History of Lossless Data Compression Algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/History_of_Lossless_Data_Compression_Algorithms <comment><USER2> Sadly, the description of arithmetic coding bears almost no resemblance to the actual algorithm (it roughly describes the equal probability case, but that misses most of the point). The description of Shannon-Fano as "bottom up" and Huffman as "top-down" is also exactly backwards (the actual descriptions of those algorithms are accurate, but the labeling is confused).

The article contains a lot of terms you can search for if you are interested in these things, but sadly is not very informative on its own.

</comment><comment><USER3> An interesting read, I will need to go through it with more care when I get home. A couple of personal interests are having studied with both David Huffman (though not for compression) and Glen Langdon (one of the arithmetic coding pioneers), I need to see how this article compares with my notes.

I also need to see about getting some of my old (15+ years) course notes online.

Just in those two, much history and memory lost and a hit for UC Santa Cruz's computer engineering and science departments (Huffman passed a number of years back, Glen this year after a period of retirement).

Edit - the scope of the article and the title provided...a serious disconnect in terms of breadth. But, better than nothing.

<comment><USER4> I took Huffman's class, 'Cybernetics', at UCSC when I was an undergrad, mainly because I thought I'd learn how to make robots.

The first day it didn't take long for the lecture to turn to 7-dimensional spheres, their packing, and its applications to network routing. He was a tough bastard-- lots of multiplication of large numbers on tests, with only a table of logarithms and exponentials. He loved tricky questions on the tests- for example he taught us Karnaugh maps, mentioned the sides wrapped around, then had an example on the final with 1s in all four corners (I hadn't realized maps wrap around the corners, too).

Great teacher; wonderful lecturer, hard grader. I failed the class (I was a biochem major and graduated), the only CS course I took in college.

I really wish I had kept the notes from that class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If anyone is interested in the PAQ code, I have put one of the stronger-but- open-source variants on GitHub, here: [https://github.com/robertseaton/paq8pxd](https://github.com/robertseaton/paq8pxd)

</comment><comment><USER6> This article is very good, but it is very short about gzip. Event if there was no technical innovation, I think that gzip was really important for development of compression softwares that are not patent-encumbered.

</comment><comment><USER7> Seems like even though people went after this, there's not been much innovation, last few decades. Most of the new stuff looks quite incremental. It almost seems like we are losing our edge in our ability to build from the ground up. This is because we are part of a system that maintains an eagle's eye on new ideas. We need to take some of that pressure off us so that we can think a bit outside the box.

<comment><USER8> I wonder how much of this is that relatively simple techniques work very well on small amounts of data, and that more complex techniques don't perform sufficiently better to justify baking them into a compression format?

That is, to some extent I subscribe to the compression-as-intelligence school of thought: compressors are tiny little AIs which try to predict regularities in the bitstreams they are given ( [http://prize.hutter1.net/](http://prize.hutter1.net/) [http://mattmahoney.net/dc/dce.html](http://mattmahoney.net/dc/dce.html) [http://www.danburfoot.net/research.html](http://www.danburfoot.net/research.html) ).

But when we look at the state of the art like ZPAQ, the AI techniques used don't seem to be much more complex than, say, a one or two layer neural network which might as well be from the 1970s. You don't see anything fancy like deep networks or other modern staples like random forests.

So this makes me wonder: maybe compression performance has stagnated because we're not willing to provide compression algorithms extremely large amounts of data or runtime, and so simple algorithms really do perform best with the minimal resources we're willing to use for compression. (People are happy to run neural networks on thousands of GPUs with many gigabytes of data and wait weeks for training to finish; can you imagine a compression utility which required that?)

<comment><USER9> It naturally follows from the compression-as-intelligence school of thought that building general-purpose compression/intelligence is hard.

I very much believe in domain-specific intelligence, and correspondingly domain-specific compression. Here's a practical business use case for lossless compression (in-memory analytics), which I have been developing:

[http://tuulos.github.io/pydata-2014/](http://tuulos.github.io/pydata-2014/)

In contrast to general-purpose encoders, this approach is extremely data- intensive, compressing terabytes per chunk.

<comment><USER8> > that building general-purpose compression/intelligence is hard.

Yes, but my point is. that we seem to be doing better at general-purpose intelligence than at compression despite the apparent equivalence of progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Site seems to be down. Cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aieeeg...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aieeeghn.org%2Fwiki%2Findex.php%2FHistory_of_Lossless_Data_Compression_Algorithms&oq=cache%3Aieeeghn.org%2Fwiki%2Findex.php%2FHistory_of_Lossless_Data_Compression_Algorithms)

</comment><comment><USER11> One interesting domain-specific class of compression algorithms not mentioned here is for lossless audio compression, which tends to use a different (though also pretty simple) technique, somewhat related to PPM. A common approach is to predict the waveform using linear predictive coding (LPC), and then entropy-code the residuals. FLAC does that, for example.

</comment><comment><USER12> > Arithmetic coding is arguably the most optimal entropy coding technique

Provably optimal, even (assuming infinite precision).

</comment><comment><USER13> Are there compression techniques that are only "mostly" lossless? I was thinking something along the lines of: for delta, N > 0 the probability that the compression & decompression of a random stream of N bytes will result in loss is less than delta?

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm surprised that LZ4 is not in the list. It's based on LZ77 like many of the others.

</comment><comment><USER15> They left out .zoo (LZW) and .lzh/.lha (LZSS).

Both were quite widespread in the BBS era.

<comment><USER16> They mentioned LZW, LZSS, and LZH, if you had bothered to read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How does Snappy compression fit into the picture?

<comment><USER18> It's another LZ77 derivative. Nothing unprecedented.

<comment><USER19> It's the current leader in performance: [http://fastcompression.blogspot.com/p/compression- benchmark....](http://fastcompression.blogspot.com/p/compression- benchmark.html)

<comment><USER20> Speed != efficiency. Some of the tricks snappy uses e.g. not compressing at all, are not that interesting theoretically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> so based on this, if someone wanted best compression program they would choose paq?

<comment><USER22> By the nature of things, anything that compresses some input data must necessarily lengthen other input data, since you can't get away from the fact that there are only so many input files that can be represented by the output number of bits. In fact, it will almost certainly lengthen many more of the possible inputs than it shortens.

I once heard someone describe compression programs as 'expansion programs with interesting failure cases', and so, of course, the best compression program to use depends on exactly which failure cases you're interested in.

<comment><USER23> While true this doesn't seem to be a practical issue. Any uncompressable data can be encoded using only one bit of overhead, where the bit is a flag indicating whether the rest of the data is compressed. In practice, there is a header and a field indicating which compression method to use. You pay for the size of the header. Adding support for another compression method is nearly free as far as space is concerned; one byte can switch between 256 of them. (Time is another matter.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I miss ARJ in the article

</comment><comment><USER25> insert weissman score joke here

</comment><comment><USER26> But what about Pied Piper?

<comment><USER27> Do we really need to hear about a fictional TV show every time compression is brought up?

<comment><USER28> It's actually a real TV show

<comment><USER27> Yes it is. I'm sorry. Poor english. Thank you for your constructive comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> ...GIF is lossless?

<comment><USER30> Absolutely, the _compression_ part of it (LZW) is, yes. (LZW has been out of patent for about a decade, by the way, but it isn't particularly noteworthy on its own.)

GIF looks like crap on some images because it's paletted to [2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256] colours - so many images are reduced to a palette (say, with an octree) and/or dithered (perhaps badly, as dithering tends to increase noise, if not entropy), and also sometimes because some techniques exist (one implementation can be found in Photoshop's "Save for Web") which perform lossy transforms on the data so LZW compresses it better - the result is noisier, however, because it intentionally introduces repeating patterns.</comment></comment>


Lapham's Quarterly - <AUTHOR> http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/ <comment><USER2> I love Lapham's Quarterly. Also, what a missed opportunity it represents for Harper's (Lapham's previous employer). Harper's has been famously slow to embrace the web and as a result has been declining lately despite still featuring strong writing. Lapham is an octogenarian and very old school in many ways, but has still managed to pull off the print/web hybrid format in a way that Harper's hasn't. I can easily imagine an alternate reality where LQ is a Harper's vertical as opposed to an independent breakaway journal.

<comment><USER3> I was going to dig up some old comments by the publisher of Harper's to show how anti-web publishing he is, but the NYT recently did a profile on him that reveals a lot: [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/business/media/harpers- pub...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/business/media/harpers-publisher- standing-firm-in-his-defense-of-print-and-paywall.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lapham's Quarterly is another example of print never going away (though it may become a niche one day like vinyl records). Their attention to physical detail in paper, ink and illustration gives each issue a tangible value that's hard to replicate in the digital world no matter how "interactive" you might make it.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been a reader of Lapham's Quarterly for about 2 years now. So much better than watching TV and crappy movies.

Its kind of meant to be a starting point for readers to find something interesting and follow it through in more detail.

Similar to a curated list of topics with short bits of content to pique interest.

I love it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was a fan of the magazine and subscribed for the first two years, largely on the strength of the inaugural issue focusing on war. In a way I think they kind of cheated with that issue because it turns out that there is a huge amount of compelling writing and art on the subject of war -- massively more than some of the late subjects they chose.

Particularly the "money" issue seemed amazing superficial. As in most of the extracts were just various ways marveling at the concept of fungibility.

(Or maybe I don't appreciate it because I'm not as smart as Lewis Lapham.)

<comment><USER7> I think it's a bit of a Rorschach test. I bought the "Future" issue on a newsstand and immediately subscribed. Of the next three issues I found two less interesting, so I let it lapse. Then the fourth was interesting again. I just picked up the latest issue, "Time", on the newsstand and it's great. So different from the usual magazine where maybe a quarter of the content is interesting to me. Here, maybe half the content is interesting, but it's divvied up such that it's feast or famine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> They have an excellent 404 page, see here: [http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/foobar/](http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/foobar/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Mr Lapham's writings in the Harper's Notebook column justified the cost of the subscription for me. The breadth of scope he would bring always amazed me.

</comment><comment><USER10> Much as we like Lapham's, it would be better to post a substantive article from the website instead of the magazine home page.</comment>


Hillary Clinton's Remarks on Internet Freedom - <AUTHOR> http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2010/01/135519.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> Its a long speech, but for me, it was worth reading. Hillary Clinton doesn't get into many specifics, not as many as I'd like, but she does describe a substantial outline, and I'm happy to find myself optimistically curious about how the US Government deals with these issues that are so important in the continued development of the internet.

There were a few things that I didn't like as much. The argument to do with religion wasn't directed at me, and so it felt out of place. She was also, understandably, a bit 'politically correct' in her speech and answers. But all in all, pretty good. I'd be interested to hear some other perspectives.

<comment><USER2> It was for me as well, but was pleased to read it directly rather than get second hand commentary via the news media. It is actually sad that the news media only focused their attention on China, whereas Clinton discussed it from a global point of view.

Also interesting were her remarks about mobile technologies. Sadly the throwing in of Berlin Wall comments made her look a bit out of date.

Anyway I am not normally impressed with political talk, but this speech was well researched.</comment></comment>


Show HN: News.YCombinator.com / news does not work - <AUTHOR>

Can someone at HN fix news.ycombinator.com/news? The link at the top left corner still points to it. I had been visiting that site constantly and consequently thinking HN was down for more than two days when in fact it was down for only a couple of hours. <comment><USER2> The link works for me. It was probably cached on your end.

<comment><USER3> I deleted my cache and the link works again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Use <ctrl><F5> to fix</comment>


Unix command line queue utility - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chneukirchen/nq <comment><USER2>
       $ mkfifo ~/.jobqueue
       $ parallel :::: ~/.jobqueue

now, from another terminal:

       echo ls > ~/.jobqueue

Tada!

for a remote job queue, use nc instead of a fifo

for a job queue with a buffer, use a file, and run $ parallel :::: <(tail -f thefile) you can even truncate the file from time to time.

Of course, this doesn't capture the context you are in, such as your current directory or the value of shell variables.

<comment><USER3> What's 'parallel'? Is it a *nix command? Looks like its not available on Fedora box

<comment><USER4> Yes, it's a GNU tool. Try "yum install parallel".

[http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/](http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This stackoverflow answer[0] shows how you can queue jobs even after you start running other processes in your queue. Essentially, you can do:

      sleep 2; echo "A" && sleep 2 ; echo "B" && sleep 2 ; echo "C"
      # Quickly Ctrl-Z
      fg && sleep 2 ; echo "D"

and you will see A\nB\nC\nD\n slowly printed out in your terminal.

[0]: [http://superuser.com/a/345455](http://superuser.com/a/345455)

</comment><comment><USER6> Could you please add some usage examples or elaborate on when this tool would be useful? For example,

> building several targets of a Makefile

As opposed to `make && sudo make install` ?

> downloading multiple files one at a time

As opposed to `(wget url1 &) ; (wget url2 &)` ?

> or simply as a glorified `nohup`

As opposed to `nohup` ?

<comment><USER7> I imagine it's useful if you don't know all the commands you want to queue at the beginning.

For example:

        nq ./my_awesome_analysis /data/complicated_file_with_long_name.dat

        # um... what's the next file?

        ls /data
        nq ./my_awesome_analysis /data/even_more_complicated_path.dat

        man rsync
        nq rsync -avh --progress out* somewhere_else.net:

<comment><USER8> You don't need nq for that. Just kick off ./my_lame_analysis in the background whenever you want.

<comment><USER7> Yes but then they will execute at the same time instead of sequentially.

<comment><USER9> How about:

        ./my_awesome_analysis /data/complicated_file_with_long_name.dat &
        # do some stuf
        wait
        ./my_awesome_analysis /data/even_more_complicated_path.dat

<comment><USER10> It's still not equivalent, and it's more cumbersome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Which systems guarantee monotonic behavior for gettimeofday()? I can't think of any. I hope there's no behavior in nq which relies on monotonicity other than file naming, because otherwise you might run into some obscure issues.

</comment><comment><USER12> How does this differ from task spooler:

[http://vicerveza.homeunix.net/~viric/soft/ts/](http://vicerveza.homeunix.net/~viric/soft/ts/)

</comment><comment><USER13> cat list.txt | xargs -n 1 -P 20 wget

Queues up 20 concurrent downloads with wget, for example.

<comment><USER14> You could also use a for loop. But as others pointed out, that doesn't allow you to add items to the queue after it has started.

<comment><USER15> It does if you use a fifo instead of a text file. This is the difference between basic Unix literacy and actual Unix proficiency. I'm not being insulting; very few people take the time to learn the tools Unix provides. And naturally, a developer is going to be more interested in writing tools than most.

<comment><USER14> I don't think you can use a fifo with xargs, though it'd definitively work with a loop. Even with text files, using tail -f.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it feasible to port Apple's Swift to the ESP8266? - <AUTHOR> Is it feasible to port Apple's Swift to the ESP8266?
What would be involved?
Does the fact that it's so intertwined with LLVM make a difference? Or is it just a case of writing a new interpreter, and the LLVM-ness doesn't really make a difference.
I'm a simple web programmer and out of my depth here.
I'm posting this off the back of reading the HN post on "A Kickstarter for funding Micropython port to ESP8266"[1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10993953 <comment><USER2> One would have to write an Xtensa lx106 backend for LLVM. Given that this architecture is pretty simple, just another typical RISC, it should be possible to rewrite, say, a MIPS backend instead of starting from scratch. I'd say it's about a month of a part-time work for a single developer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Swift is not an interpreted language, AFAIK.

So you mostly need an LLVM backend for your microcontroller. It might even exist already.

That has almost nothing in common with the MicroPython situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Swift can be interpreted in it's repl.[1]

[1] [https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=18](https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=18)

<comment><USER2> REPL is not an "interpreter" in any way. These are orthogonal concepts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not that orthogonal...

Like Python, Swift's interpreter is also it's repl. See: [http://dev.iachieved.it/iachievedit/using-swift-as-a- scripti...](http://dev.iachieved.it/iachievedit/using-swift-as-a-scripting- language/)

<comment><USER2> REPL is not an _interpreter_. 'E' in REPL does not imply any particular execution mode. It can be anything - direct interpretation, mixed mode (compilation + VM interpretation), native compilation - whatever.

And, also, the notion of 'scripting' is orthogonal to these two. It got nothing to do with both a REPL functionality and interpretation. Scripting is a mode of using a language, not a runtime semantics.

<comment><AUTHOR> All I'm saying is the same binary is acting as the interpreter and REPL for swift and Python, this is different to other languages. A good example is Ruby which has it's repl as a seperate binary 'irb'.

<comment><USER2> There is no interpreter for Swift. At least not yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> If /usr/bin/swiftc is the "swift compiler" what would you call the binary: /usr/bin/swift ?

<comment><AUTHOR> To answer my own question:

"swift" or "swiftc" w/o -frontend invokes the driver, which launches both the -frontend and other tools like ld.

The Swift REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop) acts like an interpreter. Valid statements, expressions, and declarations are immediately compiled and executed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You would want an xtensa llvm back end first. The biggest issue I think would be the lack of available ram. Micropython is written from scratch to be very focussed on being very small and uses a simplistic trace garbage collector whereas swift uses reference counting that tends to need more ram and more CPU. Possible but unlikely to be practical.</comment>


Ask HN: How to find short term work? - <AUTHOR>

My situation is this: I'm about 6 weeks from starting grad school (CS), and I'm bored.  I've been doing a bit of toying around with my own ideas, but at this point I'm trying to put a little cash in my pocket.  I've wasted time looking through the Craigslist computer gigs listings never to hear back from anyone.  I am young, but I like to thing I have pretty good ideas, and I am able to get things done.  How can I go about finding some short term work to a) pocket some cash and b) not wind up churning out boring websites for some guy on craigslist looking to help me "build my portfolio" for free? <comment><USER2> This isn't going to help asap, but start building a network now. Meet as many people as possible (both in CS as well as related fields), then use Twitter/LinkedIn and other social media tools to keep in touch with these contacts.

When you're bored and looking for a quick project to make money, you can leverage this network you've built to find projects quickly.

There are also a slew of websites for freelancers that might be more targeted than Craigslist for what you need. Try searching for these services (can't remember what they are off the top of my head, sorry).

</comment><comment><USER3> We've found gigs through Craigslist (both through the gigs section and through posting a service offering). However, the sales cycle is also very long for anything dealing with businesses, so I'm not sure what your odds would be with starting and finishing a project in 6 weeks.

Still, that's probably your best bet. Some are fakes, that's true, but some are real and if you're not getting a single response, your pitch might be off. You certainly don't want to say "I'm a student and have 6 weeks off and I'm bored". Maybe post what you are saying and we could critique.

Longer term, you may want to pick up small projects through grad school. I know I did even in undergrad. That requires networking as the OP said. Once you've done a few gigs (and done them well) you tend to get repeat clients that can sustain you and referrals.

</comment><comment><USER4> What is your skill set? You never know who at HN might have some work for you.

You might have better luck at sites like Elance instead of Craiglist. I think you would deal with less flakes.

Personally every contract and job I have had was found through my network. Find your local tech groups and start getting to know people and let them know you are looking for some short term work.

<comment><AUTHOR> First off, thanks to everyone who responded. I do a lot of java because of coursework (and a research project through school), but I primarily work with python for my personal stuff, as well as your basic html/css/js which I think everyone should know at least some of. I've looked for groups in my area through sites like jelly and coworking as a way to get to know people, but can't find many in my area (central NJ). Any advice on where else to look?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm in this spot too. A friend that had success with craigslist recommended the site, but there are almost no quality jobs on our local city's board. It really is mainly just people looking for free work in exchange for "a small percentage of the company" or something for my portfolio.

</comment><comment><USER6> Best place to look first: ask whomever were your grad rec writers if they know folks who could use a bit of summer coding or other cs know how. Or at least, thats how I have my current pre CS grad school summer gig.

best of luck</comment>


GCC 10.1 released with Static Analysis - <AUTHOR> https://gcc.gnu.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Static analysis in GCC 10: [https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/03/26/static- analysi...](https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/03/26/static-analysis-in- gcc-10/)

C++ standard status in GCC 10: [https://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx- status.html](https://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx-status.html)

GCC 10 on phoronix: [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=GCC+10](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=GCC+10)</comment>


European parliament report on the US NSA surveillance programme... - <AUTHOR> http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=REPORT&reference=A7-2014-0139&language=EN

<comment><AUTHOR> 7\. Considers that data collection of such magnitude leaves considerable doubts as to whether these actions are guided only by the fight against terrorism, since it involves the collection of all possible data of all citizens; points, therefore, to the possible existence of other purposes including political and economic espionage, which need to be comprehensively dispelled;

14\. Points out that the abovementioned concerns are exacerbated by rapid technological and societal developments, since internet and mobile devices are everywhere in modern daily life ('ubiquitous computing') and the business model of most internet companies is based on the processing of personal data; considers that the scale of this problem is unprecedented; notes that this may create a situation where infrastructure for the mass collection and processing of data could be misused in cases of change of political regime;

40\. Calls on Member States' competent authorities, in particular the data protection authorities, to make use of their existing powers and immediately suspend data flows to any organisation that has self-certified its adherence to the US Safe Harbour Principles, and to require that such data flows are only carried out under other instruments and provided they contain the necessary safeguards and guarantees with respect to the protection of the privacy and fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals;

64\. Calls on all public bodies in the Union not to use cloud services where non-EU laws might apply;

86\. Expresses its deep concern at the mounting threats to the freedom of the press and the chilling effect on journalists of intimidation by state authorities, in particular as regards the protection of confidentiality of journalistic sources; reiterates the calls expressed in its resolution of 21 May 2013 on 'the EU Charter: standard settings for media freedom across the EU';

92\. Strongly condemns the fact that intelligence services sought to lower IT security standards and to install backdoors in a wide range of IT systems; asks the Commission to present draft legislation to ban the use of backdoors by law enforcement agencies; recommends, consequently, the use of open-source software in all environments where IT security is a concern;

95\. Points out that EU and national telecom regulators, and in certain cases also telecom companies, have clearly neglected the IT security of their users and clients; calls on the Commission to make full use of its existing powers under the ePrivacy and Telecommunication Framework Directive to strengthen the protection of confidentiality of communication by adopting measures to ensure that terminal equipment is compatible with the right of users to control and protect their personal data, and to ensure a high level of security of telecommunication networks and services, including by way of requiring state- of-the-art end-to-end encryption of communications;

125\. Considers tap-proof communication structures (email and telecommunications, including landlines and cell phones) and tap-proof meeting rooms within all relevant EU institutions and EU delegations to be absolutely necessary; therefore calls for the establishment of an encrypted internal EU email system;

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here you can view the MEPs who voted against it:

[http://www.votewatch.eu/en/us-nsa-surveillance-programme- sur...](http://www.votewatch.eu/en/us-nsa-surveillance-programme-surveillance- bodies-in-various-member-states-and-impact-on-eu-citizens-9.html)

Notably UK dominated.</comment>


Brazil: A look into Latin America's largest startup ecosystem (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/19/brazil-a-look-into-latin-americas-largest-startup-ecosystem/ <comment><USER3> I'm a Brazilian who use to work at some startups here. I have a strong feeling that we didn't produce more and better companies because of two things:

1) Public Universities here hates private money and do business, entrepreneur classes are rare and most of the teachers never did create a company (to teach here you must be an academic, a successful entrepreneur can't give classes about it). If you suggest to your teacher to start a business with his Ph.D. thesis, probably, he will feel offended by your suggestion.

2) Our legislation is bad. I'm mean, very very bad. Open a company in Brazil is crazy:

\- So many taxes. I'm not talking about the value that you pay here, I'm talking about an insane amount of taxes. At the federal level, for example, there're 6 or more different taxes. And if you need to send a package across states, you need to deal with a lot of bureaucracy to transport it (and more taxes);

\- Labour protection here is insane too. It's not cheap for small and medium companies. And there is a thing that makes it even more complicated for startups: legally, the owner of the company is in charge of the labor debts even when the company is broken. So, if your company broke, you can't close it until you pay all the labor debts, and if you don't pay, you can lose your home or other assets that belong to you, not to your company;

\- Almost everything here is regulated, and our regulations are not easy to deal with.

<comment><USER4> _"Labour protection here is insane too. It 's not cheap for small and medium companies. And there is a thing that makes it even more complicated for startups: legally, the owner of the company is in charge of the labor debts even when the company is broken. So, if your company broke, you can't close it until you pay all the labor debts, and if you don't pay, you can lose your home or other assets that belong to you, not to your company;"_

This is pretty normal, you need to lay off people _before_ you run out of money to pay them. You don't gamble with your employees paychecks.

As a business owner, you get the upside if business is going great. The downside is that you, the owner, only get paid if there is money left over after you pay your employees.

<comment><USER3> But I'm not talking about wages. I'm talking about other rigths that an employee has, for example: if you bankrupt and need to fire you employees, you'll be forced to pay a fine of 40% of the FGTS (FGTS it's like a saving account the company is obligated to pay in name of they employees).

<comment><USER5> Speaking as a fellow Brazilian: so account for it beforehand, in the same way you should account for 13th salaries and other "hidden" worker rights, which are liabilities in the accounting sense.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, that's how we have always hired, and I don't see a big problem with CLT (the Brazilian employment law), perhaps with the exception of how vacation time and union membership is handled.

It's bizarre that the threads on this post seem to straddle "founders are only in it to make money off the back of their employees" and "worker's rights and compensation are onerous" simultaneously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used to work at a Robotics startup in Brazil. Talent was top notch - I'd say as good as any big Bay Area tech company (SWE, Mech & Financial). Founder was the main investor - he didn't understand SW, treated SWEs & Mech Engs as if he was making them a favor for giving them a job and paid below market. At one point the guy fired the CFO for authorizing buying a cheap Split AC for our little 10ppl office in the middle of the summer while everyone was sweating their life's away (he was off somewhere on vacation on his boat).

But the main takeaway for me was: corruption. The startup was doing something legitimately exciting and innovative but still the founder thought it was wise to sneak in a contract with his buddy at the state government's office (super shady bidding process) to have them as a first client. Eventually the law caught up with it and the whole thing became a legal mess. \+ Equipment import taxes were ridiculous!

Oh yeah, and we had to buy our own coffee!!!!! Sacrilegious!

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm a Brazilian, living in São Paulo state. I've lived here for 35 years, and before that lived in a number of other countries. In my current role, I do roughly 50% international travel. There's only one thing I'm certain about this post: it's that most brazilian commenters here will zero in on everything that's wrong about Brazil, regardless of the facts. I don't yet have a grand theory for why this happens, but it usually does. Anyway, on to the topic of the post.

Brazil has a really great startup scene, and there are many small and new companies popping up everywhere with interesting ideas. I've had my own companies participate in acceleration rounds and pitches and have been positively impressed with the quality of the programs and participants. In the past five years, funding has become much easier to get access to, and there are good hubs to exchange ideas and find talent to hire. Lots of interns and trainees coming out of university are hungry and talented, so there's a real talent pool to leverage. And the potential customer base for any class of product is massive.

A lot of the negativity will be around legislation, taxation, etc. From decades of experience both here and abroad, I can say Brazil doesn't deserve it -- it's easy and cheap to start a new company, and while taxes aren't trivial they are for the most part handled entirely by an accountant for a monthly flat fee. Yes, there are some vexing circumstances -- I've had companies subject to double taxation due to bureaucracy, and handling the chain of tax credits for physical goods that cross state boundaries is annoying. But by and large, for software companies, these are not very relevant concerns. And even with physical goods, there are lots of companies doing e-commerce nationwide, so it can't be that bad.

If there is one defining challenge to startups operating in Brazil it is that B2B deals are very slow to close. In my experience this derives from a tendency to undervalue services delivered by small companies, which for young startups is often the meat of a serious B2B contract. You can spend a year working on a 5-digit deal at risk before seeing the first payment from a customer. Often you don't have that runway and have to give up, pivot or die. In comparison, American and European companies tend to be much more agile about buying services. However, the transition to SaaS has made this problem tractable and I have seen many startups selling higher-value SaaS subscriptions successfully.

In summary, if you can manage to ignore the negativity, the country has great potential, and another round of successful startups should follow the existing crop the article mentions.

<comment><USER8> > most brazilian commenters here will zero in on everything that's wrong about > Brazil, regardless of the facts. I don't yet have a grand theory for why > this happens, but it usually does

It's the age of Brazil (governmentally speaking). The current republic is fairly young and so the popular view is the equivalent of a twenty-year-old college student that is into libertarianism and thinks that all regulation and bureaucracy is bad and that the market should decide all things

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm Brazilian and I tried building a company there after two successful products both in the EU and US.

Brazil simply doesn't have the culture that's necessary to foster a startup ecosystem.

Chile is in a much better position to be that sort of local leader, but still only relatively.

And it's not something you can change by prosecuting corrupt politicians - <USER2> goes all the way back to our colonial heritage, and the crookedness and "classicism" will always hinder the progress of companies and, more sadly, great engineers and entrepneurs.

This stereotype that "we're the most creative" is just another self entitlement like soccer or beautiful women that may build a brand, but certainly doesn't represent reality or live it up to its expectations.

I've come to realize that a Brazilian in power is often a synonym of extreme arrogance, shallowness, selfishness and an unbearable classicism that leads to an unfathomable mistreatment of both customers and employees.

It's unlike any other elites from the western world. It might compare to some countries in Africa.

If you're an investor thinking about Brazil , either understand and live by that culture or lose your money. They won't change the habits they gathered for a lifetime just because you have money or moral authority.

If you're Brazilian and talented, either as an engineer or entrepreneur, get out. Look for jobs remotely, incorporate a company in another country, find a market fit in a healthy economy that selects based on the productivity, efficiency and quality of your work.

Don't gamble your potential, talent and safety for the sake of FOMO on companies that rich, talentless, spoiled kids built with family money, and even our own (as taxpayers).

<comment><USER6> Since I can't downvote, I just wanted to note I find your comment really offensive. Is the current zeigeist is to devalue anything remotely Brazilian? My experience is the absolute opposite of yours. I've built companies here that worked with very little prior experience. I've worked with lost of spectacular leaders, made really good money, and seen many things technology and business-wise improve dramatically over time.

It's hard to have a constructive debate about specifics on this thread because your post is essentially a list of negative generalities. But to take your first point, why would you say we don't have a startup ecosystem? I see dozens of startups around me that are bustling, hiring, taking financing, failing, pivoting, growing. Just in my small city we have Arquivei & Monitora who are success stories, and many that have gone through at least one funding round. A new startup center, ONOVOLAB, was set up here this year. There are other examples nationwide. Gosh, Google just opened its own accelerator here after witnessing the success of others' existing programs. It can't be as bleak as you are painting.

<comment><USER9> Are you a developer?

I'm sure there are exceptions, but the majority of cases always rules.

There's an entire historical background that explains why most "executives" and founders see programmers, or any employee of any sort, as obedients servs that must compel and be grateful for their jobs.

That "classism" will always be present and act as the strongest force against innovation in that country.

Technology is not a factory and, whenever you try to modularize it in such form, you see mediocre, subpar, results.

There might have some small local companies that are able to challenge the even worse local oligarchs from past generations, but they will never be able to compete at a global level, as you'd expect from a real startup ecosystem.

And if they end up facing an international competitor, they might as well be crushed or acquired by them.

I don't get into a personal attack here, but you may want to experience more in depth some of these places like SF, Israel, Chile, Paris, Berlin to understand these profound cultural differences.

<comment><USER6> I started my career as a developer, working at Promon on the Tropico R and RA exchanges, and then shifted completely to Linux and open source development, which is when I founded my first companies. I don't really do a lot of real coding any longer, though.

I see the symptoms you describe, of our startups being less globally impactful [1], as a natural consequence of a smaller, more internally focused [2], and less mature ecosystem, but I don't see all the dysfunction you allude to. I have worked with poor leaders and good ones in Brazil and abroad, and I can't say Brazil tends to any of the extremes of the spectrum. Yeah, there's an oligarchy that has a strong effect on the ability for an entrepreneur (or employee) to "make it", but name a country where there isn't one?

I write this mostly for the benefit of this thread, as I don't think you're really approaching this discussion with useful data or an open mind.

[1] although you have Movile, 99Taxis, iFood to serve as counterpoints to that generalization

[2] your comment on global reach being an important metric reminded me of Nubank, and this article from earlier in the year: [https://epocanegocios.globo.com/Empreendedorismo/noticia/201...](https://epocanegocios.globo.com/Empreendedorismo/noticia/2018/03/startups- brasileiras-nao-precisam-ser-globais-para-terem-sucesso.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Brazil has the potential to be good and make anything bloom, be it startups, big corp etc. It has a good geographic area, plenty of natural resources (water, oil) and whatnot.

BUT!

What keeps Brazil from entering the row of 'actually a good place to live' countries is nothing but the rampant corruption and the sheer amount of bureaucracy involved in anything regulation or taxes in the country. It's not a matter of simply high taxes, but mainly a really complex system of hoops one has to jump to incorporate even a small and simple company. This sucks.

<comment><USER11> We also have a very serious issue with electing the wrong people. São Paulo, the richest state in the country, has been electing the same centre-right (dressed as centre-left) kleptocrats for about 30 years now, with disastrous results.

And don't get me started on that "impeachment" shitshow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe the country has the largest ecosystem because there are a lot of people in there. That doesn't imply in high quality, positive ROIs etc. Lots of people are just trying.

<comment><USER11> The country has some decent universities, some large and rich cities (despite the country, being, on average, poor) and some entrepreneurial attitude.

The drawback I observed the most is the same @cscotti pointed out: the people who end up creating companies are not particularly well suited for that. They want quick money out of outrageous profit margins - they are often already rich, but think they are entitled to more. It's the Brazilian version of the robber baron standard, but in a fractal pattern almost down to the bottom.

And, now, there's also the crazy politics (thanks, Obama) with a coup and all those shenanigans.

<comment><USER13> Brazil absolutely was a Baron country for most of its life (except they were more commonly called Colonels or Captains). Starting on the 16th century the Portuguese kingdom would distribute land for agrarian usage, and the Barons not only owned the land but its ownership was also hereditary. An intricate taxation system was developed that stimulated lang aggregation and so not long after you'd find many of these land owner families owned immense tracts of land - larger than cities or states, and became very rich.

As centuries passed, this system of power persisted, and there is still very very old money in Brazil. Many of these families would give tracts of land away for poor people in exchange of political support, and so they grew into the national political scene. Numerous past presidents came from these families (such as Sarney and Collor).

In short: Brazil has a longstanding colonial culture that persists even though its population might not be aware of it. All its symptoms are still there, including distrust in political entities, assertion of political power by intimidation or populism, archaic taxation systems, and a general sense of powerlessness to change things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> yourstruly-br There is no venture capital here. The biggest funds (Redpoint, etc) here are in fact "growth" funds, i.e. once you get a revenue about BRL 1,000,000 per quarter, you will be considered otherwise good luck. Try to build a technology company here and get the funds and then let me know.

Incubators are in fact cheap outsourced innovation departments of large companies. Once you get there (which is not difficult), they will steer your solution to fit the large corporation behind. Largest companies pay lip service saying they support "innovation" by providing start-up competitions. In fact, they buy almost none from start-ups. They are in fact searching for cheap or free technology ideas and services. Absolutely no significant success has come from corporate incubators in Brazil. You are there as a small piece on the board.

My advice to start-ups in Brazil? Build as much as you can by bootstrapping and try to sell as early as possible and avoid any "free" pilots by corporations trying to use your solution. Charge and charge upfront. I sadly see too many start-ups providing free services to large companies in exchange of vague promises. You are just a piece used by employees in these large companies to promote innovation and cheap solutions.

if large comporations want to support startups they should sign a CONTRACT and BUY from you. That's it! Anything else is just exploitation of technical talent and naiveté from your start-up founds.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's a myth that Brazilians are more creative. Doing business in Brazil is incredibly difficult - lack of talent, ethics and terrible financial sector.

<comment><USER15> Lack of competitive pay makes talent leave the country (source: I have many friends working in startups in USA due to better working conditions).

<comment><USER11> Source, yours truly.

But what drove me away was not the money - I make a lot more money now, but in a much more expensive place. Retirement projections remain firmly planted on the very same date since I left and aren't going to change much either way unless some major upheaval happens.

What really drove me out was my lack of faith. Corruption was rampant (it was always like this, since well before I was born) but it was being investigated, in some cases more seriously than others, but the local equivalents to the DoJ and the FBI (I'm doing this for the Americans in the audience, hope it helps), for the first time since essentially ever, able to work free from executive interference and, unsurprisingly, uncovered a _lot_ of misdeeds. With that, the perceived corruption skyrocketed, government popularity sunk, trust in the government went into a death spiral and the legislative and judiciary decided it'd be convenient to stage a coup (sorry, "impeachment" is not the right word) so that someone more malleable would be in power (there was even a phone recording stating that much).

At that moment I was over for me. I grew up in post-64 coup Brazil and don't want my daughter to go through the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I must say that even though it might look great for investors and business owners, software engineers suffer a lot.

In the recent years, the situation in Brazil has only got worse. The BRL is worth nothing and engineers get a lot less than anywhere here in Europe or the US.

Life quality is also bad and it's rare to find a good work environment, especially outside São Paulo.

If I had to go back to Brazil, São Paulo is definitely the only city I would live in.</comment>


Peter Thiel's Big Gamble - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/09/peter-thiels-big-gamble/ <comment><USER2> Closing graf:

 _Thiel made his contrarian bet, and he was right. Now he may discover how deeply unpopular it makes him._

And we all learned in school that being popular was more important than being right....

(And for the pedants, I mean right as you see it, not as is fashionable with the popular cliques.)</comment>


textfiles.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.textfiles.com/ <comment><USER2> The owner of the site gave a talk at DEFCON 17, "That Awesome Time I Was Sued For Two Billion Dollars"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSWqx8goqSY&ab_channel=Chris...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSWqx8goqSY&ab_channel=Christiaan008)

<comment><USER3> He also gave us the brilliant BBS: The Documentary

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU)

GET LAMP: The Text Adventure Documentary (shot in 1080p)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU)

and (apart from his many talks) his podcast "Jason Scott talks his way out of it" which is just gem after gem of documented tech ephemera.

[https://textfiles.libsyn.com/](https://textfiles.libsyn.com/)

It's baffingly hard to quantify how many people he (and all the other great people at the Internet Archive) has affected with his bullheaded conservation efforts.

<comment><USER4> Jason Scott's podcast _Jason Scott Talks His Way Out of It_ is also endlessly interesting, inspirational, entertaining and touching.

Archive.org: [https://archive.org/details/jasonscotttalks](https://archive.org/details/jasonscotttalks)

Patreon: [https://www.patreon.com/textfiles/posts](https://www.patreon.com/textfiles/posts)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All hail Jason Scott. As may have said, this guy has brought so much joy by preserving and highlighting all of this content.

I've known Jason for years from the old scene and was one of the old school original (uberspace) textfiles mirrors, which was hosted on a modified Cobalt Cube running NetBSD from my 22nd story apartment (Golden Gate Apartments) in SF, which at the time, happened to include free internet on a full T1 back in 2002!

@textfiles, thank you for continuing to bring joy to the world. Personally I've most recently enjoyed your MAME archives as I'be been building Retropie boxes from Arcade1Up cabs to play the classics with my daughter. Thanks for all you do.

<comment><USER6> finger guns

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're looking for gems on this site, just check the HN search results for it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=textfiles.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=textfiles.com)

</comment><comment><USER8> I learnt about coffee and how to brew it from the ancient coffeefaq.txt file, copied via sneakernet and usenet, back in the early 90s. The text is totally valuable, and of course still valid. It has found its permanent home on text files.com, and that is so great.

[http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/FAQS/ACAFFEIN.TXT](http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/FAQS/ACAFFEIN.TXT)

<comment><USER9> > Fact: Unless you are buying some major debris, bean quality is not very > important

That doesn't reflect my experience. If you buy fancy single origin beans, the taste varies wildly from region to region. I think within a region the taste differences mostly come down to roasting, but an Ethiopian and Kenyan coffee aren't going to taste the same at all.

To me the best quickie coffee explainer I've seen is [https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52d4cb70e4b0ba94ab0ae...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52d4cb70e4b0ba94ab0aea30/t/5a46b9740d92977993ce6582/1514584438778/MCM3_manual_004.pdf) . The coffee control diagram is basically everything you need to tell a new wannabe coffee snob.

<comment><USER10> Full quote:

> Fact: Unless you are buying some major debris, bean quality is not very > important, as compared to 1-3 and 5.

I'd wager that it doesn't matter how nice your beans are, if they were roasted a long time ago, ground a long time ago, and brewed with unclean equipment and poor quality water the bean quality matters not at all.

Even then, the file explains:

> Fact: The prepackaged stuff you buy in supermarkets is major debris, (in > general).

So if you are using supermarket coffee, you can at least grind it yourself and try to use decent water.

<comment><USER11> Water is a huge factor that I neglected for a while. It finally hit me once someone told me that coffee is mostly water, and your coffee is only as good as your water. Makes complete sense, but I had never thought about it. A simple Britta filter goes a long way.

<comment><USER12> I have very low standards for coffee, use Starbucks bulk beans off of Amazon, and brew it in an automatic mill+drip machine. But a Brita filter for the water makes a world of difference.

<comment><USER9> Whereabouts do you live? I've visited places where I found tap water undrinkable (Pennsylvania, Florida), but never lived in such a place.

<comment><USER12> Japan

<comment><USER9> I liked the water in Toyama, but they had a PR campaign to brand it as "oishii mizu" so people would forget about the cadmium poisoning in the Showa years. The PR campaign worked on me. :-) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itai- itai_disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itai-itai_disease)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All are welcome, enjoy the site.

<comment><USER13> One of the few sites that I'll always remember discovering. Around a decade ago i wandered over in the middle of the night. Almost in awe I was there until the sun came up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> For those who remember or interested, there is a similar site that catalogs the ANSI BBS art scene at [http://sixteencolors.net/](http://sixteencolors.net/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I like the footer on one of the docs that apparently came from a BBS:

Full access for first-time callers. We don't want to know who you are, where you live, or what your phone number is. We are not Big Brother.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wow, I love this. Clicked on "Where are to files?" and discovered a treasure trove. I just dived into food files.

Although it is not the type of artificial intelligence work people usually pay me to do, my passion is knowledge representation and automatically extracting meaning from text. textfiles.com looks like a great resource. Thanks for posting this.

<comment><USER17> [http://www.textfiles.com/food/recipe.002](http://www.textfiles.com/food/recipe.002)

This french soup recipe is a gem. I didn't know that I could use "3/4 cup of COCA COLA" to make onion soup.

<comment><USER18> Shockingly, here is the source of this recipe:

"International Cooking with Coca-Cola", a give-away pamphlet from The Coca- Cola Company, 1981

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Has the community of people who wrote documents like this just dried up and vanished? Or have they all moved somewhere underground I can't find?

<comment><USER20> You should poke around in gopher. Has a very dial-up BBS feel, complete with FIGlets. Here is a nice web proxy:

[https://gopher.commons.host/](https://gopher.commons.host/)

<comment><USER21> Floodgap is the de-facto home of Gopher: [https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/](https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/)

If you are on Windows, I have written a nice modern gopher client: [http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for- wind...](http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-windows)

<comment><USER22> I prefer gopher://magical.fish

<comment><USER21> Ooh nice site - it's not been around that long either.

That said, Cameron Kaiser has done so much to promote gopher, I don't feel it's fair to redirect people away from his site though.

<comment><USER22> Every Gopher hole is good, but magical.fish is a great showoff as an intro :D.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > _Congress shall encourage the practice of Judeo-Christian religion by its > own public exercise there of, and shall make no laws abridging the freedom > of responsible speech (unless such speech is in a digital form or contains > material that is copyrighted, classified, proprietary or offensive to non- > Europeans, non-males, differently abled or alternativley prefferenced > persons), or the right of people to peaceably assemble (unless such assembly > takes place on corporate or military property or within an electronic > environment), or to petition the government for redress of grievances > (unless such grievances relate to national security)._

[http://www.textfiles.com/100/billrights.fun](http://www.textfiles.com/100/billrights.fun)

</comment><comment><USER24> The ones that are formatted to 40 columns in all caps because THATS WHAT THE ORIGINAL APPLE II COULD DO are charming to no end.

[http://www.textfiles.com/apple/wiztips4.txt](http://www.textfiles.com/apple/wiztips4.txt)

I wish I was five years older and to have experienced the Apple II bbs era instead of getting an old hand me down //c in the early 90's and not having the cash for a modem.

</comment><comment><USER25> I got my first 'email' address in the mid-80s, on CompuServe.

I remember this era. I wish I could transport all my younger friends to those days. They seemed more...humane, and mysterious. There was an optimism and exhilaration about computers that seems all but snuffed out.

And Jason Scott is a saint.

</comment><comment><USER26> Love the anarchy section:

[http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/](http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/)

<comment><USER27> Reminds me of Temple of the Screaming Electron. Spent lots of time reading text files on there as an early teen.

Thankfully I didn't blow my face up/go to jail for terrorism.

<comment><USER28> i miss that site, hella nostalgia just hearing the name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Reminds me of MadChat which was popular in France in the 90's.

Closed in 2006 but looks like it was archived it here : [http://ivanlef0u.fr/repo/madchat/](http://ivanlef0u.fr/repo/madchat/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Could we have this over https?

My internet connection blocks most pages of the site as "Adult content", presumably because it has bomb making instructions on, and the UK government is tetchy about that kind of thing nowadays.

<comment><USER30> If you are an adult, why would your internet connection have any reason to block it?

<comment><USER19> It did make me find the login and turn the parental controls from "nanny state mode" to "just spy on me and arrest me if I click too many of the wrong links mode".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> [http://www.textfiles.com/internet/acronyms.txt](http://www.textfiles.com/internet/acronyms.txt)

Interesting which early internet acronyms survived and which dropped out of use.

e.g. I haven't seen PMJI (Pardon My Jumping In) (at least not in a decade, if ever).

Notable absences from the early days: IANAL / IANAD

</comment><comment><USER32> Whenever this site pops up I always end up going to [http://textfiles.com/bbs/MINDVOX/voices.txt](http://textfiles.com/bbs/MINDVOX/voices.txt) \- I recall Mindvox in Wired and that kind of thing but it was ever so slightly before my time..

</comment><comment><USER33> "How not to be boring" \- [http://www.textfiles.com/fun/boring.txt](http://www.textfiles.com/fun/boring.txt)

Love it. My wife gestures all the time. I'm going to show her how boring it is based on an ASCII document from the 90s :-P

</comment><comment><USER34> An important piece of the early internet. I remember when my brief submission made it to the last issue of HOE (Hogs of Ecstasy) and felt like a small celebrity.

<comment><USER35> This wasn't even internet. Dial-up. Hardly anyone used TCP/IP or FTP or telnet ( only universities ). At home we all used software with protocols like XMODEM, YMODEM, and ZMODEM for file transfer.

Everything else was plain ASCII over serial connections with modems between two devices.

<comment><USER36> Ugh I remember trying to dl files using XMODEM at 300 baud. Like maybe 10% of the time it would work. ZMODEM was a huge improvement in reliability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Reading Unix Use and Security From The Ground Up by The Prophet back in 1989 familiarized me with how to use Unix (anyone remember uucico?), launching my career into IT, initially as a Unix systems administrator (anyone remember when corporate IT racked their own servers?)

</comment><comment><USER38> From [http://www.textfiles.com/apple/iigsprob.hum](http://www.textfiles.com/apple/iigsprob.hum)

> It can hardly be beleived that Apple would put out an overpriced product > that works halfway and not be willing to fix it or at least offer our money > back.

Ha, just you wait.

(Former IIGS owner, owner of many Apple devices before and since.)

</comment><comment><USER39> I always loved this story of his: [http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1127](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1127)

For some reason, the original is gone. That's his sequel.

<comment><USER40> Not gone, he just needs to fix his blog so it redirects old links correctly.

I tracked down the links to the saga:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22997724](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22997724)

<comment><USER39> Awesome! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I have a box of 3.25" disks from my BBS days. I need to take a look at those and see if I can get any text files from them.

This archive is an amazing glimpse at my youth.

<comment><USER42> From the site:

> If you've got some old disks that have files you never did anything with, > please consider sending them or a copy of them to me. That stuff is > precious; and it is rare; and it is finite. That's what matters.

I'd suggest emailing him at firstname.lastname@example.com . He has the equipment to transfer most types of disk, and can also guide you through the process if you don't want to send the disks away.

<comment><USER43> It's also important to do this because old disks tend to lose their data over time. To the point where folks will take raw magnetic flux images from old media, just to have a higher chance of getting some data back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Very cool. I recently got into ASCII art while building myself a new portfolio website. I decorated my resume with ASCII art, and even created ASCII art of the International Space Station, among others. [https://iamlocaljo.com/experience/](https://iamlocaljo.com/experience/)

</comment><comment><USER45> Man AIDS was scary in the 90s. Fun to see the same conspiracy theories come back for Covid.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is a good one, "Anatomy of a pirate":

[http://textfiles.com/piracy/anatomy.txt](http://textfiles.com/piracy/anatomy.txt)

</comment><comment><USER47> Looking forward to the Twitter commentary on this thread.

</comment><comment><USER48> A gif?! That would have been an opportunity to appropriately use the <blink> tag!

<comment><USER49> No modern browser support <blink> as a tag. Though you can reproduce the effect using CSS animations or javascript.

Some examples here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_element#Implementation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_element#Implementation)

<comment><USER50> with WebComponents it's trivial to implement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> While we're at it: @textfiles, any more awesome documentaries in the pipeline?

<comment><USER6> Nope, retired.

<comment><USER51> Good for you! :)

But bad for us :(

Love your work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Hmmm, why doesn't the site have https?

<comment><USER53> I think the author had a spat on twitter a while back because of the same question. There really isn't any excuse to not have TLS on your site, even if purely to thwart MITM injection.

Most arguments are BS but still keep popping up:

\- heavy on the CPU (not with anything after 2006)

\- hard to setup (not with LE + ACME)

\- I don't process information (that doesn't matter/is not the reason, DPI, MITM come to mind)

\- browsers can't handle it (lies, browsers handle it fine, unless you're using a browser from <2010)

Better yet: even if the resource/browser stuff were relevant, you can still leave http up and add https as an option.

<comment><USER54> > unless you're using a browser from <2010

To be fair, a lot of Jason Scott's audience is people who might choose to use ancient browsers on obsolete platforms.

<comment><USER53> Doesn't that make it double-bad?

Again, people might come up with the argument that it's their own problem if they get abused, but also that is just not the reality we live in; any compromised system can (and will most of the time) be used to infect/compromise/attack other systems.

<comment><USER22> Good luck trying to a attack an HTML only browser under a Z80 machine, for example.

<comment><USER53> Well, getting an RCE on that wouldn't be that hard I imagine. Not a whole lot of protections in there, and if there is an OS between the browser and the metal you can exploit that too.

And if you don't want to exploit the browser or the hardware, you can still simply inject a self-refreshing iframe in to the plain text html stream and have that z80 act like a (slow) proxy so you can do things that will point to that Z80 being the 'origin'.

Everybody assumes that 'simpler' or 'reduced' systems are always safer, but as soon as you deal with external interfaces and the outside world, that goes out the window. Lynx was thought to have less of an attack surface because it just did basic text-based browsing with HTML and not much else. Turns out that wasn't the case either.

<comment><USER22> links in Unix for example has automatic refreshing as a checkbox.

<comment><USER53> Well, then you use progressive rendering, or you use chunks, or you use something else. Sure, there might be specific mitigations that someone might have or have not set up, but that is not the point. The point is that assuming your system is safe is a bad position, and ignoring easy to use systems and processes to thwart complete classes of abuse is bad when you use a shared medium like the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> > blinkenlights

right in the feels.

</comment><comment><USER56> legendary, often posted content/site - newsworthy right now for any reason OP?

</comment><comment><USER57> Shouldn't have stolen the color scheme from jwz. Now we have two problems.

<comment><USER58> Green on black is a colour scheme from old terminals..

<comment><USER41> This. The monitors of the time were called monochrome. Most of them came in green or amber.

<comment><USER59> ... and at the time we didn't brag about "dark mode" in "apps", there was only _this_ mode ...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Thomas Cook Shuts Down - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/thomas-cook-enters-compulsory-liquidation-11569206090?mod=rsswn <comment><USER3> Other discussion on this subject: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21045550](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21045550)

</comment><comment><USER4> Per The Guardian, it's largely due to changes in consumer behaviour - <USER2> people booking city breaks directly, less people booking package holidays via travel agents [1]. Global warming may have caused more people to prefer to stay at home in summer. That may have been the tipping point along with Brexit causing uncertainty and a lower pound.

1\. [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/sep/23/thomas- cook...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/sep/23/thomas-cook-as-the- world-turned-the-sun-ceased-to-shine-on-venerable-tour-operator)

<comment><USER5> When it comes down to is, the failure of Thomas Cook comes down to a single thing, the inability to have any kind of forward looking strategy and ability to adapt to changes.

This story has been told at least dozens of times now in the last two decades in particular and ever time it is some combination of a scapegoat excuse and ... of course, climate change done done it! ... when in reality it was an utter failure of leadership to not notice the shifting enemies on the battlefield or being able to adapt to those changes ...

Sears/Kmart, WalMart (even though they are trying), all the book stores (even though B&N is putting up a good fight), ToysRUS, Taxi services, etc.; even, arguably, the whole US economy that is now realizing that "holy shit, maybe we shouldn't have bet the farm and slaughtered that golden goose so the ruling class or fools could get rich quick by selling their own people out to China/India.

They are all cautionary tails of hubris ... nothing more, nothing less ... regardless of how little people want to learn from them.

<comment><USER6> It's not only the failure to adapt to changes or hubris that is to blame. Sometimes it's simply greed (see for instance [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16904564](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16904564))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Other government officials said the cost of the repatriation effort was > lower than the cost of keeping Thomas Cook in business.

Not sure why it's the government issue to issue flights to people.

<comment><USER8> It leaves a bad taste in my mouth too, but at least that's taxpayer money going directly back to the taxpayer.

<comment><USER9> Even better: it's not actually taxpayer money. The repatriation is funded by a mandatory £2.50 surcharge on all package holiday bookings that's been in place since 1973. [https://www.caa.co.uk/ATOL-protection/Consumers/About- ATOL/](https://www.caa.co.uk/ATOL-protection/Consumers/About-ATOL/)

<comment><USER8> Tomato, tomato. At least it was put to good use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I remember going to travel agent branches in the town centre with parents, but now it's all online. Thomas Cook are overpriced and aimed at older people who aren't able to use the internet to shop around. Their business model was not going to last.

</comment><comment><USER11> Well according to the current climate change crisis, that's one less airliner heating up the planet. This sacrifice is perhaps a benefit to saving the planet anyway.

Fantastic news for climate change activists I suppose.

<comment><USER12> Fantastic news? I would rather concentrate on the other 96.5%

"The IPCC has estimated that aviation is responsible for around 3.5 percent of anthropogenic climate change".

(Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviation#Total_climate_effects))

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sixth airline to shut down in the last 12 months.

<comment><USER14> I wonder how many of Europe's super cheap airlines are losing money.

If more fail there might be a domino effect as so many places have come to rely on tourism.

<comment><USER15> Ryanair and Wizzair are notorious to make profit out of every ticket. They live to NOT lose money. Yes some tickets do sell for £5 and some sell for £250 or more, depending the date/time you buy it.

My shock is how companies like Thomas Cook manage to survive by constantly selling below cost just to keep alive. In my mind this is just another Uber, it only stays alive because people just keep throwing money at it. I wouldn't be surprised if TUI, Itaka, and others follow suite.

I am always shocked to see their prices for a 5-6-7 day trip, at a fraction of what I would have paid. I do know that scaling reduces prices, but well.. apparently not really.. like the PIIGS economies the moment lending froze, Thomas went under.

<comment><USER16> According to Wikipedia, 20% of Ryanair's revenue is ancillary (not tickets)

<comment><USER13> Apparently people will pay a premium to be treated like a human.

United has been finding this out here states-side. Options that used to be standard for a class of seating are now upsold-options for more than the delta of the ticket price. Because fuck you, that's why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They abruptly shut down overnight leaving a very large number of people stranded away from home.

Now the government has to pay 150 million to bring them home.

Why not do a gracefull shutdown...???

<comment><USER13> European bankruptcy law doesn't allow them to do a graceful shutdown. The company is forced to stop operations.

That's the major difference between American and European bankruptcies.

<comment><USER18> Wow, harsh. If we had that in the US, half of California would be without electricity and heating fuel for months, given the current state of PG&E.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a New Yorker, I had no idea Thomas Cook had their own airline. I thought they dealt mainly with currency exchange for tourists.</comment>


The Fall Of Freeconomics. Why $0.00 Is NOT the Future of Business - <AUTHOR> http://roovno.com/free/ <comment><USER2> Using freeconomics isn't monopolistic in nature. There are ways to compete, independent of pricing strategy (e.g. all webmail is free, so the best product wins).

If Roovno is a service that can generate revenue for users while they use free web services, you're very much a part of the Freeconomy. In fact, you're betting on $0.00 being the future of business. lol.

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently, Freeconomics is just FREE service. Nothing less.Nothing more. Roovno is Freeconomics + Some revenue. That is, services are Freeconomics plus additional revenue. For example,a new webmail service [say,roovnomail.com] with revenue generation capabilities for its users will definitely have an edge over current mail giants...

<comment><USER3> If it works, good luck. I appreciate that you are excited about it, but this is not the way to get others excited, especially this infomercial writing style that SHOUTS words that SHOULDN'T be shouted for FREE.

Show a working product that is obviously different from AllAdvantage or iWon or the dozens of others that have failed to make good on the same promises, and be prepared for a lot of skepticism afterwards. The world will NOT stare at your launch countdown page with bated breath.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is not meant for SHOUTS against FREE. It is just about few services that has the revenue generation capabilities to users, which of course different from the existing stream of services. Those who have interested to follow the concept, can signup with Email. But it is never meant to make other people also to be excited as I do. I apologize if the article conveyed a different message to readers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'll believe it when i see it. This same thing popped up all over the place during the first web-bubble.</comment>


Launch HN: Guilded (YC S17) – Power-Ups for Gaming Teams - <AUTHOR> https://www.guilded.gg <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! I'm Eli, the founder of Guilded ([http://www.guilded.gg](http://www.guilded.gg)), part of YC's Summer '17 batch. Guilded helps online gaming teams recruit, improve, and compete.

I've been a gamer my whole life, and I made Guilded because I was tired of using clunky website builders, random recruiting forums, and Google Calendar/Docs to manage my teams. I thought it was kind of crazy that in a world where hundreds of millions of people play team-based online games, it's still hard to find the right people to play with, still difficult to collaborate on strategies and organize your team's schedule, and still hard to find the right competition for your team. Players are stuck with whatever tools the developer was able to fit into the game (often none) or whatever forums and game-specific and platform-specific tools have come along.

Guilded launched recently and is still in beta, but over the last two months, it's become the most popular recruiting platform on the web for Overwatch teams, and has picked up a lot of traction in some MMO communities as well.

I'd love to hear your thoughts/feedback/questions!

<comment><USER2> Is the name an intentional pun on "gilded" (in addition to being a reference to gaming guilds)?

I'm always amused by names rich in puns and wordplay, but at the same time curious whether they impede adoption at all through ambiguity. Then again, if it's primarily shared and mentioned through writing online, then that's probably less of a concern.

A quick check shows that "gilded.gg" is unregistered; you might consider picking it up as a redirect, just in case.

Apart from that, this looks impressively integrated. Do you integrate with Twitch as well? Would be nice to automatically tag guild members with roles in Twitch chat, no matter who is streaming. People could connect their Guilded account to their Twitch account, and check a box like "automatically grant [mod/flair] to [guild members / guild leaders / people designated as global mods by the guild]".

Is this focused exclusively on games you specifically support integration with, or would it work for other types of gaming-related groups (for instance, tabletop gaming)? The team coordination, communication, and storage features seem useful for that, for instance.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Is the name an intentional pun on "gilded" (in addition to being a reference > to gaming guilds)?

Yup. It's a play on the terms "Guild" (gaming guilds) and "Gilded" (to cover with gold). This inspired the gold brand colors/identity.

> A quick check shows that "gilded.gg" is unregistered; you might consider > picking it up as a redirect, just in case.

Thank you for the tip! Just grabbed it.

> Do you integrate with Twitch as well? Would be nice to automatically tag > guild members with roles in Twitch chat, no matter who is streaming. People > could connect their Guilded account to their Twitch account, and check a box > like "automatically grant [mod/flair] to [guild members / guild leaders / > people designated as global mods by the guild]".

Yeah, we have some basic Twitch integration right now. You can connect your Twitch account and it'll show when you're live and import your past streams. That's a great idea, though, and is something that I think is definitely consistent with the product goals.

> Is this focused exclusively on games you specifically support integration > with, or would it work for other types of gaming-related groups (for > instance, tabletop gaming)?

One of my goals is to make it feel like you're immersed in your game's atmosphere as soon as you create a team. For that reason, we don't have generic game categories now, only explicitly-supported games. We're working on expanding the game catalog over time.

<comment><USER2> > One of my goals is to make it feel like you're immersed in your game's > atmosphere as soon as you create a team. For that reason, we don't have > generic game categories now, only explicitly-supported games. We're working > on expanding the game catalog over time.

Fair enough. This is probably too far from your primary mission, then, but I will say that I wish there was a service that did what you do, for tabletop RPGs. Something that makes it easy to organize games, track character sheets and setting documents, provide maps, keep logs of events (including markers on maps), facilitate between-session communication and compartmentalized communication (GM/player), and so on.

I haven't seen a service that offers all of those things with good integration.

<comment><USER3> It might not be quite what you're looking for, but our group started using Roll20 recently. It has some quirks and is missing some spell data, but it is very customizable and includes online video chat. Think "Google Hangouts meets D&D."

<comment><USER2> I've used roll20, but I don't find it very useful for non-virtual roleplaying. I'm looking for something that integrates calendaring, drive, etc; meanwhile, video chat is not particularly valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks a fair amount like Guildwork ([http://guildwork.com/](http://guildwork.com/)), which I remember trying to do a fairly similar thing a few years back (but aimed more specifically at MMORPGs, I think). The founder of Guildwork is actually the CTO of Discord now. It's good to see someone else working on a similar idea, I think it's a space with a lot of potential.

Guilded looks really nice from what I can see while clicking around the site randomly a bit. Congratulations on getting it to the beta stage, it looks extremely impressive for something to have built mostly solo.

One fairly minor suggestion: I think it would probably be good to replace some of the screenshots in the carousel at the top of the landing page with more carefully selected ones. They're the very first "glimpse of the site" for someone new visiting guilded.gg, so they're the first impression of what the site will be like. And the very first thing they see right now is the Dota 2 screenshot with a large "So tired of laning with bads". Then it cycles to the WoT one that's also showing someone complaining. I think that just gives a bit of a negative initial feeling. Also, if Overwatch is one of your main focuses, having a screenshot in there with something more in-depth than "Overwatch RELEASE!" would probably help to show that off as well.

<comment><USER5> What's funny is I got rejected from YC with Guildwork years ago. After flailing around trying to make it work I reflected on why it didn't work, Discord was the result. :)

<comment><USER4> Ha, interesting. Glad to see you doing so well with Discord, I used to spend a ton of time on the BG forums back in around 2009 or so, and vaguely remember giving some feedback on the very first versions of Guildwork.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool! There's definitely a need for something like this. I played competitive Counter-Strike in my youth, and one thing that no one has successfully replaced was the vibrancy and engagement of the irc communities of the time.

Griping: Massively unimpressed with the presentation and branding. Gaming has a ton of work to do to be considered a generally accessible and comfortable place for people of all form. In your hero image, two of your images show toxic commenting by people in the team channels and much of the wordage comes across brusque-y.

... "So tired of laning with bads"...

... "Map talk mittengard is terrible"...

... "Why do you want to join Rage Force?"...

... "You decide who makes the cut"... "Talent on the market"...

Look at Discord for an example of capturing the fun, whimsical spirit of gaming and exploration.

Guilded appears dark and intimidating. I am not at all encouraged to explore and my desire for play is far from stoked. In fact, this is the kind of energy that has sent me packing to the quiet confines of single-player gaming.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I played competitive Counter-Strike in my youth, and one thing that no one > has successfully replaced was the vibrancy and engagement of the irc > communities of the time.

Yeah, a site called Gamebattles was the closest for me back in the day. I haven't found anything else that's captured that feeling yet, as they've largely died off. About the screenshots, we threw together those as parodies a long time ago and haven't gotten any feedback about them so I thought nobody read them, heh. I agree that the landing page copy could use another pass, thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER6> Cool. :)

Apologies for leaning into the negative aspects; the site struck a cord. I'm deeply, deeply passionate about gaming. I think they need a loving, gentle- touch and less of the hyper-masculine spirals of darkness.

May you use your powers of community forming to nurture comprehensive and accepting goodness and less in stoking the truly boring, raging fires of gaming negativity and elitism.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree. If you get a chance to try it out, let me know if you see anything else that gives that vibe. If anything, I've been wondering if the cute knight avatars everywhere and the bubbly GuildedBot dialogue make it a little bit too "cute" in contrast with the games' atmosphere, so I think the quoted sentences are just out-of-sync with the rest of the branding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Steam/Valve should really take note, since the monetization end game for any kind of gaming user service (this, discord, etc) will be a game distribution platform.

</comment><comment><USER8> Pretty interesting project and looks great! I see a platform filter; is this targeting all platforms or just PC at the moment? Any plans to setup a way to jump directly into a game with a group of people? I'm not sure how many games support this but being able to click a button to jump into an existing game would be pretty compelling.

Love the recruitment and players LFG though a drop down seems like the wrong mechanic to me (would be pretty cool to be able to show game titles as like squares in which you could select as your filter (IMO at least)).

Hope you don't mind the feedback! Good luck! These types of ideas are certainly interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! This is great feedback.

> is this targeting all platforms or just PC at the moment?

All platforms.

> Any plans to setup a way to jump directly into a game with a group of > people?

Not yet, but I definitely think that's worth exploring. I think the first step in that process is to build the capability to know when your team is playing. Then, if everyone is playing except you, we can let you know that you can get online now and group up with everyone. That alone would be valuable for a lot of people, and if we could auto-join you that'd be even better.

> Love the recruitment and players LFG though a drop down seems like the wrong > mechanic to me (would be pretty cool to be able to show game titles as like > squares in which you could select as your filter (IMO at least)).

The tough part is that there are so many games to support that it won't scale to show every game, so some sort of search/typeahead is necessary. On the other hand, the most popular 4-5 games (I imagine) will get the majority of the volume, so it might make sense to have a hybrid approach if we don't know what game you play already (show most common 'n' games as buttons, allow search as well). I'd have to experiment with that.

<comment><USER8> > The tough part is that there are so many games to support that it won't > scale to show every game, so some sort of search/typeahead is necessary. On > the other hand, the most popular 4-5 games (I imagine) will get the majority > of the volume, so it might make sense to have a hybrid approach if we don't > know what game you play already (show most common 'n' games as buttons, > allow search as well). I'd have to experiment with that.

Fair points. One strategy we've done is show the more important games _to the user_ first and sort appropriately (pre-orders, installed, played, etc) but that data is likely difficult to get, at least for a new user. But you could show the games they own / primarily use first and go from there and / or popular ones like you were suggesting.

You're a web app so drop downs are not as awkward as, say, on a console but I still try to see if there are creative but intuitive ways to avoid them :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks pretty good (also considering it's mostly a solo effort). I'd try to stay focused on no more than 5 games since guild requirements and features should vary greatly between them.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I'd try to stay focused on no more than 5 games since guild requirements and > features should vary greatly between them.

Agreed. Right now, I'm focusing on a few communities to make sure it works really well for them before expanding the feature set to all games.

What's interesting though is that all of the site's features - even the ones that look game-specific - cut horizontally across many games. For instance, we recently added an Overwatch team comp builder. It turns out that every game that has the notion of "balanced teams" can adapt that in the future, even if they're not even the same genre. The same engine used to generate Overwatch teams can be used to generate League of Legends, DotA, and Heroes of the Storm teams. This is something I'm really excited about in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I knew I recognized your name from somewhere! Presumably you are the iEchoic of [http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/IEchoic_Build_(vs._Ter...](http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/IEchoic_Build_\(vs._Terran\)) fame? :)

Never knew you personally but I spent a lot of time lurking on TL after SC2 release, and further on into the Dota days, congrats on the launch!

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm really, really excited about this, especially once you expand to other games. I'm big on The Crew and Rocket League but am most active in Kingdom Hearts Union χ and our party is terrible at being organized when it comes to raid event scheduling. This could very easily solve that and integration with Discord (which we already use) makes onboarding a breeze.

<comment><AUTHOR> > This could very easily solve that and integration with Discord (which we > already use) makes onboarding a breeze.

That's great to hear, that's exactly the idea. I haven't actually looked into Kingdom Hearts Union at all, thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of my first startup experiences was working for a company that built aspects of this concept in 2007; match-making, server provisioning, and competition/tournament workflows. We licensed it to id for Quake Live and later Riot Games for what became League of Legends.

We failed for a whole bunch of reasons but love the idea. I think you have the timing right on this. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's awesome, I'd love to hear more about your experience with that if you don't mind me shooting you an email later. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This looks really cool (and I'm not a hardcore gamer) but avid Discord user for things like Zwift.

I'm curious: are there other use cases for Guilded outside of online gaming? For instance, on Zwift, you can join certain races and clubs, but it's really messy and happens primarily off their app (often in FB Groups). This seems like a better use case.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the concept applies to many domains, but Guilded is 100% focused on online gaming. It's definitely interesting to see Discord gain traction in non-gaming circles, but I'm not planning on venturing there in the forseeable future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> running a dota team with mostly full time job having adults means a lot of gymnastics around scheduling. Something that would be a game changer (that I didn't see) is functionality in the calendar for future availability/suggested times for events.

this type of thing would make us absolutely use the platform

edit: also drop the colon after "Dota"

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely! This is something I'm planning on building in the future. Not only would it make finding times for scheduled events easier, but we could also send you a notification automatically when you have a full team on (for example) to queue.

Good catch on the Dota naming, will fix that now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm pretty out of it when it comes to gaming but this kind of reminds me of Google Groups + Slack + GameSpy (assuming I understand how this works).

What's the monetization angle here? Charging the guilds themselves a fee to run their group or charging game developers for integration with the platform?

<comment><AUTHOR> > I'm pretty out of it when it comes to gaming but this kind of reminds me of > Google Groups + Slack + GameSpy (assuming I understand how this works).

Yeah, that's pretty close. The main difference is that Guilded is less focused on solving real-time communication for gamers, and more focused on exploring collaborative tools like calendars, media albums, recruiting tools, and analytics tools. We integrate with real-time comms tools (like Discord) to make it easy to use both.

> What's the monetization angle here? Charging the guilds themselves a fee to > run their group or charging game developers for integration with the > platform?

Subscriptions for premium features, paid cosmetic features (think guild themes/skins, etc.), and sponsored events (using the integrated calendar) are all things I'm exploring right now.

<comment><USER16> How is this different from existing services like Enjin?

<comment><AUTHOR> Enjin was launched at a time when "website builders" were the only way to really manage your team, and that's still what it is today. A few problems with this approach:

1\. I might just want to have a team calendar, and I don't really want to create a website to use a calendar any more than I want to create a website to use Google Calendar. You can create a team and access all the tools on Guilded in 10 seconds.

2\. Enjin has poor mobile support as a result of this philosophy, because user-created websites on a desktop don't tend to work as well on mobile. They certainly won't work well as an app.

3\. Because all of the features that Guilded teams use are integrated in a first-class way, we can do really cool stuff with your network connections, like share your updates to your Discord server, notify your team when you go live on Twitch, etc. Many of Enjin's are third-party html/js/css, so they don't have that level of control.

These problems are ones that I wanted to solve, and they were a large part of the motivation to build this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This looks great. We're working on something at Tracker Network[1] that you may find interesting, but it's still pretty early. Have you got an email I can reach you at?

[1] [https://tracker.network](https://tracker.network)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks very cool! Email is in profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Really great idea, and nice product man. I am considering building something similar for Overwatch specifically.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I'd love to see what you build, Overwatch is really exciting right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Neat! The player search for Overwatch is way more involved than I expected.. How many people are on your team?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I've been focusing a lot on Overwatch recently, I think the game and the scene is really exciting right now. It's just me, but a close friend did a lot of the design work, especially very early on.

<comment><USER19> Alone? How long did that take? And.. Let me know if you need a 76.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice site. But it keep a high cpu load for me.(macos+firefox)

</comment><comment><USER21> Great to see another gaming startup on the .gg TLD!

</comment><comment><USER22> Congrats on the launch Eli! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :)</comment></comment>