Kalzumeus Software Year In Review 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/01/06/kalzumeus-software-year-in-review-2013/

<comment><USER2> A pedantic correction not for its own sake -- Patrick's meaning wasn't in any doubt -- but because I think it's quite interesting.

Not "bellweather" but "bellwether". A wether is a male sheep. A bellwether is a male sheep at the head of a flock, around whose neck a bell is hung so that you can hear where the flock is even when you can't see it. (The rest of the flock will follow its leader like, um, sheep.)

So a bellwether is a single thing whose behaviour is a leading indicator of that of a larger-scale bunch of other related things.

</comment><comment><USER3> I appreciate how open this post is. The cash crunch section struck a cord. For anyone considering starting something on their own: build a buffer. Build a bigger buffer than you think you'll need.

I started three years ago, out of school. I'm not a hacker, and didn't have an immediately monetizeable skill. I saw an opportunity to build recurring revenues (through e-book sales with a partner) and pursued it as fast as I could.

The strategy worked. Those recurring revenues are wind under my wings, and gave me the skills to expand my business into other areas.

But man, that was a tough couple years. I was constantly short on cash. Historically, when people guessed my age, they guessed [biological age - 3]. Once in this rough period, people guessed my biological age!

2013 was the year my business took off. In the final six months I earned enough to pay off my loans from school, my taxes for the year, and build a savings buffer. That was from being almost bankrupt in June.

What a difference. I feel relaxed. People now guess [biological age - 1 or 2], so the decrease in stress must be having an effect. I look more rejunvenated to myself in the mirror.

I can see and pursue opportunities much more effectively. And it's all because I have a relatively small amount of excess dollars in a bank account. That surplus allows you to raise your head and look around.

Build a buffer.

Some time ago a HN member posted about maxims he uses to guide his life, and he ended up making a daily maxim site. This one came up yesterday, it's quite relevant:

[http://www.maxims.us/build-superreserves/](http://www.maxims.us/build- superreserves/)

<comment><USER4> It's good advice, and maybe build that buffer working contracts that might give you domain insight into markets you're thinking about working with.

And to extend the advice slightly, learn to live more cheaply...

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I should have pointed out the second part. I should have lived more cheaply than I did. I frittered away money here and there that could easily have tided me through a couple of short term crunches. And I could have more easily pursued several medium run goals had I had such a buffer earlier on through saving.

I've found tracking spending has made me a lot more conscious of where the money goes, and doesn't take much effort. My spending fell naturally once I knew where it was.

I also incorporated more of those hidden liabilities patrick talked about into a spreadsheet where I have an estimate of finances at month's end. Seeing my total net worth on this sheet rise has been highly motivational. It also helped me accurately assess what margin of savings I'd need at bare minimum.

Note: I tried mint, but found it didn't produce the same effect as entering data manually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _When I got very busy or stressed, one of my coping mechanisms was avoiding opening email, out of an irrational fear of finding more work or stress in my inbox._

Reading such a honest sentence triggers a lot of emotions at the same time. It helped me realise that I've really been guilty of this, and that it is now time for me to change.

I had no idea I would learn so much before I clicked this link. Great post.

</comment><comment><USER6> Found an interesting comment from a guy called Fildo on patio11's blog:

 _Hmm,

that makes me wonder. 2013 was the first year I started selling my (desktop) software and I made a little more than you – without doing all the A/B testing and marketing dance. Makes me wonder if I should follow your path (originally I intended to do so) or if I should keep improving my product (adding more features).

The thing is that my software is not trivial and does some pretty complex things. Maybe that's the difference? The retail price is about the same.

I'm pretty confused now._

<comment><USER4> The thing is, we believe patio11, there's no way to work out whether this poster is simply trolling or not. Making six figures in 12 months from a standing start working alone is very, very hard.

That said, I was surprised, initially, to see the total profit of $60k. Thinking again, I'd say the call he made was that BCC was never going to scale to any major extent. Instead, it's just background cash generation while he searches for a market/product with more promise.

<comment><USER6> I agree with your point: BCC is a niche market.

Though I wonder if BCC even has achieved its potential. I was surprised by patio11's statement:

 _I'm sorry, Bingo Card Creator does not support using clip art. Have a nice day._

Maybe he was joking. Clip art seems to be a feature straightforward to implement, IMHO should have been part of the feature set to begin with.

<comment><USER7> The straightforward implementation of clip art would be larger than BCC in complexity, be used by almost no one, and not appreciably increase sales.

For example, you have to create a UX which allows non-technical customers who largely do not understand the file system metaphor to upload 25+ images, edit them, scale them to bingo card box size without making them look terrible, and then successfully print in greyscale.

<comment><USER8> I (obviously) don't know your business, but the fact that the clip art / images question is part of your standard operating procedure gives me the impression that it would be used by quite a few of your customers. You may be right that it wouldn't improve sales numbers.

As to the UX, I was under the (possibly mistaken) impression that in today's day and age, most users on the internet, technical or not, understand the filesystem metaphor just fine. They send photos and other files over email, facebook, and other media frequently.

<comment><USER9> _I was under the (possibly mistaken) impression that in today 's day and age, most users on the internet, technical or not, understand the filesystem metaphor just fine._

Did you see Google's video where they asked people what browser they use? Many used Google, sometimes using Yahoo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I found it interesting that in one breath you lay out your plan to land enterprise sales and in the next speak of the poor quality of the underlying code base.

A good lesson for software developers, you don't need NASA hardened code to make money.

</comment><comment><USER11> "MarkDev"? Assuming its the same thing, I've been calling this "dev- marketing", in the same vein as "dev-ops". Much better than calling it "growth hacking".

(In the future, everything will be prefixed with dev- because _software is eating the world_ (TM), until eventually everything is software and we can drop the prefix again.)

<comment><USER12> One caveat is that "developer marketing" already exists as a term representing the effort to market a product/technology to developers for adoption. (ex: developer evangelist)

<comment><USER11> Right, but "dev-marketing" is a different word than "developer marketing".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> patio11, no idea if this is applicable in Japan, but in certain conditions here in Italy (you work as an independent consultant), you have to pay into Social Security rather than the Italian equivalent. This saved me a _bundle_ of money, but it's not a widely known fact, and I didn't realize it before I found an accountant that knows how to deal with financial stuff for US persons living in Italy. Worth looking into for other Americans living abroad. I found that H&R Block had an office near the US base in Vicenza with a guy that knows both systems pretty well. It was a very happy discovery for me, because I've always felt that the US-based guys were just kind of guessing about how things worked with my living abroad.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I pay into Japanese SS and am exempted from the US version due to the US-Japan Social Security Totalization Agreement. Figuring this out was not exactly trivial for me, and absolutely mystified the local clerks in Ogaki.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks for the great write-up.

You state that your mailing list is far more beneficial for yourself and your readers than your blog, because it allows a more personal relationship. This bears the question: How would you start such a mailing list from scratch without a blog? Or do you think a blog is still the first step? I mean, somehow, you have to be known for your skills and there must be some sort of desire to sign up for it.

Your mailing list is not necessarily "advice on conversion optimization" but more "patio11's take on stuff". I, at least, am in your mailing list, because I'm interested in what this patio11 guy in particular (with your skills and your background) has to say about things.

<comment><USER7> _How would you start such a mailing list from scratch without a blog?_

Say one (or more) interesting thing publicly, promise more interesting things in return for signing up for the mailing list.

It's certainly easier to bolt things onto a platform than to build a platform from scratch, but everybody starts with +/\- nothing, so having nothing should not deter you from starting that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Stormpulse seems interesting. Enterprisy but not the run-of-the-mill CRUD application, so probably more fun to make.

</comment><comment><USER16> Patrick - have you considered selling BCC?

<comment><USER7> I suppose like all businesses it is on sale for the right price, but I haven't given much thought to actively attempting to sell it beyond "I don't think the standard going rates for small Internet businesses would value this highly enough to make me want the lump-sum of money more than I like owning it."

<comment><USER17> Have you considered that selling BCC would give you more time for Appointment Reminder?

<comment><USER7> I don't believe that to be true. BCC is very close to running itself at present. Selling BCC would mean a lot of effort to make a clean break from it -- for example, my bookkeeping system is inextricably entangled it it at present ("It sounded like a great idea in 2008!"), so I'd need to rip that out, set up a new bookkeeping system, teach my VA how to work that, sanitize the DB backups, etc. Also, selling it is likely to be a protracted process -- there would need to be contracts/escrow/technical assistance/etc.

There is, of course, a nuclear option to shut down transactions, EOL the product, and shut down any support other than FAQ/T1/"Here's how to request a refund check." That's probably less work to set up than selling it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Excellent read! I always enjoy seeing these and am so appreciative that you put them out there. Was 2013 not the year where AR went crazy and called a bunch of people in the middle of the night? I remember reading about that and being impressed with how you handled that situation, but if that wasn't in 2013.... then, sigh, time flies.

Also, I'm almost positive "asterix" (vs asterisk) is used tongue-in-cheekly, right? Just making sure...

<comment><USER7> I might have retold that story in 2013, but off the top of my head I think it was back in November 2011 or so.

The great thing about being a good writer is people assume your spelling mistakes aren't! Maybe I'll eventually level up to Shakespeare Tier, where words come into being just because I liked the sound of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> As always, thanks for a great writeup.

I think I speak for everyone when I say that I'm enormously appreciative of your writing, and the internet would be a whole lot duller without you around. More importantly, our wallets would be a whole lot lighter without you around as well. And I say this as someone who doesn't directly do dev-marketing.

</comment><comment><USER20> Patrick, thank you for another enlightening writeup. Sometimes I feel the HN crowd take the honesty and transparency of these 'internet-famous' entrepreneurs for granted.

Posts like these have been a great source of inspiration for running my own startups and whilst each individual business is different, I have gained immeasurably from them. Thank you.

I've also learned from a few others who have written on this subject:

[http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/bootstrappers-2013-year-r...](http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/bootstrappers-2013-year- review/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Having had a similar business to appointment reminder in the past and not getting the traction I was looking for, folded too quickly (after 6 months of operations) and I still regret the decision.

I applaud Patrick for keeping that business around for long enough to get paying customers and even trying to penetrate the enterprise world.

Patrick, besides the SEO ninja skills you applied to appointment reminder for inbound traffic, did you reach out to others via any outbound marketing?

</comment><comment><USER22> A couple questions about the virtual agent if you're inclined to answer.

How did you choose that company? How much does it cost? Can she also do phone support or only email?

<comment><USER7> I had heard from a few friends that they had good experiences with VAs from the Philippines so I googled something generic and found Pepper. This was years ago. I tried them out and they were adequate for my needs.

I'm on the "20 hours for ~$300 a month" plan. This is, FWIW, within striking distance of what you'd pay to hire a college graduate full time, but I find it easier to go through a company to avoid the headaches of that.

The VAs are pretty amenable to doing anything reasonable with a computer, which includes phone support. I haven't asked for it, both because I don't offer phone support for Bingo Card Creator and because the US workday would mean anyone offering it from the Philippines would have to be up very late at night, which I do not feel is a reasonable thing to ask of freelancers/employees under most circumstances.

<comment><USER22> Thanks for detailed response.

Is this a typical cost for VA's, or is there a way to save substantial money compared to hiring a US employee?

<comment><USER23> If you hire directly you can find competent employees in the Philippines with good english for around $2/hour USD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Great post! I enjoy reading these, thanks for making the info public. I have one question: Is it not very risky to angel invest in only 1-2 companies per year? I thought you needed to invest in around 5-10 in order to have a decent chance at finding the 'hit' business as most of the others will fail.

</comment><comment><USER24> Thanks for taking the time to write this up, Patrick, it was worth the read. Hope your goal for looking after yourself better this year is achieved successfully! :)

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm intrigued that you have a person named Sugar working for you.

<comment><USER13> Some people in some countries on the "periphery" (I'm not quite sure what the right term is, but places that use English for some things without it really being native) of the English speaking world sometimes adapt English words for names in interesting ways. My son goes to nursery school with a boy named Happiness Prosper.

<comment><USER26> Sounds like a 17th century English puritan ... [http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/09/13/puritan_name...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/09/13/puritan_names_lists_of_bizarre_religious_nomenclature_used_by_puritans.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Creating a JVM language - <AUTHOR> http://jakubdziworski.github.io/categories.html#Enkel-ref <comment><USER2> The next step is using Truffle to bypass bytecode generation and interact directly with Graal -- HotSpot's next-gen (JIT/AOT) compiler -- and its amazing optimizations:

Writing a Language in Truffle: [http://cesquivias.github.io/tags/truffle.html](http://cesquivias.github.io/tags/truffle.html)

<comment><USER3> I read a bit about truffle combined with graal (before deciding to go with asm) but could not find many useful resources. Seems like it is a very new stuff. I will definitely take a look at those blog posts.

<comment><USER4> Graal will be usable in Java 9, and Truffle has been relatively stable for a while now. If you are doing a project from scratch I would highly recommend trying them out.

You can talk to the Graal and Truffle teams directly on [https://gitter.im/graalvm/graal-core](https://gitter.im/graalvm/graal-core) if you can't find where to start or have questions.

I lead the Ruby implementation [https://github.com/jruby/jruby/tree/master/truffle](https://github.com/jruby/jruby/tree/master/truffle) which along with FastR is one of the most sophisticated open-source users of Truffle and Graal.

<comment><USER5> Chris came to give a talk at the DocklandsLJC recently, which gives a great intro to these to technologies.

[http://docklandsljc.uk/2016/04/truffle-graal-clojure- neo4j.h...](http://docklandsljc.uk/2016/04/truffle-graal-clojure-neo4j.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love the writing style, the detail, the example code.

This is an incredibly well-made project.

(Also, I love the Polish in-jokes. :)

<comment><USER7> > Polish in-jokes

You can't just say that and leave us hanging!

<comment><USER8> For non-polish speaking: Even that all code and articles are written in English, author uses: var dupa="dupa" as an example variable. Dupa means an ass, a booty and also an atractive woman in sexual contexts.

Dupa is often used as 'foo' variable by Polish programmers and used to be most popular password (like qwerty).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Similar articles but for Erlang BEAM would be great as well.

</comment><comment><USER10> Any one know what the program (or is that a property of ANTLR?) being used to get an on the fly pretty printed version of the AST is from the fifth article [1].

[1][http://jakubdziworski.github.io/enkel/2016/03/23/enkel_5_cla...](http://jakubdziworski.github.io/enkel/2016/03/23/enkel_5_classes.html)

<comment><USER3> This is exactly this : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h60VapD1rOo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h60VapD1rOo) . This feature is kind of hidden but extremly powerful</comment></comment>


Mill CPU is Immune to Spectre, Meltdown [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://millcomputing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Spectre.03.pdf <comment><USER3> The paper's findings are more nuanced than the title.

1) The Mill's specializer (effectively a compiler code generator) did have a bug that emitted code susceptible to a Spectre-like attack. The specializer has been fixed. (Fortunately, there's no installed base of Mills to be patched.)

2) The author pointed out that Spectre and Meltdown are specific cases of the general problem: if a cache has any effect on execution speed, it has side effects that can be observed and potentially exploited by an attacker.

3) This paragraph is intriguing for what it doesn't say.

> We have internally discussed mitigations to - and elimination of - <USER2> > attacks, even before we became aware of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks. A > cache that is still an effective cache, but where eviction tells you less or > nothing about what evicted it, would be generally immune to all cache > attacks. However, we do not have any security enhancements to the general > caching problem for disclosure at this time.

<comment><USER4> #1 was the most interesting part of this paper to me. I don't think I've seen a compiler variant of Spectre discussed elsewhere, and now I'm curious whether a similar issue might be present in more mainstream compilers too. The key bit seems to be that a compiler optimization that converts an explicit conditional to branchless code is doing the software-level moral equivalent of speculative execution (because it executes both sides of a conditional, and then throws one side out).

<comment><USER5> > The key bit seems to be that a compiler optimization that converts an > explicit conditional to branchless code is doing the software-level moral > equivalent of speculative execution (because it executes both sides of a > conditional, and then throws one side out).

Isn't speculative execution only a potential problem when the speculative executer has access to memory that the code in question is not supposed to have access to?

I.e. compiler-speculative execution, as it were, is not a problem, because the compiler can't reveal anything it doesn't know about (private memory), whereas a CPU can reveal information about private memory because it has access to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Vaporware does tend to be pretty bug-free.

<comment><AUTHOR> What part of the paper do you take issue with?

Can you point to a specific design feature in the linked paper (or in any of the talks on the Mill CPU) that might be vulnerable?

<comment><USER7> > What part of the paper do you take issue with?

There exists no Mill CPU - just software models of it at best.

<comment><USER8> Do you not think it's reasonable to believe that the Mill is immune to _these_ flaws without hardware given the information presented in this paper?

<comment><USER7> It is plausible, but without having a concrete CPU on which independent researchers are able to do independent tests I am rather cautious.

Intel, AMD and ARM also claimed that the branch prediction on their CPUs cannot in practise be used to generate a side channel - Spectre proved otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there an FPGA implementation of a Mill CPU, or even a scaled-down version (32 bits maybe)?

<comment><USER10> Nope, just whitepapers, presentations, and patents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In the same way that "Code in Haskell is guaranteed to have no side effects"? [https://xkcd.com/1312/](https://xkcd.com/1312/)

<comment><USER12> It's always amusing to look back at failed predictions, even if they're tongue-in-cheek. Surely you're aware that comic was in jest.

[https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry](https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry)</comment></comment>


Quote: All I ask of you is one thing: please don't be cynical - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2117-all-i-ask-of-you-is-one-thing-please-don <comment><USER2> Similar requests:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052676>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057133></comment>


Nokia offers Lumia to owner of the Samsung Galaxy S4 which caught on fire - <AUTHOR> http://www.thewp-hub.com/2013/12/nokia-offering-lumia-to-samsung-user.html

<comment><USER2> When your company's devices are catching fire, you'd better send out replacements for free and without terms, because if you don't someone else will.

</comment><comment><USER3> So 6 lakh views is 600,000. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakh](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakh)</comment>


GitHub Compare View goes cross repository - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/blog/683-cross-repository-compare-view

<comment><USER2> GitHub is _really_ nailing the "make collaboration easy and enjoyable" stuff. I'm _way_ more inclined to pull a project's code, patch it, and send off a pull request when using github than I am on, say sourceforge (or even other comparable sites like bitbucket).

It's just so damn pleasant to use. It helps that a lot of really "neat" projects are hosted on it as well.

<comment><USER3> I'll second this. They really are doing a great job.

I'd like to add that I really like their funding model. I feel like it is very sustainable and I don't have to worry about them loading the site up with ads or something to make it work. Our interests are aligned because it's paid for by the developers themselves. They make awesome tools for me, and I pay for them.

I feel like this is an important and underappreciated aspect of their service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fucking awesome! I can finally move away from rietveld to a pure-GitHub only experience. Thank you guys!!</comment>


Developing your own Kubernetes controller in Java - <AUTHOR> https://blog.frankel.ch/your-own-kubernetes-controller/2/ <comment><USER2> Nice article, I like the emphasis that "you don't need anything else than HTTP and JSON to extend Kubernetes !".

Regarding the use-case, I just want to note that if you want to add a container next to every scheduled pod, it is best to have it be part of the pod itself rather than in another pod with another lifecycle. And to achieve that the best tool is not a plain controller, but a "mutating admission controller webhook", described here [https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn- authz/exte...](https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn- authz/extensible-admission-controllers/#admission-webhooks), which will allow you to, well, mutate, pod descriptions on the fly as they are submitted to the cluster (and add your sidecar container to it).

Of course, the goal of the article is to demonstrate lifecycle management by reacting to change (a controller), so it's all fair in this case :).

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice article(s)!

> Notice all the null parameters that need to be passed

Why, yes, I think we noticed those :)

Thanks to your article(s), I've begun calling the k8s api myself now in some experiments.

It actually works to call the REST API manually in dotnetcore (without a library), but I fear having to do with any self signed certificates that may be "defined" (? I've only heard of them so far) in kubeconfig would be too much to do oneself.</comment>


Secured at Docker – Diogo Mónica and Nathan McCauley - <AUTHOR> http://blog.docker.com/2015/03/secured-at-docker-diogo-monica-and-nathan-mccauley/

<comment><USER2> Good move for Docker to publicly improve on security!</comment>


Could We Dredge the Netherlands Without Fossil Fuels? - <AUTHOR> http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/08/could-we-dredge-the-netherlands-without-fossil-fuels.html <comment><USER2> The horse powered dredge boats are interesting to compare to today's technology. They don't specifically give dimensions, but considering the space it takes one horse to walk, plus some extra space for dredging and boat functions, it is easy to place 750 watts of solar panels in the same space.

You could make solar powered dredge boats which would be functionally equivalent to the horse boats. You'd only dredge when the sun shines, but you also wouldn't have to stop and change horses every hour and maintain dozens of horses per boat.

You would get a good 4-5 months of dredging 4 hours/day, and you'd get to take December and January off! (or operate a fraction of an hour a day).

You'd need about 20 thousand of the boats to keep up with current demand, so that might be a traffic congestion problem during the summer months.

<comment><USER3> Interesting ideas! Might want to take into account the customarily rainy weather in the Netherlands. The graph here shows roughly 50% of the time conditions are rainy, so your estimates might be somewhat over-estimating. Luckily there are other opportunities for green energy in the Netherlands, like wind power for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's an interesting article, but a better title would be "How the Netherlands were dredged without fossil fuels".

The article makes note of how wind power was used pre-electricification at several points (windmills, specialized sailboats) so they're not oblivious to that obvious answer.

Since it can be periodic and during daytime surely electric dredgers with umbilicals could do some of the heavy pumping based off a wind and solar powered grid. Would be interesting to see the dredging power requirements vs local renewable resources.

</comment><comment><USER5> Anywhere you'd really need to dredge, you can run power lines and dredge on tethered power electrically.

I think it's interesting from the standpoint of understanding human capacity and thinking differently about how we allocate our time and effort though. I'm not sure that typing 24/7 is the ideal way to build a life.

</comment><comment><USER6> Simplest to use biofuels or hydrogen cells for this sort of thing?

<comment><USER7> Biofuels has always been and should only be considered as a bridging solution. Crops use a bunch of elements that we really don't need for energy transfer but really do need for nutritious food. Phosphorous most significant among them, but plenty of other soil minerals too. Put them in an engine and poof, they're in the air not being good for much.

<comment><USER8> What about algae-based solutions?

I'm curious where the phosphorus and mineral losses come into play. Is it not totally feasible to repurpose the waste products of fuel production back into fertilizers?

<comment><USER7> I have my doubts as to whether it would be cost effective enough to filter out everything but the long chain hydrocarbon molecules (in the case of biodiesel), though ethanol based fuels might be better as they already have to be fairly well purified. Really depends on the individual chemistry I guess. Hopefully the waste isn't too contaminated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wind power and a long extension cord....

</comment><comment><USER10> Just put a big battery on a boat. If it gets good utilization and can charge inexpensively, it should pay for itself in fuel savings.</comment>


Burger King's meatless Impossible Whopper isn't completely vegetarian or vegan - <AUTHOR> https://www.insider.com/burger-kings-new-meatless-whopper-isnt-completely-vegetarian-2019-8 <comment><USER2> Burger King will most likely have to reevaluate where they are cooking these burgers. The articles outlines well how while eating vegan or vegetarian is better for the environment there will still be a number of customers who will not eat cross contamination, which is understandable.</comment>


Rotten Tomatoes' Revamp Could Save Captain Marvel - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/rotten-tomatoes-captain-marvel-trolls/ <comment><USER2> Pretty sure the movie was never in any real danger from trolls, but good news nonetheless.</comment>


Instagram star isn't real. But brands are buying in - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/25/technology/lil-miquela-social-media-influencer-cgi/index.html <comment><USER2> As it relates to sponsorship transparency, I think platforms such as instagram, youtube, etc have broader issues with their influencers whether CGI'ed or not...

I did find it really interesting that a CGI character could be more appealing to brands as there is much more complete control over image, no past issues, etc.

Reminds me of Hatsune Miku, virtual pop singer in Japan. As CGI continues to improve, wouldn't be surprised if we start to see entire digital labels churning out multitudes of artists/bankds

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

<comment><USER3> ~~Video killed the radio star~~

CGI killed the video star.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I"m shocked that fooled anyone. It looks like a video game character.

<comment><USER5> I think most people would assume it was just a heavily photoshopped photograph.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm more interested in the design choices behind her looks.

Why asian, why freckles? Why those facial proportions?

This can't just be one artists preference. There has to be business decisions behind it all of it.

Optimizing breast size for success on Instagram, is a design meeting I would love to listen in on!

</comment><comment><USER7> a few years from now, we're going to have the top instagram accounts all being photorealistic computer generated posts with AI determining the content that real humans want to see.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does it really matter if it's real, while attracting millions of real eyeballs? Pixar movies aren't real, and they attract millions of real people.

</comment><comment><USER9> CGI vs real but heavily photoshopped influencers...</comment>


Ask HN: What is Product-Market Fit? Explain like I'm five - <AUTHOR> Just saw a guy on Twitter claim that he grew his client's revenue from $170k to $850k, because of product-market fit. (https://twitter.com/zachmstuck/status/1293570074054397952)<p>I was under the impression that product-market fit means how well your business idea meets the market demand. Well, how can then a consultant change that? Am I missing something? <comment><USER2> My framework for this as a failing entrepreneur so far, so don't take too seriously:

There are 3 steps going from 0 to 1: 1\. problem/solution fit 2\. product/market fit 3\. business model fit

#1 determines whether or not you can make just a few people very successful in achieving some outcome they want where they are willing to pay you

#2 determines whether or not there's a market that highly demands your solution and you can convince them to pay you for it at scale

#3 determines whether the net profit and net profit growth YoY justifies working on the company

I think this tweet is saying the company already had product/market fit so scaling it was no problem.

Brian Balfour is someone who actually has some success. Here's his series for putting p/m fit in a different framework: [https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-market-fit-isnt- enou...](https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-market-fit-isnt-enough)</comment>


A free text-based MMO alternative to SimCity - <AUTHOR> http://www.reign.ws/?c=42 Totally exploiting this SimCity mess to plug my free game :P Reign is a completely free browser-based text-based persistent multiplayer strategy game.
It's kind of a 'coffee break game' as you make decisions, such as what to build, and then your nation carries out your orders while you're out living life.
The game is in active development (beta) and has about 130 active players right now.
Here's the game in a nutshell: Pick a modern day nation (that another player hasn't picked yet), build power plants, build residential, manage agriculture, issue executive orders, consult your general, draft citizens into military, manage citizen morale, build factories, trade uranium in the black market, trade with other players, form alliances, war.
Again, community-run, 100% free, no ads, no bullshit. Just pure fun.
Sorry to blatantly advertise, literally no other way to get the word out with a free game like this. I hope this isn't seen as out of bounds plugging. Honestly sorry if it is. I do genuinely think it's of interest to a sizable portion of the community and, again, it's a free thing.
Anyways, check us out if you're interested. Great community, good fun. Email me your feedback: firstname.lastname@example.com
Screenshots:
Mobile UI:

  - What to build next? http://i.imgur.com/4NR5vYE.png
  - Managing assets: http://i.imgur.com/kDgCsi5.png
  - World chat! Where nation leaders negotiate: http://i.imgur.com/nMAsVLc.png
  - When duty calls. Drafting an army: http://i.imgur.com/n4JzzNw.png
 Desktop UI:

  - The mysterious Black Market: http://i.imgur.com/KKgpRys.png
 Random ad I made but don't know what to do with: http://i.imgur.com/k8mCprV.jpg <comment><USER2> This reminds me more of Fallen London (formerly known as Echo Bazaar) [1] than SimCity. Fallen London was the first and only free-to-play game to get me hooked enough to pay the developers for some extras. I'd suggest anyone with an interest in either free-to-play games and/or the role of writing in video games to take a look at it.

Here's a review [2] and an analysis of the game's monetization [3].

The developers' blog has insights into their process and what they call "narrative engineering" [4]. It's best to read it oldest-to-newest.

[1] <http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/>

[2] [http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/03/30/impressions- falle...](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/03/30/impressions-fallen- london/)

[3] [http://www.gamesbrief.com/2012/09/my-f2p-journey-fallen- lond...](http://www.gamesbrief.com/2012/09/my-f2p-journey-fallen-london/)

[4] The post at [http://about.failbettergames.com/2010/02/27/echo-bazaar- narr...](http://about.failbettergames.com/2010/02/27/echo-bazaar-narrative- structures-part-one/) provides a starting point for learning about the latter.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty rough browser game. But seems to be going since 2010/11 and have a pretty tight community, so maybe really give it a shot if you never experienced such a game before. Probably will be fun.

Still, definitely not really an alterantive to SimCity. Sorry.

<comment><AUTHOR> The original Reign was released in 2004, so it's been around :} Yeah, SimCity was a bit of a stretch I admit, but Reign players did coin the term 'simcitiers' for defensive, cultured nations :P

<comment><USER3> Wow, 2004 is impressive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks distressingly like a BBS door game, a la BRE.

Those ate my life in the early 90's. I can only fear for my productivity now.

(I still get TW2002 web reboots every so often that can easily eat a week.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Always online as well? ;P

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, it's persistent!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how much lacking a privacy policy / data use policy hurts signups for something like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, good point. I should look into this. We need a new homepage too, yikes. Probably should have thought about this stuff before randomly posting a link up :X If you have any advice for me, I'm all ears (email@example.com).

<comment><USER7> is reign open source? Would be fun to hack around

</comment></comment></comment><comment> the-kenny Captain Picard is in charge of Defense?

<comment><AUTHOR> Who else? ;}</comment></comment>


Don't hate me for my .NET - <AUTHOR> http://boagworld.com/news/dont-hate-me-for-my-net <comment><USER2> I can't agree more with this post, after attending the Google Developer day as a .Net developer, I felt very much out of place. Every demo was done using Python or PHP or Ruby...also being a HN lurker, there is rarely any interest in .Net stories amongst startup developers.

Another hurdle with adoption is the sense of having to pay for everything good. With languages born out of the open source movement, there are ample complete source code samples to download / use.

Try finding good open source .Net products like CMS's without having to pay, there are some, but nothing of the quality coming out of the likes of PHP / Ruby / MySQL.

Still I hack on, it might not be as l33t as the open source guys, but I get my prototypes built and running, and that same sense of accomplishment :)

</comment><comment><USER3> The biggest problem preventing more widespread adoption of .NET on the web is hosting. Compared to Linux-based hosts, the market for Windows/IIS hosting is not quite as large, and also not quite as trusted.

.NET really is a great platform, it's just a bit hampered by the baggage (imagined or otherwise) that is the Microsoft juggernaut.</comment>


Coffee Shops Skip Wi-Fi to Encourage Customers to Actually Talk - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/technology/coffee-shop-wifi-access.html <comment><USER2> The article links to a 2005 NYT article about wifi-less coffee shops, and another to a 2010 version of the same. What a nothingburger!

Does anyone else have good reading on this subject? As someone who haunts coffee shops habitually, I've always figured it fell into a kind of Third Place[0], but weirdly didn't always promote socializing.

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


Showing you my new project: UXPatrol - <AUTHOR> http://uxpatrol.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, everybody! I just launched my new sideproject. It's called UXPatrol and it's a weekly newsletter with the best articles, videos and resources for UX designers.

Everybody can suggest a link and the newsletter is human curated by me.

Critique and ideas are welcome!</comment>


Show HN: I built a SSL expiration notifier - <AUTHOR> http://www.ssl-expiration-notifications.com/ Thoughts? Feedback? Suggestions? <comment><USER2> It didn't work on my site :(

<comment><AUTHOR> shoot me a message (info in my profile) and I'll double check for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> how often do you check the certificates?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now I check every two weeks, with checking every day inside of 90 days. I'm thinking about increasing this to be every 3-4 days though. Thoughts?</comment></comment>


US Journalist arrested after reporting on Venezuela - <AUTHOR> https://thegrayzone.com/2019/10/28/this-charge-is-one-hundred-percent-false-grayzone-editor-max-blumenthal-arrested-months-after-reporting-on-venezuelan-opposition-violence/ <comment><USER2> Arresting journalists is not a good look.

It doesn't justify an arrest or intimidation, _but_ : supporting the Maduro regime is not a good look either.

<comment><USER3> I mean whether or Maduro is good or bad is irrelevant. US-backed coups have routinely blown up in our faces.

Juan Guaidó is problematic in his own respects. The entire reason why the US backed his coup was because he (falsely) claimed he had the broad support of the military, only to later admit that he didn't have enough support. There's a very real chance the US may have committed itself to another war based on lies.

Foreign politicians feeding our national security complex false information is a bigger threat to our national security than Maduro. Think about the damage Rocco Martino and Naji Sabri did. Guaidó's only difference in so much as he was unsuccessful (so far).

<comment><USER2> > I mean whether or Maduro is good or bad is irrelevant.

Yes, it is totally irrelevant to an arrest or intimidation.

It is relevant in that you might not think highly of someone for supporting that kind of regime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really disappointing to see an article from The Gray Zone make the front page here, to be honest.

Everything in this article is misleading and convoluted, including the title.

<comment><USER5> >Everything in this article is misleading and convoluted, including the title.

Can you elaborate on a few of them?

<comment><USER6> There's literally 0 evidence presented in the article to suggest the arrest was political and the only source cited is the very guy who got arrested (their own reporter)...

<comment><USER5> >There's literally 0 evidence presented in the article to suggest the arrest was political

There's this:

>The arrest warrant was five months old. According to an individual familiar with the case, the warrant for Blumenthal's arrest was initially rejected. Strangely, this false charge was revived months later without the defendant's knowledge.

Sadly there's no court documents or police records to back up this claim.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


PM's open letter to EU citizens in the UK - <AUTHOR> https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pms-open-letter-to-eu-citizens-in-the-uk <comment><USER2> Is it unreasonable to expect a leader to put citizens of its own country first? A genuine question.

<comment><USER3> It's fucking stupid to think that UK citizens can provide all the workers the UK needs, especially for things like the NHS which runs on immigrant labour and will be impossible to safely staff without immigrant workers.

<comment><USER2> In the first place that's not what I said, thus straw man on your part. Secondly, surely if the UK cannot provide enough staff from the existing UK population the question should be primarly how to address that, rather than the easy fix of stealing other countries' talented people; thirdly, no one is talking about zero immigration; fourth, current policies do not mandate that EU immigrants must find work; fifth, what happens in future decades if the UK still needs cheap workers - going by your logic, why not invite the entire world to come to the UK? Sixth, EU immigration has lowered the wages of British labour; seventh, surely rather than the ponzi scheme of bringing in cheap labour we should all accept that we need to treat workers with dignity, pay them a proper wage and if prices need to rise to enable this then so be it.</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft's HoloLens 2: a $3,500 mixed-reality headset for the factory - T-A https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/24/18235460/microsoft-hololens-2-price-specs-mixed-reality-ar-vr-business-work-features-mwc-2019 <comment><AUTHOR> So does anyone think this is at the point where I can pick one up and do away with multiple monitors? (Hypothetically, I see they aren't selling to consumers yet)

I play a game called Elite Dangerous with my Oculus rift, and the UX of being able to have holographic windows around my person that I can look at to activate and control is so insanely powerful and so freeing, and I'm literally willing to drop multiple thousands of dollars on something right now that can give that experience with normal desktop software right now.

Sadly the Rift lacks any way to see the real world when it's on (which makes using a keyboard and mouse more difficult), and the resolution still has a ways to go before I can comfortably use it like this, not to mention the software still needs work for this use case.

But I can't wait until the day when I can get rid of the monitors on my desk and replace them with a headset. Being able to place normal 2d windows around my person, be able to maybe use some limited gestures to control them, and then the same keyboard and potentially mouse that in used to.

<comment><USER2> IMHO, what they need is to work on "ClearType for 3D" and/or "DirectWrite for 3D".

In the demo they use giant fonts, because text rendering sucks if you simply render text to a texture, then put that texture on a rotated plane in 3D. If that last stage was bypassed, e.g. when rendering text, the renderer would somehow know the rotation and distance, and draw the vector font directly into the screen pixels, they could get it crisp enough for most apps.

<comment><USER3> This challenge is one of the reasons we're so excited about pcwalton's work on Pathfinder ([https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder](https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder) )

<comment><USER4> I'm ashamed to realize that despite being well aware of Pathfinder, and of Mozilla's somewhat surprising pivot toward "mixed reality", this connection had never occurred to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For finger tracking, version 1 used random forests [1], because of the performance/hardware budget trade-off: they're harder to train than a traditional deep learning algorithm, but are much more efficient to compute on the device (branching being basically free on a CPU).

Version 2 uses a deep learning accelerator [2], which makes it possible to do the heavier computation of DNNs (which involve floating-point operations, which would be much more expensive on the CPU).

From an engineering perspective, I just love seeing how it touches all abstraction layers of the stack, and the types of solutions that come out of thinking about the silicon and the high-level ML models at the same time.

[1] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/2017/05/Towards-realistic-hands-gesture-interface.pdf)

[2] [https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~kklebeck/lebeck- tech18.pdf](https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~kklebeck/lebeck-tech18.pdf)

<comment><USER6> When you mention version 1 and 2, are you referring to the original hololens and the new one?

<comment><USER5> Yes. I'm referring to the original HoloLens and HoloLens 2, so to the hardware versions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 2x field of view (or possibly area of view, description could be read either way). Eye tracking. MEMS display. High grade low latency hand tracking. Improved set of default gesture recognizers. Spatial Anchors service for cross platform localizing (see same AR in same location on HoloLens, ARKit, AR Core). Some sort of geometry streaming service. Support for hardware customization (hardhats, etc). Also showed a separate stand-alone IoT Kinect + CPU/GPU hardware device.

</comment><comment><USER8> I was disappointed to see Microsoft is still working with the concept of apps. I think we need to rethink how we start experiences in mixed reality. Pointing and tapping an app makes sense for a touch/mouse device, but not for a device that's supposed to continuously immerse the user. Here's my alternative concept:

We need a search engine for holographic layer services. It would be like Google, but for MR experiences. Holographic services would use a protocol that defines a geofence to be discovered by the layer search engine's crawler over the internet (this could just be a meta tag on a classic website). The HoloLens or whatever MR device would continuously ping the search engine with its location, and the results would be ordered based on their relevance (size of geofence and proximity are good indicators). The MR device would then show the most relevant available layer in the corner of the FOV. Selecting the layer would allow enabling it either once or always, and the device would then deliver the holographic layer over the internet. The holographic layer would behave like a web service worker (in fact, it could be a web service worker) and would augment a shared experience which contains other active holographic layers. For example, your Google Maps holographic layer could be providing you with a path to walk to the nearest Starbucks, and once you're outside Starbucks, the Starbucks layer is also activated, which allows you to place an order.

This concept of activated layers, I think, is a great way to avoid a future where we're being bombarded with augmented signage and unwanted experiences. In fact, you could go further and enable blocking notifications about specific/certain types of available services. (ie. don't notify me about bars or fast food restaurants.)

<comment><USER9> That would make zero sense for Hololens - Hololens is an enterprise device that will in practice run one or two applications (e.g. the company training or maintenance tool). Also most industrial networks are behind heavy firewalls, so anything that actually depends on internet access is a problem.

Hololens also doesn't really work outdoors (display contrast and tracking are the largest limitations), so there is no point of designing a system for supporting that when the hardware is not usable in such scenario.

<comment><USER8> It would make zero sense for HoloLens _today_. The HoloLens doesn't even have a GPS chip. But Microsoft is building the future of MR in general. It's a space they want to own or at least lead, and their investment in Azure services for HoloLens today are proof of that. Obviously what I've described does not really favour industrial use (though I dispute the idea that this would not be achievable in industrial/enterprise environments.)

Indeed, HoloLens isn't great outdoors, however the current technology is capable of it (despite the HL design.) The visor can be darkened to function more like sunglasses, which solves the contrast problem.

I'm just looking 5-10 years out, in terms of what's going to be needed.

<comment><USER10> It doesn't make sense to develop for 5-10 years out; you need to build for today and sell for today. If that means running apps, then you run apps. When the need arises, it will be built.

Evolving technology from an existing place is generally more successful than trying to invent the end goal at the start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice. AR for the industry is an interesting field. I've worked a bit on real- time recognition and registration of CAD to point cloud, for another industrial grade AR headset, developed by another company. But unfortunately an exec from Qualcomm came in, brought in his buddies and flown the thing into the ground. Hopefully Microsoft will pick up the flag of AR for industrial use.

<comment><USER12> >Nice. AR for the industry is an interesting field

Yep I'm also happy about this and like the direction Microsoft seems to be going. Industrial applications have always seemed much more interesting and potentially widely beneficial than just targeting consumers and entertainment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I played with a HoloLens 1 briefly, which was both a revelation- AR feels like it could be useful in a way VR doesn't- and very frustrating. The worst part was the gesture recognition, which was the absolute bare minimum. The Air Tap was horrible.

Twice the FoV and with real hand tracking? That suddenly makes this thing viable in one step.

<comment><USER14> I generally feel like anything that requires your hands to be in the field of view (at anything near its current size) is an immediate non-starter, which is part of what ruined Air Tap for me. Plus it was just horribly imprecise.

We do stuff with our hands _largely_ away from the center of our vision. You might make a brief glance to calibrate yourself, but e.g. grabbing a thing doesn't require constant focus on the thing through the entire act.

<comment><USER15> This may be the least insurmountable challenge though: A pair of smart gloves will mostly solve this problem.

<comment><USER14> yep, that'd be the most comprehensive way certainly. downward-facing cameras could probably get most of it tho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The piano demo was by far the most exciting for me as someone who developed for the first HoloLens. Having used the first one extensively, the improved gestures support is IMO a more significant improvement than the FOV upgrade for long term use cases.

I'm interested to see how Firefox handles web browsing on HoloLens. I've always envisioned URLs in that context as a way of loading a new holographic experience into a shared space, as opposed to each URL providing its own separate experience (though this would be good as an option.)

</comment><comment><USER16> What's cool about the use-case they describe is that it's the perfect bridge between what humans are good at: improvised problem solving and movement, and what computers are good at: crunching and surfacing data. Is this the sweet spot?

<comment><USER17> >Is this the sweet spot?

Yes it is!

What is actually hilarious about this tech is that as the hardware gets better, the information it feeds you will ultimately be the most valuable piece. Crazy to think about when verifying validity a firehouse amount of data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So frustrating when videos I think of as marketing on YouTube are preceded by other ads. I get that this content is from theverge, not Microsoft, but the same could be said for YT shoving ads at you when you're already just trying to watch a movie trailer.

I'm sure a lot of folks rarely watch many entire segments of ads unless it's on their terms. Does further ad-walling that content not just reduce the overall number of eyeballs? It's like the only ad metrics seen as meaningful are the hostile ones..

<comment><USER19> My other pet peeve is movie trailers channels that start their videos with a 2-second mini trailer of the trailer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's pretty exciting, especially the doubled field of view

</comment><comment><USER21> Wake me up when you can use these in outdoor and dark lighting conditions. At that point they will be useful for several of my scientific needs.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's not a hologram, people. It's a very clever projector, but it's not a hologram at all.

The example given, showing someone where to put a bolt, is about making a human do a robot's job. The computer decides what has to be done, and tells the human exactly what to do. Like the picking system in Amazon warehouses. We're getting ever closer to Marshall Brain's "Manna".

 _Machines should think. People should work._

</comment><comment><USER23> So same as gglass now, how is that one doing in the enterprise market btw?

</comment><comment><USER24> It's a fascinating space. I'm Waiting for a startup, the 'Apple' of mixed reality, to take a fresh approach and create something for the rest of us.

</comment><comment><USER25> For the war _

</comment><comment><USER26> This is quite disappointing. Lot of good people I've known who joined this team at early stage are all gone and it shows. Kipman simply didn't seem to get this. Magic Leap should have at least taught them that it is very bad idea to have so much weight on headset. The AR is pretty much dead at this point and all these push towards creating demos for factories is pure media stunt. They even managed to lure US army and I'd like to know the story of how they did this but from my own experience trying to use Hololens in such situations would be a tax, not benefit. The battery life is miserable, its too heavy for wearing on head and induces headaches for most people. Also, using it in custom situation requires huge amount of software development costs which are rarely justified given inability to actually use the device.

Kipman has become an expert in working on projects that has initial oh-ah factor and media appeal but he doesn't think beyond that at all. Kinect's main use case was never gaming. It's too inaccurate for pleasant use after initial wonder fads off. Hololens's main appeal is never creating this virtual world but rather becoming a sensor that can be leveraged in all kind of applications. But that would be the least sexiest thing for Kipman to do and ofcourse that may not generate as many media articles.

</comment><comment><USER27> Also selling it to the military to "increase lethality".

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/22/18236116/microsoft- holole...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/22/18236116/microsoft-hololens- army-contract-workers-letter)

<comment><USER28> The military also buys iPhones, and Androids. What phone do you use? That very phone was probably used to order a drone strike!

Did you use GPS technology this past week? That was the tech guiding the drone to it's target. And this thing called the internet was invented to network the military

<comment><USER13> GPS is a military technology opened to civilians... going the other way feels different, for whatever reason.

<comment><USER29> No, GPS was actually designed from the start as a dual military and civilian system. The only part that wasn't originally available to civilians was the high precision signal.

<comment><USER30> > GPS was actually designed from the start as a dual military and civilian > system

No, what prompted GPS to be opened to civilian uses was KAL007 being shot down by the Soviet Union. [1] 269 killed, including a US Rep.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007)

<comment><USER29> No, as usual Wikipedia isn't quite accurate. Here's an actual interview with the "father of GPS".

"BRAD PARKINSON: Absolutely. And there are a lot of misconceptions about that. You hear people saying, well it was a military system and eventually made a civil system. That was not true.

When I testified before Congress back about 1975, I said this is a combination military civil system."

[https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/how-gps-found-its- way...](https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/how-gps-found-its-way/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Debt/Consumption Sham - <AUTHOR> http://www.jasonkelly.com/2009/02/whole-damn-sham.html Piece is 5% editorial on American politics, 95% on building a sustainable lifestyle and how the author got out of corporate life by living ultra-frugal and started his own company that's never had debt. Really inspiring piece. <comment><AUTHOR> Piece is 5% editorial on American politics, 95% on building a sustainable lifestyle and how the author got out of corporate life by living ultra-frugal and started his own company that's never had debt. Skip the brief part on politics and read on, how the author built his life is pretty inspiring.</comment>


Why some smart people give bad advice? - <AUTHOR> http://www.rajeshsetty.com/2012/02/21/why-some-smart-people-give-bad-advice/

<comment><USER2> Why do some smart people believe in nonsense?

I'm no psychologist, but I speculate it has something to do with emotion- driven self-deception.</comment>


Computer Science Logo Style:Preface - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1ch0/preface.html <comment><AUTHOR> This introduction is both dated and timeless at the same time. Sigh. Part of me wishes I was back in school.</comment>


How "Patent Trolling" Taxes Innovation - <AUTHOR> http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/07/11/how-patent-trolling-taxes-innovation/

<comment><USER2> Notice this is a guest article, it isn't by the "freakonimists", Levitt & Dubner. Levitt & Dubner had a chapter in their book which was glowing puff piece about Intellectual Ventures. IV is perhaps the biggest patent troll of all.

<comment><USER3> IV is known for its glowing puff pieces. I saw one once in the Harvard business review that stopped just short of actually giving fellatio.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't waste your time. This is a pretty crappy article. It will be old hat for you if you've been following this area in any depth.

Misleading discussions: the proportion of patents that are overturned compared to the number that aren't, what makes a bad patent bad, who files for patents, what is a patent troll, who are the patent trolls.

Missing discussions: the distinction between software patents and non-software patents, the consequences of in re Bilski, the proportion of software patents vs non-software patents, the current misguided "reform" efforts in Congress, the nuclear war in the mobile industry, Google vs. Oracle.

</comment><comment><USER5> Lets talk about how the patent cartels suppress small companies in order to dominate the entire computer and mobile hardware industry.

<comment><USER6> Patent cartel? Got an example of this?

<comment><USER7> MPEG-LA?

<comment><USER8> Put that question mark away, and add suppression of competing technology to the list of offenses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be an interesting (albeit expensive) experiment for some VC to start publicly and aggressively financing defence against patent troll attacks on their portfolio companies. If trolls are after settlements and the VC sends the message that they won't settle, trolls may leave their portfolio alone in the long run.

<comment><USER10> This strategy may work for those cases where the troll has a claim of questionable value but what about the cases where the troll holds a meaningful patent and has a valid claim?

<comment><USER9> Then they're not a troll.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would help if they characterized 'patent trolls' accurately. Their alleged behavior is after all the subject of the piece.</comment>


The Secret Cost of Chinese Buffets - <AUTHOR> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_secret_cost_of_chinese_buffets_part_1_20161102 <comment><USER2> It so unbelievable that this is still happening. Is the INS that ineffective? I really can't trust what I read anymore.</comment>


Show HN: Run your own OAuth2/OpenID Connect provider - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ory-am/hydra# <comment><USER2> If you're interested in this sort of thing, Doorkeeper[1] is a robust, open source OAuth 2 provider that's been around for about 5 years. We use it as a standalone app, and have many other node.js apps that sign in using it.

[1] [https://github.com/doorkeeper- gem/doorkeeper](https://github.com/doorkeeper-gem/doorkeeper)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, however Doorkeeper is an SDK, right? With Hydra, you simply boot the docker image and are done.

If you're interested in OAuth2 frameworks, check out [fosite]([https://github.com/ory-am/fosite](https://github.com/ory- am/fosite)), which is like Doorkeeper for Go.

<comment><USER2> Doorkeeper is closer to a full-package with customizable features, including a basic frontend. I'm not too familiar with hydra, but it seems Doorkeeper is best when you want to get the full OAuth app & user interface running (and customize later), whereas Hydra is best when you want to get a quick OAuth API app and build your own frontend. Would you say this is accurate?

<comment><USER3> Yeah I think that is valid. Hydra can also be put on top of existing infrastructures. Not sure how well that is possible with Doorkeeper.

<comment><USER2> Doesn't the nature of an OAuth server imply that it can be added to existing infrastructures? Or is there an issue you foresee with non-Hydra libraries?

<comment><USER3> No, Hydra works with every existing solution :) You can read more on this topic in the guide: [https://ory- am.gitbooks.io/hydra/content/oauth2.html](https://ory- am.gitbooks.io/hydra/content/oauth2.html)

<comment><USER2> You didn't answer my question. I think you may have misread it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also similar: [https://github.com/coreos/dex](https://github.com/coreos/dex)

</comment><comment><USER5> Ask HN: Is "hydra" the most used open source project name ?

<comment><USER6> Unicorn

<comment><USER5> hydra vs unicorn dixit github :

Hydra = 1,934 results ([https://github.com/search?utf8=&q=hydra](https://github.com/search?utf8=&q=hydra))

Unicorn = 1,878 results ([https://github.com/search?utf8=&q=unicorn](https://github.com/search?utf8=&q=unicorn))

Winner Hyra !!!

<comment><USER7> Hail Hydra!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice! Lowering barriers to the use of technologies like these is important.

Would anyone else be interested in hosting Mozilla Persona? [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/Persona](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Persona)

<comment><USER9> Check out Let's Auth:

[https://github.com/letsauth/letsauth.github.io](https://github.com/letsauth/letsauth.github.io)

It's a successor to Mozilla Persona in development.

Details in the readme and on freenode #letsauth (mirrored to gitter.im/letsauth/letsauth).

<comment><USER3> why is it written in python? why not something that compiles and runs well on all platforms?

<comment><USER9> From the readme:

> Let's Auth 1.0 will ship as a single, statically compiled binary. Pre-1.0, > we will use a variety of dynamic languages for prototyping.

<comment><USER3> nice :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How do you integrate this with your existing API? Do you need to proxy requests through Hydra or do you just need to read and trust Hydra-signed tokens on every request? Is there any overlap with [https://getkong.org/](https://getkong.org/)?

<comment><USER3> Currently hydra issues opaque tokens but has the capabilities to switch to JWT in the future. There is a warden HTTP API endpoint that you can use to inspect tokens and use hydra's access control. I will probably add a more common token info endpoint or a OAuth2 Token Introspection endpoint ( [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7662](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7662) ) later on.

I haven't used kong yet but from my first impression it should be possible to use hydra together with kong.

<comment><USER10> Ok, thanks. So let's say I wanted to use Hydra for authenticating requests made to my REST API, I'd have to make an API call to Hydra on each request, right? Would be interesting to have some integration examples with popular web frameworks (e.g. Express.js, Rails, Django, etc.).

Thanks for releasing this by the way, looks really well engineered. I'm sure you've considered it already, but you could probably sell a hosted version (a la [https://auth0.com](https://auth0.com)) to make money and finance development.

<comment><USER3> Depends, if you use JWT you can cryptographically verify that the token and the token claims are valid. Right now, Hydra does not issue JWTs but it would be easy as pie to add that functionality.

Writing an integration guide for this is a very good idea. Hydra's APIs are validating all requests using that technique, but it's not documented.

Auth0.com is pretty cool, they have done some cool projects that help OAuth developers. However, they are overpriced imho. Hosting hydra is definitely something I will consider. Thanks! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For anyone interested the Go client library is: [https://github.com/ory- am/fosite](https://github.com/ory-am/fosite)

</comment><comment><USER12> OAuth is super simple, you only need two endpoints for an OAuth provider. It only took a few hours to write the WakaTime OAuth provider implementation[1]. No offense and serious question: why would you need a library for this? Isn't it more trouble to integrate an external OAuth provider with an existing api than to just write two api endpoints yourself?

[1] [https://wakatime.com/api](https://wakatime.com/api)

<comment><USER3> The libraries (SDK) I used for my first project for had security flaws. OAuth2 is super simple to implement, but hard to get right. It's not just two endpoints, it's multiple specs with ~200 written pages. Some people for example don't even know that [rfc6819]([https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6819](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6819)) even exists. Most SDKs are also very limited or hard to extend (e.g. adding OpenID Connect).

I believe that adding a docker container to your deployment and creating a consent token (JWT) is even less work than integrating with an SDK and implementing the missing parts every time you hit that new edge case. On top of that, you can be sure that it is backed by an open source community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know it's in the title but I don't see any OpenID capabilities here. Looks like Oauth2 spec implementation. Am i missing something?

<comment><USER3> OpenID has been deprecated in favor of OpenID Connect:

* [http://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html](http://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html) * [http://openid.net/connect/faq/](http://openid.net/connect/faq/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This looks very nice, but isn't it overkill to use RethinkDB when SQLite would do (and probably be about as fast)?

</comment><comment><USER15> It'd be really neat to see an amazon lambda serverless version of this.

<comment><USER3> Integrating that in lambda should not be hard. If you want, create an issue on GitHub and I will try my best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would this or coreos/dex replace something like Auth0?

<comment> jon-wood Auth0's big feature that isn't provided by open source platforms at the moment is being able to request an OAuth token for third party services the user has authenticated with, so for example you can trade in an auth token that was issued when you logged in the user for a Facebook token.

<comment><USER3> Not true. Dex and Hydra both support it, although you need to implement a little bit more stuff when using Hydra. Read it in the docs: [https://ory- am.gitbooks.io/hydra/content/connection.html](https://ory- am.gitbooks.io/hydra/content/connection.html)

<comment> jon-wood I stand corrected. In that case Auth0 is even more overpriced than I originally thought.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


JavaScript TV – Tech Talks on React, CSS and Anything JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://jsgeeks.tv/ <comment><AUTHOR> To all the javascript geeks out there, with [https://jsgeeks.tv/](https://jsgeeks.tv/) I am building a list of javascript tech talks categorized by topics.

Any feedback on what other topics should I put in there ?

Let me know in case you know of any other awesome talk</comment>


OS/2 2.0, Summer '91 Edition - <AUTHOR> http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-2-0-summer-91-edition/ <comment><USER3> The superior OS that was eventually killed by the inferior Windows 95. OS/2 did a lot right. The integrated Windows-Environment was initially better than native Windows: better process isolation (remember Windows 3.1's cooperative multitasking aka "hangs one hangs all"?), more DOS freespace.

The next thing I liked and adopted was Windows 2000, the less-sucking NT. We have come a long way since then!

<comment><USER4> It also got a lot wrong: OS/2 also had a single threaded event queue the entire time it was a contender. It was also very expensive.

<comment><USER5> Microsoft convinced IBM to use a single message queue despite protest from IBM. Perhaps they were purposely sabatoging the effort, as they clearly wanted their 386 fork (which became Windows NT) to have the upper hand.

<comment><USER6> Anecdotally, that was kind of the feeling at IBM about several of the misfeatures of OS/2 in 1990-92, when I worked there with OS/2.

Typical conversation:

"Why the hell does..."

"Microsoft."

"Right."

<comment><USER7> And the feeling of mis-features being the other company's fault was mutual. Microsoft people viewed the introduction of more UNIX-like features into MS- DOS/PC-DOS 2 as happening despite the strenuous objections of IBM, for example.

People do this. I've seen this happen in places that have nothing to do with IBM or Microsoft. Problems and misfeatures are _all the fault of that group of incompetent outsiders in that company over there that we have a business deal with_. It is rarely actually true, in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Speaking of OS/2, its descendant ArcaOS will be released April 15:

[https://www.arcanoae.com/blog/](https://www.arcanoae.com/blog/)

<comment><USER9> How does it compare to eComStation? I bought eCS 2-3 years ago out of curiosity, but the system basically looks like they got the last version of OS/2 IBM made and piled a ton of binary patches and third party fixes and utilities, replaced "OS/2" with "eComStation" in several messages, added a few wallpaper and called it a new thing. It gave a _very_ hacked on feel and somehow i doubt they even had the source code for the OS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> around '92 (as a student) I wrote to CEO at IBM to rant that if they want OS/2 to get some market share they need to start letting students/universities use it for free

a few months later I got a letter back thanking me and noting the letter got published in some staff magazine and some software would follow

an enormous package arrived soon after full of IBM OS/2 and commercial development tools - my IBM PS/2 55SX wasn't even up to installing the OS - <USER2> full credit for trying

</comment><comment><USER11> Also check out OS/2 2.0 Limited Availability:

[https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/os2/history/os220/ind...](https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/os2/history/os220/index.html)

<comment><USER12> os2museum link: [http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-2-0/](http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-2-0/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Diskette 1 of 1... The good old days of operating systems

<comment><USER14> Yeah, a full OS with a GUI, drivers and a userland on a floppy. That is pretty darn small!

<comment><USER15> A demo of QNX has been circulated in tech magazines on a single floppy disk: [http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Rexx was pretty neat. I'm guessing anybody coming from Unix wasn't very impressed, but I, as a Windows person, thought it was pretty sweet.

<comment><USER17> When I gave up on my Amiga, I thought hard about OS/2; but I was a college kid without a ton of disposable income, so I built a DIY PC and stuck a $99 OEM copy of Windows 95 on it. Soon after that I switched to Linux, and rarely looked back (I've almost always had at least one PC laying around that could boot to Windows for audio work and games).

Rexx was one of the reasons I liked the looks of OS/2\. ARexx had been shipping with Amiga OS since 2.04, and while I only occasionally used it directly, it enabled a lot of cool stuff between applications (directly sharing data between apps was neat, and ahead of its time).

Honestly, I don't think UNIX was actually better on that front, at the time. I never actually used it on OS/2, but on Amiga OS it was sort of universally accepted as The Way for applications to interact and for users to automate their applications. Even today, we have tons of scripting languages, often integrated into bigger applications, but not a lot of standardization between them. So, there's a lot of friction in getting a program that uses, say, Lua as its scripting and automation language, to communicate with a program that uses, say Scheme or Python or Perl or Ruby. UNIX had the command line with pipes paradigm, which I guess was universal-ish, but didn't play well with big GUI apps.

So, yeah, Rexx was pretty neat, for sure. It might even be a useful source of inspiration today (even if the language is a little clunky compared to modern scripting languages).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ah yes, OS/2 that were the days. I really enjoyed using Describe/2 that was a great word processor. For a long time I played with Delphi for OS/2, Sybil. I still think OS/2 was a great operating system back in the day. Nowadays I am using macOS.

</comment><comment><USER19> I loved OS/2\. Back in the '90s I ran the later OS/2 Warp version and it was pretty solid. I remember running a BBS in a window and was still able to use the OS for other things. Multitasking like that was still a novel thing back then.

</comment><comment><USER20> Oh OS/2... multitasking that worked and higher reliability than Windows 3/95 (for the most part). A job I had at the time required doing incremental and full backups of an OS/2 box, and also transmitting backoffice data to corporate. It was reasonably solid.

Historical minutia c. 1994:

Fry's Electronics botched the OS/2 Warp launch by misspelling, in 192 pt red font, "OS/2 WRAP [sic]", not once but 3-4x IIRC in their full-page SJ Mercury News ad.

</comment><comment><USER12> One of my favorite is anti-trust exhibits is [http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011...](http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/0000/PX00307.pdf) Notice that it is about "PM vs. Windows" as it was about API calls only, which was the wrong way to make the decision.

</comment><comment><USER5> Microsoft and IBM co-wrote OS/2 initially, then Microsoft unveiled Windows using a lot of the ideas they came up with together. Classic Microsoft!

When they split, IBM kept the 286 fork (which became 2.0) while Microsoft kept the 386 fork (which became Windows NT).

<comment><USER21> Sorry to be the pedant complaining about ancient trivia, but neither of those claims is quite what happened.

Windows was a Microsoft product already before the OS/2 development deal happened. The plan was always to have a more or less unified GUI in Windows and OS/2, following UX standards defined by IBM. This did happen -- Windows 2 and OS/2 1.2 had almost the same look and feel, as well as very similar APIs (both 16-bit).

2.0 was always intended to be a 32-bit operating system, and Microsoft was responsible for its development initially. NT was a new kernel that was supposed to become OS/2 3.0 for a while.

<comment><USER22> You're probably thinking of OS/2 1.1, which was very close to Windows 2.0 in look and feel, i.e. flat and mostly monochrome, although it had a proportional system font where Windows still used monospace (Fixedsys). Comparison:

[http://toastytech.com/guis/os211cpl.png](http://toastytech.com/guis/os211cpl.png)

[https://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/muiseum/systems/win2/01.gif](https://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/muiseum/systems/win2/01.gif)

OS/2 1.2 added the style that would become Windows 3.0's, with beveled buttons and so on, while Windows 3.0 upgraded to the proportional font (System) that OS/2 had been using.

<comment><USER21> Right! 1.1 was the version I was thinking of. (I remember using 1.3 which had the proportional font and pseudo-3D widgets, and assumed the look was introduced in that version.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> OS/2 was nothing but an unimportant distraction to my teenager self. :D

The only software I've got nostalgia towards, is anything related to gaming as I grew up: C64, Amiga then PC finally took over until this very day.

</comment><comment><USER24> 40 minutes to complete the tutorial, nobody would have the patience for that today.</comment>