT provides. Also, they would never use a product from a company named "Slack".

<comment><USER43> Why wouldn't they?

<comment><USER42> doesn't sound "enterprisey"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I would be a fan of Skype, if they did not route everything through government spyware.

<comment><USER12> While I'm not sure that's what they do they DID get caught red-handed a couple of years ago snooping on urls sent over Skype.

<comment><USER45> "route everything through government surveillance" is perhaps a bit too blunt, but let's not forget that Microsoft was the founding member of the PRISM program.

And Prism or no Prism-- Skype was a $1bn present from Microsoft to the intelligence community. Even if they never snooped on anything (we know they have) they did re-engineer skype in a manner that allows it to be subject to more traditional CALEA trap and trace techniques, as well a numerous side channel attacks and traffic interception. The "secret sauce" of Skype in the very beginning was P2P connections, which MSFT immediately removed.

<comment><USER46> Isn't skype still P2P?? otherwise why would it have an option to disallow P2P between you and people you don't know?

<comment><USER47> [http://www.zdnet.com/article/skype-ditched-peer-to-peer- supe...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/skype-ditched-peer-to-peer-supernodes- for-scalability-not-surveillance/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Woah woah woah. Comparing Slack to Skype... it's not just apples to oranges... it's comparing Iron Man's Jarvis to a rotary telephone.

Slack is how we bring together all of our project data -- from all of our tools -- in one place, and how we automate tasks like daily Scrum and contract creation. Slack asks us, "Hey what are you working on today? What are your blockers?" and builds an automated list. We can ask Slack to do work for us, like, "Slack, create an MSA from our template and send it Joe at Clientcorp." A million other uses. Slack is great and saving SO much time.

Skype sits unused and spams me every month asking me to put in more quarters for some bizarre concept of "long-distance" phone calls. And honestly the UX is so horrible, it's going to take a total re-launch to make it something I'd even consider installing again.

</comment><comment><USER49> Why not build one? Why keep trying to lift Skype to this purpose? It seems if they really wanted to they could make a good product.

<comment><USER50> it could cost more than 8bn to build one, and would take time too. Slack is right there, already built.

<comment><USER51> If it costs you more than $8bil to write a chat app then you're doing something wrong.

<comment><USER52> I'd like to know what people think developing something like Slack should cost, and why MS thought $8e9 was a potentially reasonable valuation.

<comment><USER53> Keep in mind that the acquisition value is not just the code. There's also the brand, the userbase, the engineers, and not having to actually do it themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I wonder why Discord isn't more popular, it's basically Slack with voice chat baked in that works really well. All of your favorite Slack shortcuts work exactly the same. Even pressing the Up arrow key to edit your last message.

I guess the 'gamer' branding hurts it's potential use in the workplace.

<comment><USER55> Yeah it's heavily gamer focused. Not that it coulnd't be used for business.

Slack is a lot more featureful though and you can do cool integrations.

Discord has no search ability.

Discord is also conspicuously free and I think everyone's waiting to see if they implode or not.

I love Discord.

<comment><USER56> >Discord has no search ability.

Yet. It's in our pipeline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Ono-Sendai Does anyone else find it bizarre that what is effectively a web-based IRC is (possibly) worth $8B?

<comment><USER57> It's far more than web-based IRC and has a substantial userbase, a significant number of whom are paying for the service. Given the failures MS has had with communication tools in the past, I'm not surprised at all they mulled an $8B acquisition of Slack

<comment><USER58> > It's far more than web-based IRC

How exactly?

<comment><USER59> Mobile clients, persistent chat history when switching clients/devices, search, @mentions notify you when you're away from your desk, and easy integrations with lots of services.

P.S. I mainly use IRC everyday :)

<comment><USER47> Which is IRC + ZNC + Andchat + bots...

<comment><USER60> This echoes the "couldn't you just replicate Dropbox with x + y + z ..." mindset of the past.

<comment><USER61> Why the past?

I tried to use Dropbox but it just didn't have what I wanted it to have. So, I find it to be not only replaceable, but awfully inferior to the x+y+z-style solutions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Doesnt microsoft alredy own yammer? Wouldnt thatbe a better fit to compete with slack?

</comment><comment><USER63> They should just ditch all of their efforts to try to make Skype or Lync working and either start it over or acquire a company that can do voice/video calls and text chat reliably like WeChat for example. Skype is such a tragic product that I can hardly believe that anybody would using it in a corporate environment if it wasn't MS who were pushing for it. One interesting question that comes up in my mind: is group voice calling a really hard problem to solve? At this stage I am much more likely to use a simple phone conference than Skype because it works just so much better. Curious what others think.

</comment><comment><USER64> Before I started to use Slack more frequently I was in a Skype chat group with some ex colleagues of mine. We simply started a group chat and just kept it consistent.

It was actually a pretty easy and great way to share links and discuss things. We even toyed with some ideas around a link grabber for alle the stuff we shared there. We only moved to Slack because of better support for link sharing and some other things.

If Microsoft can't figure out how to turn Skype into a Slack competitor they are more than welcome to contact me. I have plenty of ideas on how to to do that :)

</comment><comment><USER65> Slack works on Linux, which is a big deal for some teams. Before people jump on me, stating, "Linux market share for dev machines is too small to matter." Consider that there are some members of organizations who need to use it. Is an org going to leave those users out in the dark? Slack working on Linux is quite convenient for my team, which has some Linux and OSX users. Lync and Skype on Linux just don't work (at least, I couldn't get them working).

</comment><comment><USER66> Microsoft should have been the most natural choice of in-team communication. While their sales team was busy selling crappy software to large companies and ignoring small ones someone built a kick-ass product called Slack.

It does not make sense for Microsoft to buy slack. Microsoft already has the sales muscle to reach millions. What Microsoft does not have is a product that can compete with Slack. They should build it ASAP as part of their Office suite. Skype is not that solution.

</comment><comment><USER67> No one in here mentions Jabber. . .

</comment><comment><USER68> This situation strangely reminds me of MSN Messenger for anyone old enough to remember that. It ended in failure. Most blamed Microsoft's management for it.

</comment><comment><USER69> And all the slack users breathed a sigh of relief. Their most beloved tool wasn't destroyed by an accident prone behemoth.

</comment><comment><USER70> I keep hearing over and over about how horrible Skype is. I've been using it for over 5 years (on OS X) now and I have not noticed any issues, and the improvements to UI over the years made it really nice and user friendly. So I don't really know if people who complain about it actually used it in the recent years or not.

<comment><USER71> I've been recently (eg, had a meeting yesterday) interacting with a company that uses Skype for meetings, and I think by far, it's the worst meeting software I've used (vs Webex, joinme, Gotomeeting, etc).

It takes several minutes to get things connected and working -- especially the first time, when you have to install something (not sure if it's the full skype client?) to even view the meeting. Screen sharing has some really stupid flaws, like not being able to go full screen on the client-side. Phone integration _usually_ works, once you find the right number in a list of several dozen phone numbers (not sure if this is Skype or the business using it), though it shows you in the meeting as a separate "unknown" user (even if you've also joined via PC).

<comment><USER70> I think the problem is that they are using a wrong tool for the job, because of that you are comparing Skype to a meeting software, but Skype is not focused on being a meeting software, it is focused on friends and family video calls by proving a simple interface and basic functions.

<comment><USER71> [http://www.skype.com/en/business/](http://www.skype.com/en/business/)

<comment><USER14> That's the confusion. That page is selling two completely different products, which some brainiac in Marketing decided to lump under the same banner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Please focus on Skype, it's a mess.

Now that we are no longer using HipChat, the buggiest application I use on a regular basis is Skype.

<comment><USER73> Would mind commenting on why you do not use HipChat anymore? Curious...

<comment><USER74> I still really like HipChat but the latest versions have been unbelievably bad. Connection issues, message delivery issues, users showing up as offline who are actually online, etc... If they don't fix things soon we're going to have switch to Slack.

<comment><USER73> I've been having the same issues. It's almost unusable. A pity because we've been using it for years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> What a disaster that would have been. The people that use Slack are much younger than the enterprise customers that Microsoft has. It would have been another failed acquisition.

Plus we used Slack and moved aggressively back to HipChat. I thought it was fine but there's no real difference between Slack and Hipchat.

<comment><USER76> Xbox & minecraft users are often much youger that Slack users and that acquisition worked well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Slack might of made a great addition to Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code... I really don't want to see it happen though, they need to fix up some odd security problems with Skype and the sluggishness of Skype is really bad, used to be somewhat bad, but lately it's gotten worse.

</comment><comment><USER78> Skype is old and broken on Linux, and the worst battery nightmare on Android. I could not even use it if i wanted to.

Slack on the other side just works everywhere i could ever need it, including a lot of automation tasks.

How could skype even get popular with the crappy API they offer?

</comment><comment><USER79> I've always thought of Skype as a personal product that was also used for business, and Slack as a primarily business oriented product. I'm afraid if Skype gets more features rammed into it for groupware, then it'll be even more bloated.

<comment><USER29> You, me, and everyone else.

That's Microsoft's issue with Skype: they fail to realize that the marketplace determines what a product is.*

If you took a well-known, purpose-built apartment building and converted it in to offices, you know what people would say? "Why would I set up my office in an apartment building?"

Regardless of how good they could make Skype, it's always going to be Skype: the cool thing you use to talk to your brother who's living in Costa Rica for the year.

— *That being said, if you've done your due diligence and really understand your audience, you can do a better job at creating a product that directs the attention of the user toward the thing you'd prefer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> It would be really cool if they can make Skype easier for app integration similar to Slack. Also, if they can update their Linux client.

Anyone tried running Skype for windows on wine?

</comment><comment><USER81> This is just sad. Slack and Github fit into their strategy perfectly as they both tie into productivity. This must be another one of those bad moves from Bill Gates.

</comment><comment><USER5> The day MS buys Slack and assimilates it into "Skype for X" is the day I cancel our business subscription and rotate our credit cards.

</comment><comment><USER82> First Microsoft destroyed Skype, now they want to destroy Slack? Hopefully not gonna happen.

We're in the process of moving away from Skype, which we used for 10 years in the company, to Slack. Partners went away from Skype to Flowdock and Hipchat.

Instead of buying Slack, Microsoft should invest to make Skype great again. Yet I'm not sure if this is still possible after they broke all features Skype excelled at. Or use the money to found a new competitor. But please don't buy Slack. This can only fail.

</comment><comment><USER47> It would be about time for Skype to get a serious competition and force M$ to fix it, especially for non-Windows platform.

</comment><comment><USER83> I wonder how SKype will go in to Business use. Perhaps it'll be like Google Hangouts

</comment><comment><USER84> The real question is, would Stewart B. take the offer?

Anyone who cares about their product knows a sale to MS is a death knell for innovation. Becoming a hit like Slack is such a rare opportunity. I mean, why are you in this business if not for a chance to build a transformative platform? Which is what Slack has right now, a chance.

<comment><USER85> My gut says that Stewart doesn't take an 8B offer. But that, of course, raises the question of what number he does take. It's very hard to know.

<comment><USER86> It also raises the question of how much ownership he retains of the company and how much of this would actually be his decision (vs. his investors looking for an exit) given that they've raised a Series E round and have taken ~$340M in funding [1].

[1] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#/entity](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#/entity)

<comment><USER85> Remember that the Series E round was on a very large valuation. He surely gave up a much greater % in the early days when the company was still working on a game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Not to worry. They will buy it when it becomes $20B. Old companies move slow.

<comment><USER87> Cisco might be more interested to buy Slack if their Lync competitor called "Cisco Spark" fails.

</comment></comment><comment> a-dub "Skype for Business" has some of the worst UX I have ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER88> When the number is over 1 billion the answer is always yes... Mmmk

</comment><comment><USER89> Yikes... Being acquired by big CO is the equivalent of "we sent buster to your granny upstate"...

</comment><comment><USER90> Classic Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER91> Came for comments about Lync, was not disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER92> a bargain if you ask me

</comment><comment><USER93> Please no, stay away. I thought those kinda days at MSFT were over ...

</comment><comment><USER94> And Skype will continue to be terrible. Just installed Office 2013 with its included 'Skype for Business' and boy does it look terrible. Its got a distinct MSN Messenger from the early 2000's vibe going on. Lots of buttons, very bright color choices (lots of white and bright blue).

<comment><USER95> To be fair, that is rebadged Lync, not really skype. And yes, lync is terrible.</comment></comment>


Diablo III open beta this weekend - <AUTHOR> http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/4963739/Diablo%C2%AE_III_Open_Beta_Weekend-4_19_2012#blog

<comment><USER2> While not still in college myself, I was enjoying the tide of students crying because Blizz is having open beta weekend the week before a lot of people take finals. Made my morning. =)

</comment><comment><USER3> Seeing a beta test with such a potentially big audience (I'd say that a game as anticipated as D3 would get quite a seizable amount of people participating in an open beta), I would be willing to bet my hat(…) on the fact that we'll see D3 go free to play very, very soon.

<comment><USER4> This will not happen.

Not before Starcraft 2 or World of Warcraft anyway. (And WoW is a six year old game that requires subscription, and Blizz still require you to purchased all previous expansions in order to enjoy the latest xpac, albeit at a lower price)

Why give it for free when people are willing to pay for it?

<comment><USER5> The difference being that Diablo 3 has an in-game real-money market, and more people playing the game means more people putting money into that market. The same strategy has been applied (successfully) with Team Fortress 2.

This is not a new idea, either. Free to play but in-game real-money purchases have been going strong with casual games since it became easy to send money over the net.

I'm not saying it will happen, but it's not an impossibility.

<comment><USER4> "Free to play but in-game real-money purchases have been going strong with casual games since it became easy to send money over the net."

Casual game examples cannot be applied to Diablo's model. They are between the game makers and the users (which is more similar to Blizzard selling their items for WoW).

Diablo 3 is unique because it's facilitating transactions between _players_ , while taking a cut. Hold up, it's not the same as TF2 either. TF2 items are pure cosmetic, novelty. Items in Diablo will effect the avatars and in turn, effect other people as well in terms of game play. One can truely buy their way up, legally.

Another aspect is consider people owning multiple accounts. How many of your WoW friends/guildies own multiple accounts? Because of the nature of the game, there are obvious benefits to have multiple characters online at the same time. How many accounts does a TF2 player has? There's no reason to have more than 1 account because there's no unique player avatars, there's no attachment, no profession limits, no character limits. Giving away free TF2 accounts is different from giving away free D3 or even WoW accounts.

Each D3 account also have a limit on how much real money balance (Bnet dollars) it can carry. So if a person wants to deal in more money or more character slots (and there will be alot of them), they need to get another account – more money in Blizz's pockets.

The point is different game mechanics, different target audience have different approaches. What works in one may not work as well as in another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> With the game due out in three weeks, my guess is there's very little "beta" about this. Anyone have an educated guess when the game is sent to publishers for production? A day after beta ends? Already?

I think this is more like a demo or a way to get the game installed on millions of computers so that buying it is as easy as possible (a click away). I don't know about their publishing relationship but perhaps they get a better cut on electronic sales and this definitely helps increase those.

That said I'm downloading it now :)

<comment><USER7> the key word being "open". IIRC its been in closed beta for a few months now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This timing coincides with another open beta – TERA. An 'action' MMORPG that requires active dodging from the player and cursor targeting (instead of tab targeting like most traditional MMOs).

Diablo 3 beta will be easily completed in a day, all 5 classes, so TERA is a good second game to play around if you find yourself gobbling up the D3 beta too fast.

<comment><USER8> A link to TERA for the lazy [1]

[1] <http://tera.enmasse.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> They recently released a few developer diaries that are worth watching: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYe_eNG5Cz0>

It's impressive how much effort is put into a game like that compared to the web/mobile apps I usually build. Tempting, really

</comment><comment><USER10> And to think I was prepared to go to class today.

<comment><USER11> And to think I was prepared to go to work today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does a "valid battle.net account" mean you have to be paying for a battle.net service? I've got one, but not paying for WoW.

<comment><USER13> Fairly certain that you don't need to be paying, just be able to log into the battle.net site. This was the case for the signup and download for the closed beta.

<comment><USER14> I can confirm that a Battle.net account that has inactive WoW subsciptions and no Diablo pre-order is able to access the Open Beta.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I still can't get over the fact that Diablo 3 will require an Internet connection to play it in *single player".

<comment><USER14> From what I can tell there is no single player, just games that don't let other people join.

Even solo there is noticeable lag on every achievement and when moving/selling items, presumably as it updates the server. (Being in Australia we get screwed on both a higher price for the game and playing on a much higher latency that USA based players)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is this really HN material?

<comment><USER17> When not building iPhone apps or scaling MySQL, most of us play WoW or Diablo. Didn't you get the battle chest with your welcome to the valley gift bag?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> And this on a weekend filled with Ludum Dare 23 and the Philly Startup Weekend. Oh, such evil timing.</comment>


Ask HN: Remote work business exploding, what do we do - <AUTHOR> My business parter and I have a small business serving what until 2 weeks ago was a fairly niche product for remote collaboration in a specific market. In the last 2 weeks we've got 5x the sales and doubled our support staff. Our company valuator says we would be worth a lot more. Do we reach out for VC money right now? Where would we go? We bootstrapped and never imagined we would have the opportunity to get so big as it looks like we will now. Exciting and scary times for us - we'd like some more sleep but we're also grateful for the opportunity. <comment><USER2> What are your goals? Investors will put major pressure on you to grow enormous, which may or may not be healthy for your business.

If your income is increasing steadily but you need a cash infusion to handle the growth, you may want to consider a small business loan instead.

</comment><comment><USER3> Governments are going to offer deferred interest loans in this environment. Not sure how much but it only makes sense to prop up Main Street.</comment>


Stanford & Cornell Fight to Win Bid for Engineering Campus in Manhattan - <AUTHOR> http://www.betabeat.com/2011/09/27/will-stanford-take-the-f-train-to-silicon-valley-tensions-rise-as-deadline-for-tech-campus-approaches/

<comment><USER2> Fwiw, a friend of mine recently returned to NYC after serving in Iraq in the Army, and started an initiative to get this engineering campus built in Willets Point, Queens:

<http://www.coalitionforqueens.org/>

His argument in a nutshell: why relegate NYC's tech hub to a single university on a cramped island, relatively inaccessible by subway (which Ramen-subsisting entrepreneurs will need), when you can situate it in the middle of 60+ acres, near the 7 Train, Mets/tennis sports center, and LaGuardia airport, with enough room for _several_ universities plus office space and restaurants and other amenities.

He thinks NYC's attempt at recreating SV will be DOA if it tries to build 'Silicon Island'. Imagine instead having a 60 acre campus with say, Stanford, Cornell, and the Technion, alongside incubators and other entrepreneurial support infrastructure, in the middle of a hungry immigrant community. That's a better recipe for success.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is wrong with NYU or Columbia? Can they not attract top CS talent?

<comment><USER4> The prospects for NYC as an entrepreneurial tech hub are looking better. I think Stanford and Cornell just want a piece of the action.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it's cheap city-owned land and a chance to get in on NYC's bid to become the innovation capital of the East Coast.

<comment><USER5> Right but why not use the local schools who have better resources and roots here?

<comment><USER6> I hope NYU-Poly wins the bid but the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship is not quite there yet like it is in places like Stanford. (even though that's in the school's marketing efforts)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hmm, this submission and some other comments around the web call the article "Stanford & Cornell Fight to Win Bid for Engineering Campus in Manhattan", but it's now been changed to not mention Manhattan. From what I can tell, none of the proposed sites are in Manhattan.

<comment><USER8> I lived on Roosevelt Island for a year. It may not be geographically Manhattan but I it (and other East River islands) is in the jurisdiction of that borough.</comment></comment>


Startups Do Not Prepare You to Create Products - <AUTHOR> http://unicornfree.com/2013/startups-do-not-repeat-do-not-prepare-you-for-a-product-business

<comment><USER2> I get the frustration with the litany of crazy startup ideas that no normal person would consider a business.

But somewhere in that crowd, there are startups that do great work. Everpix just shut down, but they had a gorgeous product and a 12% conversion rate. With another round of funding they might done quite well.</comment>


Sugar reduction: from evidence into action - <AUTHOR> https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sugar-reduction-from-evidence-into-action <comment><USER2>
      > The Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN)
      > has concluded that the recommended average population
      > maximum intake of sugar should be halved: it should
      > not exceed 5% of total dietary energy.

If we say that an average man has nutritional requirements of 2500kcal per day, then these recommendations imply he should not consume more than 125kcal of sugar per day, which is 31.25 grams of sugar.

A ~350ml can of Coke contains 39 grams of sugar [1]. A ~600ml 'Vitamin water' drink has 31 grams of sugar. A single McDonalds 'McFlurry' dessert has 64 grams of sugar [2].

Even something 'healthy' like a 250ml 'pomegranates, blueberries & acai' smoothie from 'innocent drinks' has 35 grams of sugar [4].

I guess my point is that we want people to reduce their sugar intake to recommended levels, there needs to be a sea change in what's seen as a normal diet. No one thinks that a 'McFlurry' is a health food, but in my experience they're not seen as a huge indulgence, despite being more than two-days worth of sugar-allowance for an average man, and more for an average woman.

      [1] http://www.coca-colaproductfacts.com/en/coca-cola-products/coca-cola/

      [2] http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/food/product_nutrition.dessertsshakes.3832.mcflurry-with-oreo-cookies-12-fl-oz-cup.html

      [3] http://vitaminwater.com/files/vitaminwater_2014_NutritionFacts.pdf

      [4] https://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/things-we-make/our-smoothies/smoothies/pomegranates-blueberries-acai

<comment><USER3> Why do you consider the smoothies from Innocent Drinks as healthy? I've always considered those as something bad for the health and I'm not sure they are marketing it as healthy.

<comment><USER4> Is this sarcastic? Look at the name of the brand, fer chrissakes

<comment><USER3> I'm a non-english speaker so it was not so obvious for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Actions to take" section:

1\. Reduce and rebalance the number and type of price promotions in all retail outlets including supermarkets and convenience stores and the out of home sector (including restaurants, cafes and takeaways)

2\. Significantly reduce opportunities to market and advertise high sugar food and drink products to children and adults across all media including digital platforms and through sponsorship

3\. The setting of a clear definition for high sugar foods to aid with actions 1 and 2 above. Currently the only regulatory framework for doing this is via the Ofcom nutrient profiling model, which would benefit from being reviewed and strengthened

4\. Introduction of a broad, structured and transparently monitored programme of gradual sugar reduction in everyday food and drink products, combined with reductions in portion size

5\. Introduction of a price increase of a minimum of 10-20% on high sugar products through the use of a tax or levy such as on full sugar soft drinks, based on the emerging evidence of the impact of such measures in other countries

6\. Adopt, implement and monitor the government buying standards for food and catering services (GBSF) across the public sector, including national and local government and the NHS to ensure provision and sale of healthier food and drinks in hospitals, leisure centres etc

7\. Ensure that accredited training in diet and health is routinely delivered to all of those who have opportunities to influence food choices in the catering, fitness and leisure sectors and others within local authorities

8\. Continue to raise awareness of concerns around sugar levels in the diet to the public as well as health professionals, employers, the food industry etc, encourage action to reduce intakes and provide practical steps to help people lower their own and their families sugar intake

<comment><USER5> A "sugar tax" is not a bad idea if it is ringfenced to creating a healthier environment and funding NHS obesity-related treatments.

The problem is that this type of tax will be subsumed within general taxation.

<comment><USER6> what about a "healthy food tax" ringfenced for funding the costs of end of life care for people with longer life expectancy??

<comment><USER7> Yes, Minister made a similar joke that people who died from smoking tobacco are doing society a favor by limiting the need to spend money on elderly care and pensions.

<comment><USER8> Except it's not a joke, it's probably true [0] :

 _Research by the Institute of Economic Affairs argues that a tax on fatty food could actually increase the burden on the health system and unfairly penalise the poor._

 _Dr Barrie Craven from the Department for Education at the University of Newcastle, who co-wrote the IEA report, said: "It is commonly assumed that obese people are a disproportionate burden on the NHS.

"By 56, the obese are the most expensive but not over their lifetime.

"We have to remember that the obese and smokers tend to die earlier and the healthy incur very expensive 24 hour care later in life for diseases such as dementia."_

[0] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/9359212/Obese- an...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/9359212/Obese-and-smokers- less-of-a-burden-on-the-NHS-than-the-healthy-who-live-longer-report.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We stopped buying raw sugar as well as things with added sugar at the grocery store. We also stopped buying juice and obvious junk food like potato chips. We still buy whole milk and bacon and cheese and pasta.

It was hard at first, but we still have sugar in various forms around the home to use on occasion. We're buying more fruit now too, but eat less than it takes to make the juice we eliminated.

We're losing about one pound per week, with no change in activity levels. So that's crudely about 500 calories per day, each. We have sweet things for social reasons, or to celebrate. The trick is just to avoid buying them so you can't eat them when you get hungry. Once we get down to our target weights I imagine we'll buy more.

It's really quite shocking when you stop buying sugar, just how many of your usual purchases you end up putting back on the shelf.

<comment><USER5> Sugar is an odd substance. It's made up of glucose and fructose. Glucose tells your body to store fat and "use me" while your liver is converting the fructose to fat.

<comment> david-given At least where I come from, domestic use sugar is almost entirely sucrose. Glucose and fructose are available but they're very much specialist products (for baking, jam-making, etc). They're certainly not something you put into tea.

<comment><USER5> Sucrose breaks down into glucose and fructose. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They should probably just copy whatever we've been doing in the US. Our sugar consumption has been falling since the late 90's.

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUsIUgdVAAA- pu3.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUsIUgdVAAA-pu3.jpg)

(Obesity has continually increased, however.)

<comment><USER11> Does that chart include the corn syrup and other substitutes?

<comment><USER10> Yes. Jozan also just posted a link to a more detailed breakdown:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/US_Sweet...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/US_Sweetener_consumption%2C_1966_to_2013.svg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Note that sugar consumption has been falling since the 1970s in the UK. Strangely this "evidence" is not mentioned.

<comment><USER5> Note that our environment has changed significantly since the 1970s, with a propensity for many people to go from A to B by car and generally exercise less.

I see a sugar tax as a way of creating a fund to enable councils to implement healthy travel options (protected cycle to school networks, discounted public transport, public transport networks) and mitigate the cost of obesity-related diseases to the NHS.

<comment><USER12> Public transport isn't a "healthy travel option". This just goes to support the worry of another commenter that this will just go into the general taxation pool to support various programs that may or may not have anything to do with sugar and/or health.

<comment><USER13> While what you say is true, taking public transport makes people move around more: going to/from the bus-stop, changing at connections, standing up in the metro instead of sitting etc.

Here is a study on this subject: [http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g4887](http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g4887) Its conclusion: "Men and women who commuted to work by active and public modes of transport had significantly lower BMI and percentage body fat than their counterparts who used private transport."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Still not convinced reducing sugar is going to stop childhood or adult obesity. The large part of it is simply because food is too convenient. With many foods having no preparation requirements it becomes easy for food to fill idle time.

The easiest route to reducing over eating of foods that don't complement a sedentary diet would be to restrict food assistance programs. Instead of just saying "No" to certain purchases it should instead reward specific food type purchases. You could put a punitive value on some allowed but not good for you foods in necessary but rewarding good choices is better than punishing bad.

Still their 25g is less than one ounce... how do you do that on a normal day?

</comment><comment><USER15> What a surprise: a Government-appointed committee recommends increasing taxes.

<comment><USER16> It's a specific consumption tax. It's not like they are proposing a 2% hike on income tax.

<comment><USER15> Even worse - in addition to it being more tax, it's in a form that disproportionately harms poor people.

<comment><USER17> If making more nutritionally balanced foods cheaper relatively to foods with a lot of associated health problems is taken as "harm", then yes.

<comment><USER18> If a family is struggling financially, a sugar tax could easily push them over the edge. This strikes me as an increase in taxes for the poor as the impact relative to their income (as a %) would be significantly higher. So, the financial strain and stress would likely offset any benefit from reduced sugar for the poor. There were good posts about people on the poverty line on HN yesterday as a case in point.

<comment><USER16> If the tax is restricted to "high sugar soft drinks"[0] do you still think that there wouldn't be alternatives for a struggling family to purchase?

0 - [https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...](https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/470173/Annexe_2._Fiscal_evidence_review.pdf)

<comment><USER15> So you _really_ think it's ethical to use taxation and the threat of bankruptcy to coerce people to change their sugar habits? _Honestly_?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't drink, smoke nor do any type drugs (caffeine exempted). I am addicted to soda! I have gotten better but for a good 12 years I bet I drank 1.5 gallons of soda a day. I am down to 1 gallon a week or less. Hard to beat this consumption of sugar.

<comment><USER20> One idea is to unceremoniously slam down a glass of water before you drink the sugary drink. Don't use sugar water to quench a thirst.

<comment><USER19> I drink 32 oz of water in the morning and 40 oz of tea before lunch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> More bureaucracy. If they really wanted to decrease sugar usage, they could require poison labels on fruits, and any product with more than 5 grams of sugar, as well as any ads for these products.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why can't they just leave us alone?</comment>


Show HN: Duplicate Images Finder [with OpenCV] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/magamig/duplicate_images_finder <comment><AUTHOR> Find and delete duplicate images inside a directory.

Using SIFT for feature detection and FLANN for matching.

feedback is appreciated :)

</comment><comment><USER2> You should look at the pHash algo.</comment>


Flattery Will Get You Everywhere - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/social-media-lessons/9599cedcd9c8

<comment><USER2> It should say "compliments".

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using this method to gain Twitter followers for as long as I can remember. The goal used to be to get retweeted, but as the article mentions, having one of your Tweets marked as a favorite can be just as effective as it shows up in the activity tab on Twitter.

My approach is a combination of flattery and also a dash of comedy/trolling. Sometimes I'll say something outlandishly stupid like: "I still remember that time @sometwitteruser chased that goat and tripped on a log" I made that up, but sometimes that's all you need to get a retweet which in turn gets you followers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment and the tip. I appreciate it.</comment></comment>


By the Numbers: A History of the Android Invasion - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/mobile/android-activation-timeline/ <comment><USER2> The article provides few data points, but I expected the growth of Android activations to be higher.

In the period from June 2010 to December 2010, the number of Android activations per day went from 160k to 300k. In the period from December 2010 to April 2011, the number of activations per day went from 300k to 350k. I would've expected Android activations to be at 400k per day by now, given that the smartphone market is still expanding rapidly.

To compare: Apple went from selling 93k iPhones per day in the spring 2010 quarter to selling 180k iPhones per day in the fall 2010 quarter. For the winter 2011 quarter that ended on March 26, Apple is expected to have sold upwards of 200k iPhones per day. For a company that only releases a new generation of phones once a year, in summer, a slowdown of growth in winter is to be expected. New Android phones are released all the time, so why the slowdown?

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how Apple will respond with iPhone 5 and the launch Mac OS Lion, which unites mobile and desktop devices...</comment>


Experiments in Early-Stage Customer Acquisition (ESCA) - <AUTHOR> http://bigbangtechnology.com/post/experiments_in_early-stage_customer_acquisition_esca

<comment><USER2> Check out Hubspot's blog (<http://bit.ly/nDZyos> ) - they have really good stuff on lead gen.

Also check out this video by Jason Fried of 37 Signals. Great explanation on how they were able to grow their business with minimal marketing spend: <http://bit.ly/ooclky>.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Dundas,

Thanks for the links, those are helpful. I'll take a look and follow up if I have questions :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

I'm Max and I wrote this article. You should read this if you're interested in Lean startup or Customer Development. I'm specifically curious about early stage customer acquisition, and how you're doing it.

I'd love to hear your feedback.

Thanks Max from Big Bang

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi Max,

Have you tried killerstartups.com? For about a hundred bucks you can get a few thousand pageviews. I used their service and was pretty happy. There are also other similar sites. They are not as effective but each would bring a few new subscribers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heya,

Thanks for the suggestion. How did the conversion rate from killerstartups.com compare to ad campaigns, if you tested those as well?

Thanks

Max

<comment><USER3> Ours is a B2B product for Oracle PL/SQL developers. It is a niche that does not fit the demographics of killerstartups. So the conversion rate wasn't all that great but it helps to get the word out. We had about 250 visits in the first days of our web site being up which is not bad by our measures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would have signed up but I am in Australia on Optus?</comment>


Show HN: I2 – Interactive Real-Time Visualization with Zeppelin and Flink - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/TU-Berlin-DIMA/i2 <comment><AUTHOR> I2 is an interactive development environment for real-time analysis pipelines, which is based on Apache Flink and Apache Zeppelin. The sheer amount of available streaming data frequently makes it impossible to visualize all data points at the same time. I2 coordinates running Flink jobs and corresponding visualizations such that only the currently depicted data points are processed in Flink and transferred towards the front end. We show how Flink jobs can adapt to changed visualization properties at runtime to allow interactive data exploration on high bandwidth data streams.</comment>


How Citus rebalances your data - <AUTHOR> https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2018/02/01/how-citus-database-rebalances-your-data/ <comment><USER2> I vividly remember trying to deal with an "activities" table in postgresql-8.x, around 2010 or 2011. Every pageview or user action would add a row. It was a nightmare to shard that schema after the fact, once it had grown to hundreds of millions of rows and no longer fit into RAM on the largest machine Softlayer could sell us. We eventually enlisted the help of the core PG team and wrote a bad version of what Citus has done with stored procedures. (In perl!)

If only Citus existed back then. Where the hell were you folks?</comment>


Estonian Electronic Identity Card: Security Flaws in Key Management - <AUTHOR> https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentation/parsovs <comment><USER3> Anyone wondering if this is a new issue; it's not, it's a more detailed writing of some previous issues, one of which being the Gemalto affair[0].

The new cards issued in 2018 are not known to have any vulnerabilities.

[0]: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/timeline-estonian-id-card- vul...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/timeline-estonian-id-card- vulnerability-andres-k%C3%BCtt/)

<comment><USER4> Didn't read the paper but it appears to be fresh, so maybe the newsworthy part is that they are still not fixed?

<comment><USER5> The paper is half for giving a technical overview of the issues and part new analysis based on datamining old certificates. The issues have been mostly fixed, compliance violations however are still badly monitored.

<comment><USER4> Yup, true - from the end of section 2.3.4 jTOP SLE78: "The jTOP SLE78-powered ID cards were issued until the end of 2018. ID cards manufactured currently are powered by the chip platform supplied by IDEMIA (not covered in this work)."

Looks like the ID cards issued after 2018 are not covered, so I guess this really is "old news".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The flaws of the ID-card is a very politically charged topic to discuss in > Estonia, having any doubts about the ID-card or e-voting will make you a > persona non grata.

I somewhat disagree, the discussion tends to get bent by some populist agent provocateurs and some of the initial reactions from the private sector media. (In Estonia, the government media is the most centered out of all news outlets, go figure). What these statements usually are is that "ID card has a flaw X, therefore we should immidiately ban it, close the R&D and burn it with fire", forgetting that crypto and computing in general, changes over time. My view is that, of course each flaw has to be resolved and sometimes this is political, but this just means the work has to continue.

<comment><USER7> Thinking that compulsory id cards "Papers Bitte" are not a good thing is not an uncommon view.

<comment><USER8> It's not about it being compulsory, but the system being unverifiable end-to- end and any criticism of that being laughed at.

If you put it into business terms, would you trust an employee or vendor who told you that everything was alright, did not allow you to perform checks and audits and mocked both your and external partners concerns [0] about it? I don't think so. If the government is indeed for the people and not vice versa, then this is not acceptable.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs) Tom Scott's video about e-voting. Funniest rebuttal I saw on Estonian social media was that we are secure, since he is talking about e-voting, but we have i-voting. So I guess once we will call it c-voting, it will be even better...?

<comment><USER9> I watched the video. It's a load of crap. I mean, here are his arguments (feel free to tell me if I missed something):

      - voting systems inevitably have to be closed source, loaded on easily compromisable USB stick, connected to internet unguarded and sitting that way for years. In what reality is this nihilistic fatalism a reasonable expectation?
      - voter has no way of independently verifying that their vote has been processed correctly. First of all, this is simply ignorant as there are many cryptographical schemes that allow verification, but most importantly - how do you know that your vote has been processed correctly in our current system? You don't, there is no way for you to do that.
      - US hacking machines are routinely exploited at Defcon. That's right. You know what else is routinely exploited there? Physical safes, which are used for storing you know paper ballots. Also cars. And Air Force has promised to bring a fucking satellite next year. Something having vulnerabilities in the past does not mean it still has them, something having vulnerabilities currently does not mean they are easy to exploit in practice or can't be detected and mitigated, some products in a certain category having vulnerabilities does not mean all products in this category will inevitably have vulnerabilities in the future and we should just give up on ever fixing them.
      - trusting a person in a voting booth to vote for you would be ridiculous, but filling a ballot yourself and trusting that it will get counted correctly along the way is somehow self obvious - I guess because in the first case you clearly see that a human is involved in the process and in the second example it sort of feels like the process is finished once you physically put your vote into a box?
      - the average voter won't understand checksums. Well, maybe the average voter shouldn't worry about bad bytes in that case? And how come deterministic and auditable cryptography is a problem while demonstrably non-deterministic process of current paper voting (look at how results always differ ever so slightly when votes are recounted) is a non-issue?
      - transferring votes over internet is problematic because you can't trust software on either end. Right, because you know (never mind trust) everybody that will handle your vote on the path from voting booth to the whatever-governing-body-is-announcing-results-in-your-country?
      - central computer could be manipulating your votes and only a few people will have an opportunity to inspect it. Well, how many voting boxes have you been allowed to inspect in your life? Are you allowed to go to the central location where your votes are aggregated and recount all of them personally? How do you know that officials in your voting location, precinct or at a national level haven't agreed to manipulate the results?
      - casting doubts on the election is easy to do with electronic voting and nearly impossible with paper voting. Have you heard this cute story about medical masks becoming a conspiracy and symbol of oppression among certain population in US? Has nothing to do with electrical circuits and everything to do with politics. If a current incumbent happens to lose an election there you can be sure that election results will be called fake, no matter paper or digital.
      - malware exists, so voting from personal devices is ridiculous. Just as ridiculous as doing e-commerce or banking? Or in case of Estonia getting pretty much any other official business done, or so I hear.
      - a single vulnerability in someones computer can be scaled to millions of computers. Ok, let's say someone is still using Windows XP and got infected with something after downloading GTA from Pirate Bay. How does that affect people voting from their iPhones?
      - anecdotes, anecdotes, anecdotes

tl;dr: Stop spreading FUD.

<comment><USER8> Please try to think here in terms of probabilities, not absolutes and about the threat model.

1\. Closed source and loaded on an USB stick is the simplest case. But in the end, how will you still know what is the actual code that the eventual tallying system is running?

2\. Verification of votes is not about encryption. If you allow it to be unlimited, then you can actually sell your vote. In Estonia, you can verify your vote 3 times for 30 minutes after your vote was cast: [https://www.oiguskantsler.ee/sites/default/files/field_docum...](https://www.oiguskantsler.ee/sites/default/files/field_document2/Elektroonilise%20h%C3%A4%C3%A4letamise%20usaldusv%C3%A4%C3%A4rsus.pdf) (point 14 on page 5)

3\. Mostly agreed with you about the rate of vulnerabilities. But the issue here is that voting is such an important of how democractic society works that there should be no obvious vulnerabilities or any exploitations of vulnerabilities can be easily discovered. E-voting has neither of these because again, how can we know what code is actually being executed?

4., 5., 6., 7. Yes, one vote can get lost. Hell, thousands can get lost. But on average, I can still count on the process eventually working out due to the observability. Somebody will find ballots thrown in trash, pre-filled ballots, 117% of eligible people voting. Sure, in those cases the country is unsalvageable, but you will at least know that it is happening.

8\. OK, but that is neither here nor there.

9., 10. If you open up Google Maps and look one country eastward, you will understand. As a reference, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia) Not sure on what their planning divisions are cooking up, but I do not doubt that they will use any angle they can. What is the going price for a Windows 10 0-day anyway, on the order of a few hundred k to 1M, I assume? Peanuts.

<comment><USER9> You're the one that seems to be thinking in absolutes (when it suits you).

      1. In cryptographical/philosophical sense that's a tough problem. But our goal is to improve on existing solution not come up with an absolutely ideal scheme, right? So let's look at what sort of trust our current system provides us. Do you get to see how the whole system works? No. Does any single person gets to see the whole system for that matter? No. But you are provided with the description of the process and large part of it is happening in the open even though though you can't attend all the places / oversee everything in a single election due to real life and restrictions. Some people are also provided with the power to inspect arbitrary components of the whole scheme  when they see fit and even though they don't inspect even the whole components all the time and no one is inspecting absolutely everything, these people are attracted from all interested parties and can act on random, so we believe that if there were any symptomatic fault play someone would have found it simply by chance. And we generally don't believe in conspiracies but we try to counteract them by providing more incentives for people to speak up, get involved, become a whistleblower if that's necessary so that any largish conspiracy would inevitably become public knowledge quickly enough. Well, we can arrange all of these in electronic voting as well and we can even double down on all the in depth mitigations by providing more monitoring capabilities in real time & possibly even making data openly available in whole after election.
      2. You can sell your vote in our current system as well. But somehow that's fine because we have different standards for what we grandfathered already, am I right? Yeah, you could pay people if they film themselves voting, but there is no evidence of they being widespread so no need to worry. Mail ballots aren't anonymous and could be spied/spoofed easily but there is no evidence of that ever happening, so no need to worry. Lack of strong ID requirements in US could lead to massive voter fraud but there is no evidence of they ever happening in a large enough numbers to skew the election, so no need to worry about. And yet when it comes to electronic voting, geek versions of Penn and Teller - cryptographers have shown us in their stage shows that they can conceive such situations where the victim gets unknowingly duped into disclosing their vote, or the vote being miscounted. So that means literally anyone could carry out the same attack in practice and at an arbitrary scale (or maybe not but we'd better err on side of caution).
      3. How do you know that that nice lady overseeing voting in your district isn't a secret Trump/Clinton/Nazi/Communist sympathizer? You don't, but you have a faith in the system as a whole that it won't crumble because of a single person. Similarly we can use defense in depth tactics in designing election security. The hardware would only be able to run signed code in a minimal environment, you could even make the decided stateless, meaning the code gets reset before each new vote gets accepted, maybe even provide an option for voters to reflash the device themselves (with a click of a button on their phone). Devices themselves don't have to be generic PCs with USB ports and what not, these could be a really dumb chips enclosed into sealed & transparent casing with each one being certified etc. You could make the system modular by having multiple devices each doing their small thing - like the Unix utilities but with each utility being separate hw and most of them disconnected from any networking / being air gapped with obvious input/output interfaces. There are so many things we could do it we approached this in a sane manner as a serious engineering challenge instead of trying to out-cynic each other.
      4,5,6,7 That's exactly my point, electronic voting can be made even more transparent and with the records being forensically preserved they could be analyzed in full at any time after the votes have been casted (with the operational stuff being able to run all sort of threat hunting / anomaly detection during the Election Day). Granted this assumes the whole system uses the same protocols and is run/overseen by a joint committee which might or might not be viable in US, but the discussion started from Estonia - European country, where this would be totally expected.
      9, 10 Not all 0days are noclick RCEs present in a default configuration (of a desktop/mobile). In fact we haven't seen such a beauty in a long time. So no, there isn't a price for that as it's not something you could buy off the shelf. And if you could get one you would burn it pretty fast by using it in such a campaign. Makes much more sense to keep it as a nuclear option as no matter how aggressive in your opinion nation state attackers are, their primary incentive is fear for the survival/integrity of their own country (yes the bears crap their pants thinking about possible armed intervention any year soon and so do the pandas). So no I don't think there is any conceivable way to exploit large portion of private devices in a country in a uniform fashion. You totally could do that using top bottom approach - sort of like exploiting DC and pushing malware from it via group policy. But in case of Estonia voting apps would be the last tech to use for that. They are already mandated to use governmental services for various everyday tasks, they have centralized ID and there are just a couple of major banks - all of which require having an app for modern banking. So there are already plenty of avenues to wreck havoc for a skillful/motivated attacker. And yet we don't have panic attacks over it, it's just operational risk that we seek to understand & mitigate just like in every other enterprise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "The jTOP SLE78-powered ID cards were issued until the end of 2018. ID cards manufactured currently are powered by the chip platform supplied by IDEMIA (not covered in this work)."

If my memory serves me right, there was an easy way to check if your ID card was affected and it got replaced for free. The flaws described in paper are not known to exist in cards issued since the end of 2018, beginning of 2019.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, an "offline tester" [0] was made available by the researchers who discovered ROCA [1] and a company with "close links" to the researchers created a "ROCA Vulnerability Test Suite" [2]. The Estonian government also had one on their web site [3] but it is, apparently, no longer available.

ROCA didn't _just_ affect Estonian ID cards, though. It also affected also TPMs (from Infineon), certain Yubikeys [4], and even some PGP keys!

\---

[0]: [https://github.com/crocs-muni/roca](https://github.com/crocs-muni/roca)

[1]: [https://roca.crocs.fi.muni.cz/](https://roca.crocs.fi.muni.cz/)

[2]: [https://keychest.net/roca/](https://keychest.net/roca/)

[3]: [http://www.id.ee/?lang=en&id=38239](http://www.id.ee/?lang=en&id=38239)

[4]: [https://www.yubico.com/support/security- advisories/ysa-2017-...](https://www.yubico.com/support/security- advisories/ysa-2017-01/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The aftermath of the issue has been previously discussed here (2018): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18104861](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18104861)

</comment><comment><USER8> Brave guy to publish this, hopefully it won't end up similar to the Dreyfus affair — depends on which the media will roll due to it being "pickled cucumber season" (everybody is on vacation, nothing much happening during summer in Estonia). The flaws of the ID-card is a very politically charged topic to discuss in Estonia, having any doubts about the ID-card or e-voting will make you a persona non grata.

<comment><USER13> > "pickled cucumber season"

Funny, it's called "cucumber time" (agurketid) in Danish. I wonder if it's a related term in Nordic countries + Estonia.

<comment><USER14> We also call it "agurktid"/"agurknyheter" in Norwegian, and I know the Germans use "Sauregurkenzeit".

I've never heard any similar expression in English, nor in any Romance languages. The Brits use "silly season" for the same concept in journalism/news.

<comment><USER15> Ha, I'm an American who lived in Estonia for a bit, I'm not familiar with any related US term. Maybe we just don't have this as much as Europe - I know I was shocked at how slow business got in the EU in summer, there's for sure a dip in the US with people going on vacation but nothing like Europe in July/August

<comment><USER16> > I was shocked at how slow business got in the EU in summer, there's for sure > a dip in the US with people going on vacation but nothing like Europe in > July/August

Reminds me of back when I worked for a company that exported machines to the US and my boss told an American customer that we couldn't get a shipment sent in June which meant it couldn't be sent before somewhere in August since key personell was on holiday in July.

They then asked if he couldn't just tell us we _had to work_ anyway, which -luckily for us- wasn't an option.

<comment> kube-system One time here in the US I had to work late hours and weekends to hit an ambitious deadline for a French customer who wanted to review our work before they all went on their vacations.

<comment><USER16> Oh, that was a nice thank you from us pampered Europeans! /s

Sorry, hope you got some nice overtime bonus (but I fear not.)

<comment> kube-system Overtime? Ha. Almost all salaried jobs in the US are exempt from overtime laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm from the EU and considering incorporating my next company in Estonia.

Anyone else in a similar situation has any recommendations or ideas about this?

<comment><USER10> Make sure to understand the tax laws when it comes to the company tax residency in scenarios where you're physically not operating in Estonia nor employing people there, nor having majority of your clients there.

See my older comment [1] for some related topcis to research.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21321451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21321451)

<comment><USER15> Yes, I'd definitely echo that, a huge amount of tax implications are based on individual residency/permanent establishment so if you're living in say, Germany, for 1/2 of the year + 1 day, you should be expecting to pay at least your personal income taxes there, and likely the business taxes if you're a sole prop without local employees and local business. Of course, if you're a true 'digital nomad' who doesn't establish residency anywhere it gets much trickier. But in general, my advice it to pay for 1-2 hours with an accountant up front before you go through setting up a new entity somewhere

<comment><USER17> Even if my personal account was in an Estonian bank?

<comment><USER15> Having a personal account in a local bank may be a data point if you want to make a case about where you should be taxed but it won't automatically make you have permanent establishment or tax resident in Estonia

<comment><USER17> Ah, right.

Yeah I should definitely check with an accountant in the country where I will end up residing.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, highly recommend that. You can also contact Estonian folks who do understand the idea of running a co in Estonia and living elsewhere which isn't common in a country like Germany as local accountants there may be confused, there's a bunch of people on this list that have gone through at least some govt vetting [https://e-resident.gov.ee/marketplace/service- providers/](https://e-resident.gov.ee/marketplace/service-providers/)

I personally had a good working relationship with 1Office in particular and recommend them (wasn't a client but they were a partner when I worked for the e-Residency program and a buddy's GF works there who I trust and who does good work)

<comment><USER17> Would you incorporate again in Estonia?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > n this paper, we describe several security flaws found in the ID card > manufacturing process ..

Like accidentally on purpose,secure up to a point, but weak enough to allow the spooks to generate their own IDs. I mean if the cards were unhackable how would a spy do his job :]

<comment><USER19> As an American residing in Estonia, I'm not sure what the benefit of a state compromising the card crypto would be. There are four broad categories of uses for the ID cards:

1) Obviously, a government-issued photo ID

2) For an increasing number of shops, as your "frequent shopper" card, which admittedly is slightly related to...

3) Authentication, including: logging into your bank, government websites (the state portal, the tax authority, the the "digital story" - all your medical records, the online booking website for booking some combination of surgeons/specialists that operate under the public healthcare system), the (one) online pharmacy that exists, etc.

4) Signing things. I've signed my lease with it (though "paperless" Estonia still wanted me to sign a paper version as well) and more routinely you have to "digitally sign" any bank transfers... which are the standard way to pay bills in Estonia, so you do it a lot. Finally, voting online.

I don't see how broadly compromising the crypto would really benefit anyone for any of those things, it would have to be a more specific individual attack, like draining your bank accounts.

Edit: formatting, added voting

<comment><USER20> Getting asked as an expert "can this id card thing be trusted?" my answer has been "for communicating with the government you inherently don't trust, the method or security of an authentication device does not really matter" (filing your taxes or logging to services being the scope). Some claiming encryption privacy issues ... Well, for any meaningful opsec you should not be using the id card for encrypting messages about overthrowing the same government issuing the encryption devices in the first place, if government reading your messages is a threat in your model.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I think the biggest risk would be rigging an election, but we're talking about a country of 1.2 million people. Not to dismiss the importance of their elections on Estonia, it doesn't really have the same worldwide ramifications that compromising a US, UK, German, etc. election would have.

<comment><USER21> Rigging (digital or not) would be hard to hide, because it could only be a minor adjustment to remain plausible. All the election results end up roughly similar to all the various independent polling results. If some party suddenly receives a lot more votes than they polled for - it will be noticed.

Also Estonia already has a history of (non-digital) election rigging [1] so rhetoric of the " _digital results in rigging, keep it physical for safety_ " kind isn't super convincing.

\--

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1940_Estonian_parliamentary_el...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1940_Estonian_parliamentary_election)

<comment> dane-pgp > Rigging (digital or not) would be hard to hide, because it could only be a > minor adjustment to remain plausible.

How many more votes would the party in second place at the last election have needed in order to have won instead?

> If some party suddenly receives a lot more votes than they polled for - <USER2> > will be noticed.

Is there a mechanism by which the election could be run again (before the winners of the election have a chance to prevent this)?

> Also Estonia already has a history of (non-digital) election rigging

Or it's an argument that a voting system should have both hand-counting and digital counting, because rigging both counts is at least twice as difficult as rigging one.

<comment><USER22> > How many more votes would the party in second place at the last election > have needed in order to have won instead?

It's a multiple party proportional representation system so who "wins" doesn't really matter that much.

> Is there a mechanism by which the election could be run again (before the > winners of the election have a chance to prevent this)?

I'm not an electoral law expert, but complaints about election process go to National Electoral Committee, which can have its decision contested in Supreme Court.

> Or it's an argument that a voting system should have both hand-counting and > digital counting, because rigging both counts is at least twice as difficult > as rigging one.

The e-voting over here is actual e-voting - the vote is purely digital and done remotely. Not in any way related to the digital vote counting machines used in the US.

<comment> dane-pgp > It's a multiple party proportional representation system so who "wins" > doesn't really matter that much.

Obviously by "wins" I meant "becomes the (biggest party in a coalition) government", not "gains the most first preference votes" or some other strawman interpretation. And yes, I admit that it is hard to calculate the minimum number of extra votes that would need to be added to change which party leads the government, but I do think that a good proportional voting system should allow that number to be determined at least to a reasonable approximation.

> I'm not an electoral law expert, but complaints about election process go to > National Electoral Committee, which can have its decision contested in > Supreme Court.

I wonder how long that process would take in practice, and whether the Supreme Court would decide it had the power to invalidate an election. In particular, what sort of evidence would be required to satisfy the court that it had to demand that remedy? I imagine that "The opinion polls were wrong by 6%" might not be enough, and the political biases of the judges themselves might well be significant in such a situation.

> The e-voting over here is actual e-voting - the vote is purely digital and > done remotely. Not in any way related to the digital vote counting machines > used in the US.

Yes, the fact that the voting can be done remotely is another problem, since someone can be bribed or coerced into voting a certain way. I believe the mitigation for this is that the voter can supersede their online vote with an in-person vote, but an attacker could quite cheaply work around this by having tracking software on the victim's phone, and henchmen outside the polling stations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So, an argument that I hear regularly is that having a mandatory centralised and cryptographic ID system really expedites certain ID-related tasks. Can anyone in Estonia comment on this? Within the US and U.K., there's no mandatory ID, which I think is probably a good thing for civil liberties (no papers please, for instance), but also fosters certain industries such as credit reference agencies and has all sorts of weird side effects from bootstrapping things like SSNs and NI numbers into secrets. Are there companies like Jumio and Acuant in Estonia, or has the government rendered them pointless?

<comment><USER5> > I hear regularly is that having a mandatory centralised and cryptographic ID > system really expedites certain ID-related tasks.

Paper signatures and fax are both considered obsolete, the latter is basically never used. Cheques? Never seen them. Logging into any high-value service is done using the eID. If you use local services there's rarely any need for any site specific passwords, password managers, U2F, FIDO(2), GPG or similar identity technology. There's no need to send a pic of yourself to verify your identity anywhere, zero shit like that.

You know how PayPal, Stripe or similar payment processors felt/feel really cool and fast? Yeah, we barely felt that because banklinks have fulfilled that use case for the majority for a really long time now.

There aren't any other examples on the top of my head right now, but they're really not the only things. By now, there's basically an entire generation in Estonia that literally have zero idea how things were before, and are thus often shocked by what and how much is required from them in other countries.

> Are there companies like Jumio and Acuant in Estonia, or has the government > rendered them pointless?

They're basically nonexistent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Seems interesting, but security flaws were in a countable (small) number of cases. Is this a general issue?

<comment><USER20> This shows the issues in process and attitude. Even in the case of ROCA, you do not really break the crypto part itself, you wiggle around the implementation and procedure issues to bypass it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Are these things PIV or something else?

</comment><comment><USER26> Are there any Estonians here on HN who would be willing to chat a bit about digital identities in your country? I'm working on bringing e-ID to more people ([https://getpass.app/](https://getpass.app/)) and looking to get a better understanding of current solutions.

Feel free to reach out, my email is fabian (at) flapplabs.se</comment>


Poll: JSON pronounced "Jay-sohn", or like the name "Jason"? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Looks like you forgot to add the poll options.

<comment><USER4> I think he needs more Karma points to add a poll

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah call it a "pseudo-poll", I am not empowered to poll formally yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I always pronounced it like "Jay-Sohn". Not sure which one - if either - <USER2> _technically_ correct.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. I've always said "Jay-Sohn" as well; although I recently saw a job description that was looking for "2+ years of Jason experience"... too bad my name isn't Jason :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Like Es-Que-El vs Sequel I've heard both about equally and tend to adopt whatever version the person I'm talking to uses without worrying too much about which version is canonical.

</comment><comment><USER8> On twitter, my ID is JSON and I always preferred "Jason". However, whenever I go to conference that show my twitter handle everybody assumes that is my name and calls me Jason.</comment>


Potato Salad Kickstarter Raises Over $45000 by now - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/07/07/potato_salad_on_kickstarter_the_project_has_raised_more_than_9_000.html

<comment><USER2> The listing as of this moment is back down to $15287, lower than the 23k update on the artcile, or the 45k in the HN title.

Perhaps some early donors put in large numbers, but changed their mind after the fact.

Still kind of hilariously amazing. If he does turn this into a party event, I think that would be a good result, still funny and satisfying.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. I didn't know they could retract money.

<comment><USER3> No money is taken until the funding period ends. You can cancel your pledge at any time.</comment></comment></comment>


Home Inspectors on Their Weirdest Discoveries - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/realestate/home-inspectors-on-their-weirdest-discoveries.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> Photos:

[http://www.homerite.net/inspection- photos-2016.html](http://www.homerite.net/inspection-photos-2016.html)</comment>


Show HN: Warp, a query-by-example analysis tool for (big) data - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tommyvdv/warp-a-query-by-example-analysis-tool-for-big-data-c6fc46fd8409

<comment><AUTHOR> See also the discussion on replacing spreadsheets with something better suited for large data sets: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9177478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9177478)</comment>


Verizon Changes Exit Package for Workers It Planned to Outsource - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/verizon-changes-exit-package-for-workers-it-planned-to-outsource-1539295703 <comment><USER2> The jobs are _still_ being outsourced to Infosys, so the title is misnamed.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1,000 are offered package... wasn't it something like 40K being layed off?</comment>


Show HN: Service Provider and Network Domain Back in GoogleAnalytics - <AUTHOR> http://ipmeta.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

As you may be aware, Google has quietly removed the 'Service Provider' and 'Network Domain' dimensions from Google Analytics.

I was personally making heavy use of these dimensions, so I made a GA plugin to get the dimension back into my GA accounts.

I guess some of you could benefit from this too, so I have published the plugin. It's 100% free forever, without any limitations. I would love some honest feedback :)</comment>


What learning tools/ strategies do you use alongside Anki? - <AUTHOR> I find that Anki flashcards can only take me so far in learning computer programming.  For me, Anki helps with retention, but not necessarily in connecting the dots.  What other learning tools or strategies do you use alongside Anki? <comment><USER2> I'm a fan of using the Feynman Technique[0]

I find I tend to ask myself a lot of questions while going through this process that helps me to link the dots. It also highlights weak points in my understanding.

[0][https://fs.blog/2012/04/feynman- technique/](https://fs.blog/2012/04/feynman-technique/)

<comment><USER3> Oh yes, I'm trying to combine this with spaced repetition to keep what I've learned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The twenty rules of formulating knowledge is a good article about effective Anki strategies [https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru...](https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20rules)

I also like the image occlusion and incremental reading plugins

</comment><comment><USER5> Writing presentations or articles really helps. You can used spaced repetition to check your ability to explain something.</comment>


Anti-Abortion Lawmakers Have No Idea How Women's Bodies Work - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/jessica-valenti/anti-abortion-lawmakers-have-no-idea-how-womens-bodies-work-3ebea9fd6015 <comment> ga-vu It's not about knowing how women's body work. It's about giving the plebe something controversial to talk about while they pass legislation in the interests of certain lobby groups, which will receive less media scrutiny, as everybody will be focused on the abortion thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, its horrifying to see how laws get passed based on few pathetic beliefs.</comment></comment>