HN: Review my little Twitter app - <AUTHOR> http://glunote.com

<comment><AUTHOR> My desk is covered with little sticky notes, with just about everything written on them - things I'm interested in(books, websites, music, etc.), restaurants, lyrics to songs, people phone numbers/email addresses, etc. Anyway, this just isn't a good system, since I never seem to have these notes when I actually need them (i.e. when I'm not at my desk). Even if I don't tweet a lot I have Twitter open all the time since I like to keep up to date with what some people are doing/talking about. I also have Twitter on my phone, so a few months a go I thought it's be a good idea to create a system where I could create notes, just little ones, and access them from anywhere. Hence glunote.

The premise is pretty simple, just follow a user "glu" on Twitter then to take notes send a direct message to glu. The system then stores the note permanently, i.e, "d glu dicount socks 1-800-555-SOCK". You can then search notes by sending a direct message to glu with a ? as the first character. For example "d glu ? discount socks" would return all your notes that matched "discount socks" as direct messages (actually at the moment it returns the best match and a link to all other matches).

It was originally just for me but I've opened it up to anyone. I'd love to get some feedback on what people think, where there might be improvements, what's missing, that kind of thing. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

<comment><USER2> I've been toying with an idea like this (quickly and easily take notes from anywhere) and using twitter didn't even come to mind. I like your implementation and I see myself using it.

One feature I would love is a reminder system of some sort. I'm an extremely forgetful person and I could tweet notes all day long but would never remember to check time-sensitive ones. Could you add some functionality to retweet me reminders for time-sensitive notes? e.g. I could tweet "d glu meeting @6:30pm", "d glu do so and so @tomorrow @12:00pm" or something similar that could be parsed easily and wouldn't misfire.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I've been thinking about something like this but didn't want to implement it if no one wanted it - now that I know someone would think it's useful I'll do it. One question though - how would you prefer to get notified? Would retweeting work (might be sensitive info), direct messaging, or maybe email (although you'd have to provide an email address).

<comment><USER2> I guess direct messaging would be best; Like you mentioned, privacy is a concern and making it a RT wouldn't afford any advantages that I can see. I can get notifications from twitter via a client app or SMS too so I don't think email would be a huge advantage either.

<comment><USER3> Whilst small, direct messaging will not be an issue. But...

"250 total direct messages per day, on any and all devices"

<http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/15364>

Im not sure if they will make an exception for you. I too wanted to us dm as a means of communicating, but having a limit of 250 in a day would just be crippling.

Perhaps an argument in your d glu would be to allow for "trigger word or phrase" then an open message would not be as bad.

Another option would be you send a tweet with a link. The page has a password which displays the message for the user.

<comment><AUTHOR> Initially I wasn't concerned about this because it was only me and I thought about not opening it up because of this limit, but I also thought that it'd be solvable, somehow. We could make a case for an exception, but that doesn't guarantee one. Your idea of a tweet with a link is a great one and would go a long way towards solving this. Thanks.

<comment><USER3> The link could also give you the ability to bring your userbase back to your site.

Clearly on the mobile or something, not as important. But bringing them back via the web page. Allows you more options in terms of what to display.

I know you haven't mentioned nor asked. But a potential tier pricing scheme.

1) How many reminders per week / month

2) Maybe allow non paying users the ability to pick 15min blocks, yet allow paying users the freedom to create any.

<comment><AUTHOR> I havn't been thinking about charging but these are not bad ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While I like the app and what you're trying to do, just a heads up that you're going to come across as super shady by automatically following the @glu Twitter account when you have users login with their Twitter credentials. The problem is that you're not making it clear up front that by logging in, you're going to be adding a follower to their Twitter account, which will be interpreted as a violation of their privacy, and will almost certainly cause a backlash at some point.

I understand that in order for your app to work, the user has to be following the @glu account, but automatically opt-ing someone in is not the right way to do it. You need to update the content and design to make it painfully clear to anyone logging into your site that they are also consenting to following the @glu account.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, I'll change the language to reflect this. Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the app's simplistic nature, but I think your explicit use case is not really correct. I can't see myself using this to take class notes at all. The sticky note format just does not work for that. However, it seems like it would work great for leaving yourself reminders. More of a "note to self" than capturing in-depth information.

The visual style is good conceptually, but needs polish. You need more than yellow rectangles for each note, the cork board background needs some kind of border, and your X buttons need to be more stylish.

Edit: I see that you really did intend it for the use I just described, but the language on the site makes it sound like it's for taking notes in class, meetings, etc. I think that a more descriptive phrase is "write notes" rather than "take notes."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Steve, great feedback. Wish my design skills were a little better :)

<comment><USER6> I'm a designer/front-end developer and have some free time at the moment. Get in touch if you'd like some help with the visuals. My details are in my profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll drop you a line about this tomorrow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wasnt this posted a while back ?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848889>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but I felt I did a really poor job of describing what I wanted to achieve so I thought I'd give it another go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, I liked it. Very cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that's always nice to hear :)</comment></comment>


WeWork postponed thousands of layoffs because it can't afford to pay severance - <AUTHOR> https://www.insider.com/wework-reportedly-delayed-layoffs-because-its-short-on-cash-2019-10 <comment><USER2> Can anyone who works at WeWork (the company, not an office) post what it's like working there right now? I'm extremely curious how it's like on the inside.

<comment><USER3> Not likely. When employees talk bad about their employers in public, they gain nothing, but risk being seen as a liability to future employers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why would you still be working there if you could find something, ANYTHING else as a job?

This might end up being a black mark on your resume.

<comment><USER5> Why quit when you can start your job search while continuing to work, then get laid off with severance?</comment></comment>


The $199 tablet . . .  - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10423606-64.html

<comment><USER2> I think it's important to remember this is a reference design not an actual product. So when they say $199 they're presenting a low ball figure to attract companies to manufacture the actual devices. I sincerely doubt they're factoring stuff like marketing and administrative costs into that estimate.

CES is full of stories where some no-name manufacturer shows off a reference design promising the world only to have it never materialize as an actual product.

I spent a good size chunk of my young life waiting for this: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaze3D>

<comment><USER3> It should be mentioned that Freescale is not a no-name. :)

Doubtless, there will be $300 and $400 devices built upon this design, but also there will be $200 devices.

That said, the keyboard dock looks like a Speak and Spell..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if this qualifies as "looking like a toy" - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1029069>. This'll be sweet if true and if it hits the price points as described - I think TechCrunch was right about needing to hit the price point to get acceptance though it'll be interesting to see where Apple ends up pricing them (especially if it's true that they're targeting sales of 10M units).

Definitely not good for the JooJoo - since effectively this will probably mean they are competing against Apple's marketing/design while being squeezed out of the lower end of the market.

Add - a few more details here <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2357588,00.asp>

</comment><comment><USER5> Conceptually I think that this is right on. I realized that what I want most is an adjunct to my normal computing environment such as an LCD graphics tablet for scribbling on. These tablets (say, by Wacom) are north of 1000USD, and they aren't even computers, just graphics tablets with an LCD screen. Maybe Apple will blow the status quo completely apart with their tablet, but it will have to be just mind-blowing in order to justify the Apple price. It's going to have to be more than a way to browse the net on the couch. I can do that well enough with my phone. It's going to have to change the way I think about tablet computing and maybe even touch computing altogether. In the 200USD price bracket though, all bets are off. A `good enough' way for me to hack little diagrams together makes it money well spent.

</comment><comment><USER6> I hope this sees daylight at this price point, but I'm not going to hold my breath. On the other hand, there are ARM tablets out there already, e.g. <http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/> . I've been keeping an eye on them for a while, and the device seems to be pretty cool, but sadly I can't justify the cost yet. (I'm looking at it for ARM kernel development, and I can build a nice little ARM desktop for the same price, which will be easier to work with)

<comment><USER7> I have a Touchbook (I do embedded systems development for a living) and I got it to co-exist with my Beagleboard, which has really become one of my favourite computers in the house.

The Touchbook, however, still needs a lot of work .. both in the hardware design itself, and in the software - the good news is that the OS is going through many iterations and updates and is probably going to be quite slick within a few months.

That said, I look forward to the Pandora gaming console, more .. its really a much better design, in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This device uses very similar processor cores (Cortex A8 + PowerVR SGX)as the iPhone 3GS & Motorola Droid does.

Considering an iPod Touch 3rd Gen starts at ~$189.00 - The market for tablets in the $200-300 range will be hot.

Android or any other linux distro could be easily ported to the MX515 based device.

</comment><comment><USER9> Since it's a reference design, it's not clear to me whether the $199 price tag is the BOM cost or the consumer cost. I would not be surprised if it's just BOM cost.

</comment><comment><USER10> Make the RAM expandable and build it with a hard disk.

If it runs a Debian-like Linux (or BSD, let's not be picky) and emacs, that's more or less all I need. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER11> 3G + Flash + Android + Camera + Accelerometer

All for under $200.

I'm very excited to check this out at CES.

</comment><comment><USER12> If this supports flash and has a nice, compliant and fast browser....sold!</comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't Moxie sign Signal's releases? - <AUTHOR> It's good practice and obviously the guy is smart and knows this... <comment><USER2> If it's distributed using Google play store aren't apks signed by the developer anyway?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that is true. But Play is the middle man, not sure the end user could even verify the apks in any way...

<comment><USER4> On Amazon's Android app store, they repack the developer-provided APKs. Any developer APK signatures would be lost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On Android or iOS or did you mean sign a source release ...?

My guess is because of potential friction with reproducible building (for Android) and this for iOS: [https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal- iOS/issues/1063](https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-iOS/issues/1063)

hth, adric

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know, but am I right in saying that he is generally in favour of ephemerality over verifiability? It'd seem odd to do this with definitely attributable works like software releases, but it is what would make most sense to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> > he is generally in favour of ephemerality over verifiability

That's not an absolute law in a vacuum. What does "ephemerality" even mean in the context of the question "how can I verify that the software that's being pushed to my phone comes from where it says it comes?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Crypto experts don't follow "good practice" for the sake of it; they do things that would meaningfully improve security.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you suggesting that signing doesn't meaningfully improve security?

<comment><USER7> Yeah, that additional signatures on top of the app store ones don't help users, who aren't going to check them.

<comment><AUTHOR> When you say "doesn't meaningfully improve security", does "meaningfully" mean "for the majority of users"? Because I can assure you that for a single user who does things properly it does improve security.

<comment><USER7> Yes. Meaningfully means that the _overall_ state of security is increased. A single user's actions don't count.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok so you're giving me an answer about something that I don't care about, the "overall" state of security. I just care about mine, really. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


OpenThread, an open-source implementation of the Thread networking protocol - <AUTHOR> https://nest.com/press/nest-announces-open-source-implementation-of-thread/ <comment><USER2> There does not seem to be any intent to make the Thread protocol itself public. Interesting situation, where the codebase is open but what it's supposed to do is still proprietary.

<comment><USER3> I imagine that's both for licensing purposes as well as for standardization purposes? I mean if every company starts making its own version of the Thread protocol that's slightly incompatible with everything else, that kind of defeats the whole point.

<comment><USER4> > ...purposes as well as for standardization purpose...

Huh :) what's wrong with ietf rfc mechanism? or has google set a precedent which everyone else is now emulating ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would love more public details on all the workings since there doesn't seem to be more interest in making the thread protocol itself public as others have mentioned. We ([https://flair.co](https://flair.co)) were skeptical of 2.4Ghz radios and so far that has been a good move but maybe one day you will be able to change out physical layers?

<comment><USER6> I agree sub 1GHz has a lot of potential even though there's a lot of activity at 2.4GHz. Interested to see how subGHz 802.11ah Wi-Fi pans out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cute. It's not an open protocol unless they make the spec public and free.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's cool there's some open source here, but people should probably bear in mind Nest's significant troubles of late. It's not a company I expect to see much longer in the future, as even Googlers internally have expressed on Memegen a desire for Google to offload it.

I wouldn't find building your platform on top of it to be appealing in that context.

</comment><comment><USER9> Any idea why they chose DV based routing? Looks like they have ignored about 20 years of Wireless Sensor Networks/cyber-physical systems research.

<comment><USER10> DV is well-understood and proven in the field. I am not so sure about the newer WSN routing research (Directed Diffusion, LEACH etc.). Also many of the WSN protocols assume a high density of nodes (e.g. a production plant covered in sensors). A Thread-type network can be quite sparse.

<comment><USER9> Then why not Dijkstra + source routing?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do I need a license to be an escrow? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I'm working on a C2C web application, and I want to implement an escrow system where user A pays me for an item, user B ships the item to user A, and when everything is received I release the payment to user B.
I want to launch this in the US only (as a Dutch company). The only thing I'm afraid of: do I need any licenses? Will 'they' see me as a bank? How does all this work (especially in the US since there are so many different states with different laws)? Is it hard (especially for a Dutch company)? What can/will happen if you do this without the proper licenses?
Edit: I'm just talking about low-priced objects. The value of the items sold is between $10 and $100. <comment><USER2> Seems like a question for a US based attorney.

Is the escrow management your product or just something you need to offer? It seems to me if it is just something you need to manage, then use a service like Balanced Payments. If it is your business, then seek out some legal advice to make sure you protect yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Escrow'ing is not my business, it's just a measure I'd like to take to protect consumers against other (fraudulent) consumers. It's how AliExpress does it (and maybe ebay too, but I don't really know ebay): you buy an item off the website, pay AliExpress, and when you received the item you can flag it as received. After that, AliExpress pays the money to the merchant that shipped you the item.

<comment><USER2> You may really want to check out someone like balanced payments. I know there are others out there as well, but they have this type of service, and you can control when funds are released etc. I personally just happen to like Balanced more than most, so I have a bias.

But no matter what you do, I personally wouldn't go about writing this type of system as the requirements for security, certifications etc can just consume all your time.

Good luck with whatever you choose to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Too bad, Balanced only works with US companies. Bummer.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I should've thought about that, did you try reaching out to them? Just to see if there are any options or things they can suggest? I am trying to think of any other systems like that which exist already.

Maybe someone else has some ideas of systems that work where you are.

If you do have to go about making something, you might want to checkout the payment API's, like Balanced, Stripe etc to see the type of things they handle. Might help things go a little faster.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I checked with Balanced to see if I can sign up as a European company, but they didn't offer any ways to do that. I'll just keep looking for alternatives.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Storing Data in Music - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190709122014.htm <comment><USER2> This reminds me of stories about coded messages during World War II [1]. This could be used to maybe embed data messages within public broadcasts? I wonder how much data quality could degrade over AM/FM modulations. There is of course packet radio for data transmissions, but I am specifically thinking about public broadcast. A scenario I thought of is a broadcast in distressed areas, similar to the WWII coded messages, but with addition of data layer embedded that could authenticate the authenticity of the messages, for example.

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

<comment><USER3> Music broadcasts were also used to send secret message to hostages in Colombia:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8852772](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8852772)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another application is DRM, e.g. storing "This song is licensed to ..." in the music. Let's hope we're not heading that direction.

<comment> VvR-Ox This isn't a problem. Software can find the delta and filter it out.

<comment><USER5> This isn't a problem if you pay for your music.

<comment><USER6> Quite the contrary. Pirates can spoof their identities with vpns and stolen credit cards, and won't care if a piece of IP gets tagged with their fake ID. But paying customers will have their personalized codes publicized every time they play a song at a party, use a snippet for a ringtone or put a bit of background music in a video clip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pretty sure this is old tech now? There used to be a light-show app that relied on the same principle. The app received (audio) signals at high frequencies, and would then use the screen to flash different colors - basically sequenced by the incoming signal.

It was used at sports events and such, so that when all the attendees fired up the same app, they'd create cool light shows.

<comment><USER8> > Pretty sure this is old tech now?

It seems they're claiming higher bitrates than existing techniques.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> An obvious marketable application for this is location tracking. Advertisers could embed more detailed positional information into audio / video advertising and use apps to get more granular information on who's listening to it. A logical extension of [https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/life- st...](https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/life- style/gadgets-and-tech/news/android-apps-beacons-tracking-users-inaudible- sound-hidden-adverts-ultrasonic-audio-privacy-phones-a7723871.html%3famp)

</comment><comment><USER10> I was hoping this would be like in the film "The man with one red shoe" where the theory is that a violinist in an Orchestra is encoding secrets into his performance that normal people in the audience would not detect, but it could be detected and decoded if you knew what to look for.

<comment><USER11> That description reminds me of: [https://youtube.com/watch?v=J1p5zOM96f0](https://youtube.com/watch?v=J1p5zOM96f0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> [Whistling distractedly] Don't mind me... my microphone ears are just open all the time just to catch the fleeting sound of data encoded into music!</comment>


Apple trademarks architecture, intellectual property gone haywire? - <AUTHOR> http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/860577/what-apples-troubling-quest-to-trademark-store-design-says

<comment><USER2> Wow, it's a good thing that no one has trademarked the door as distinctive trade dress, or no one would be able to get into an Apple store, not even geniuses.</comment>


Patreon Gains $30M Series B Funding to Support Growth - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/19/patreon-gains-30-million-series-b-funding-experiencing-major-growth/ <comment><USER2> Co-founder Jack Conte after raising $15M in 2014 [1]:

> Conte said his main concern in raising the round was pissing off the Patreon > community. "Because we're so cognizant of how venture capital can also be a > dangerous thing, we do want to make sure our creators know how thoughtful > this round was," he said. "We spent a long time meeting a lot of folks."

I wonder how creators feel about Patreon raising $30M today?

[1] [http://recode.net/2014/06/23/creative-patronage-startup- patr...](http://recode.net/2014/06/23/creative-patronage-startup-patreon- raises-15m/)

<comment><USER3> I was extremely worried to see this headline. Patreon is opening up a new path towards professionalism (a 10x improvement over e.g. YouTube, and that was a pretty massive deal), and if it goes under a lot of human potential will be shuttered. Might sound overly dramatic, but cultural shifts are always on a razor's edge

<comment><USER4> I'd like to think of Patreon as validation for this model of supporting content creators. Even if Patreon can't turn a profit (which seems impossible considering the amount of money going through them), it's validated the idea that consumers are willing to pay the people they like to make the content they like.

<comment><USER5> Well the fear with taking VC is that they now have an ever greater growth agenda, and it's either the moon or bust. No option of living happily on earth, so to speak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Now that the internet has billions of people, if just a tiny fraction of them direct their gaze upon someone, that person is almost instantly made rich.

There are lots of Bob Ross type people in the world that we would all love to learn from and get to know. They're starting to show up on YouTube and podcasts. They're providing huge value to millions of people. All they need is a few dollars per subscriber to be comfortable and productive.

<comment><USER7> I disagree with saying "instantly made rich" (with respect to Patreon). The reality is closer to what you stated in the last sentence of your comment.

This is actually why I like Patreon... the model seems to align more with sustainability.

<comment><USER8> There are a fair few who've done it in the Youtube space (the infamous Pewdiepie for example), but no, I don't think I know of any Patreon millionaires yet either.

<comment><USER9> But how sustainable is it? Patreon is rather simple: Users directly pay the artists, however much they want (and Patreon presumably takes some fee).

Youtube makes artists depend on Youtube's subscription and/or advertisement viability, which are largely outside of the control of both artists and consumers. Consumers cannot control where their money ultimately ends up, artists have little planning security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hey all! Engineering manager at Patreon here. Thanks for all the kind words throughout the comments. Would love to answer any questions you may have about what we're up to, how we do things, where we're going, and all that fun stuff. We're also hiring! Shoot an email to firstname.lastname@example.com if you wanna talk more :D

<comment><USER11> It'd help if you described your current technology stack. Right now it's not really clear what type of software engineer you are looking for.

<comment><USER12> If you're really curious, Patreon's code (and user data) was leaked onto the web.

It appears to be a Flask app, storing data in mysql, couchbase, and redis. All presumably hosted on AWS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have a question for HN: would running a Patreon for a software developer be a good idea?

It's something I've been considering doing myself in lieu of the traditional ads/sponsorships/ebooks/etc methods of monetization, but it might not make sense since the costs of development (for purely code-related endeavors) are much more manageable than artistic endeavors.

<comment><USER13> I back the Patreon campaign of a software engineer who makes a very niche platform that I find lots of value in:

[https://www.patreon.com/cubetutor?ty=h](https://www.patreon.com/cubetutor?ty=h)

<comment><USER14> CubeTutor saved my bacon several times during this most recent Holiday Cube.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As for other crowdfunding platforms, I'm surprised Twitter hasn't tried to monetize Likes using a Flattr-like system. Just add a "tip" button next to the heart button, paying out say $0.01. It could create a virtuous cycle of more tweets, more tweeters, and more idle funds in tip accounts for Twitter to reinvest elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you have a website online and ask people to support you via patreon and reward them with some kind of extra feature on the site would this be seen as them paying for this feature? Contractually, or legally for example?

A bit like the idea of crowd funded projects could accept money but not delivering anything were looked at negatively in terms of legal contracts and people paying for things and services.

In my case, my hobby website of a few tens of thousands of users could benefit from some extra development time (backups, caching etc) and I was thinking of Patreon rather than a paid service to reward the donors with these new features. Would Patreon be a better fit for "support this and as a side effect get somewhat improved access to new features" rather than "I will give you X in return for your money". Seems like a Patreon donor may consider their donation as a service they have paid for, rather than a gift.

<comment><USER17> > _... would this be seen as them paying for this feature?_

I can't give you an answer that I know is 100% correct and back it up with a primary source. However, I believe that it would be and let me explain why.

I recently received a renewal notice in the mail for an organization of which I am a member. A while back I had already decided that when renewal time came around, I would become a "life member". In the marketings materials with the renewal letter was an offer for a slight discount on a lifetime membership along with the _option_ to receive a "free gift" (of my choosing, out of three or four choices) or to forego the "free gift" entirely.

If I did not select a free gift, 100% of my membership would be tax- deductible. If I _did_ choose one of the gifts, part of the membership fee would be applied towards that gift and only the remaining amount would be tax- deductible.

It's a slightly different situation, obviously, but I believe the decision of whether they are paying or not paying (legally, at least, in the USA), would hinge on whether or not the "donator" was receiving _ANY_ "compensation" \-- regardless of what that compensation is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I hate Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon, in a good way. I mean, he is a super talented musician, singer and youtuber. And just recently I learned that he is also the CEO of Patreon? And I'm just a mediocre musician and an always aspiring founder. That's why I hate him, but not really.

<comment><USER19> Don't you mean jealous?

<comment><USER20> I think envious is the word you're looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Remember when kickstarter was all the rage? Then they started to lose credibility. I think Patreon will be more sustainable.

</comment><comment><USER22> I do wonder what the end game looks like to these investors. Patreon doesn't strike me as a company that's going to have a big exit.

<comment><USER23> Even if Patreon doesn't have a big exit, it could still make a profit, and that profit could then go back to the investors.

According to the article, this gives Patreon a $47 million valuation, and Patreon has 17,000 artists.

That is only ~$2,800 per current artist.

Given that this investment is made with exception of growth, this does not seem like an unreasonable valuation.

<comment><USER24> $47M isn't their valuation, it's the amount they've raised. No company would raise $30M at a $47M valuation unless they were very desperate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Similar concept, but more youtube and french oriented: [https://www.tipeee.com/](https://www.tipeee.com/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Good stuff!

</comment><comment><USER27> Ahh Patreon, the middle man helping uneducated or uncaring musicians raise money through performing cover songs but probably not paying the mechanical license rates to the authors. Just like Conte's Pomplamoose. Not a fan. Fortunately I'm of the belief that the serf-patron model isn't viable so I do at least have their eventual disbanding to look forward to in time.

<comment><USER28> Eh, I'd advise caution with your generalizations. I support a web comic that rakes in $226/month drawing cats with exceptional financial acumen. My wife supports a knitting ezine that rakes in $17,000 per issue.

<comment><USER29> Um, link for the cats? That sounds like a comic I would enjoy!

<comment><USER28> Tom Fonder's Adventures of Business Cat. The humour's a bit different, but I like it.

The archives are small; his Patreon covers some other projects that he's working on, too.

Patreon link: [https://www.patreon.com/tomfonder?ty=h](https://www.patreon.com/tomfonder?ty=h)

Some samples: [http://www.businesscat.happyjar.com/comic/photocopier/](http://www.businesscat.happyjar.com/comic/photocopier/) [http://www.businesscat.happyjar.com/comic/redundancies/](http://www.businesscat.happyjar.com/comic/redundancies/) [http://www.businesscat.happyjar.com/comic/numbers/](http://www.businesscat.happyjar.com/comic/numbers/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Design a personal vCard - <AUTHOR> http://crappypixel.com/design-a-personal-vcard In this Photoshop tutorial you will learn how to design a personal vCard. <comment><USER2> Mandatory: I use to have a vCard....but i lost it some time ago ;)</comment>


Bivvy - <AUTHOR> https://www.bivvyapp.com <comment><USER2> A site listing campsights that is behind a login wall. Is that intentional? What's the logic?

This is publicly available information. [https://www.google.com.au/maps/search/Palm+Springs,+CA,+Unit...](https://www.google.com.au/maps/search/Palm+Springs,+CA,+firstname.lastname@example.com,-116.7050604,11z/data=!3m1!4b1)

You're competing with Google, you put up a massive barrier to anybody coming to your site, or even your site being found by search engines.

Step 1, make something useful

Step 2, don't shoot yourself in the foot by turning away users</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think a good GraphQL boilerplate needs? - <AUTHOR> On my last project that involved GraphQL, I spent an inordinate amount of time fixing version/library conflicts, reinventing the wheel for things that should honestly be available out of the box (user groups, access control, auth, etc) and generally wrestling with the whole ecosystem in order to get it working the way I want to.
That's why I've decided to go and write an opinionated full-stack boilerplate generator for GraphQL that comes with batteries included and tries to automate as much of the repetitive work as possible. I'm pretty set on JavaScript for the whole stack, with Postgres as the database and React for the frontend. I can't decide between Prisma and Sequelize for the ORM.
Which do you think is more appropriate?
My chief goal is to have the user only define the most elementary elements of their API (such as the data model) and have the boilerplate generate everything else - all the way from the database to the frontend CRUD UI, with sane defaults that could be modified by the user to suit the project's particular needs.
What do you think a good GraphQL boilerplate generator would need in order to satisfy your needs? <comment><USER2> Check out [https://github.com/sysgears](https://github.com/sysgears)

They have a boilerplate A.U.S.K, CLI tool for adding new models, spinjs for managing the build system, nd uapm is in the works for larger modules with diff3 capability

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks pretty interesting, the only thing that's turning me off is that it's the first time hearing about some of those technologies, so I'm not sure how safe of a choice they are compared to more established solutions like Sequelize.

Also, knex.js is not really an ORM layer, just a query builder?</comment></comment>


Banksy's Fake Store Is an Attempt to Abuse Trademark Law to Avoid Copyright Law - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191007/17291443141/banksys-fake-store-is-attempt-to-abuse-trademark-law-to-avoid-copyright-law.shtml <comment><USER2> I had two problems.

First, I really didn't like the tone of the card company. They're selling someone else's work (whether legal or not), and then were condescending toward the person who made it. They say they're just trying to honor Banksy, but they paint him as an out-of-touch rich asshole.

Second, it's hard to know for sure, but I think this analysis misses the bigger point... I feel like opening a small shop that isn't real is very Banksy-esque, and likely is more of a statement on trademark than him actually trying to enforce a trademark. This is clearly just an exhibit + marketing. (It's a glass storefront, after all)

<comment><USER3> > they paint him as an out-of-touch rich asshole.

That's because that's how he has treated them. Lying about them and what they are doing is nasty. That's what Banksy did.

<comment><USER4> Banksy doesn't want anyone to be profiting from his own work and he has every right to do so if copyright is used. Why would that mean he should accept their royalty offer? They can just stick to nature photos on their cards. How rich Banksy is nothing to do with this.

What the card company is doing is to take advantage of his desire to be anonymous and make money from his work.

<comment><USER3> I think you mean Banksy doesn't want anybody but himself profiting off his work. Agreed, that's his right through copyright. But he refuses to use it. That's the whole point of the article.

The other point is that Banksy is _lying_ about this small business and what they are doing. This is an objective fact. He claims they sued him. They didn't. He claims they are a big corporation. They aren't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The whole situation is interesting at the very least.

The only comment I have is that I have to fault the article for making a lot of assumptions and leaps to conclusions on Banksy's intentions, it sort of unilaterally declares that Banksy is selling out and cheating the system.

But what they want is far simpler: they don't want other people claiming they're Banksy, and they want to remain anonymous.

The article gets upset at Banksy as a corporate sellout as if they opened up a line of art pieces for sale at Walmart or Target. What Banksy did is more akin to opening up a UPS Store mailbox in order to have an address on file.

<comment><USER3> > they don't want other people claiming they're Banksy

No. This is obviously not the problem. Nobody at that greeting card company was claiming to be Banksy. The problem is that they are making _money_ off of a Banksy work of art without his permission.

His behavior is quite clearly protecting his financial interests in his own work. That's actually the only explanation that makes sense. The other option being that he's opposed to anybody making money off his art, including himself. Nothing he has done in the last year has indicated the latter to be the case.

<comment><USER6> Banksy making money or not is moot. He probably just didn't want some grubbers making money from his work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >> Having once claimed that copyright is for losers, Banksy has been ramping up his legal position for several months now. At the end of 2018, the artist's handling service Pest Control took action against an Italian company that organised an exhibition, The Art of Banksy—A Visual Protest, for Milan's Mudec Museum.

>> In February this year, the judge ruled in favour of Banksy's request for all merchandise bearing his name to be removed from the museum's shop, but promotional materials using his name were allowed to remain. The judge noted that the documents filed in the proceedings showed a limited use of the Banksy brand.

Banksy should have GPL'd his works. Seriously.

Everyone creating artwork derived from Banksy's works, including merchandise articles, would be required to provide the sources. So if for example an Italian Museum decides to sell flower bomber T-shirts everyone could just use the design files to order at CafePress. This would promote the unrestricted dissemination of his works while putting natural limits on the commercialization by others.

<comment><USER8> You probably mean "Creative Commons", not GPL. GPL is for code.

But in either case, both CC and GPL are based on copyright, therefore cannot use.

<comment><USER9> > GPL is for code.

Citation needed. GPL can work for anything.

<comment><USER10> The text of the GPL describes the subject of the license as a "Program" and refers to it as having "machine-readable source code" (or "Corresponding Source" in GPLv3) and an "object code or executable form". It's difficult to interpret what any of this would mean in the context of an artistic work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can kind of get this. He wants to remain anonymous but he doesn't want to see his work on every shonky piece of merch in every dollar store in town.

Both of those seem like reasonable desires. Nobody's disputing that he's the creator after all. It looks to me like copyright law is broken, but I guess parliament won't be rushing to fix it to plug gaps for edge cases involving anonymous street artists.

What surprises me more is that there isn't a wave of faux Banksys flooding the market - sure the artist has a style but it's not absolutely unreproducible. And if, in legal terms, nobody's Banksy doesn't that mean that we're all Banksy?

<comment><USER12> How is banksy going to protect their work if they cannot even prove they made it? I don't even believe all the 'banksy' originals over the years came from one person, it's more likely a group.

Honestly it's frustrating to watch an anonymous entity decorate the city while still expecting people not to use their work. The way banksy has established themself as a figure would indicate they want the art to be free and open for all to use. You cannot have your cake and eat it too, which is to say you cannot be anonymous and trademark your artwork.

<comment><USER13> For the same reason that Satoshi Nakamoto is likely one person and not a group, so is Banksy. too hard to keep a secret like that for as long as it has been. I'm surprised we haven't seen more people claim to be Banksy, as we have with Satoshi but perhaps it's easier to profit from pretending to be SN than it is by pretending to be Banksy.

Three may keep a Secret, if two of them are dead

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The article implicitly suggests Banksy is making money off his artwork with word choice like "won't let anyone else profit off it". The idea being to paint him as a sellout and a hypocrite.

But is it true? By everyone's admission he isn't selling shoddy kitsch like post cards and fridge magnets. All that's left to sell is the original works, and to the best of my knowledge the people who can actually sell those are usually the owner of the wall itself. He pulled that stunt with the Sotheby's auction. Did he actually get any money after that self destructed? Does anyone anywhere actually have an estimate on how profitable the Banksy operation is?

<comment><USER15> Indeed. And if we assume he does not want money to be made from his works by him _or other people either_ then it is all pretty consistent.

Indeed it's a strange world if he, on principle, refuses to profit by his work but other people must be allowed to.

<comment><USER16> > Indeed it's a strange world if he, on principle, refuses > to profit by his > work but other people must be allowed to.

That exact situation exists in many free software situations... doesn't it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The website attached to the store is astoundingly corporate. For example, it contains a long and clearly custom-written TOS with classic gems like this: "Our site must not be framed on any other site, nor may you create a link to any part of our site other than the home page."

<comment><USER18> That's just a copy paste from someone else's TOS.

<comment><USER13> Good artists borrow, great artists steal -- Pablo Picasso

<comment><USER19> Here's the story on that quote. It's not Picasso

[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists- steal/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/)

<comment><USER13> To be fair I saw it at a Banksy exhibition where Picasso was crossed out and replaced with Banksy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Huh.

The potential non-copyrightability of graffiti I understand but I am failing to understand the anonymous ownership issue. Why he cannot transfer the copyright for the work to a corporation which enforces the copyright? -- it isn't like he needs to register the work before transferring it to the company, the berne convention assures that.

<comment><USER21> Graffitti is copyrightable.

In the US copyrightable works can be copyrighted by an anonymous or pseudononymous creator. There's even a box to check if the creator is anonymous.

[https://www.copyright.gov/eco/help- author.html](https://www.copyright.gov/eco/help-author.html)

Perhaps in the EU anonymous works can not be copyrighted?

<comment><USER22> They can, but you cannot remain anonymous before a court in Europe.

<comment><USER20> You can't in the US either, but the creator wouldn't need to appear before a court, the copyright holder would.

<comment><USER23> The copyright holder needs to prove he's the copyright holder, which is difficult to do without a paper trail to the creator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Banksy pretty much ripped off Blek Le Rat — so much of his work is completely derivative. Plus you could argue he did much of his work in the public domain. If I graffiti an image in a public place, haven't I kind of given away copyright to it?

Given Banksy's anti-capitalist, semi-anarchist stance, and utilization of public property for his own fame, I can't think of any better means for him to honor himself than to allow people to rip off his work freely.

I certainly can see the case against those who misappropriate bad work to his name — artistic integrity is important. There is also nothing wrong with him wanting to make money. But I see no moral problem with selling knick knacks with banksy imagery on it.

FWIW I love his art and his moral stance. Just can't have your cake and eat it.

</comment><comment><USER25> > _We legally photograph public graffiti and make it available to you_

Is that how the copyright works in the UK??? Like I can photograph anybody's art and just sell prints? That doesn't sound right.

<comment><USER26> No, it isn't.

The closest that UK copyright law gets is that there's an exemption for photographs of "sculptures, models for buildings and works of artistic craftsmanship, if permanently situated in a public place or in premises open to the public". (See section 62 at [https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/308729/cdpa1988-unofficial.pdf) .)

But Banksy's pictures are just straight "artistic works". There's no need to class them as "works of artistic craftsmanship" and I don't believe any court would do so.

The infringers are either deliberately misreading copyright law or simply ignorant of it. I suspect the latter.

<comment><USER3> What is the difference between works Of artistic craftsmanship and artistic works?

His works are generally permanently situated in a public place. I would think that taking a picture of any random public wall with graffiti on it is legal. But you seem to be saying that there are two kinds of art, and that the kind that is "worse" gets protection, but the better kind didn't get protection. Very odd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Pretty cheesy. You can't use trademark law like this which clearly is the reason they didn't try this against a company that would have the resources to handle a baseless lawsuit.

</comment><comment><USER28> I have always been suspicious at Banksy, it always seemed to me like corporate plot to generate hype. This article really aligns with my intuition. I am very surprised of all the responses here. I expected that this of all places will look through the fake.

</comment><comment><USER29> FYI just another take on Banksy Fake Store

Hacking a Banksy with Bash and Varanid: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21368691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21368691)

</comment><comment><USER30> If this article was intended to make the card company look good, and Banksy look corporate and bad, it has failed.

</comment><comment><USER31> Eh? Someone else is selling his art.

<comment><USER32> Nobody stole his million pound painting and sold it.

<comment><USER11> If you're talking about the one with the monkeys at Sotheby's he didn't own it at the time either

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Tldr; this article seems highly biased and tries to paint Banksy as an evil corporate mastermind who tries to damage a small home business by ways of shady litigation - while the issue at hand looks more to be that said business tries to make profit off pictures he won't print as merch and prohibiting this is complicated legally without disclosing one's true name.

The article plays on sympathy for the "poor little home run shop" versus Banksy ressorting to "evil lawyers". Feel like it's grossly misrepresenting the matter on purpose.

<comment><USER3> But which one has a big corporation? The article clearly and seemingly correctly points out that Banksy is a much bigger corporation and that corporation is lying through its teeth about what is happening.</comment></comment>


Breaking free of the curse of the gifted - <AUTHOR> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2426

<comment><USER2> I would love to see treatment of this material added as part of standard "AG" class structure.

<comment><USER3> What is this "AG" class structure? I've never heard of it, and Google wasn't very helpful.

<comment><USER4> I'm assuming this: [http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/admissions/undergrad_a...](http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/admissions/undergrad_adm/paths_to_adm/freshman/subject_reqs.html)

which I pulled from Google but I totally agree with you that it's not that helpful, since it mostly talks about agriculture courses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would a 'genius' really be asking for advice on how to work hard?

<comment><USER6> Yes.

I know people who cruised through High School and then a Bachelors degree without working. They were accepted on a doctoral program and found that they had no idea how to work. No idea at all.

At least this character knows to ask for help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Learn to do something that brains don't directly help: Karate, Customer Service, Sales, Welding, Drawing, etc.

<comment><USER4> Did you read the article before commenting? You simply parroted point number one (of three) in the article with no apparent acknowledgment that you have done so.

<comment><USER8> I see this happening in more and more articles, e.g., the Ask HN nutrition post that asked for more scientific versions of 'Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.' and received highly upvoted comments like 'Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.' I don't think there's much we can do about it.</comment></comment></comment>


Review My Startup: Daily Mobile App Deals - <AUTHOR>

It wasn't all that technically challenging, but we've just soft-launched our mobile app deal platform at AppDiem.com.
The premise is simple enough -- it's basically Groupon (or maybe Woot) for mobile apps.  There are a ton of warts at the moment, and I'm working on them, but I'd love any feedback from you guys.
The platform is Django, with a tiny little bit of celery+rabbit to move some of the slower tasks into the background. <comment><USER3> I'm curious, how come you went with a whole sign up page (asking for a name, and password) rather than simply putting an email box on the main page like the most deal sites do?

Do you really need to call a person by name in emails? Is the sign up friction worth it?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a fair point -- but, by asking for a name and a password (and admittedly, we can forego the name) -- you get an account.

For regular users, this is probably worth deleting. But for app developers, the 'having an account' means that they can add, upload and manage applications that they'd like to have featured.

<comment><USER3> Right, that's what I figured. I think this dualism is absolutely necessary as you have a chance to have a very simple, one-field sign up for non-developer users whereas right now the friction is pretty high (five fields, separate page).

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed. The signup process for the email is now a dismissable 1-field box on the homepage. Thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the UI a lot. Curious though, so when i click on Android - it wont let me see the deals?

Does that mean i have to actually sign up and wait for the daily emails - <USER2> is there a platform that allows me to go on the site and see what the deal is?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I should also point out that we're working on mobile apps for each platform that will let you see what deals are live for the day as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like that. One thing I'd change is the positioning of the OS. I was looking for it in the text and as I was clicking away happened to catch it above the screensnap. Too low in contrast and not where I'd look.

<comment><AUTHOR> To ask the better question -- where would you look?

<comment><USER6> You could maybe try putting it in the top right, like this: <http://idea.s3.amazonaws.com/appdiem.png>. The problem with that though is if you get a long app name it's going to overlap.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I could give you 10 points I would, just for the effort.

It was originally there, for what it's worth, but we ran into exactly that issue.

My personal (minimalist) favorite position was just outside the grid, to the left of the picture, with JUST the application icon -- of course, that had to be rethought as soon as we had our first iPad app submitted.

I'll keep playing with options, naturally -- can I pester you again later to get your thoughts on what we end up with?

<comment><USER6> Yes, outside the grid to the left looks good in a full browser -- but as you mention, that wrecks the mobile layout. I wouldn't worry about it too much -- where you've got it isn't bad, it's just a little hard to read on the busier background. Btw, on an iphone the max-height you're applying to .app_summary is causing a little bit of overlap: <http://idea.s3.amazonaws.com/appdiem2.png>.

Sure, feel free to email me -- address in my profile -- or just reply here.

<comment><AUTHOR> For what it's worth, there is a much simpler (and uglier) mobile layout at mobile.appdiem.com (or m.appdiem.com, as soon as DNS catches up) currently -- I just haven't yet implemented user-agent detection.

If I go left of the grid, I'll probably use a vertical indicator, instead of horizontal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hate to sound cynical, but I am genuinely interested in how you see a "deals" arrangement being successful in a market where the majority of the products (or viable alternatives) are free already.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working with app developers to arrange for high-value deals, similarly to how Groupon does.

From a user perspective, at worst, it's perhaps the easiest way to discover new apps you may not have heard of. We do have 'free' apps that are featured, and we don't discriminate, so long as we think the app is worthwhile.

At best, we have arranged deals that we've arranged for '1 day discounts' that will be exclusive to AppDiem. So, whether or not there are free alternatives, I believe there's value in getting an app at a discount. There are plenty of invaluable apps worth paying for. Who wouldn't want to get them at a reduced price?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable: <http://appdiem.com/></comment>


Uber halts California self-driving cars test - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38400224 <comment><USER2> Well, to be fair, Uber didn't halt their test. That sounds very voluntary. In reality they were forced to take the cars off the road because the authorities revoked their registration.</comment>


How I find ideas in trivial details. The guy who stares at screws. - <AUTHOR> http://ninjasandrobots.com/i-like-screws

<comment><USER2> That Kudos shit even fires if you come close to it, not only if you actually move over the kudos shit circle.

Sorry, but I find this highly annoying and indecent.

<comment><USER3> That kudos circle is a feature of the blog platform, Svtble. I agree that it is terribly designed. Svtble's creator wrote an unconvincing defense of Kudos: <http://dcurt.is/unkudo>. See discussion of Kudos on Svtble's original announcement story: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742654>, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3743125>.

<comment><USER4> I didn't know what you were talking about until I went back and accidentally kudos'd the post myself. The creators "defense" sounds more like an FU or maybe that the whole thing is really more of a joke. In the end, I'm not upset that I accidentally kudos'd since to me it's pretty clear that the whole feature is meaningless anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is this valuable at all? Has nothing to do with anything... Is this what people think is good blogging?

<comment><USER6> Why the snark? There is much talk on HN and elsewhere about how new ideas are generated, how companies try to be "innovative," etc. This is just his take on one way he comes up with new ideas. I don't have the same fascination with screws, but he obviously didn't mean it to be literal for everyone to do the exact same thing. It certainly made me think about both the physical things and processes all around me that I constantly take for granted. Questioning these things is how we are always evolving and improving. I'd say reminding people of this is valuable.

<comment><USER7> I'm with GP on this one. Most HN articles these days are fluff. These aren't bad bloggythings for the most part, but I'd just as soon see these things show up on a more general aggregator. (This is, in part, my failure to recognize the HN audience itself changing over the last year and a half).

Fluff isn't necessarily bad, in that it's a discussion point, but it is very bad for this format of site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For some reason, traditionally, this sort of observation is made about pencils. <http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html> is one of the more famous examples.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for posting that jerf. Someone sent that to me this afternoon as well. I've also had a couple people mention this book Mezzanine of a similar ilk:

[http://www.amazon.com/Mezzanine- ebook/dp/B003OYIG1O/ref=wl_i...](http://www.amazon.com/Mezzanine- ebook/dp/B003OYIG1O/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=2K47A7OT719FI&coliid=I2SFWRK17RGK2N)

Richard Feynman also has a neat bit (the whole interview is awesome) about teaching his kids. He mentions a game he'd play with his son where one person would pretend to be miniature and describe the experience. The other person would need to guess the miniature person's location.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXiOg5-l3fk>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can relate. I believe that this ability to think about mundane items, is the root of creativity. I am still fascinated by a story my uncle told me about a man who had a little metal casting setup in his garage, and made lug nuts for semi-tractors. Who would have thunk it? Since then I have often thought that this would be a way to start a business. Pick one small part of a piece of machinery and develop a way to make it. Then keep adding parts until you "owned" an entire vertical market.

</comment><comment><USER10> The amazing thing about screws is how they're made. Imagine you were tasked with producing them. Where would you even start? Making a nail seems like an easy process in comparison, it's basically a bit of wire with one end blunted and the other sharpened, but a screw is an entirely different beast.

Deconstructing objects and imagining how they are constructed is an important exercise for anyone serious about their craft.

</comment><comment><USER11> I can relate to the first part, the part about being a kid in his dad's shop with nothing better to do but examine the small details of things around him. But I didn't wonder at the long journey a screw took to wind up in a hinge. I created imaginary worlds where the crack in a bathroom floor tile was a cliff on an alien planet where all kinds of drama unfolded before me.

Maybe that bodes well for me to have a future telling fictional stories of some sort.:-)

</comment><comment><USER12> I can relate. Ever so often I think about how effortless my life is. Someone picked the coffee beans. Someone fed a cow. Someone roasted te beans. Someone drove a truck. Someon build a factory where the beans are made into instant coffee. And so on.

All I did was drink the coffee.

</comment><comment><USER13> "One thing I've noticed about myself is that a lot of things interest me.

I'm not entriely sure this is a thing that can be taught."

All kids have this curiosity; the parents are the ones that kill it ("don't do that!", "behave!", "you are not allowed!")

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if I should ask him about Robertson (square)screw heads versus Phillips (star or X) screw heads or will I dredge-up the Canadian versus US war?

It reminds me of Shelbyville turnips versus Springfiled lemons.</comment>


Reverse Engineering Sublime Text's Fuzzy Match Algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/reverse-engineering-sublime-text-s-fuzzy-match-4cffeed33fdb <comment><USER2> There is youcompleteme for vim.</comment>


Radi 0.5.2 available - <AUTHOR> http://radiapp.com/whats_new_in_v052.php

<comment><AUTHOR> Just an update on my HTML5 content creation app (previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2040844> ).

This version is taking some baby steps towards interactivity. You can now create event handlers in the UI, and there's a starting point for the required scene-level glue. (You can find a sample with some basic buttons affecting a canvas object on the linked page.)

I'd be very interested in your comments on these features -- now that I still have the opportunity to change it if it's going in the wrong direction...</comment>


Jetson AGX Xavier - <AUTHOR> https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-systems/jetson-agx-xavier/ <comment><USER2> I have one of these powering my open source four wheel drive robot. [1]

I've started doing machine learning experiments with it finally. (See [1] for details)

There's a few tricks to getting the best performance. You want to convert your neural network to run with NVIDIA's TensorRT library instead of just tensorflow or torch. TensorRT does all the optimized goodness that gets you the most out of the hardware. Not all possible network operations can run in TensorRT (though nvidia updates the framework regularly). This means some networks can't be easily converted to something fully optimized for this platform. Facebook's detectron2 for example uses some operations that don't readily convert. [2]

But then if you're new like me you've got to both find some code that will ultimately produce something you can convert to TensorRT, and you also need something that you can easily train. I've learned that training using your own dataset is often non-obvious. A lot of example code shows how to use an existing dataset but they totally gloss over the specific label format those datasets use. That means you've got to do some digging to figure out how to make your own dataset load properly in to the training code.

After trying a few different things, I've gotten some good results training using Bonnet(al) [3]. I was able to make enough sense of its training code to use my own dataset, and it looks like it will readily convert to TensorRT. Then you load the converted network using NVIDIA's Deepstream library for maximum pipeline efficiency [4].

The performance numbers for the AGX Xavier are very good, and I am hopeful I will get my application fully operation soon enough.

[1] [https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/](https://reboot.love/t/new- cameras-on-rover/)

[2] [https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2/issues/192](https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2/issues/192)

[3] [https://github.com/PRBonn/bonnetal](https://github.com/PRBonn/bonnetal)

[4] [https://developer.nvidia.com/deepstream- sdk](https://developer.nvidia.com/deepstream-sdk)

<comment><USER3> Cool robot!

For dealing with layers not supported by TensorRT, you might want to try to export to onnx instead and then use tvm[1] to compile your model for the hardware. I have not used it on nvidia boards yet, but I had good experience on other less powerful ARM boards, and as tvm docs show some examples running on jetson tx I imagine the AGX Xavier is likely fine too.

[1] [https://tvm.apache.org/](https://tvm.apache.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My biggest complaint with the Jetson line is it's all ARM. Look, I get it. But the developer experience is horrible. Building Docker containers for ARM devices is a pain. Hell, building anything for a Jetson can be a pain unless it's a pre-packaged NVIDIA thing - really not a fan of building things from source. Add on top of that NVIDIA's very low level documentation for pretty much any tooling they ship, coupled with the difficulty in getting near-time engineering support (unless you want to post to one of their message boards, and hope you get an answer back in less than a week)... basically, it's really rough to do anything seriously useful with Jetson hardware.

Second biggest complaint is deploying Jetsons in production environments. Dev kits aren't production stable, so you either need to build your own carrier board or find one pre-built, and frankly that's just a giant pain to do.

Third biggest complaint is having to flash Jetsons manually. Misery.

A production-ready x64 Jetson that you could order directly from NVIDIA would be my dream. Add up all of the shortcomings and overhead of ARM Jetsons and IMO you do not have a viable device for shipping AI solutions at scale.

<comment><USER5> > Building Docker containers for ARM devices is a pain in the ass.

It's not so bad, you just need a beefy ARM machine to build the containers in CI. It would be silly to build a Docker container on the Jetson itself. You would never use an embedded device for compiles and builds, why would you build Docker containers on one?

<comment><USER6> Genuinely curious, what is an example of a beefy ARM machine?

<comment><USER7> Anything with a ThunderX processor is maximum beefy. You can get on-demand servers like that from places like Packet. AWS also has their own A1 instances with lower core counts. These would all be good for cross compiling/builds.

Comedy answer: iPad Pro

<comment><USER8> > Comedy answer: iPad Pro

I mean, the iPad Pro _does_ have a relatively beefy processor. If only you could run arbitrary code on it.

<comment><USER9> A lot of instruction sets aren't there yet, but [https://ish.app](https://ish.app) is doing a truly incredible job in this regard.

Gives you a working Alpine Linux installation which you can download and install packages for normally, all within the bounds of the normal Apple sandbox, with decent enough performance.

It doesn't have SSE or MMX yet, so eg Go and Node aren't usable at this point. But a shocking amount actually does work perfectly, so it's only a matter of time as more instruction sets are implemented.

<comment><USER8> It's pretty atrocious that you have to run an x86 emulator to use your iPad "pro" for this stuff. This project is super cool though.

<comment><USER8> Actually wouldn't a userspace ARM "emulator" be faster than an x86 one on an ARM device? Or are you so far removed from running actual CPU instructions that it doesn't matter?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just built a gesture controlled robot[1] with the Xavier board.

We were able to run OpenPose[2] at 27FPS, which we found was even faster than running it on K80 on AWS p2.xlarge. It was a pain to install caffe and all the dependencies on an ARM processor, but it worked out eventually.

We were able to train and run Tensorflow 2 models quickly also. Felt like using an actual GPU at a fraction of the cost.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8zmTaa17s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8zmTaa17s)

[2] [https://github.com/CMU-Perceptual-Computing- Lab/openpose](https://github.com/CMU-Perceptual-Computing-Lab/openpose)

</comment><comment><USER11> The original posted title was more helpful. The Jetson AGX Xavier has been out for a couple of years, but it dropped in price from $999 to $699 and has double the ram now at 32GB.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For a moddable Arm platform with all batteries included, there isn't really an alternative to this, especially at $699.

It's much stronger than an RPi and could fill the gap between RPi and Arm- based server platforms.

<comment><USER12> In terms of using it as an ARMv8 desktop workstation (with decent CPU performance, real SATA / Ethernet / PCI-e connectors) - some other contenders include the MACCHIATObin (quad A72) and Honeycomb LX2K (16-core A72, 750USD) from Solid-Run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm definitely not expert and probably this is a dumb question , but why smart edge things like smart robot and not dumb edge with smart central brain ? Anyway data are useful aggregated central;ly why not incorporate the brain centrally too?

<comment><USER2> Well, first some clarification - "edge" means "on robot" versus something in the cloud. And the reason you do this is latency and connectivity.

I am designing a four wheel drive robot using the NVIDIA AGX Xavier [1] that will follow trails on its own or follow the operator on trails. You don't want your robot to lose cellular coverage and become useless. Even if you had coverage, there would be significant data usage as Rover uses four 4k cameras, which is about 30 megapixels (actually they max out at 13mp each or 52mp total). Constantly streaming that to the cloud would be very expensive on a metered internet connection. Even on a direct line the machine would saturate many broadband connections. Of course you can selectively stream but this makes things more complicated.

Latency is an issue. Imagine a self driving car that required a cloud connection. It's approaching an intersection and someone on a bicycle falls over near its path. Better send that sensor data to the cloud fast to determine how to act!

On my Rover robot it streams the cameras directly in to the GPU memory where it can be processed using ML without ever being copied through the CPU. It's super low latency and allows for robots that respond rapidly to their environment. Imagine trying to make a ping-pong playing robot with a cloud connection.

I am also designing a farming robot. [2] We don't expect any internet connection on farms!

[1] [https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/](https://reboot.love/t/new- cameras-on-rover/) [2] [https://www.twistedfields.com/technology](https://www.twistedfields.com/technology)

Edit: Don't forget security! Streaming high resolution sensors over the cloud is a security nightmare.

<comment><USER14> This is a bit off topic, but I'm constantly looking at ways to efficiently stream 4K cameras live to local displays as well as remote displays at the highest framerate and resolution possible. How feasible would it be on the xavier to stream 2 4k cameras and display them on at least 2 4k screens? Extra points if you could do that and simultaneously upload to a streaming service, such as twitch.

<comment><USER15> I've wondered about this too.

I think the magic camera interconnect is CSI/CSI2 and it's not really flexible enough. You either have really short copper interconnects, or unavailable fiber interconnects.

What would be cool is if csi to ethernet were a thing. either low latency put- it-on-the-wire or compressed. I don't know, maybe it is. But make it a standard like rca jacks.

<comment><USER16> You can buy kits that send video over coax including power for somewhat reasonable prices:

[https://leopardimaging.com/product/nvidia-jetson- cameras/nvi...](https://leopardimaging.com/product/nvidia-jetson- cameras/nvidia_agx_xavier_fpdlinkiii_camera_kits/li-ar0231-ti953-xavier/)

I haven't tried them, but am considered them for project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They seem to offer a cheaper 8 GB model too but unfortunately I see no price for it. I'm curious how much it'll be because, as much as I'd like to toy around with this, the $699 is a little to much for just experimentation.

EDIT: The 8GB _Module_ seems to be $679 here[1]. This makes the $699 or the 32 GB _Developer Kit_ seem like a steal. Still, too expensive for play, I guess I'll stick with my Jetson Nanos for a while...

[1] [https://www.arrow.com/en/products/900-82888-0060-000/nvidia](https://www.arrow.com/en/products/900-82888-0060-000/nvidia)

<comment><USER18> There is also the Jetson Nanokit which costs ~120 EUR.

<comment><USER19> Maxwell does not have unified memory -> custom code compared to latest generation along with performance disadvantages.

<comment><USER18> Unified memory is useful during development when porting the application, but I don't know of any well-tuned applications that use it.

<comment><USER19> Any "well-tuned" multi-threaded application requires unified memory for simultaneous access to managed memory from the CPU and GPUs as it is not possible with compute capability lower than 6.0. This is because pre-Pascal GPUs lack hardware page faulting, so coherence can't be guaranteed. On these GPUs, an access from the CPU while a kernel is running will cause a segmentation fault.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I develop on one of these every single day I just use Visual Studio Code with custom launch.json and task.json that allows me to ssh into the jetson, copy over the compiled for linux code, and attach a remote debugger.. I like never even touch the jetson and all my builds and shit are pushed over... its actually an easy as shit development experience at this point.. You have to kinda know what you're doing... but its all totally usable. The dev kit i have has been running 415 days without any issues running 5 custom programs I've written.

</comment><comment><USER21> The cheapest Volta GPUs I have seen so far cost over 2K for 12GB. Can the GPU provided in this kit be used for training?

<comment><USER22> Yes, if your model is small enough or, if you are fine-tuning small number of layers. TendorFlow 1.15 and 2.0 are available on Xavier. I understand that PyTorch could be built as well.

Nite that the number of CUDA kernels and amount of memory available is smaller, if compared to descrete Volta GPUs.

<comment><USER23> You say it can do training for small models because of the presence of the small (512-core) GPU? (plus maybe some left-over, control calculations by the CPU)

<comment><USER24> It's a low-wattage device. It's performance can't hold a candle to a last-gen card that uses 10X the power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder how to train for those. The biggest one has 32GB of RAM and needs a frozen inference graph converted to TensorRT. So one would need a GPU with 32GB of RAM in addition to this to be able to train the network. AFAIK, Nvidia doesn't sell anything with that much RAM.

</comment><comment><USER26> The lineup continues to balloon in price. A lot of students would the TK and TX models for robotics and whatnot, since they were only 200-300 bucks.

<comment><USER27> The Jetson Nano[0] seems like it would be better for students, it's only $99.

[0]: [https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano- developer-...](https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano-developer- kit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Honest question, can something like this kill the market for embedded DSP processors made by Texas Instruments or Analog Devices?

<comment><USER29> I mean, this is absurdly more powerful than those dedicated DSPs.

<comment><USER30> It's also easily 10x the price. It really matters what the application is and how much processing power you need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> No details on the CPU I wonder if it's going to be a Carmel (via the Transmeta lineage).

</comment><comment><USER23> Inference only. (So this is competing with Google TPUv1; a few years late and way more expensive, but with more memory)

<comment><AUTHOR> It can do training with its GPU, not the fastest thing in the world though.

<comment><USER23> So looks like it can do "checkbox training" (add an iota of training capability just so you could check the box labelled "it does training").

Got it.</comment></comment></comment>


Scientists find a simpler and more precise method to measure body fat percentage - <AUTHOR> https://www.techexplorist.com/forget-bmi-scientists-developed-simple-way-estimate-body-fat/16683/ <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/cedars-sinai- investiga...](https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/cedars-sinai- investigators-develop-more-accurate-measure-of-body-fat/)

with the contents copied verbatim, including photo, and a phony byline authorship claim.</comment>


Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Analytics - <AUTHOR> Here in Turkey, some Google services sharing the same IP block with YouTube are banned, including Google Analytics. Classic Analytics code prevents browsers from completely loading, resulting in page load time hell. An alternative is the asynchronous code (http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncTracking.html), but there's no point of using a serviceunable to track page views.<p>What are the alternative services you recommend? I just installed Clicky but wanted to know my options. <comment><USER2> Open source: <http://piwik.org>

Clicky: <http://getclicky.com/> (This is a good one)

Woopra: <http://woopra.com/>

<comment><USER3> +1 to clicky. The real time stats are a very nice addition to a solid suite of tools.

My one gripe with them is they seem to do more processing of the data, rather than just letting you find the numbers you need. I am a data hound, so YMMV

<comment><USER4> Could you elaborate on your gripe? (I'm the co-founder/lead dev)

<comment><USER5> Why do you say this on your site: * Note: we do not allow any individual sites that receive over 500,000 daily page views.

<comment><USER4> Well the more traffic a site has, the more resources we need to process that traffic. 500,000 daily page views is currently the max we allow to ensure our service runs smoothly for everyone. This limit is higher than most other analytics services allow, and easily covers 99.9% of the sites on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://haveamint.com/> is a nice product by Shaun Inman. It's $30 for a site license, though.

<comment><USER7> I was happy to pay the $30, FWIW

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> <http://piwik.org/> , you may need to host it on your own servers.

<comment><USER9> Second vote for Piwik. It's free and open-source, install it on one domain and you can then add multiple sites to it, just like Google Analytics. In fact, I've found it's significantly sped up my page loading times, although need to test this further.

In addition there are plugins for every major CMS and blogging system out there. I'm just waiting for the time that the ClickHeat* plugin works :)

* ClickHeat is a free heatmap available here: <http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reinvigorate is doing a great job. It's in beta stage, but you can apply for an invitation: <http://reinvigorate.net>

</comment><comment><USER11> Do not forget to voice your opinion with your government about your discontent in them blocking Google while you are at it. (Write a letter or protest.) There is really no reason why Google should be blocked by your country.

</comment><comment><USER12> Good to hear you've installed Clicky, I use them over Google Analytics (and am very happy) as I'm admittedly paranoid but uncomfortable about giving Google precise traffic stats when they know how much you spend on Adwords.

<comment><USER13> Make sure you don't have AdSense installed as well!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> <http://chartbeat.com> is great for real time views but not sure about for your case.

<comment><USER15> chartbeat is also great if you're running a Wordpress blog

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> AWStats is a tool that generates statistic pages from the server logs. It doesn't even require you to put anything on the pages; all you need is access to the logs. It doesn't offer quite as much information as Google Analytics, but it's pretty good.

<http://awstats.sourceforge.net/>

</comment><comment><USER17> +1 for Mixpanel.

</comment><comment><USER18> What are your criteria for analytics?

If you require third-party reporting for vetting your traffic numbers to potential advertisers, there are services such as Quantcast.com.

The big fish in the game is Omniture.com, recently acquired by Adobe. It's worth looking at their documentation because they have become (arguably) the de facto standard in many areas of web analytics, particularly marketing analytics for websites. Knowing their jargon and how they bucket data can be useful in those conversations.

Many people want free as in zero out-of-pocket expense and freedom to customize. More on that below...

The trade-off with completely free techniques is that you lose any demographic or psychographic profiling that a larger service provider might offer. If this subject matters to you, BlueKai.com would be a good starting point, but be prepared to talk about marketing "funnels". (Not sure if they accommodate beyond US, though.)

For leveraging this class of data, real-time ad networks such as Adchemy.com use these technique to drive traffic. They'll likely be expanding beyond US soon. [full disclosure: my current employer is a partner of theirs]

Back to free:

If you simply want to know basic facts about traffic landing on your pages and considering the HN crowd, you could likely get by with a little JavaScript code that generates a URL with query-strings identifying those facts. Then use JS to insert an image into the page, fetching a 1x1 transparent pixel from your own server, thereby logging the facts. Various tools for analyzing HTTP logs are available for bucketing, graphing, etc.

The Nginx HTTP server has native support for serving transparent pixels and has a very light load (e.g., an Intel Atom CPU on your DSL line is more than adequate; under US$200 complete). Since it's all under your control, this approach can still work with dynamic IP addressing of the pixel server.

Some relevant JS fields and function calls include: navigator.cookieEnabled, screen.height, screen.width, screen.colorDepth, navigator.plugins['Shockwave Flash'], window.ActiveXObject() with "ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash" [but search for caveats regarding known bugs with Flash 6.0.21, .23, .29].

Add your own session ID to the query-string, and you have unique visitor journey tracking as well. Usual caveats apply due to visitors who clear cookies, etc.

Again, considering the HN crowd, this minimal treatment should be sufficient.

</comment><comment><USER19> This talk from Mike McDermott of Freshbooks is really great: [http://carsonified.com/blog/business/mike-mcderment-of- fresh...](http://carsonified.com/blog/business/mike-mcderment-of-freshbooks- on-web-app-marketing-metrics/)

Explains exactly what to track and how to code it yourself.

</comment><comment><USER20> Yahoo: <http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/>

Sitemeter: <http://www.sitemeter.com/>

</comment><comment><USER21> I've run <http://www.w3counter.com> for the past 6 years. It's free, though occasionally a bit slow.

</comment><comment><USER22> I've used Woopra. There is a free version for small sites. <http://www.woopra.com/plans/>

</comment><comment><USER23> I'd love to see one completely done in html5/css3/svg/canvas

<comment><USER3> [http://thenextweb.com/me/2010/06/04/woopra-gets-a-shiny- new-...](http://thenextweb.com/me/2010/06/04/woopra-gets-a-shiny-new- html5-web-version/)

Looks like Woopra heard you

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> i use piwik but you need to host it yourself

</comment><comment><USER25> Site Catalyst: [http://www.omniture.com/en/products/online_analytics/sitecat...](http://www.omniture.com/en/products/online_analytics/sitecatalyst) It's not free though. :/</comment>


The top 10 start-up billionaires - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupsmart.com.au/growth/success-stories/2011-03-11/the-top-10-start-up-billionaires.html

<comment><USER2> A number of these startup billionaires are paper-billionaires due to Facebook's grossly inflated private market valuation.

I expect to see a lot of these names dropping off the billionaire list as quickly as they got onto it.

<comment><USER3> I had a look into this a while back, I could only find a single person who became a startup paper billionaire and then lost it (Jay Walker of Priceline.com), I suspect that the reason for this might be that while valuations may be off, they're unlikely to be off by an order of magnitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Meh. Good for them, but fawning over these guys is like aspiring to be the next Michael Jordan, Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet. The startup media focuses too much on the outright winners instead of... I don't know... not failing?

<comment><USER5> If you aspire to be Michael Jordan and you fail, you still might be pretty good at basketball. If you aspire to not fail and you fail, you've just failed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have the most respect for #10. It boggles my mind how you can become a billionaire from eggs (not sold on the internet.)

<comment><USER7> I'd be willing to bet there's ill gotten gains involved somewhere on that guy. He's only 35 and was previously involved in Ukranian oil & gas. There's a lot of shadowy players in that market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Another Facebook co-founder, Saverin was given a sympathetic portrayal in > the 2010 movie The Social Network.

What exactly was so sympathetic about being portrayed as a guy who could not separate emotion from business, was terrible with girls, nearly destroyed his own business by closing the account, let himself be tricked into giving away his stock. He got off more poorly than Sean Parker.

</comment><comment><USER9> Did you notice that most (all?) of these billionaires are related to social networks?

I wonder how volatile is their fortune.</comment>


Vintage drum kits from the 1920s and 1930s - <AUTHOR> http://www.polarityrecords.com/vintage-drum-kits-1920s-and-30s.html

<comment><USER2> I'm loving this article. When listening to old jazz recordings where trap kits like this were used, it's clear that there's sounds that would be difficult to reproduce with modern gear, particularly cymbals (all those hi-hat predecessors!). I'm amazed that the hardware held up. The way I play, I'm sure I'd destroy these kits in minutes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Beautiful. I love the "low boys" which predated hi-hats. I should add a vintage kit to my app Drum Kit.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Note the glowing bass drum: inside is a light bulb, which, aside from making the drum look really cool, served the practical purpose of keeping the bass drum heads heated, therefore tighter, therefore better sounding."

Surely heat would caused the head to expand?

<comment><USER5> Drier skins are tighter. This is before air conditioning and you could have lots of humid weather.

<comment><USER6> And the tension rings around the head will expand so it's a double win.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wanna find some Chinese toms. Great stuff

</comment><comment><USER8> Always nice to see the evolution of design.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great article. I play a 60s Ludwig kit but never really dig earlier than that era or maybe the 50s.

</comment><comment><USER10> From the headline, I thought it was about new virtual instrument plugins for ProTools/Cubase/etc. Though, it's about the real drum kits from that era - still interesting.

</comment><comment><USER11> Needs more cowbell!!!!

3 is not enough.</comment>


AT&T Now Supporting Rubinius Development - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fallingsnow.net/2008/12/09/the-ruby-community-rocks/

<comment><USER2> Err... I think that headline isn't quite accurate.</comment>


How Tippi Hedren made Vietnamese refugees into nail salon magnates - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32544343

<comment><USER3> When my parents left Vietnam, it seems their whole generation took to opening fast food places. My parents and my uncle are still doing it. There's only a few things to do if you're alone in a new country where you don't speak the language, and once one of the new arrivals figures out a business, they tend to tell all their friends.

</comment><comment><USER4> <quote>Those 20 women - mainly the wives of high-ranking military officers and at least one woman who worked in military intelligence - went on to transform the industry, which is now worth about $8bn (£5.2bn) and is dominated by Vietnamese Americans.</quote>

interesting, so the ones in power managed to get back to power, in a way.

<comment><USER5> Though they had lost all power at the time when they picked this career. So they did not get the new position of wealth through any existing position power, but through hard work and confidence in themselves (and luck, of course).

<comment><USER6> They've been in the position of power before and had experienced that it is possible to take control of your life. I guess a psychological problem in long term refugees as well as poverty is not believing that you can take control of your life - since it was take from you before.

<comment><USER5> True enough. Sometimes people have no physical (financial) capital, but mental capital.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did not expect to have my mind blown this late on a Saturday night. Talk about an amazing example of "teach a man how to fish".

<comment><USER8> Seconded, I'd always wondered how the vietnamese and Cambodians came to dominate the nail and hair cutting business on the west coast, now I know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was house hunting a few years ago, and toured a house listed by an independent agent with a Vietnamese name. In storage, in the garage was about 20 or so tables from a nail salon.

Amazing how they not only came to dominate the industry, but they essentially built it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Would love to see more stories like this. For example, how did Koreans come to dominate the black haircare industry?

Also wish the nail industry was healthier for these women to work in. It still seems to be a place where a lot of newly landed Asian immigrants find work and I wonder about the long-term health effects of working with those fumes. I knew a manicurist who suffered miscarriage after miscarriage -- surely the toxicity of the nail shop she owned may have had something to do with it. I have also heard, from someone who works at Sephora's corporate office, that nail polish is so flammable it is not allowed to be shipped by air. Harsh chems.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have to say, I don't know a huge amount about Vietnamese culture, but I would say it is one of the least patriarchal/most matriarchal Asian societies.

Case in point, in relevance to HN: I knew someone who was sourcing electronic parts from there. Japanese companies have set up their "outsourced" manufacturing there, with electronics plants meeting some ISO standards, etc. There is a heavy female:male predominance at many of these plants.

<comment><AUTHOR> My in-laws are Vietnamese. this is an astute observation; Vietnam has a tradition of prominent female military leaders going back millenia. For example, the Trung sisters are considered national heroes for their resistance to (patriarchal) Confucian rule by the Chinese, resulting in their becoming joint queens of Vietnam for several years, though they eventually suffered military defeat.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C6%B0ng_Sisters](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C6%B0ng_Sisters)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Refugees & IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) are some of the most resourceful & inventive people around - mostly by necessity. They've nothing else to loose; & can make the best from a (often bleak) situation - <USER2> if given the tiniest of hope & opportunities. Long time ago I worked with/for some refugee groups, & have seen the remarkable resiliency & spirit first- hand.</comment>