How Craigslist Makes Money - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/05/03/how-does-craigslist-make-money/ <comment><USER2> I think they are doing it right.

Just find a niche and work at it progressively through life. No need to raise $100M D Rounds, no need to have an explosive exit, whatever.

I think it would be nice to just steadily have six figures, work on something I love and live life (a la Basecamp). Most of all: Have complete control of your destiny. No investors, no bosses, etc.

<comment><USER3> I know hindsight is 20/20, but it's interesting to me that they could've created Airbnb, as they had both the reach and finances to potentially create a side-project that was specific to short-term rentals. They already had sublets and temporary rentals as a sub-listing since forever.

I know that Airbnb comes across as warm and fuzzy hosts who engage with guests, but it's progressively more commercialized with a good portion of hosts either managing multiple short-term rental properties or dedicating a space specifically for the purposes of consistently having short-term rentals.

<comment><USER4> That would have completely changed the company, though. Airbnb works by introducing ratings, insurance and being an intermediary someone can at least theoretically call if a renter is crazy or the listing isn't as advertised.

Craigslist has 50 employees and minimal vetting of anything. It's great for what it is, but I would never use it to rent anything site unseen.

<comment><USER5> > Craigslist has 50 employees and minimal vetting of anything. It's great for > what it is, but I would never use it to rent anything site unseen.

This is one reality show I would watch. Forget all those "We sleep in a dark place recording all the sounds buildings make and then speculate wildly about causes" shows. Sleeping overnight in a house/room/whatever rented randomly off Craigslist would be way more interesting and probably frequently more frightening.

<comment><USER6> I hope someone reads this and makes it a reality.

<comment><USER7> Thinking about this a bit more, I think it would have to be a show where the hosts were in on it. The scam artists would learn of this show if it became popular, and avoid renting to folks seemingly associated with it.

A format like "Diner's, Drive'ins and Dives" would make sense with personal tours, instead of these 'virtual tours' found on VRBO (now owned by Expedia) and AirBnB.

Anything too dramatic won't scale, or it will be fake (like most 'reality' tv).

Edit: I guess one could do it surreptitiously, and save up the content, only to slowly release it ("maximizing revenue"). This might come across as "hit- piece journalism" funded by the AirBnB and VRBO. Change the cast of the show so they are not known associates of the show before the content is made public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Craiglist, because of its age, is interestingly built on Perl[1] and four years ago brought on Perl's founder, Larry Wall.[2]

[1] [https://www.craigslist.org/about/thanks](https://www.craigslist.org/about/thanks) (CL tech stack) [2] [http://blog.craigslist.org/2013/10/15/artist-formerly- known/](http://blog.craigslist.org/2013/10/15/artist-formerly-known/)

<comment><USER9> Craigslist are so quiet about their tech; I'm surprised there's even that much. I'd love to hear their opinions on operating some of those things at scale, given that their problems are likely much more like those of the average CRUD-y SaaS business (scaled up) than they are like those of e.g. Twitter or Facebook, who have to care about things like "realtime demand-based geographic read-only partial replication of event streams."

<comment><USER10> I believe this based on a thing I _think_ I read a long time ago, but isn't all of CL's tech focused solely on preventing any indexing of the site? It's no wonder they would keep it quiet.

<comment><USER9> I would _like_ to believe this, but given the amount of spam that gets posted to CL—and given how well a sophisticated, heuristic anti-indexing WAF would block spambot request traffic as a simple side-effect—I find the idea a bit dubious.

<comment><USER11> A lot of spam on CL isn't created by bots, but by human beings.

As little as 3 years ago, I knew people who'd make job ads on elance asking someone to 'automate' their craigslist renewals and postings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remember looking up this exact question a few days ago. I really prefer to sell things like used electronics on Craigslist over eBay.

I really like their business model too. They made enough to keep going, but not enough that they aspire to take over everything. It's a really simple concept, and there are very few business ideas that can pull it off.

<comment><USER13> > It's a really simple concept, and there are very few business ideas that can > pull it off.

The vast majority of businesses bootstrap themselves. Not on HN of course :)

<comment><USER9> I think the GP was right—there are very few business _ideas_ that can pull off bootstrapping. The space of business _ideas_ executable with funding is a superset of (and probably much larger than) the space of business ideas executable without funding.

Also, most of the ideas you can only execute with funding are such because they'll never make any money. ;)

The majority of all successful businesses, meanwhile, operate off a very small sub-space of the space of all business _ideas_. The part of the space called "workable business _models_."

I'd agree that if you look at the space of workable business _models_ , probably the majority of them are either bootstrap-friendly, or common and low-risk enough that regular consumer banks are willing to finance them with debt-capital (i.e. "business loans".)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was wondering how they got that number; basically they use a $690M revenue guess from a third party, apply a valuation multiple from eBay and then multiply by the 42% Newmark owns.

Craigslist is unique; it isn't entirely profit driven and as far as Alexa 1000 sites; it might have stayed closest to it's original founding philosophy. I am not sure how they make money; iirc it was only a few select markets and select offerings like realestate. Costs are probably the lowest out of a site that size.

Awesome product; seemingly great philosophy; Newmark was early but he was principled and to that Craigslist owes much of it's success

<comment><USER15> > I was wondering how they got that number; basically they use a $690M revenue > guess from a third party, apply a valuation multiple from eBay and then > multiply by the 42% Newmark owns.

It's not that dubious. The methodology is as simple and straightforward as it gets:

> AIM's Zollman, who called his company's Craigslist revenue estimate > "conservative," said the AIM Group counts up listings for each category in > various markets and then multiplies that by the known fee associated with > that listing. (Fees can range from $7 to $75 per posting, depending on > location.)...As the founder of 3Taps, Kidd built an interface for > programmers that pulled classifieds data from Craigslist and was able get an > accurate picture of the total number of listings on the site. He published a > 2011 white paper that pegged Craigslist's annual revenue at $300 million, a > number he said has certainly risen as Craigslist has increased or rolled out > more fees.

This is hard to screw up, and if anything, counting listings ought to be a drastic underestimate - crawls of a hostile large high-turnover website will be incomplete, and Craigslist has other potential revenue sources like selling feed data to hedge funds or real estate or HR agencies.

This makes it all very puzzling. As the quoted employee says:

> "Eventually we realized we were making a lot of money and it was more than > we needed to just cover costs," the employee said, noting at one point in > the early 2000s Craigslist was making $40,000 a day on Bay Area jobs ads > alone. "We could all do the math, and we'd wonder where all the money would > go."

So CL is making at a bare minimum $300 million a year by 2017, of which a large fraction is profit; the few employees say there are no major capital investments a la Amazon (and no one has ever pointed to major software or hardware investments attributed to Craigslist that I've ever seen), and you never hear of Craigslist billionaires or millionaires aside from Newmark, so the profit isn't simply being spent on datacenters or employee stock compensation; thus, around half would go to Newmark if it's distributed as dividends, so he could have an income of easily >$50m a year over the past 7 years after taxes or >$350m on top of whatever he earned before 2011 on that increasing revenue. The Craigslist Charitable Fund is disbursing $10m/year or less (and donations to that wouldn't be taxed), so that leaves >$300m (7 * 50-10). But Newmark claims to be worth much less than $400m total. So... where does it all _go_?

It's hard to see how two different groups counting listings could be high by an order of magnitude, what Craigslist could be spending it on, or what Newmark is spending it on, unless he's making huge anonymous donations every year through other nonprofits (but why avoid his own CCF?) or simply lying (for privacy to avoid the attention or maintain his self-image, or just in order to make look bad "a fake market intelligence group who I won't name").

<comment><USER14> I agree; and didn't say it was dubious. That said; the title was phrased with a slight negative connotation; before it was changed it was like:

 _Newmark was an idealist; now he 's a billionaire_

He is likely a _paper_ billionaire but the article didn't really prove _to me_ he's less of an idealist not that he would sell; making that figure hypothetical.

Sure he's rich; but he could be much more so and the reason is ethics and idealism. So too me; I think saying the company is worth x; and he owns most of it fails to consider he likely wouldn't sell and has built a profitable business users love while remaining humble and ignoring greed

Edit: I know of one large anonymous donation he has made personally and I an nowhere near connected or know anyone that knows him personally

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > 25\. A Craigslist competitor. Craiglist is ambivalent about being a > business. This is both a strength and a weakness. If you focus on the areas > where it's a weakness, you may find there are better ways to solve some of > the problems Craigslist solves.

[http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html](http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html)

<comment><USER17> Remarkably prescient for 2008.

 _1\. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom. Something is broken when Sony and Universal are suing children. Actually, at least two things are broken: the software that file sharers use, and the record labels ' business model. The current situation can't be the final answer._

 _8\. Dating. Current dating sites are not the last word. Better ones will appear. But anyone who wants to start a dating startup has to answer two questions: in addition to the usual question about how you 're going to approach dating differently, you have to answer the even more important question of how to overcome the huge chicken and egg problem every dating site faces. A site like Reddit is interesting when there are only 20 users. But no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users—which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem._

Tinder launched in 2012.

 _17\. New payment methods. There are almost certainly things whose growth is held back because there 's no way to charge for them._

Bitcoin.

<comment><USER18> w.r.t bitcoin being the new payment method, so far bitcoin hasn't enabled the really game changing thing: frictionless micropayments. It's possible that lighting networks will enable this (load up your browser with 5 bucks and lock that up in a connection to the LN, pay for articles then pay 1 cent to skip ads, buy premium features one at a time etc), but we haven't seen this yet.

<comment><USER19> Having read the Scott McCloud book that focused on micropayments almost 20 years ago, and having seen so very many people try something and have it go nowhere, I've come to the conclusion that micropayments are simply never going to be a thing.

My guess is, at the end of the day, people don't want to think about money transactions when doing ordinary things. You know that word "gamify"? Adding badges and shit to things to make tedious things "fun"? Micropayments do the opposite. Transactifying your ordinary processes makes them _less_ fun because you're constantly thinking about spending money. It just adds friction, even just cognitive friction, when everything we do is about reducing it.

I think this is also why Patreon is taking off. People don't think about paying a penny to read a single comic, they just toss a few bucks at a comic artist each month.

<comment><USER18> What do you think about non-human actors interacting through micropayments? Either your computer acting in your interests with a small sum of money, or autonomous agents that live through a couple hours of compute at the cheapest price & keep their own wallet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Craigslist is ubiquitous in its niche, but i never really engaged with it beyond having a laugh at the occasional Craigslist meme post that worked it's way into the internet at large.

At the same time, for years now I've been banging on to any of my industry friends about how global social networks are an internet anachronism and that local networks are the future.

It's only just dawned on me that my misplaced futurism was simply describing a very successful long term business. A billion dollars later, it turns out Craigslist isn't niche at all - my thinking was.

</comment><comment><USER21> I often wish Facebook would have followed that approach. They made money very early with small ads on a lots of page views, did not need investors.

But they went into the VC religion of revenue growth, took their money, then Wall Street money, and they cannot go back now because all employees and stockholders have been promised more. So more ads, more snooping on users, more worldwide control, we need to feed the beast.

Zuckerberg could have continued managing it a-la Craigslist, and still make a few billion for himself. We would all feel much better about using FB.

<comment><USER22> Facebook is at least successful at that: Twitter jeopardized their core business, took on huge operating costs, and is struggling to pay for it despite making what would otherwise have been a quite successful revenue stream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I found it useful that they could use spam as a signal for what to monetize. When doing Blekko (search engine) we noticed that spam was a solid indicator of the search categories that made the most money.

</comment><comment><USER10> If Craigslist makes ~600M in _profit_ , Why the hell is Forbes giving them a valuation of 3B? That's a Price to Earnings ratio of 5. That's not conservative, that's insane. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER24> For companies that aren't going to eat the world, only exist on the network effect, and are happy in their space, a P/E of 5 is reasonable. How much would you pay to buy craigslist?

<comment><USER25> At least 10x their yearly profit? What other investment provides a consistent 10% yearly return on the scale we're talking about?

At P/E ratio of 5, you literally just wait 5 years and you've just made as much as your initial investment.

<comment><USER26> If you get five years before someone disrupts it. That's not a given.

<comment><USER27> Given craigslist has been around for 20 years I think it's fair to assume they could take an upwards of 5 years to unseat. Even Myspace continues on to this day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> >It also charges fees to list postings in categories including ... automobiles offered by dealers

This was a huge thing in my industry. I work with a lot of independent car dealers that used to list everything on their lots with Craigslist, then they started charging the dealers $5 a pop and many of them just quit using it.

There are too many other car listing sites out there now that offer more than just an ad (vehicle reports like Carfax, market trends, valuation, et cetera), so Craigslist just wasn't worth the cost to them.

<comment><USER29> I'm happier for it, as otherwise you wind up with garbage ads from the smaller lots. For example, they'll list the monthly payment instead of the price, which makes wading through 'sort by increasing price' a PITA. Or they'll put a bunch of SEO keywords into the ad such that their vehicle shows up on a search that it shouldn't.

<comment><USER30> Not to mention the places that post the same ad every day or even more frequently.

Hmm, I'm interested in a Subaru. (I search Subaru) _500 listings of the same BMW x5 come up._

Nevermind, let's see what Hondas are on the market. _500 listings of the same BMW x5 come up._

 _I throw my computer out the window._

<comment><USER31> Yup, if i search for 'honda' i have to throw in '-nissan -ford -financing -credit' or some abomination to actually get results, and flag whats left.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > At 64, Newmark has long said that he is not involved in management decisions > at Craigslist, though he still continues to do customer service.

I'm kind of curious what this means at a 50-person company. Is he still handling routine support tickets just for the love of it?

<comment><USER33> > Is he still handling routine support tickets just for the love of it?

I've always understood that this is PRECISELY what he is doing. I hope it's true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> How's Wales doing with Wikia? That was his attempt to monetize the Wikipedia concept. It ended up as a huge repository for fancruft. Does it make serious money?

<comment><USER35> Ugh, wikia has so many ads. Super annoying, especially when it's the only source of the content that you're interested in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> just look at how successful a business that is, so simple, so little innovation and yet so much revenue. But despite all that, they have the best feature (X factor) in the wolrd: market timing.

ohhh what i wouldn't do, to time travel back to 1995.

<comment><USER37> What's innovation have to do with it? Sounds like someone has convinced you that things have to work a certain way and you've found your first counter example...

<comment><USER36> It's a broadly held belief by many. It's good to look at craigslist to see how simple solutions are all that's necessary. Any yet, too frequently, we see companies spending soooo much money on useless features and so called innovations that don't help them solve their problem. This happens for both failing companies and very successful ones too. It can be difficult to isolate, exactly why something works, when you have so many confounding factors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Why doesn't Craigslist have mobile apps?

<comment><USER39> Craigslist is one of the best pages on the internet. It's functional, it loads fast, it doesn't have a stack built of buzzwords and bullshit. It works on every device everywhere. I mean, what business does a page have being megabytes and megabytes if it's gonna display a couple bytes of text? None. It doesn't matter if it's "technically free" these days, that's just bad design and engineering.

<comment><AUTHOR> Craiglist design actually sucks. When I first used it, the whole thing was almost revolting from design perspective. Where some people see simplicity, others see utter lack of modernity, friendliness and affordability. I still can't get some of my relative to use it (they ask me to post on their behalf!). Before you cite page counts, revenues and unique users, think about how many people are _not_ using it despite the fact everyone has heard about it and everyone has a need to sell something on and off. Amazon UX is almost complete opposite of craiglist but is usable by much much wider audience.

<comment><USER40> I mean, we can't prove who "isn't" using it. We can prove that millions and millions of people are using it and seem to be content with it; we can provide anecdotal accounts (including by many people in this thread) that the simplicity and straightforwardness and consistency is what brings them back to the site. I can tell you that everyone I know looks at Craigslist when they're looking for apartments. But I get that you don't like it; I just think you need to acknowledge that's a preference, rather than an objective fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The very first sentence of the article - "On March 1, 1995, fired off an email to his friends." \- is not a valid sentence, it's missing the subject! _facepalm_

<comment><USER41> Aha, I was viewing it at [https://outline.com/xX7xe3](https://outline.com/xX7xe3) but in fact his name IS present and hyperlinked in the original article, so it's Outline.com that's at fault.

UPDATE: I've reported the issue to Outline.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Great service for selling used electronics, renting out an apartment, or sucking a strange man's penis.

<comment><USER43> I guess that explains your username.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Forbes is unequivocally the worst website I have the displeasure of being linked to on a regular basis. Readability is quickly approaching 0. This page kept hijacking my scroll thru the article to keep an ad at the top of my window. Horrible, horrible, horrible.

<comment><USER45> I honestly don't even bother anymore:

[https://outline.com/xX7xe3](https://outline.com/xX7xe3)

<comment><USER46> Pro-tip:

Add outline.com/ to the front of the article's URL. Much faster and works nicely on mobile.

<comment><USER47> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Craigslist has one of the worst UX. How come has it not been improved in years?

Why doesn't Craigslist get any competition? It should be trivial to implement something that's 10 times better...

<comment><USER49> When I hard reload the Craigslist home page for my state, it downloads right around 150 kb.

That is a thing of beauty.

<comment><USER50> >> When I hard reload the Craigslist home page for my state, it downloads right around 150 kb.

>> That is a thing of beauty.

I really find it sad that it's such an anomaly.

<comment><USER51> Text-only content does not make a ton of sense for a whole lot of websites.

<comment><USER50> A few graphics shouldn't cause much bloat, and there is way too much JS out there today. IMHO of course.

<comment><USER51> > and there is way too much JS out there today

Heh, well unfortunately the web doesn't get much in the way of alternative : (</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Roar (1981 Film) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roar_(1981_film) <comment><USER2> Oh man, everyone who was involved in the making of this movie should be committed. The more you learn about the production the more insane it gets. From the lack of animal trainers, to the financial and production issues (took 11 years to make), to the injuries suffered by cast and crew (approximately 100 in total), lions and tigers escaping into the greater Los Angeles area, it just gets more crazy the more you look into it. The movie itself is also pretty terrible which is the icing on the cake.

Do yourself a favor and watch the trailer, and the cast and crew talking about making this move. Pure insanity.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cny_D50Rr44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cny_D50Rr44)

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

<comment><USER3> I have to say the horribleness of the movie doesn't quite transpire from the trailer at least. Looks like fun :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Red Letter Media had an hilarious discussion (with Macaulay Culkin, no less) of _Roar_ on a recent episode of their series "Best of the Worst": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaSkO4TosYo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaSkO4TosYo)

<comment><USER5> It was also discussed on the podcast Omnibus, ep "Tippi Hedren's Fingernails"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Holy crap: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cny_D50Rr44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cny_D50Rr44)

</comment><comment><USER7> _seventy people, including the film 's stars, were seriously injured during filming as a result of animal attacks._

Wow.

<comment><USER8> They should make a movie about this movie ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This movie was INCREDIBLE to watch knowing that it was all real. This was 'reality tv' at it's best. Try to ignore the shitty plot, the Lions are the real stars.

</comment><comment><USER10> Oh, yeah, the one where a young Melanie Griffith got mauled by a lion and had to get reconstructive surgery. That production sounds like it was nuts. OTOH, from what I've read about Hitchcock, maybe Heddren found this a pleasant break.

</comment><comment><USER11> This film came up last night at an event I was at, now I wonder if OP was also there :)

<comment><USER12> It might also be by way of my newsletter, which featured it yesterday, and which I know lots of HNers read: [https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2019/10](https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2019/10) (Which is only fair because, after all, I found it via someone else on /r/wikipedia .)

<comment><USER11> That is almost certainly the case. The talks I went to were run by Recurse and I am confident there is overlap :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is legit one of the scariest movies I've ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Marshall and Hedren wrote a script for the project, whose working title was > Lions, Lions and More Lions.

Heroic and funny. They accumulated more than 70 wild animals and sold the shirts off their backs. What kind of manic energy makes someone capable of this shit?

<comment><USER15> Sunken cost fallacy, I presume</comment></comment>


20 Examples of Simplistic but Effective Logo Design - <AUTHOR> http://webdesignledger.com/inspiration/20-examples-of-simplistic-but-effective-logo-design <comment><USER2> Isn't simplicity naturally effective? Why the "but"?</comment>


China Is Achieving AI Dominance by Relying on Young Blue-Collar Workers - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7xyabb/china-ai-dominance-relies-on-young-data-labelers <comment><USER2> Anyone know what software these data labelers are using?</comment>


Show HN: Million Short - 7 Days Later - <AUTHOR> http://www.millionshort.com/

<comment><AUTHOR>
      -New design: Disover and Search button interface

      -New browser plug in with Autocomplete

      -New feature - SiteBoost, push the sites you like to top of results

      -Traffic still strong

Feedback would be great, especially on the two button interface.</comment>


Truth and Probability (1926) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/7048428.pdf <comment><USER2> It's sad that Ramsey died so young. It's also sad that it has taken nearly a century for the wider culture/society to begin embracing the concept of 'degrees of belief' in any significant way (I could definitely be wrong, but it seems to me that it is being embraced more). A number of public intellectuals have said probabilistic reasoning is king for the forseeable future (of course, such reasoning is a bit different from the ground being covered by degrees of belief). I know some professors who are even moving away from the emphasis on deductive reasoning in introductory logic courses.

<comment><USER3> My brief exposure to this was frustrated with the complex math involved in combining (adding/multiplying) probability distributions without simulations.

Something so fundamental to making probabilistic choices is so immediately daughnting from a programmatic point of view

<comment><USER2> I bet with more exposure it would become more intuitive. I also think there is simply an immense benefit in the type of epistemological mindset it inculcates, regardless of how fast or adept you are at the mechanics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I did a module in "philosophy of probability" and we covered this. At the beginning, I thought it was all people arguing about nothing in a lot of words, but after 3 weeks I realised that my assumptions that probability is a fairly 'rigid' field were way too strong and there is still so much that is not understood or controversial.

This is a really interesting field and I would encourage anyone to make the effort to dive into it beyond the surface</comment>


Ask HN: Can we hack together a ventilator? - <AUTHOR> There are already some good open source projects hacking together ventilators. It occurred to me that we might be able to combine a computer fan (or two) together with a fan controller chip and an arduino to make a ventilator.
I don't know enough about the fan controller chips, though, to do this. Does anyone have an opinion?
Finally here's the best open source project I've seen as a starting point:
https://panvent.blogspot.com/ <comment><USER2> I am working on one now.

The problem is that ventilators require tubes to be inserted into the patients lung. This requires a very skilled doctor and has a risk of infection and injury.

So I am making an wooden lung - like an iron lung but made from plywood. I can share the plans and sourcing for the parts if you want.</comment>


New spike in Covid-19 Cases - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-10/second-u-s-virus-wave-emerges-after-state-reopenings <comment><USER2> I can't say I'm surprised. We all knew a second wave would be likely and that was before states reopened early and protesters took to the streets.

The question now is whether or not states will be more squeamish this time about rolling out lockdowns (yes, I think... I'm willing to bet several governors will double down and eat a much larger death toll as a result). What do lockdowns even look like when people are out and on the ground fighting against oppression?

<comment><USER3> > The question now is whether or not states will be more squeamish this time > about rolling out lockdowns

Certain restrictions may be added and removed, but there's no way full lockdowns will be implemented again at this point. We're going to have to rely on masks, social distancing when possible, identifying super spreader events, testing, and contact tracing.</comment></comment>


WHY nobody say NO to fossil fuel? - <AUTHOR> http://www.skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/Extinction.htm <comment><USER2> _" the scientific consensus is that there is now more than a 5% chance that human beings could be virtually extinct in as little as 90 years from now"_

\--Extrapolate trends much?

</comment><comment><USER3> its not in the bag yet sir.</comment>


Show HN: Teleport – see what the web looks like from elsewhere in the world - <AUTHOR> http://teleport.to/

<comment><USER2> Neat, works great to unblock Youtube videos if you are living in a country where 90% of the music videos are blocked (Germany) and it's rather fast too. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER3> Unblocking YouTube videos is the first thing I tried. It works but it is very slow, so I still prefer to use Tor for that (I can usually download between 500 and 700 kbps using torsock + youtube-dl).

<comment><USER4> Ugh, that's really kind of abusive of the Tor network. There's very limited bandwidth, and it would be more polite for you to not use it just to watch Youtube clips.

There are all sorts of inexpensive VPN services you can use (e.g. [https://www.witopia.net/](https://www.witopia.net/)) to circumvent region blocks. Tor should only be used in situations where strict anonymity is crucial.

<comment><USER3> Just to reassure you, I very rarely do that (and I don't use Tor just for this purpose). If it was something that I did regularly, I would of course pay for a VPN or even a small VPS somewhere where videos blocked in France are most often not.

FYI, I have two computers running Tor nodes with a close to 100% uptime, and I regularly give to an association running big Tor exit nodes :-).

<comment><USER4> Fair enough, sorry if that came off harsh. If you're actually contributing to running exit nodes, then you're more justified in using Tor to watch videos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _For the rest of the countries we rely on publicly availably proxy servers (marked non-truested)._

Which organization is running publicly available proxies servers wittingly? Answer: none.

I wouldn't base an application on exploiting mis-configured proxies around the globe.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is openly addressed in "How it works".

<comment><USER5> Not enough. Some countries are lifting new laws saying any kind of unauthorized access is already a crime. This website is fooling users into committing a crime by using resources that were not explicitly made available to them and taking advantaged of poorly configured proxies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I went to Facebook.com login page, using the UK proxy, I had a popup for a VPN provider invade the screen. Is this injected by the untrusted server?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, those ads are mine. Although they were supposed to be disabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I clicked in the text box to enter a URL and my cursor appeared in the middle of the example URL. Pressing left... nothing, right... nothing, delete... nothing. Typing some more text - the example URL disappeared and I could enter one from scratch!

Does this just happen from the UK? ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> On it, thanks for the _input_ :)

Edit: fixed

<comment><USER8> still seeing this behavior. Text should disappear as soon as textbox gets focus.

Also I tried a URL from GB and from India and got the generic error message. What does that mean? Is the URL not accessible from those countries?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another small error. If you type in an incorrect url all the page does is says "Error".

Example: [http://new.google.com.prx.us.teleport.to/](http://new.google.com.prx.us.teleport.to/)

Otherwise it worked great for me. Awesome job

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! HN front page with a buggy site feels like coming to school without your homework. But as Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder) once said, "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I tried [https://fluxcards.de/home](https://fluxcards.de/home) from Iran and got an error page. You should at least communicate if that error page is you not finding a proxy in Iran (as I guess from looking at the list of "available" proxies that are all offline) or if that is indeed a blocking of my site for Iranian users.

My developer is in Iran and he would have told me if our project was blocked. Also I know that Iran shows some funny Qur'an quotes when you try to surf ol dirty facebook but your service claims something which I think it doesn't hold at least for Iran.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, on it, thanks for the heads up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The colors used for the map on the homepage are basically indistinguishable to colorblind folks like myself (the trusted vs. untrusted colors, specifically), just FYI.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it, will fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If I enter www.google.com and "open from the Netherlands" I get sent to Google Turkey.

<comment><AUTHOR> The servers used in this case are definitely in the Netherlands. However what seems to be happening is they are used a lot by people from Turkey (they are shared with another popular web proxy) and Google learned this somehow from some implicit signals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sorry for the tough question, but what make your servers _trusted_ by me? Why should I trust you? With _trust_ I mean _I can safely browse without worries about traffic data collecting, password stealing and so on_ , do you mean the same too?

<comment><AUTHOR> More like trusted by Teleport. Whether you trust Teleport is up to you. While I promise I won't steal your passwords it's really the best I (or anyone serving as a proxy) can do. If you want a "trustless" channel, the only options are SSL over VPN or SSL over Tor, but you still have trust the CA and browser vendor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It looks like all URLs in plain text on the page are being rewritten (eg. from Amazon.com to Amazon.com.prx.uk.teleport.to). URLs in <a href="..."> fields are not, but only if they point off the domain you're visiting.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's certainly not the intended behavior, but it's not a surprising bug either. The rewrite was surprisingly tough to make work even most of the time. But if you could share the specific site this happened on, I will likely be able to fix it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Inception: [http://teleport.to.prx.us.teleport.to.prx.us.teleport.to/](http://teleport.to.prx.us.teleport.to.prx.us.teleport.to/)

</comment><comment><USER16> [http://www.hulu.com.prx.us.teleport.to/](http://www.hulu.com.prx.us.teleport.to/) fails, I have a blank page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Might be a bug on my end, but Hulu is generally very good at detecting proxies and VPNs. Will look into it though.

<comment><USER2> I see a lot of syntax errors and "XMLHttpRequest No 'Access-Control-Allow- Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin '[http://www.hulu.com.prx.us.teleport.to'](http://www.hulu.com.prx.us.teleport.to') is therefore not allowed access." in the JavaScript console.

I guess the latter error is to be expected in this case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> * Is it OK to use this for moderate/high volume stuff?

* Does it use any kind caching?

* Any plans on adding a way to use HTTPS?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Is it OK to use this for moderate/high volume stuff?

At the moment I am not incredibly confident about the countries where it relies on third-party proxies. Although as the database of proxy IPs grows I'll implement load balancing of sorts to address this. For US, NL, SG and UK it shares the infrastructure with another proxy that used to serve 200K visitors/day without a hitch.

> Does it use any kind caching?

Nope, not yet.

> Any plans on adding a way to use HTTPS?

Absolutely. It's not done yet because it'll make proxy implementation notably more complex and fragile (you can't use proxy domains like youtube.com.prx.us.teleport.to with SSL because you can't buy a cert for _._.X domains, only for *.X)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why does the non-Somaliland area of Somalia have a slightly different colour?

And why are they separate?

<comment><AUTHOR> Truth be told, I have no idea. Maybe the author of the map had an agenda :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a color blind person, I could not tell any difference between trusted proxies and un-trusted proxies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, duly noted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ok... so - this is a web proxy service. Am I missing something here or is this all there is to it?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is indeed a web proxy service with country selection - something that is not addressed by other web proxies AFAIK.

Also, web proxies aren't as trivial as you are implying.

<comment><USER20> Oh, I didn't mean to imply that web proxies are trivial, simply that this is nothing new - there are hundreds of proxy sites from all over the world on [http://proxy.org/cgi_proxies.shtml](http://proxy.org/cgi_proxies.shtml). Still, if you made this, good job!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There should be clickable examples so users dont have to think of an example. Youtube, etc.

</comment><comment><USER22> Add https to the beginning and you should be able to see most ecommerce sites, like Amazon.

<comment><USER22> note: this isn't actually supported officially, but you can have the browser ignore the SSL cert mismatch

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately it's not as simple as that. You can instruct the browser to ignore an invalid cert for the site in address bar, but all background requests (images, scripts, ajax, etc.) to different domains made via https will still be silently blocked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Puerto Rico is one of those weird places where I think content gets blocked on accident.

</comment><comment><USER24> China would be very useful. Seem to be getting 500's though

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I should make China the default in my testing I think - it's certainly the most interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Heh, when you hover over Uruguay it says Uganda! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ooops, the map had a messed up ISO code. Fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Perfect for browsing google play top charts!

</comment><comment><USER27> Imgur direct links do not work

<comment><AUTHOR> Which country were you trying?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> my first try gave me a HTTP status 500! and so on..

<comment><AUTHOR> Damn last minute changes! Fixed.

Edit: although for some countries you still need to manually try a few different proxies before it works. I have a solution to this in the works, but couldn't wait to show off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> excellent proxy</comment>


How to hire top tier developers (a.k.a unicorns) - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/17/how-to-hire-top-tier-developer-and-engineer-unicorns/

<comment><USER2> Alternatively, you could have a reality check and realize that your business probably doesn't need unicorns.

I find it very odd that an industry obsessed with putting out _minimum_ viable products is also obsessed with getting the absolute best engineers, particularly in an environment where mere competency is supposedly hard to find.</comment>


Drop the ego and prove "I could make that so much better" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lawnstarter.com/post/76623724133/drop-the-ego-and-prove-i-could-make-that-so-much <comment><USER3> I consider this post part of a nascent trend to de-bullshit the startup and technology scene. For years the narrative has been "we in the tech industry are standard bearers leading society into a bright new tomorrow." The recent protests around the Google buses, as well as John Oliver's takedown [1] of the tech industry seem to be striking a chord with the public, and there's a lesson to be drawn: we tech folks are not as important as we think we are.

A business is just that: a business. Not a humanitarian aid mission dispatched from your benevolent head into a world made unbearable by its lack of smartphone apps and productivity software. It's an organization that is focused on delivering a product that people will pay for. I'm thrilled for the author that he found something he can profitably produce, and I commend him on his exit from the messiah complex echo chamber that's plaguing our industry.

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/11/john-oliver-kills-at- crunch...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/11/john-oliver-kills-at-crunchies- with-jokes-about-san-franciscos-gentrification-the-nsa-techs-cartoon- villains/)

<comment><USER4> "Join us and help change change the world" \- _every valley startup ever_

<comment><USER5> The world must be one hell of a shitty place if it needs to be changed so much every single time.

<comment><USER6> The world is extremely shitty place and you dont see that only because, I assume, you are the part of the top earning cohort.

<comment><USER7> And how many tech startups serve any other cohort?

<comment><USER6> Most startups are b2c and serving mass markets. This is fairly obvious if you look at their target audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's one of those things you (well I at least :) learn when you get older; you have a few years to do what you came here for and then you expire, so feeling embarrassed or otherwise caring about the negative things people might think about you is not very interesting and should best be not at all even in your brain at any time. Took me about 34 years to learn that and it's not actual advise you can give someone as people don't listen or cannot do it, but it will make everything a lot easier (and more successful as well).

Also people looking down on you are usually not better off either; I had a guy at a party talk to me about my 'little company', 'little moneys', 'little investments' (these words don't translate well; in Dutch you have 'small' words geldjes, investerinkjes which I don't know how to translate). He was a banker guy making E500k/year after tax (the fact he said that makes him a loser already imho); when he told people about his job my ears started bleeding out of boredom. I would not trade places with him for any amount of money let alone be bothered about him belittling what I do :) It's not often (never...) that belittling/offensive people actually have a life to be jealous about; that's why they are offensive and give you shit; they envy you.

<comment><USER9> Is your attitude toward bragging about income culturally typical for Dutch people?

<comment><USER10> Is certainly typical in the UK. Income is considered an intensely personal matter. You may as well walk into a party and proudly start telling people your genital measurements.

Here's an amusing video on the subject: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E837tnxRVS0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E837tnxRVS0)

 _" It's essentially a distillation of the problem we always have with american behaviour that's different from ours: Are they being admirably honest and upfront, cutting through the cant and failing to be hamstrung by old-world prejudices and preoccupations, or are they just being rude?"_

The video is actually about asking other people their income, rather than stating your own. The point is basically the same.

<comment><USER8> Good one that video. I'm not sure if that's it in the Netherlands either.

When thinking about it; why do you tell or conversely, why do you ask? Why you tell without being asked, to me, is just a sign of you having a very small penis (it's usually guys). Asking it; are you really interested? Or are you comparing to yourself in some kind of oh i'm really not interested what you answer I make more anyway and really want to tell you that!? Or do you want to feel bad about your own income in some kind of sadomasochistic manner people seem to enjoy? Or do you want the other person to feel bad because you know he makes crap or is 'in between jobs'?

I'm trying to figure out what the upside is here; I don't mind telling what I make per se but I'm curious why anyone would want to know and when I think about it I cannot come up with any positive reasons. And so it never came up as a question from or to me and the only people I heard talking about it are guys I suspect were picked on a lot in high school. But maybe someone can enlighten me here? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I experienced a similar change in mindset regarding the valley and the tech scene, catalyzed by recent trips out to SF that left me with a very uneasy feeling.

The uneasiness, I think, came from realizing that the community I wanted to be a part of for so long consisted largely of the same young, inexperienced recent college grads with self-appointed expertise in a variety of abstract fields (marketing, social behavior), who peddle the same formulaic and shallow insights on business and life, all with the belief that they are changing the world for the better. And look, there's nothing wrong with being inexperienced and wanting to do big things, but what irritates me is the semblance of expertise, arrogance, and contribution startup people put on without putting in their time to attain a deep understanding of any one area, especially since I come from a medical background where you know the people you work with are intelligent, have run the gauntlet, and prove themselves on a daily basis.

Or maybe that's how you hack wealth and I'm growing old and grumpy.

<comment><USER12> That's how I was feeling about the recent article on the Bitcoin robbery at Silk Road 2. A lot of libertarian-minded tech nerds are all hot about "disrupting" frumpy old fiat currency with its baroque rules and distasteful whiff of authority. Now they're finding out that there's a _reason_ for that frumpy old system and all its baroque rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The author touches on being embarrassed.

As a game developer making games that many players would call evil (IAPs, IAPs everywhere.), I tend to prefix my "what do you do?" with "Oh uh, it's not something I'd _actually_ play, but it's called ...". Shame, really.

<comment><USER14> What is "IAP"?

<comment><USER15>
        Spend 100 karma to view this reply?
        [yes] [no] [purchase]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I make roads for a living. (Well, my software does.)

Actually this has been a bit of a boon for me - whereas in the past peoples eyes would glaze over when I told them about SIL-4 practices and other such nonsense involved in keeping the trains running on time (safely), nowadays I can just point at the road and say - software makes this happen, now.

Software is boring. What the software _does_ \- now _that_ captures peoples interest!

<comment><USER17> My view is that software is fascinating _and_ the real world problems you can solve with it are also fascinating - so it is a double win!

<comment><USER16> I of course meant in the social context - if I didn't think software was interesting I wouldn't be involved with it. But I have to say that this is an article about the social effect of explaining what you do to people - so many times, young developers come to the scene wanting to be rock stars, whereas that's just simply not going to happen in software. If you want to be a rock star, learn to play the guitar and rock ass.. but if you want people to understand why your job as a developer is so cool, you have to be prepared to explain it to them. If a person doesn't have the humility to describe your task in a way that people will understand - they've got a ways to go as a developer.

Saying "I make a logistics/analysis/solver system for mowing lawn - i.e. I'm a gardener" is not so easy when all you want is praise for doing something cool .. right .. coz mowing lawns isn't cool. Well it sure is, if you're using software to do it ... better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lawns are conspicuous consumption at its finest; improving them is not making the world a better place. This is one case where the guilt is telling you something.

<comment><USER18> Would you prefer to have a road/more dense urban space/a parking garage?

I agree with you in that I wouldn't find my own personal lawn satisfying, but lawns are not nearly the worst option. Humans need outdoor space - the lawn also benefits people passing by.

<comment><USER7> More dense urban space, yes. Once you increase the housing density you can have walkable/cycleable cities and decent public transport rather than urban sprawl.

I'm in favour of open, green spaces for people to play or relax, but that doesn't happen on lawns; public parks (at least as implemented here in Europe) offer much more chance for everyone to enjoy, and socially rather than on their own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A quote I once heard from a very bright hedge-fund guy: "My gardener drives a Mercedes SUV. There is no one I can't learn something from."

<comment><USER20> _A quote I once heard from a very bright hedge-fund guy: "My gardener drives a Mercedes SUV. There is no one I can't learn something from."_

That actually sounds crass and a bit stupid. Any idiot can buy an SUV on credit, and SUVs just show that one has shitty, suburban taste in vehicles.

I agree with the sentiment of, "Don't assume someone's an idiot because he does physical labor". But it shouldn't take a fucking ugly hunk of metal to make someone learn that. If you actually go out and talk to people who aren't like you, you learn that there are some extremely intelligent people in blue- collar labor by, I don't know, high school at the absolute latest.

<comment><USER21> > Any idiot can buy an SUV on credit

i take the point that you hate cars, but this isn't actually true.

<comment><USER20> I don't hate cars. I hate when people buy unnecessarily large, unsafe, and environmentally irresponsible cars as a status symbol.

<comment><USER21> guessing you've never had to drive around with a bunch of gardening equipment, or potted plants, or bags of soil, or take a crew of 5 out to lunch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting company - refreshing to see some different ideas out there. Congrats on making the plunge!

</comment><comment><USER23>
      > For some reason, I bought into this premium that our
      > community puts on companies that produce gimmicky
      > technology and raise massive rounds without having any
      > real revenue streams. I got so caught up in this
      > mentality that I was literally embarrassed to be working
      > on a company that was making money in a less than sexy
      > industry.

Anyone who is looking to take VC money needs to be able to convince investors that they'll have a 100M+ exit within seven to ten years. Investors who are looking to make these "long-shot" bets are not looking for solid companies with predictable growth like a lawn care business.

It's _really_ important to understand the investor's point-of-view when considering a position at a VC-funded company, otherwise the company's behavior may seem irrational.

<comment><USER24> I'm guessing they aren't looking for companies like Uber and Handybook, you know because they're in predictable industries like taxi cabs and house cleaning...

<comment><USER23> My phrasing was poor. I should have said "companies with predictable growth", not "predicable growth industries." I've edited my post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Loved this piece.

> I got so caught up in this mentality that I was literally embarrassed to be > working on a company that was making money in a less than sexy industry. > Seems ass-backwards to me...

Spot on! I wish you much success in your venture. Oh and in my opinion, a freshly cut baseball field is waaay sexier than any mobile app haha

<comment><USER26> I like that he had some personal revelation but he loses me when he assumes that everyone else working on "the next" Facebook or Snapchat is suffering from his same ego problems. There is a much more benign explanation for the glut in the consumer internet/app space; domain experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm actually working for a company now that specializes in online marketing/websites for lawn care and pest control companies. There's a guy in the area that was a programmer for a big corporation (IBM, maybe?) and he saw an opportunity in pest control, so he started his own company and pretty much wiped out all the competition. Then he bought the agency I'm now working for so we could focus on similar lawn/pest companies across the states.

I don't think that's really your plan at all, but it's awesome that you're looking into a market that is full of outdated websites and definitely has room for improvement!

</comment><comment><USER28> Innovation is to make something better than the current state... Anybody who does that, are more creative and daring than most!

If you actually help people and make them happy - then you've got a something to proud of, in my opinion! :)

</comment><comment><USER29> While I assume this is really the intent of posting this - I did end up going to the main site. I'm missing how this is disruptive in any way. Maybe I'm totally not getting it.

<comment><USER30> Disruptive means potentially viable business. It used to mean something else, but it is not used that way anymore.

<comment><USER29> Well, uh, either definition would apply here.

Which isn't to say that any given lawn care service is not viable, but the whole "we're doing it _differently_ " would indicate something more than, you know, setting it up online.

That's just me and I'm a cynic. But I feel like if you're going to take a stab at a paradigm shift in an industry, you should aim higher than this.

Keep in mind, this is precisely how I found and set up my lawn service, which is just two guys. :shrug:

[ And do keep in mind that I realize that self-promotion requires a healthy dose of hyperbole, but save it for the customers, not your peers ;) ]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> People build products related to fields they are familiar with. The percentage of us that have experience with lawn care or some other specific industry is far less than the percentage that have experience with Facebook and the like. People are wary (and rightfully so) of building a startup to "disrupt" an industry that they have no experience.

</comment><comment><USER31> The photo of Kate Upton on their "customer satisfaction" part of their main website really helps this.

<comment><USER32> I was slightly impressed after reading the blog post and then completely turned off by seeing that image. I almost thought they might have forgotten to take it off, but it seems pretty intentional. It's just so completely irrelevant to their message. It might be funny to men, but I can't imagine many women who would find that charming, so you're alienating the demographic that schedules services for their homes.

<comment><USER33> That was what stuck out to me most of all, after initially actually thinking it was a pretty good idea. I was totally turned off as a woman, and it make me feel immediately that this service, whatever it was, wasn't targeted at me.

<comment><USER32> Seems like they copped up to it and said they forgot to remove it in their new HN piece.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The validity of this approach depends entirely on your goals. If you just want to run a successful business, then by all means, mow lawns for a living. However, if you have passion for a particular market or technology, then you'll be bored mowing lawns, even if you make money at it.

</comment><comment><USER35> I grew up with a father who owned garbage companies and caught a lot of shit about it when I was a kid, but for as "unsexy" as garbage is, it's a goldmine(esp things like owning landfills). I live in DC, if I had a lawn(condo) I would have you cut it. Good luck

<comment><USER36> That's pretty cool. I've always been curious about how well served waste management has been with technology and innovation over the years. It doesn't seem like we'll ever stem the tide of consumerism and the relentless torrent of disposable crap we manufacture and throw away. Have we progressed beyond digging holes and filling them up or dumping it all in the ocean?

I've heard about incinerator technology in some Baltic country that uses liquid magnets to extract precious metals from the ash piles.

Makes me wonder if there's some way to reclaim other materials... though I don't have the chemistry/physics background to know if it's worth following through.

Still... garbage companies are important!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Sounds like you're on the right path. Nothing to be ashamed. Although you do get that feeling when you're not "changing the world" . But if you're helping people in reality you are changing their world for the better.

</comment><comment><USER38> _We all have a list of things or industries that "we could make so much better"._

We do?

<comment><USER39> Don't you?

I've got a list of things that I think could be improved. For instance:

      The interface of the remote control? Could be improved for elderly.
      The price of a CNC router? Could be cheaper.
      The atmosphere of that bar? Could be nicer.

Easy to say, hard to do.

<comment><USER25> Same here. I want to make a battery powered noise canceling headphone that automatically shuts off if the jack isn't plugged in. Why should a 250 dollar pair of headphones not do this automatically when the battery is required for the experience!?

<comment><USER40> Because there's a niche market for people like myself that wear noise canceling headphones without music?

Seriously though, if I go in a server room I'm putting noise canceling on. I still need to hear if someone is talking to me, so no music unless I'm doing repetitive work.

<comment><USER25> Fair enough. I think you are a _very_ small niche though and my proposal would save tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people from wasting expensive batteries. Worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> LawnStarter, happy to give you a revenue arm - www.yourlawnsucks.com - <USER2> provided beer money in college. Condition: slightly old - looks like fb code snippet needs some love as well.

</comment><comment><USER42> Dedicated lawn genius and part time red carpet crawler.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hahaha, impressed you saw that, redid the site yesterday and forgot to swap pictures before going live :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm really happy for the author and simultaneously really disappointed because I have recently started work on a very similar venture.

</comment><comment><USER44> People should do what they enjoy! If you enjoy the lawn mowing, don't feel embarrassed about it.

</comment><comment><USER45> RESPECT!

</comment><comment><USER20> For me, it's not about ego. It's about practicality.

There are hundreds of places where I see inefficiencies and _know_ I could make it better. It happens every day. But I'm also humble enough to know that superior capability does _not_ mean that I'm guaranteed to make money doing it.

Two examples come to mind for me personally. First, venture capital. What they do (picking companies to fund) I could do better, guaranteed. I wouldn't fund zeroes like Lucas Duplan. I'd fund people with actual capability, not fuckups. However, VC is a business with a lot of variance and a lot of corruption (connections really matter) so, as to whether I'd actually make money, who knows? Given enough time and money for the noise variables to even out, I'd beat the leading players, but the world can stay random longer than one can stay solvent.

Second in that vein, games. Game quality is something at which the main players are failing miserably. I have no doubt that if I ran those studios, the games would be higher in quality. Would that automatically ensure more money? Fuck if I know. I don't know all the details of the business. I know that I'm better at one kinda narrow thing (technical excellence) but that doesn't mean I would run a more profitable enterprise. Maybe they produce shitty games because, guess what, shitty games make a lot of money for minimal effort.

Competence is only a small part of the equation. (If it weren't, then VCs all over the Valley would be calling me up every damn day to run their companies.) Connections and political leverage and just plain luck are also huge factors.

So, what people like me tend to end up doing (and this may be a bad strategy, but that's another discussion) is to try to stay fairly general in business scope while diving deep on a technical specialty. At this point, I'd rather climb the ladder at a boring company (and gain general technical skills and, more importantly, the relationships and credibility to advance later on) than start a potentially world-changing game company, knowing that the skills and credentials that come from the former are more transferrable. You can say that resume culture is the devil, and that it's making us all mediocre in our ambitions, and you'll be right... but I don't have the power to change it.

The real issue is that no one insures the careers of the people who start "real world" businesses. If fixing, say, the moving industry had the landing pad that being Staff Engineer at a Twitter did, then more people would do it.</comment>


The Day "/Proc" Died - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/rkeene/the-day-proc-died-53ic <comment><USER3> Some things never change. Is there a single UNIX variant that doesn't fail in some way when it can no longer write to disk? It's unacceptable for most programs to fail if they can no longer write to disk; Firefox also fails, but of course gives no indication as to what's happening.

Now, of course, no UNIX variant I'm aware of has a real notion of system programs and so there's no programs that get special privileges that would protect them from this. It would be preferable for the system to die, rather than permit this debugging nonsense, considering it would perhaps actually be fixed if the machine died in this case.

This is an asinine failure case mired in 1970s malpractice. Don't you agree this is damning and unacceptable? No one has any right to be proud of this mess. There's millions of lines of code and yet basic failure cases aren't truly accounted for or are handled in the most asinine of ways, such as with the ``Out of Memory Killer''.

<comment><USER4> Did you know that Linux has this special note of "root reserved space" specifically for situations like this? And the same way, there is per-process "oom_adj" which can be used to control OOM killer priority, to spare the system processes.

This problem has been solved, multiple times. Of course many distributions fail to mark appropriate processes as system, so they fail anyway, but this is just a bug, not an a glaring design omission.

<comment><USER5> The OOM killer __never __in the twelve years I 've used Linux has triggered before my system grinds to a halt and never recovers. This problem has __not __been solved.

<comment><USER6> That is probably being cause by your use of swap space, not an OOM issue. I've had multiple cases of the OOM killer kicking off on my system, all without it slowing way down.

<comment><USER7> Lacking swap space causes more severe symptoms in an OOM situation, not less, from my experience. I think this is because everything that can get evicted from RAM is before the OOM killer gets invoked, which means every disk access slows to a crawl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Since ext4 became the default, my most common cause of bizarre behaviors has been running out of inodes.

       df -i

will show this, but a bare df command will not.

Getting off topic now, but does anybody know if the ext4 utilities changed the calculation of inodes when formatting compared to ext3/ext2 utilities? Running out of inodes on those filesystems was fairly unusual, but I've seen it happen a dozen times in the past 5 years on ext4.

<comment><USER9> Across the approximately 2000 VMs we look after as an MSP, we see this at least once a week. It's almost always badly cleaned up session files from a php app or similar.

<comment><USER10> The default ratio of inodes is configured in /etc/mke2fs.conf. You should either change that, override it with the -i argument when you create the filesystem.

My desktop's / filesystem is around 238,000,000,000 bytes, and with the default ratio of one inode per 16384 bytes, I have around 14,500,000 inodes.

Note that with a default blocksize of 4096, you're limited to 4× as many inodes as you have at present, so if you're seeing this weekly I recommend monitoring the number of remaining inodes (df -i), or changing the app to store sessions in a database.

<comment><USER9> We're talking about preexisting systems. inodes are already tweaked up during build to highest, and we monitor similar to how you suggest via a checkmk script. If the apps running were ours we could make changes to make them clean up better or store through other means, alas this is just something you have to handle when doing break fix response on 100s of clients making their own decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The rookie mistake a lot of admins do is never creating a partition for /var/log , I lost count how many times servers went into a weird mode when the root is getting filled to 100%

<comment><USER12> I always rm the dir inside /var/log and ln them back from another disk. Because I am too lazy to change default config sparsely located on /etc of many installed programs.

<comment><USER13> Most of the programs should by default use syslog, so you should not really have to configure much of them except enabling syslog output. Then you just have to configure your syslog implementation to write wherever you desire, rotate the files, or forward the messages to other machines for storing, etc.

<comment><USER14> > Most of the programs should by default use syslog

Is that still true today? Docker wants you to log to stdout, so that's what most newer applications do. systemd also wants you to log to stdout, and will redirect stdout to journald/syslog automatically. In fact, an application that only logs to syslog can turn into a minor headache when you want to dockerize it. Which is why stuff like [https://github.com/sapcc/syslog- stdout](https://github.com/sapcc/syslog-stdout) exists.

I'm having a related problem with another project that I'm working on where I wrap an OpenLDAP server. It would be much easier to properly wrap it if OpenLDAP would just log to stdout instead of bypassing me and going for the syslog. Maybe at some point I'll set up a separate mount namespace for it to pass a /dev/syslog shim into it. But this shows that the log-to-stdout pattern is much more Unix-y because it composes better.

<comment><USER15> > Is that still true today?

I think it is.

> Docker wants you to log to stdout, so that's what most newer applications > do.

According to Debian popularity contest [1], which matches my observations, Docker itself isn't a particularly common package to be found in a system.

> systemd also wants you to log to stdout

While that's an option, there is sd-journal(3), which allows proper logging with priorities and custom fields.

[1] [https://popcon.debian.org/by_inst](https://popcon.debian.org/by_inst)

Edit: Perhaps worth mentioning that even with systemd and logging into stdout, syslogd (and maybe journald) configuration should be sufficient to sort out the log files, as mentioned in the grandparent comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting. I'm legitimately surprised the author put so much work into this research (happy they did!). By far one of the biggest culprits for "really odd behavior" is because of a full disk, or the disk is in some failing/failed state. To the point where when troubleshooting, `df -k` will be one of the first commands I'll run.

Does this company not have disk monitoring?

<comment><USER17> Did you not see that the date was 2011? I think this is lesson learned sort of article. When things go wonky, look for simple reasons. At least he didn't think it was a hardware bug.

<comment><USER16> Nope, I didn't actually. Which is funny and makes a bit more sense, since I haven't seen a full disk cause bad locking like that since around the date of the article. Still, this never should have been an issue, since disk space monitoring shoulda prevented the problem from ever happening in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, that's almost exactly the same problem I encountered in Linux last week, where simply reading /proc/$pid/cmdline would block the process attempting to read the process info. It appears to have been related to this issue:

      https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/2/20/576

And much like the Solaris issue, as best I could tell the original processes (this occurred multiple times on two different nodes) would seem to be blocked either in the filesystem or memory management layers flushing pages.

<comment><USER14> Please don't put things that are not code in codeblocks. In this case, it makes the link unclickable for no good reason. Working link: [https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/2/20/576](https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/2/20/576)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow - cool example of live kernel debugging. It is very cool that the kernel is still usable while this issue occurred.

Also lucky that someone was logged into the zone without a /proc dependency. Usually people have complex shell prompts that might require /proc lookups.

It is concerning, though, that a less privileged zone could affect the entire system.

</comment><comment><USER20> Slightly tangential, but I find it a bit hard to accept that systems do not have a more graceful failure mode when their disks are full.

I keep a few GB free on my / but when I inadvertently fill it, it becomes almost impossible to use. Would it be so hard to keep the few last MB as reserved space for debugging purpose and refuse any space allocation that is not devoted to a 'ls' or a 'baobab' process?

<comment><USER4> They do [https://odzangba.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/how-to-free- reserv...](https://odzangba.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/how-to-free-reserved- space-on-ext4-partitions/)

<comment><USER20> You can reboot as root in a terminal but really, there is no good reason to fall back to this mode instead of more gracefully refuse, from userland, to use up more space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've never used mdb on solaris, but its where I first learned of strace (and ptrace) - which unlocked soooo much of how unix worked for me, and lead me down the path to unix wizardy (well, that and access to open source code bases). in fact, when i started reading this, it's where I thought it was headed (in fact, I think could have come to the conclusion quicker than trying to read mdb)

</comment><comment><USER22> I've never heard of mdb before. I mean I've never actually used Solaris (OpenSolaris/illumos to be specific) for anything other than a few experiments here and there but nothing in production. But I've been intrigued by it mostly due to watching talks by Bryan Cantrill. It seems that at least Joyent bets heavily on it, and it seems that's mostly due to ZFS. There's also DTrace in this area, again haven't used it, but I've been itching to use bpftrace on Linux as an equivalent. Anyway, what I really came to ask is, who uses Solaris or illumos? Does it have a future? How relevant is it?

<comment><USER8> I've been using illumos on and off since it was called "OpenSolaris" and illumos is rapidly becoming less relevant just due to the tiny ecosystem. dtrace and mdb are both great tools, but it's getting to the point where ZFS on Linux (which possibly can't even be shipped as a binary without violating the Linux EULA) is seeing more usage than all other downstream consumers (and ZFS/FreeBSD was probably a wider usage than Illumos for a long while now).

Ultimately being a libre *nix that is better in a few ways than Linux seems to be a long-term losing proposition, as Linux will eventually check all the boxes you (even if it's not quite as nice) thus steadily shrinking your niche.

<comment><USER23> > the Linux EULA

What are you talking about? This isn't a thing that exists as far as I'm aware.

<comment><USER8> [https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.18/process/license- rules....](https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.18/process/license-rules.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> And that's why you must monitor your servers health. You know, for when they're starting to act funny.

I'm not related in any way with them but as a personnal favorite (I even use it at home) I'd recommend Zabbix as it's open source and quite straighforward to install and deploy its agents, once configured you can even forget about it.

Gosh, its default alerts will give you hints on things you never considered checking before while the integration of new/bespoke software can be done in a matter of minutes.

</comment><comment><USER25> Heh. I've yet to witness a system yet that survived no disk space. Lucky the whole thing didn't lock up, had a remote mail server die like that and required an on-site intervention.

</comment><comment><USER26> Hm. I am impressed by the casual kernel debugging. I couldn't do that. However, why would I have to do that if running check_disk on all important file systems tells me if file systems are >80% or >90% full?

There'll be bugs I cannot debug, because I cannot casually debug my linux kernel. Yes. I still have to encounter them personally, but I'll get there. But this just seems weird, because this is a very, very basic problem to monitor for.

<comment><USER27> Nobody thought to run "df"? Disk being full is a common source of all sorts of weird server problems.

<comment><USER28> > Nobody thought to run "df"? Disk being full is a common source of all sorts > of weird server problems.

Yep, to the point where `df -h` has become one of the first things I run when a server starts acting funny or things stop working.

Disk being full is far too common - run away logging, weird temp files, etc, or sometimes just a box that nobody maintained for years and years.

The fun part starts after you've identified which partition or drive is full - now you have to identify the problem files!

<comment><USER29> First things you run on login?

It ought to be monitored with alerting by default and inode use too.

<comment><USER27> True. Unfortunately good monitoring is an afterthought in most organizations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> No production monitoring type alert went "blip" when the disk(s) started filling past a certain percentage?

</comment><comment><USER31> I've encountered a ton of these at my previous and current job, in Linux.

The primary problem is that forms of ps output that read the full command line (from /proc/$pid/cmdline) require reading memory from the process. This requires, at least, a read-lock on the process's memory map semaphore (mmap_sem), and lots of other things like to access mmap_sem, including other memory allocation (write lock), a page fault (read lock, so you can figure out what to fault in), etc. In particular, if the process is in the middle of mapping or faulting a mapped page from a slow filesystem - such as NFS or a network-backed block device provided by a hypervisor - then it can sit around with mmap_sem for arbitrarily long.

Usually the process taking a read lock on its own mmap_sem, or someone else taking a read lock, is harmless, since it's a reader-writer lock and there can be multiple readers. But as soon as a writer declares an intent to take a write lock, further readers are blocked to avoid writer starvation, which means a single slow reader will prevent all further readers. See [http://blog.nelhage.com/post/rwlock- contention/](http://blog.nelhage.com/post/rwlock-contention/) for some excitement there.

You can generally read /proc/$pid/comm (short command line) and /proc/$pid/status, which both just reference info in the kernel's task_struct, and don't require taking a lock on the userspace memory map. You can also read /proc/$pid/syscall, which will tell you what syscall it's in and the numeric arguments, and usually you can read /proc/$pid/stack, which tells you the kernel stack of the process. (Though I have recently found that that one _also_ takes a lock, but fortunately one that's much less frequently contended.) If you're trying to make sense of why a system is stuck, and ps aux is unresponsive, my goto is grep 'disk sleep' /proc/ * /status, followed by reading the corresponding /proc/$pid/stack. If you're lucky, you'll see which module is slow (filesystem / block I/O? networked filesystem? FUSE? etc.) and can try to address that. Or perhaps you'll see several processes trying to get a lock on something and one that looks like it's holding a lock and stuck doing work; if you can address (perhaps kill) that process, the system might make progress.

lsof likes to read /proc/$pid/maps, the list of mapped files, which of course requires an mmap_sem read lock. It does this so that it can list files that are mapped but no longer have a file descriptor (e.g., shared libraries get opened, mmaped, and closed). If you know that you're only interested in files with file descriptors - e.g., you're looking for a socket, or something - <USER2> can do this with less contention by looking at /proc/$pid/fd/, which is a directory of magical nodes that show up as symlinks to open files. (They're not really symlinks; for instance, they'll work even if the actual file is deleted. But you can ls -l them as if they were symlinks, so ls -l /proc/ * /fd/ * | grep is a pretty decent alternative to lsof.)

[sorry about the formatting, HN is really enthusiastic about asterisks]

</comment><comment><USER32> Sounds like an excellent edit: [ strikeout Linux] kernel bug report

<comment><USER33> It's solaris, not linux.

<comment><AUTHOR> And there was no point in reporting kernel bugs to Sun/Oracle at the time, because they did not care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> this is more confirmation of my anecdotal experience that when things fail it's 90% of the time a FS problem (run out of space, run out of inodes etc), thanks :)

</comment><comment><USER35> Just df -h, dude.

<comment><USER36> Right, how do you know to check that? What if you're out of inodes, would you know to check for that, just randomly because a process is acting weird? Learn something everyday.

<comment><USER35> The experience came from the days when I wasn't able to debug yet, and when full disks were frequent for similar reasons.</comment></comment></comment>


Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are now VCs - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/04/27/meet-silicon-valleys-newest-vcs-tyler-and-cameron-winklevoss-video/ <comment><USER2> The Zuck > Winklevoss thing here is out of control. Do you guys even understand what really happened?

This is not a tale of "Rich assholes tell hacker about their idea, then sue him for building it without them."

This is "Rich assholes come to hacker with mostly built site, he agrees to finish it up for an equity stake, and then lies to them for two months about progress _to make sure that he can beat them to market_."

Do all of you Winklevoss-haters even realize that the site was almost done when Zuck joined up?

That the guy that started building the site worked on it for four months and only stopped because he graduated to get a job at Google?

That the next contractor specifically referred Zuck as a good person to get the job finished when he had to leave?

That if Zuck had said "no" they would have found someone else to finish it, but he didn't say "no" because he realized how important it was to be first to market?

It's not like this was some fucking pie-in-the-sky idea. There was code on the table (crafted by a guy that got a job at Google a few months later, so probably pretty decent code), and they were putting money behind getting it finished. The only reason that Facebook beat them to market is that _Zuckerberg lied to them for four months about working on it_. Specifically so that he could delay them, from the looks of it - his IMs indicate that within a couple weeks of first meeting with them, he'd already decided to string them along but had no intention of actually doing the work.

Do I like the idea of non-technical founders getting hackers to work for equity? No, I don't. It's their right, and it's the hacker's right to foolishly say yes, but I don't think it's ideal.

But I'm far more offended at the idea that a hacker agrees to take on the task of finishing a project, digests the confidential IP (including code) that they've agreed to flesh out, and then lies to the client to delay them and then crush them in the market. That's disgustingly unethical (not to mention fraudulent) behavior.

If you question whether Zuck's motives were really that sinister, read some of his IMs, like the one he sent to Eduardo, in December (3 months before launch, as he was telling the twins that the site was "almost complete"): "Check this site out: www.harvardconnection.com and then go to harvardconnection.com/datehome.php. Someone is already trying to make a dating site. But they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them. So I'm like delaying it so it won't be ready until after the facebook thing comes out." ([http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-was- founded-2010...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-was- founded-2010-3) \- there's more sinister stuff there, too)

Shit like this? He should have lost 100% of the business, plain and simple, and (to their discredit) if the Winklevoss twins had played the legal dispute competently (they should have pushed harder, earlier, and they obviously should not taken the settlement offer when they did), _he would have_.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to see the source code to that site at the point it was handed off to Zuck. If this was really near finished, or at least significantly far along, it would be extremely illuminating.

Here's the thing though. How could the Winklevoss twins get strung along for 4 months? Not that this has any relevance to the ethics of the matter. But their contribution to developing this idea was simply money. They needed technical people to build on that idea. Outside of this one idea they funded, they haven't done anything significant or relevant in business since. And now they're just spending money that they got from the settlement.

I'd much rather take a $5 Starbucks coffee and a conversation with Paul Graham over $1M in funding from the Winklevoss twins. I just don't see what value they bring to the table. Money can be found all over the place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tyler Winklevoss: "We were there at the beginning of web 2.0.."

Yes, technically you were both alive on earth at the time. So was my Nana, my creepy uncle Hank, and about 6 billion other people.

</comment><comment><USER5> I didn't watch the video, but the first question I had was - wouldn't they have become VCs anyway? Harvard Business School, upper class background (right schools, right clubs, etc), probably a massive rolodex (Larry Summers at the very least), and one startup that failed because they didn't hire good lawyers to make sure their programmer didn't get uppity.

This seems to fit the profile of thousands of people in the valley.

<comment><USER6> I don't think they have Summers' info on their rolodex.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjJgUlme1XQ>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I guess one good thing that came out of the Social Network is that they will never live down their parts in the movie. Especially being portrayed as "bad guys." Just the start of the interview the first 30 seconds must have been very awkward for them.

<comment><USER8> I only saw it once a while ago, but I don't think they were portrayed as 'bad guys' in the film. They even came out in support of how their story was told in the movie.

<comment><USER9> To me it portrayed them as money-grabbing, egotistical and a bit moronic. Is it possible that the film manages to re-inforce whatever views the watcher had before seeing the film, I wonder what somebody who had never heard of those twins before seeing the film would think of them.

<comment><USER10> Is that because in the end we are rooting for Zuckerberg?

I mean I could understand 'naive' and even understand dislike for kids who come from old money.

Yet money-grabbig/egotistical is a bit weird to parse. Heck if it was a kid from lesser beginnings and he fought back, he would have been the hero of the movie.

<comment><USER9> I'm not a huge fan of Zuckerberg in real life - I admire what he's done, but not his personality. But in the movie, he's written to be the hero, a hero with flaws certainly but hero none-the-less. So yes that's certainly part of it, but just as he was written to be the hero, so too were the twins written to be the bad guys, even if they weren't as bad as we might expect hollywood villains to be.

I don't think egos is weird to parse, they didn't just come from money (incidentally I come from money, to a lesser extent, so that doesn't set me automatically against people), they were the type of people that think their coming from money makes them superior in more ways that just their bank account balance.

As to money-grabbing, it's my opinion both from the actual story and also the movie, that they frankly didn't deserve the money they got from Facebook, so yeah they were money-grabbing in their legal pursuits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> People are being way too negative about this. So, they were a pair of "idea guys" who failed to execute and then managed to grab more than their fair share of the latest Valley success story. Does this warrant their eternal membership in the tech community's pantheon of evil?

It seems to me like they're trying to put the Facebook thing behind them and use their wealth constructively. If you think startups are generally a net positive for the world, then more money going into startups has to be a good thing. And you have to admit they do have _some_ ability to spot big ideas.

<comment><USER2> _People are being way too negative about this. So, they were a pair of "idea guys" who failed to execute and then managed to grab more than their fair share of the latest Valley success story._

I'd be fine with the negativity if that was even what happened. But it's not.

They _didn't_ "fail to execute". They were fairly far along in the process of executing ("the previous HarvardConnection programmers had already made progress on a large chunk of the coding: front-end pages, the registration system, a database, back-end coding, and a way users could connect with each other", according to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConnectU>), and would have finished up just fine with someone else if Zuck hadn't signed on and lied about progress specifically to delay them (that this was his intention came out pretty clearly in the IM conversations that were leaked a couple years ago, he basically lays out his plan to feign progress so that they don't look for someone else to finish ConnectU up before Facebook launches).

It's one thing to get beat to market because you didn't hire the right programmer, that's a straightforward failure of execution; it's another thing altogether to get beat to market by the very programmer that you hired to beat the competitors to market. That makes you a victim of fraud, and I have a lot of sympathy for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "We focus on early stage disruptive startups." Does this scare anyone else? Just feels like people with money are throwing it around and making it look pretty with buzz words.

<comment><USER13> "Just feels like people with money are throwing it around"

Also, there is this quote: "One of the areas of focus for their fund is cloud computing"

So, it looks like EXACTLY that. They will probably end up with lots of "Pets.com 2.0"

<comment><USER12> I wouldn't be surprised if the entire startup ecosystem doesn't end with a bunch of Pets.com clones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Operational experience" == "litigation experience"?

<comment><USER15> I LOL-ed really hard when they claimed they had relevant/useful "operational experience".

<comment><USER16> I don't know about you, but I remember ConnectU.com being an actual, usable website. Not that it at any point gained traction over Facebook, but they did at least execute the idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Money is the great equalizer. I don't imagine they'll have any trouble getting start-ups to take their money. Then again, 65 million seems like a lot of money but if these guys don't know what they're doing it won't last them very long.

<comment><USER18> That initial 65 million in equity is worth easily 3x that much now, even more post-IPO

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> They didn't seem to have much original to say. Everything they discussed could have been gleaned from Techcrunch, Mashable, etc.

I wonder if their money and network will be enough to compensate for lack of (real) operational experience when they court top tier startup teams.

Reading PG or Thiel, or watching Andreesen's presentations at <http://ecorner.stanford.edu>, there's a world of value beyond money that they bring to table.

</comment><comment><USER20> Would working for the Winklevoss'es be a black mark on someone's resume?

For one thing, you'd never get hired at Facebook after that. Then again, Facebook isn't the only game in town.

<comment><USER21> Honestly, I doubt they occupy more than a passing thought in Mark Zuckerberg's, or Facebook's, minds these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> They actually come across fairly well. They mention the history of timesharing. Which is an important indicator that they pay attention to history.

This is key, we've had "social networks" since the 80's. We called them BBSes. We dialled them up to chat, play online games, etc. Bring some historical perspective to the party and you can short circuit a lot of work - or just pass off something old as new again.

Their focus on enterprise tech is probably a good one too.

</comment><comment><USER23> They are not VCs. They are opportunist/tech celebs with a pool of cash. I simply do not see the announcement of them "becoming VCs" as much more than PR. When they actually start investing and getting returns, THEN let's give them some attention.

</comment><comment><USER24> Imagine they invest in your startup and later say "It was our idea!"...

But on a serious note: I'm happy for them because they'll see now that business is more than suing someone for the mere idea.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think they should hire Aleksey Vayner as their spokesperson.

<comment><USER26> I wonder how many will get that. I still remember the guy, he's awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "we think the cloud will be really big"

mind. blown.

<comment><USER25> followup question: "how big? can you show me?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> that was painful

</comment><comment><USER29> Who?

</comment><comment><USER30> So since I have only watched the Social Network I'm very uninformed about the Winklevoss brothers and facebook. Can someone throw up some links to give me some more datapoints on the issue. From my point of view they are the same as normal VCs

<comment><USER31> I didn't downvote you but I wanted to respectfully point out that your question could have been more easily answered by taking a moment to Google about the Winklevoss brothers and the Social Network, rather than post your comment here. That kind of thing is all just a few clicks away at any time, on the web.

<comment><USER30> Thanks for the reply, I was wondering why my HN points had dropped. I think my original post should have read, "The Winklevoss brothers seem to be fairly normal VCs with a short track record of backing good ideas. Why are people _here_ on HN dismissive of them." Live and learn I guess.</comment></comment></comment>