Reputation: kind of a big deal - <AUTHOR> http://zachholman.com/2010/12/reputation/

<comment><USER2> >If you take an action — write a blog post, publish a photo, launch a website — you want your action to spread to as many people as possible.

Overgeneralization, is what I see there.

Actually, "avoiding success at all costs" motto is great.

I think that quote from Adam Chlipala (author or Ur and Ur/Web) is quite appropriate:

"I also want to emphasize that I'm not trying to maximize adoption of Ur/Web. Rather, I'm trying to maximize the effectiveness of people who do choose to use it. This means that I'm completely happy if basic features of Ur/Web mean that 90% of programmers will never be able to use it."

[http://www.impredicative.com/pipermail/ur/2010-December/0003...](http://www.impredicative.com/pipermail/ur/2010-December/000329.html)

I think that author is wrong.

You don't have to have superfans.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not saying you _have_ to have superfans; you're welcome to do whatever you'd like (and there are plenty of paths to success!) I just think there's so many examples of a small, passionate userbase forming the bedrock of success. Why not try to foster that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A wise man once said "Don't try to be a great man; just be a man, and let history make its own judgments."

The reason _why (used as an example in the article) has the cult-like following he does is that he made fun, interesting things, not because he marketed himself or gamed the social system around him. Sure, a bit of self- promotion is often a good thing, but if you're expending lots of energy on making yourself into an icon, you've got less use actually earning such a status.

</comment><comment><USER4> Related: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie>

</comment><comment><USER5> See also: Seth Godin on Tribes ([http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/seth_godin_on_the_tribes_w...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/seth_godin_on_the_tribes_we_lead.html)).

<comment><USER6> While I love Seth's thoughts on tribes, the downside of the success of that book is that now there's so much talk about "my tribe" or "our tribe" that people fail to realize that none of us really have a tribe, per se. We have fans that happen to like us at the time. That's always subject to change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This sounds like it would be an additional chapter on Rework titled "Don't Be Big On Numbers Through Social Media," well thought-out.</comment>


[Android] Finally! Play YouTube with the screen off (no root) - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.derpdeveloper.blackscreenoflife&hl=en <comment><USER2> You already could play a lot of YouTube videos with the screen off, or with the YouTube app in the background. This app would come in handy for the music videos which Google apparently is not allowed to play in the background.

<comment><AUTHOR> How can you do that (without rooting)? I developed this app because I could not find any to turn off the screen while keeping youtube playing without rooting.

<comment><USER3> One of the selling points of Google's Play music is letting you play videos in the background (part of YouTube Music Key).

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, but also I didn't want to pay :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another alternative is YT Mobile for background YouTube play: [http://ytmobile.tk/](http://ytmobile.tk/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion mate. However, I don't like installing apps from unknown sources, and I also wanted to use YouTube stock app, that's why I ended up developing this app ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does this follow Youtube's TOS ? I would not be too surprised to see it removed from the store.</comment>


Quick survey for designers, developers, product managers - <AUTHOR> http://sigur.io/survey/ <comment><AUTHOR> Would you take this short survey? We're looking to gather information on how designers and developers work together. We're aiming to gather 250 data points and will share the results.</comment>


VimConf - <AUTHOR> http://www.vimconf.org/

<comment><USER2> As far as topics are concerned, I'd really like to see a vim plugin created from start to finish. The tutorials and docs that exist leave a lot to be desired, and this seems like a nice venue to demonstrate (and explain!) the capabilities of the vim plugin system.

<comment> sasha-dv While this is an excellent topic for advanced vim users, I suspect that the majority of us would benefit more from a _"Beyond the basics"_ topic.

I'm comfortable with using vim to edit files now and then, but for that role any editor will do. Now I'm willing to invest some time to learn how to harness the full power of vim. Signed up.

<comment><USER3> There is a chapter on Vim scripting in my online book, please take a look and let me know your feedback - <http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Vim_en:Scripting>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Separate to Vim, this concept should become more popular. Real world conferences have their place, for sure, but some topics are avoided as they probably wouldn't break even, and seeing more things like this would be great.

<comment><USER5> In fact, that's one of the reasons I'm working on building CastingCode.tv (<http://castingcode.tv>) as a platform to serve both ad-hoc and organized live coding events to the web. :)

<comment><USER6> Are you the same creator as vimconf? The sites look alike and so did the emails (subject atleast, did not open). Are you the submitter of this? Why two different usernames if so. And why promote them both??

<comment><USER5> I am indeed the same person behind both CastingCode.tv and VimConf. However, I did not submit this VimConf article to HN. That was done by somebody else and I had no idea it was being submitted, so it took me by surprise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone know some Vim luminaries who'd be good "keynote" speakers/demo-ers? I'd vote for Drew Neil - <http://vimcasts.org/about>

<comment><USER8> Tim Pope.

<comment><USER9> I'd love Tim Pope to do a presentation about creating Vim plugins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When I saw the URL my first thought was that it's a collaborative repo of vim's conf files, snippets, etc...

<comment> bulte-rs That's what dotshare.it (no affiliation whatsoever) is for. The whole idea sounds nice though.

<comment><USER11> And <http://dotfiles.org/> (though I haven't looked there in years).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am so excited about this! Watching other people use vim has been the most valuable part of my vim education. I think this is going to be a great venue for it.

Edit: I'm also clueless when it comes to vimscript. It would be nice to see some stuff on that.

</comment><comment><USER13> This event looks promising. Interacting with other Vim users really helped me get over the initial Vim learning curve. For any devs that use OSX and want to test the Vim waters, checkout Vico (<http://www.vicoapp.com>). It is a Textmate-esque editor with Vim bindings.

</comment><comment><USER6> Signed up. Id like to use vim since i like the concept but it seems so damn hard to get into. The post yesterday "learn vim progressively" was interesting though.

Not sure i know what it is though. I really like VS debugger and programming in C#, C++ (both with VS). So, what exactly will i give up if i switch to vim?

<comment><USER14> I recently took the plunge. I had been using e-TextEditor for everything but .NET, and VS for .NET. Now I'm using gVim for the majority of my editing for all languages I am working in. However, I still use Visual Studio with ReSharper for certain things: debugging, intellisense (only when I'm stuck; I'm trying not to rely on it much. you can also use vim plugins or create your own to let you quickly jump to MSDN and find something), and editing project/solution configuration.

Alternatively, you could use ViEmu (emulator plugin for VS, amongst other MS things), but I like the split buffers so I haven't gone down that path.

In summary, I don't think it's an all or nothing deal. You should use the best tools for the job. I think using Vim will make you more productive for plenty, but not all tasks.

<comment><USER15> I might be wrong here as I'm relatively new to vim and haven't used VS, but I'm pretty sure omnicompletion is the equivalent of intellisense in vim, <http://vnfiles.ign.com/ects/css-tricks/VideoCast-101.mov>

<comment><USER16> IntelliSense knows the library, omnicompletion just autocompletes similar words in the current file.

<comment><USER17> Grandparent was correct. Vim's basic completion is "similar words in the current file" (plus some other things), but omnicomplete is an arbitrary algorithm that can get pretty fancy. For example, in Ruby, omnicomplete on 3.14.tr will include truncate, while omnicomplete on [[1, 2]].tr will include transpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I know this is off topic but would you mind sharing how you created a special link that can be passed to earn credit?

Are there plugins/gems for something like this or was this made from scratch?

<comment><USER19> Vimconf is currently running on www.kickofflabs.com (I am a co-founder). The link sharing is a recent feature addition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've never understood people's obsession with vim. I used it for a few months, then timed myself doing the same tasks with vim and gedit. Gedit was faster by a significant margin.

<comment><USER21> Do you mind telling what was faster? I'm really curious.

<comment><USER20> The vim tutorial.

Click-and-type is really quite fast once you try to master it. Double-click to select a token, triple-click to select a line, etc. On a laptop (or on a Kinesis Advantage (awesome ergonomic keyboard) with a center-mounted touchpad) the mouse isn't much of a context switch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Cool idea. Signed up. I've been using vim just for editing config files remotely and now I'd like to start exploring it a bit more.

</comment><comment><USER23> Cool idea, as a 10a+ user of VIM, I wanted to sign up. Unfortunately my 'email does not seem to be valid'.

<comment><USER5> Yes, sorry about that preek. I am currently working with my provider to get the email issue resolved. Keep an eye on @vimconf and I will update everyone once it gets fixed. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm an Emacs user but I'm really curious about modal editing and composability of Vim commands. Signed up!

</comment><comment><USER25> Signed up and I spread the word :) Great initiative!

</comment><comment><USER26> Does it strike anyone else as a bit funny that a promoter of vim would send HTML e-mail?

<comment><USER27> I write HTML in vim all the time. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> 550 lines of css! I hope he has ctags :)</comment>


PhpMyAdmin 3.3.9 is released - <AUTHOR> http://sourceforge.net/news/?group_id=23067&id=295815

<comment><USER2> PhpMyAdmin is a really great tool. It's also a really great tool with a history of exceptionally serious security issues.

If you run PhpMyAdmin on an Internet-accessible server please please please add some security above and beyond what the application provides.

1) Use web-server based IP-address based restrictions to allow/deny connections only from trusted hosts.

2) Please run it over HTTPS, as it passes mysql passwords around plaintext when you use cookie or www-auth authentication.

3) Use an additional .htaccess in front of PhpMyAdmin's basic www-auth.

4) Do not host it at /phpmyadmin in your docroot.

5) Maybe consider running it only on a virtualhost listening on a different port.

</comment><comment><USER3> /me wishes our Security group did not dislike phpMyAdmin as I would love to fire this up and see the new features.</comment>


The Dotty experimental compiler for Scala now bootstraps - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/10/dotty-scala-bootstraps <comment><USER2> How about the official Scala compiler? It seems to stagnant a bit... I know there is a lot of work behind the scene, but from developer perspective there aren't many things going on.

E.g. Scala 2.10 Introduced a lot of interesting features like string formatting s"Hello $name!".

Scala 2.11 offered minimal improvements, for me just compilation time improvements and better incremental compilation. I don't see anything exciting on 2.12 roadmap.

It looks like Scala compiler is very complex machinery, few key people left: [http://www.slideshare.net/extempore/keynote-pnw- scala-2013](http://www.slideshare.net/extempore/keynote-pnw-scala-2013) and Typesafe doesn't monetize compiler itself, so it focus on building ecosystem around it (e.g. Akka).

<comment><USER3> > How about the official Scala compiler? It seems to stagnant a bit

It is. Odersky is spending most of his time on Dotty these days and he doesn't seem that interested in Scala any more, except when he's obligated to talk about it at keynotes (and he tends to talk more about Dotty there anyway). Despite the grandiose plans of possibly back porting Dotty features to Scala at some point in the distant future, Scala has been in maintenance mode for a couple of years now and with more and more people leaving the core team, it's probably going to stay this way.

Such a missed opportunity.

<comment><USER4> The former developers on Groovy are spending most of their time on their day jobs these days and they don't seem that interested in Groovy any more, except when they're promoting the existing version at conferences (and they tend to talk more about the fabricated number of downloads there anyway). Despite the grandiose plans of possibly improving Groovy with a proper meta-object protocol at some point in the distant future, Groovy has been in decline for a couple of years now and with less and less people using it, and those that do use it only using it for 30-liner test or build scripts, it's probably going to stay this way.

Such a missed opportunity.

<comment><USER3> I think the only reason Groovy is still around today is Gradle. Once Gradle starts declining, Groovy will probably disappear along with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why do they want to bootstrap themselves? Golang specifically set that as a nongoal, and look how fast their compiler is. Scala being a functional vm based language will always have a performance disadvantage to well written C code. If they really care about the real world usability of the compiler (and thus the language), this implementation seems like a poor strategy.

<comment><USER6> Bootstrapping is a useful test of the completeness of a compiler, and it makes development easier.

The Go compiler is fast because it does very little. It doesn't do much optimisation and Go is not a very sophisticated language and so does not require much of it's compiler. It is not comparable to the Scala or Dotty compilers.

<comment><USER5> Turns out go is bootstrapped now too as of 1.5....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/10/dotty-scala- bootstraps](http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/10/dotty-scala-bootstraps) has some more details.

<comment><USER8> Thanks! We changed the URL to that from [http://www.scala- lang.org/blog/2015/10/23/dotty-compiler-boo...](http://www.scala- lang.org/blog/2015/10/23/dotty-compiler-bootstraps.html), which doesn't give as much info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems kinda weird that Dotty is referred as "Scala compiler" when the language Dotty compliles sounds fundamentally different from Scala. Bit like saying that DMD (the original dlang compiler) is an experimental compiler for C++?

> Dotty, a platform aimed to develop new technology for Scala tooling as well > as try out new concepts for future Scala versions, has reached bootstrap > status. This means that its compiler is written in Dotty and can compile > itself, thus providing a drop-in replacement for the original one

I would imagine that self-hosting is fairly minor aspect of being a drop-in replacement of exising software compared to backwards compatibility.</comment>


Tesla's P85D Will Get Even Faster Thanks to a Software Update - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/29/teslas-p85d-will-get-even-faster-thanks-to-a-software-update/ <comment><USER2> > Imagine getting into your car and having it say "Oh! Hey. I'm faster now > than I was yesterday. You're welcome!" Because that's what's happening.

Yes, that is awesome.

But on the other hand, in the past I've had updates to my TiVo and my PS3 where I turned it on and it said "Oh! Hey. I'm shittier than I was yesterday. Suck it."

And someday, that could happen with Teslas, too. Updates are a mixed bag.

<comment><USER3> "This car will never speed in construction zones anymore"

"This car is now property of pWnz0r. Pay 20btc to {address} to reclaim your car"

"This car will only fill up at TSA approved electric stations"

"This car will not turn on for anyone with a recent DUI"

"This car will not turn on during the Snow Emergency"

Some of these are probably not risks given the current capabilities of Tesla's, but future cars might have enough cameras and sensors to enforce such updates.

<comment><USER4> Future generations will have all sorts of amazing technology and vehicles, but their experiences and freedoms will just never match what we have today...

to them we'll be bad-asses who lived danger ever minute of every day on our terms. The way we make movies about the future they'll make movies about our time. And the few of us still remaining we'll make up all sorts of stories to make it sound like everyone alive was an action star. They will be repulsed by what they have become.

that or...

to them we'll be wreckless and inefficient neanderthals. They'll be just happy to have their governments. Like having this monolithic antivirus installed on society, to keep everyone 'safe'.

<comment><USER5> This could even be applied to how we currently view our more recent history of "cowboys" and the "wild" west. Imagine the freedom those men had!

<comment> saiya-jin same as you can have, just stand up and walk away from treadmill... oh wait, cash, security, not dying from appendicitis and whatnot is so comfortable, right? :)

<comment><USER6> /rant

You can walk away from the treadmill.......and still have cash, security, and not die from a healthcare issue. Live below your means, save, invest, and then move somewhere nice but with a lower cost of living (Costa Rica, Panama, and Uruguay are my short list).

This will not happen if you live somewhere paying $3K/month for a studio though ;)

<comment><USER7> ... you can get off the treadmill.

Just run _faster_ that's the ticket.

You can also just get off. Lower your spending and you don't need to work a full time job 48 weeks a year.

ex: If you want to live in a cabin in the woods, the forst service pays some people to watch for fires in some really remote areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's nothing stopping ICE car manufacturers from doing the same thing. ICEs are run by computers with lookup tables for fuel and ignition timings(etc.) which are often less than optimal and could be revised for both performance and reliability after a model has been in use by the general public. This is just Tesla being their usual disruptive self. Patiently waiting for a Tesla I can afford.

<comment> Arcanum-XIII Traditional vendors are not willing to give the general public those kind of improvements not because they can't, but because they feel it will hurt their bottom line by not being able to sell more new car. Customer are left on their own - and so they resort to patch their car with parts that drop their warranty - sometimes for good reason, sometimes not. For example some vendors are famous for selling the same engine at different price point, throttling the low end - a bit like what's done on some CPU/GPU in the computer world !

<comment><USER9> Actually, some other manufacturers do provide such free improvements, though they would require a visit to the dealership. McLaren provided performance improvements for the 12C, even after the model got discontinued.

<comment> saiya-jin good example, but McLaren is far from your usual car manufacturer. In purchasing price you pay also for these services...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how the security on these over-the-air updates is. I'm a little scared of the idea that someone who's not even touching my car might be able to replace the piece of code that connect the brake pedal to the actual brakes.

<comment><USER11> While I have no knowledge of how Tesla does their OTA, my startup makes software for over-the-air updating, so I can make a few general comments on this.

It may help if you think of your car as just another server. Any connection between the server and client can be encrypted of course, using well-known tools. Besides that, the car can be made to not accept updates that are not signed by the manufacturer, so your only exposure is to the manufacturer.

Of course someone may have physical access to your car and be able to write new software locally, but then they may also be able to do mechanical sabotage, so it's not a new risk.

So you basically have to trade off one kind of security (the manufacturer can update my car remotely) with another (security bug announced in the software my car runs, I am now a sitting duck).

It definitely takes a shift in perspective, but in the brave new world where cars (and other things) run millions of lines of code, over-the-air updates are a necessity. (but of course I'd say that).

I've written a bit more about this conundrum here - [https://resin.io/blog/you-cant-secure-what-you-cannot- update...](https://resin.io/blog/you-cant-secure-what-you-cannot-update/)

<comment><USER12> Exactly. If you can't update the car's software, then you can't patch bugs/vulnerabilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> elon recently tweeted a video of people experiencing P85D "Insane Mode" acceleration for the first time

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qFV5i8tBhs&app=desktop](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qFV5i8tBhs&app=desktop)

<comment><USER14> This strikes me as quite a dangerous feature. Cars accelerating slowly is a great safety feature. Maybe they could relabel this feature the "Suge Knight" feature since it will make parking lots and other areas of surging cars a whole new theatre.

<comment><USER15> It's around as dangerous as any other performance car with an extremely powerful engine. You can still drive slowly; the difference is in what happens when you floor the pedal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Imagine getting into your car and having it say "Oh! Hey. I'm faster now > than I was yesterday. You're welcome!" Because that's what's happening.

Imagine having such a software-powered car and being unable to get into it because it was stolen: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Fauto%2Faktuell%2Fadac- entdeckt-it-sicherheitsluecke-bei-bmw-connected-drive-a-1015819.html)

Imagine some company without Google's software engineering expertise building a self driving car, allowing hackers to take it over and create mayhem.

<comment><USER17> > _Imagine having such a software-powered car and being unable to get into it > because it was stolen:_

That's OK because the mobile access provider will know where it is - he always does, wherever you go...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The notable thing here is that the updates are done "magically", as in, in the background over WiFi.

Software mappings for engine performance are often modified by hobbyists, performance tuners, etc., it just normally takes plugging in a tool or swapping a control chip.

<comment><USER19> The only question I have is.

Can I block Tesla from delivering updates.

<comment><USER20> I don't believe any of the Model S updates have ever been automatically applied. It will automatically tell you "hey, an update is available" but won't install it until you give the go-ahead.

<comment><USER21> But can you skip that update but install the next? Say update 2.1 is a speed increase and user doesn't want that. Update 2.2 is a safety feature that the user wants, would 2.2 include 2.1?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does something like this require DOT approval?

In the case of the Tesla there is no emissions change but are there safety changes that need to be retested?

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow. This is just insane.

I was a bit confused initially as to how a mechanical problem can be solved by a software update, but then someone explained in one of the comments that it's about fuel-injection tables and stuff.

Incredible, but just a bit scary too.

I really hope they test that software to the hilt - I mean like NASA style, slow but steady kind of stuff. I wouldn't want to go 1 feet near the car if the quality is in the same quality vicinity as 99% other software (and that includes software that we generally consider "good quality").

Anyone knows what their software development process is to get that kind of confidence?

<comment><USER24> There is a write up about the development of the STS-software[1]. If memory serves, the key is specifying everything extremely rigorously. It seems to me though, that writing such specification (if sensor A detects such-and-such value and sensor B...) would share most of the problems writing actual software does.

Another look at how to get "NASA like" confidence is provided by Richard Feynman[2] and Diane Vaughan[3].

[1] [http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right- stuff](http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff) [2] [http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...](http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers- commission/Appendix-F.txt) [3] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Challenger-Launch- Decision-Technol...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Challenger-Launch-Decision- Technology/dp/0226851761)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> As a motor control guy I'd really like to have a look inside Teslas control algorithm. Most people - even experts - leave something on the table. This improvement is no surprise to me.

<comment><USER26> I wonder if they typically launch with very conservative defaults and over time can learn more about the system and what tweaks can be done without causing too many issues. In ICE there's this whole "chip tuning" culture that does this as well. With a trivial updating process and all the data each Tesla sends, it seems like "chip tuning" is built into the Tesla culture as well.

<comment><USER25> >> I wonder if they typically launch with very conservative defaults and over time can learn more about the system and what tweaks can be done without causing too many issues.

Good point. Slamming full torque as fast as possible on a Tesla might physically break things and should only be pushed out as an update after appropriate testing. I'm assuming they were not even getting the highest possible torque out of it though. Electric motors are a fairly interesting problem and most of the work goes into dealing with limiting cases. Most of the literature doesn't even deal with some of the fundamental problems and most people just avoid them by leaving a little performance on the table.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Insane mode is great but an extra gear or something would would also be nice for even more performance.

[http://youtu.be/r4CnSS4OG4A](http://youtu.be/r4CnSS4OG4A)

<comment><USER27> An extra gear would not give more performance, the reason cars with internal combustion engines have gears is because they do not produce their full power at low engine speeds, whereas electric motors do, hence why the Tesla does not have nor would benefit from a gearbox.

You can see why a gearbox is a disadvantage in this video here:

[http://youtu.be/0e-jquwHKtI?t=30s](http://youtu.be/0e-jquwHKtI?t=30s)

During the first 2 gear changes you can see the lambo fall behind during gear changes.

<comment> semi-extrinsic s/power/torque/

And saying a Tesla would have no benefit of a gearbox is a bit strong. There are reasons to believe [1] it would increase efficiency at the cost of more complexity.

[1] [http://www.gizmag.com/new-multi-speed-electric-vehicle- trans...](http://www.gizmag.com/new-multi-speed-electric-vehicle-transmission- improves-ev-performance-and-range/11670/)

<comment><USER27> I was speaking a bit imprecisely. An electric motors power-speed curve is not totally flat, just much more so than normal engines.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SwipeGood (YCW11) Raises $500K From Michael Birch And Others - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/10/swipegood-raises-500k-from-michael-birch-and-others-to-allow-you-to-donate-with-each-purchase/

<comment><USER2> If SwipeGood can help pursuade people to donate more to charities then good for them, but it's not for me.

I already donate to a few charities on a monthly basis, and am open to making one-off donations now and then to others (and do that fairly often).

I donate based on how much money I'm willing to not have - i.e. the most I am "able" to afford without it impacting on my other monetary plans. If I used SwipeGood then it would either donate more (which I don't want, and if I did, I would chose to donate more right now) or less (and -5% for SwipeGood), so it would be a lose/lose.

</comment><comment><USER3> I average 40 credit card transactions per month, or about $20/month -> $240/year under SwipeGood's average-50-cents-to-charity-per-swipe model. Assuming that's typical, since the average American household donates approx. $1000/year, a SwipeGood user would be increasing their household's giving by 20%. (Swipegood takes 5%)

But it'd be interesting to find out if users ended up giving less outside of SwipeGood because they feel they've "already given"-- or if they end up giving more because they have charities on the mind (giving to one cause is unsurprisingly strongly correlated with other philanthropic activities.)

Edit: Also, I think it's great that YC is funding a startup like this. I'm reminded of "Be Good": <http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting... it takes money for donations for each transaction, but it's not dependent on the size of transaction. So each time you use your credit car it will "randomly" donate $0.01-0.99 to a charity?

I could see more people signing up for something like this than traditional "10% of gross income" that people tend to promote.

</comment><comment><USER5> Congrats. This is an awesome idea, simply because it takes people's laziness out of the equation. It's kinda like that popular financial 'pay yourself first'/'automate your finances' set it and forget it mantra but applied to charity.

</comment><comment><USER6> Congrats guys... great product idea and excellent team, I know you're going to do well.

<comment><USER7> thx man! we're looking to hire amazing people so if you know anyone let me know ( steli at swipegood dot com) ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Confused as to the business aspect of SwipeGood, is it a non-profit or a for- profit (if so, how does it intend to make money)?

<comment><USER2> As written in this very article:

      The startup makes money by taking 5% of the donation.</comment></comment>


Thousands of Hotmail users hacked - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8291268.stm

<comment><USER2> While I dislike hotmail as much as the next person, emails being 'hacked' and people stupidly falling for a phishing attempt are two different things.

<comment><USER3> I cannot emphasize this enough. While phishing is definitely a threat, calling it "hacking" creates a massive problem. Imagine, for example, if grand theft auto was referred to as identity theft. If they become synonymous in the public mind, many people will begin to think "Well, I have a safe that I keep all my information in, so no one can take anything from me."

The problem is the method for protecting yourself from anything, from car theft to identity theft to having your email account hacked, all have different methodologies. The best way to protect users from phishing. In fact, that's about the only way to do it. Calling it hacking means that people start to think "Oh, I have a firewall, so I'm safe." I've heard that from far too many users, frequently after they've fallen for a phishing scam "What? The firewall doesn't stop that?"

<comment><USER4> I can too agree we must tell people that its not hacking but phisihing so they can be better aware of threats like these.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had my hotmail hacked with a plain old dictionary attack (it was an extremely rare word, but still). While I hadn't used it in years, at some point I seem to have synced it with Plaxo, so it had all of my contacts, who were all now the recipients of various kinds of spam. Sucky.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you want to do some password research, you can still find the list on google cache.</comment>


Comparison between online courses-Udemy and Lynda - <AUTHOR> http://www.maskoid.com/comparison/udemy-vs-lynda/ <comment><AUTHOR> There are Two online Programing courses available. One is Udemy and the Second one is Lynda. Udemy is very costly course because you have to purchase software but it is very good for learning. Lynda is programming course for learning your skills.</comment>


Soon, Eat Meat Without Killing Animals for It - <AUTHOR> http://www.thebetterindia.com/49214/memphis-meats-develops-meat-from-stem-cell/ <comment><USER2> I'd love to see a Ron Swanson reaction to this headline.</comment>


About the security content of Security Update 2017-001 - <AUTHOR> https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208315 <comment><USER2> See Apple's comment on this, given to BuzzFeed I assume: [https://twitter.com/JohnPaczkowski/status/935909264362586112](https://twitter.com/JohnPaczkowski/status/935909264362586112) / [https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/apple-released-a- pa...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/apple-released-a-patch-for- that-massive-security-flaw-in)

"Security is a top priority for every Apple product, and regrettably we stumbled with this release of macOS.

When our security engineers became aware of the issue Tuesday afternoon, we immediately began working on an update that closes the security hole. This morning, as of 8:00 a.m., the update is available for download, and starting later today it will be automatically installed on all systems running the latest version (10.13.1) of macOS High Sierra.

We greatly regret this error and we apologize to all Mac users, both for releasing with this vulnerability and for the concern it has caused. Our customers deserve better. We are auditing our development processes to help prevent this from happening again."

(posted to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15808164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15808164) if separate discussion is preferred)

<comment><USER3> Why is all communication from Apple on this case, both yesterday and today, being channeled via screenshots of text appended to random twitter users posts or blogs? It's weird that there's no official page on apple.com for these statements. (Beyond the actual "security update 2017-001" announcement webpage, which wasn't published until the patch was available)

<comment><USER4> Apple's answer is on that page:

"For our customers' protection, Apple doesn't disclose, discuss, or confirm security issues until an investigation has occurred and patches or releases are available."

<comment><USER3> I'd say that works against the purpose of protecting customers. Every blackhat in the world had probably heard about it last night, but if Apple had announced details earlier, even without a patch, informed customers could take preventive action (such as not connecting to public wifi, disabling screen sharing, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Real problem is that if you are nobody then your private bug reports mean nothing. Only public shaming helps here.

[https://medium.com/@lemiorhan/the-story-behind-anyone-can- lo...](https://medium.com/@lemiorhan/the-story-behind-anyone-can-login-as- root-tweet-33731b5ded71)

Author of this tweet said that Apple was informed at least week before tweet, but zero response.

<comment><USER6> Lots of companies are quite good at handling security vulnerabilities, but somehow still neglect to reply to the original reporter.

Usually there's a long chain of people involved in creating tickets, allocating resources, finding the bug, fixing the bug, QA, release processes, documenting the problem, making security bulletins, translating security bulletins, etc.

Each of those people communicates via internal processes the reporter doesn't have access to, and none of them think to ping the original reporter saying 'yo - bugfix complete, qa next, then release'

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Description: A logic error existed in the validation of credentials. This was addressed with improved credential validation."

I hope they won't stop to this brief summary, because a "logic error in the validation of credentials" shouldn't be able to allow the creation of a root super user with empty password.

I'm hope they'll go deep in the gory details, to show us how it's in fact much more complicated than a "if !password { createEmptySuper()}" line written by mistake.

<comment><USER8> That's kind of what it was: [https://objective- see.com/blog/blog_0x24.html](https://objective-see.com/blog/blog_0x24.html)

<comment><USER9> It seems to me that the biggest problem highlighted by the link in parent is backwards compatibility of authentication metchanisms. OSX seems to support typical /etc/passwd hashed-user-credential authentication. However, it tries to "upgrade" that authentication mode to "shadowhash or securetoken", which appear to be two new auth schemes integrated with Open Directory.

All of those things might be fine, on their own.

However, the biggest issue is that there are now _more than one primary way to get authenticated on the system_. This is likely true because network accounts need to be supported in addition to local ones (I.e. apple accounts, LDAP accounts, etc.). However, my (admittedly uneducated) impression is that the systems for handling those accounts are totally separate--the part of the auth system that is swappable between shadowhash/old-school-passwd/etc. is . . . basically the whole auth system.

I'm sure that's a very quick and easy way to write authentication code, and it also preserves backwards compatibility of users doing the old method, but it seems inherently prone to more issues (even if you don't make screw-ups as obvious as this one). You have more auth stacks (and thus code) to debug in total, to say nothing of code that migrates credentials between different auth stacks.

Preserving backwards compatibility is important, to be sure, but only sometimes. This seems like a case where things would have been easily mitigated if Apple had done something like "everyone must sign in with their Apple account, now, as the sole authenticating credential for this operating system" during some OS upgrade (or "/etc/passwd no longer works; all these systems have been refactored to use a single central credential database in Keychain Services, update any code that cares since it's being aggressively deprecated", though that would probably have been both harder to implement and harder to sell to the user/developer-base). However, I'm far from an expert here, so maybe the "just expand on the existing UNIX local auth system" option is less-infeasible than it seems (linux ditched this too for network accounts, though, which doesn't give me confidence).

Either way, an old-auth-system removal like that would have crippled some of my workflows/code, and others', but it also would have allowed Apple (if they followed it up with a dead-systems-removal pass) to remove many of the then- redundant authentication systems in OSX.

TL;DR Linus isn't always right, backwards/userland compatibility shouldn't always be held paramount, especially when you're developing parallel systems for something as critical as authentication. Sometimes the pain caused by deprecation is worth the removal of a security risk.

<comment><USER10> Mac OS X has always used POSIX compliance as a selling point. Would the change you're suggesting break that?

<comment><USER9> I think they have already broken POSIX compliance in this area. A lot of the /etc/passwd entries don't do anything by default (like the root entry, in this case, whose significance in that file changes based on an external, second, unrelated-to-POSIX auth system).

While the file is still there in the same form it would be on a truly POSIX compliant system, the functionality is not.

The change I proposed, or other equivalent changes, might "loudly"/fatally break programs that rely on the /etc/passwd style of auth, but if those programs are depending on POSIX-compliant behavior based on that file on OSX systems already, they are likely "silently"/more subtly broken (which, when it comes to code that interacts with the security system, is a much worse thing, I think). It's the same old accessibility/security compromise as ever though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > it will be automatically installed on all systems running the latest version > (10.13.1) of macOS High Sierra

So uh... where are all those people who lost their mind about Windows 10 forcing updates?

[http://i2.kym- cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/042/619/4ea...](http://i2.kym- cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/042/619/4ea.jpg)

<comment><USER12> People weren't upset about windows installing _security_ updates. If this update adds nagware to OSX or forces people to restart their computer in the middle of whatever they are working on, your comment will be a fair point. Until then, it is an stupid comparison.

<comment><USER13> As of the latest update macOS has started to nag me to allow automatic updates, so I think the comparison is probably valid.

FWIW I told it No, for the same reason my Win10 laptop has been nagging me to update but I've not let it install for a month - until I've finished whatever work I'm doing I'm not going to let a possibly badly written patch stack the OS and leave me rebuilding the machine from scratch (yes - I'm looking at you Windows - TWICE) or dealing with whatever beta-level release macOS is going to throw out that breaks remote access etc. that I need on my build server.

<comment><USER11> Oh geez. Have you ever tried to skip iCloud setup? Or Cloud Keychain? Or two factor authentication?

It's like trying to leave a time share presentation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Apparently this forced update breaks file-sharing(!): [https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/security- update-2017-00...](https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/security- update-2017-001-breaks-file-sharing.2091913/)

(SMB still works)

<comment><USER15> NFS is still working for me. I thought "file sharing" _was_ SMB. AFP is deprecated. What other kind of file sharing is there?

<comment><USER14> I think they're talking about AFP, which is still in use in a lot of places (you can't share ADFS over AFP, but you can connect to/share non-ADFS disks)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not to be confused with the other 2017-001 update they released one month ago: [https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208221](https://support.apple.com/en- gb/HT208221)

The App Store Updates page on my mum's Macbook Air now shows that she has installed two updates called "Security Update 2017-001", and she started to worry that she didn't have the correct update installed today.

They both link to the same page ([https://support.apple.com/en- gb/HT201222](https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201222)), so it took me a while to figure out what was going on, and that she really had installed two distinct security patches (one before upgrading to High Sierra, one after).

</comment><comment><USER17> I heard the bug was working on El Capitan for some people [1]. Some Mac devices aren't able to upgrade past El Capitan; will they just forever have this vulnerability?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800817)

<comment><USER18> The link you post claims that root/empty password worked on the first try, not the second, which probably means that the system in question had the root account enabled with an empty password already (which is a thing you can intentionally configure and then forget about).

<comment><USER17> Ah, that makes sense. I haven't heard of any other instances of this, so I think it's safe to say El Cap isn't vulnerable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Earlier today I set a root password. Can anyone confirm what the steps are to get back to the original state of a disabled root account with no password?

<comment><USER20> Open Directory Utility.app, click the lock to make changes, then Edit -> Disable Root User.

<comment><USER19> Ah, looks like it was automatically disabled again by the patch, so nothing to do.

<comment><USER20> That's interesting, it seems to have disabled mine as well, even on the computer that already had a root user enabled from before. I'd guess they can't distinguish between root accounts deliberately enabled by the user and accidentally enabled because of this bug. Fun stuff. No trouble for me, at least, I'm not even sure why I had it enabled in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does their patch also disable root accounts that were enabled using the exploit?

<comment><USER22> That last sentence [0] suggests that the patch will disable every single activated root account.

[0]

> If you require the root user account on your Mac, you will need to re-enable > the root user and change the root user's password after this update.

<comment><USER6> Which could lock some users out permanently if the root user was the only user they knew the password to.

<comment><USER18> It's impossible to have full-disk encryption with that config, right? (i.e., does FileVault work for the root user?)

If you can get in from an install CD, you can reset passwords as needed.

If I were writing this patch, I'd probably check to see if the root user's password was indeed blank, but given that use of the root account only is extremely unsupported I cannot get too upset about Apple breaking that use case as long as you can get back in.

<comment><USER23> The issue wasn't actually specific to a blank password. You could try to log in as root using _any_ password, and as long as root had never had a password set, it would fail but set root's password to whatever you entered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Kinda aggressive. I don't even clicked on update and they already did that for me.

<comment><USER25> They force-pushed code to your box without you agreeing to this? Can anyone else confirm?

<comment><USER26> It's a massive global security vulnerability with huge amounts of public exposure (so any malicious user is well aware they can take advantage). If they did, wouldn't be surprised and I'd be glad they did.

<comment><USER27> If they did for this, great. But the fact that they _could_ for any other update, too, is what's scary.

<comment><USER3> They do this all the time with invisible updates.

Click AppleMenu > About this mac > System Report, and scroll down to Software > Installations, and click on the "Install Date" column header twice to sort by install date descending, and you will discover apple pushing updates very frequently for things like "MRTConfigData", "XProtectPlistConfigData", "Voice Update - Samantha", "Gatekeeper Configuration Data", "Chinese word list update" etc etc.

It's not without flaws; at least once they slipped up and pushed a blacklist for their own ethernet adapter driver (cutting off their own patch life-line, I guess, for those affected) : [https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/mac- update-breaks-et...](https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/mac-update- breaks-ethernet-fix/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Haven't seen this mentioned anywhere so far but this was not a remote vulnerability right? Only from login screen, right !! ??

<comment><USER29> I read that it worked even with Remote Management and Screen Sharing. [https://twitter.com/voretaq7/status/935609138725425153](https://twitter.com/voretaq7/status/935609138725425153)

<comment><USER30> Yep. We blocked VNC at the border routers. Now you need to use our VPN in order to use VNC.

And we are very glad to know we can triage and log. Yeah internal users could still exploit machines. But that fact is recorded. Fired and criminal charges are not a light thing.

<comment><USER31> So you log and audit this kind of unusual event, but you didn't require VPN access for critical resources?

<comment><USER30> I'm not going to talk about our intricacies of security. But it should go without saying that all the critical stuff is much more locked down.

This policy applies to everyone. Students, faculty, staff. Previously, a student could set up VNC to allow remote access to their machine in their dorm. Now it takes VPN to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > We are auditing our development processes to help prevent this from > happening again

The root of the problem is the CEO has put an emphasis on flashy useless features rather than quality. Jobs realized that quality was ultimately what sells first, followed by practicality, which was driven by need and innovation.

The Steve Ballmer of Apple thinks has squeezed creativity at Apple dry. Sad to see problems from the hardware division start to creep into the software division. :(

</comment><comment><USER33> Wow I'm glad that happened BEFORE Apple hired me. Not that they hired or will ever hire me but, just saying.</comment>


Flowgorithm: Flowchart Programming IDE - <AUTHOR> http://flowgorithm.org/index.htm <comment><USER2> Make it: open-source, cross-platform, extensible and then it's a matter of finding a great integration way so it can be used for defining the business logic.

Personally I am pretty confident that in the next few years there will be an emergence of such tool. Node-RED and NoFlo are on the area, but the goal of the first didn't help and the other went after the money and lost traction and the opportunity so it became stagnant.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks easier to use than [DRAKON]([http://drakon- editor.sourceforge.net/](http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/)) but does it launch rockets?

<comment><USER4> Hear about that before, but now they seem to have introduced a web based editor.

[https://drakon-editor.com/](https://drakon-editor.com/)

Seems to make it very easy to visualize parallel code btw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Didn't we, as a community, already try and subsequently scrap this idea when it was called UML?

<comment><USER6> The problem with UML is not that it's graphical, but because it's not the ultimate source of truth in your software. The UML isn't executable.

Instead you build the UML and then go write code to implement what you modeled in UML. Anything you change in the code is not reflected in the UML making it out of date.

If you could actually execute your UML it would be much more useful. As it stands, its just a standardized diagram for visualizing designs.

<comment><USER5> There was this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UML_tool#Code_generation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UML_tool#Code_generation)

<comment><USER7> And it mostly generated scaffolding or property bags(java beans), not logic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why do people think programming is wiring up boxes with arrows? That's like 10% of it.

This does look neat though and should be useful for education.

<comment><USER9> > Why do people think programming is wiring up boxes with arrows? That's like > 10% of it.

I agree with this but would like to add: Why do people think programming is writing text into an editor? The suggestion that maybe there's a better way than writing stuff in emacs or vim is considered heresy.

<comment><USER10> You want to maximise the density of information that is visible on the screen.

The limiting factor is human working memory: the more that is visible at any one time, the less I have to remember.

So it makes sense to divide the screen into a matrix of little boxes, and put a symbol in each. That maximises information.

Most programming languages fill those little boxes with ASCII glyphs because those are what's available on a US keyboard. We certainly could use Unicode or something else, but we'd need different input devices.

How could we improve things? At the moment any space after a newline is wasted, unless there's a line comment. I like Chrome web inspector's approach of putting debug evals in there.

<comment><USER11> Flowchart programming would let you zoom out and parse the program flow visually, something that's not always easy to do when reading a textual implementation.

You're exchanging density at a detail level with being able to visualize the entire program from a 1000 feet high.

<comment><USER9> Quickly switching between "high level" and "low level" and everywhere in between sounds great.

I would love to be able to browse a new codebase with the ease with which I can browse a new city on google maps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I was in an intro to programming class I used a similar tool. This is great for teaching people the absolute basics .

</comment><comment><USER13> Also, I dont see any concepts of parallel programming or any object oriented programming features. It can only used by beginners to learn very basic features of a language.

</comment><comment><USER14> Oh, no, not again!

Anyway: how do I resolve merge conflicts in version control?

<comment><USER15> With that Windows flowchart tool, no clue.

But with Node-Red, I can use Flow-Cloner to close the main repo to my local machine.

Then I can do work, and make sequential updates to my project in projects/project1/flows.json and use GIT as normal. Then I submit them as any source commit.

Then the project owner can then clone the .json file into stable/main/dev as appropriate.

And yes, that works, because it's what I do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think I'm about 67% towards text and away from GUI as a person, but I think if one attempts to make something GUI based it should be beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER17> never did this, what's the "selling point" of this method? Thanks.

<comment><USER18> The selling point is that you can present algorithms to non-programmers and they can actually follow them without knowing anything about programming. It seems the brain is better suited for understanding spatial visualizations than complex linguistic structures, which require more training to understand.

Visualizations like flow charts can help even advanced programmers get an understanding of some unfamiliar code, because it's much easier to see the program flow spatially than to read a big block of code and produce that representation in your head (temporarily, only to forget it shortly after).

The downside is that building visualizations is much slower than typing the set of instructions for it, as we do in code. This program seems to do things backwards (generate code from flowcharts), where what would be the most useful functionality would be to generate the flowcharts from code - thus enabling both the programmer to be productive and the non-programmer to not be scared.</comment></comment>


Show HN: FormFiller – A JavaScript bookmarklet for repopulating forms - <AUTHOR> https://formfillerjs.com/ <comment><USER2> This seemed familiar to me and I recalled this: [http://www.benjaminkeen.com/open-source-projects/smaller- pro...](http://www.benjaminkeen.com/open-source-projects/smaller- projects/form-filler-bookmarklet/)

It is the first hit in Google for 'form filler bookmarklet'.

Any noteworthy differences between yours and that? (Honest question, no snark intended.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll be honest, once I decided I needed a solution, and that browser extensions weren't an option, I didn't really try that hard to find a bookmark alternative as I figured I could create something to do the job fairly quickly.

The first version of FormFiller was written in about 30 minutes over the course of 2 lunch breaks and it did what I needed it to (though not very elegantly. It send the generated JS bookmark code to a php script which saved it to a file which was then loaded in the created bookmarklet. Caused issues with https though :( )

Also, because I originally made it for use at my day job, there were some special use cases that I hard coded in.

Once I'd got to that point, the thought of looking for existing solutions didn't cross my mind.

Now, to answer your question, having looked at the project you linked, I would say that there are only a few differences (at the moment).

1) While they are both open source, FormFiller is on GitHub and therefore I feel it's a bit easier for people to access the source code and potentially contribute.

2) The FormFiller save bookmarklet loads the code from [https://rawgit.com/wearecontrast/FormFiller/master/src/FormF...](https://rawgit.com/wearecontrast/FormFiller/master/src/FormFiller.js). What this means is that when I update FormFiller with new features, everyone gets upgraded without having to create a new Save bookmarklet. (This doesn't update the generated bookmarklets though. Anyone wanted to take advantage of a new feature can just use their current bookmarklet to populate the form, then save again using the automatically updated Save bookmarklet. The benefit of this is, if your generated bookmarklet works now, it will always work regardless of any features added/removed in the future)

3) When you click the FormFiller bookmark to save a form, you are presented with a modal window. Currently, the only thing you can do on this window is change the name of the link (and thus the name of your bookmark). The plan going forward is to re-implement some of the functionality I need at work. This means being able to select certain fields to have random values inserted, and also having fields have calculated values inserted. for example, random characters in the name fields, and always inserting the current date (or +3 days) into a date field.

4) The only other difference I could see was that FormFiller does not split up the generated bookmarklets for multiple forms on the page. I'm not sure if this is better or worse though?

Thanks for the comment and I hope that gives a bit of insight into where I'm planning on taking FormFiller. If you end up giving FormFiller a try then feedback is always appreciated :D

Cheers, Mike

<comment><USER2> Fair enough. I haven't tested either one recently, but here is a dump of some past notes I took about improving the other one, as food for thought.

* put focus on submit button

* offer option during creation to auto-sumbit the form. trigger click event on the submit button.

* detect wrong form and alert user something like "This form does not seem to be the same form that was saved. Try anyway?"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the notes, will definitely take them on board. Auto-submit is probably going to be the first feature that gets added. I currently have a separate bookmarklet for it, but it's much easier if it's just part of the generated bookmarklet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sounds similar to [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lazarus- form-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lazarus-form- recovery/)

<comment><AUTHOR> They are indeed similar, but work a little differently. One of the main requirements I had when making FormFiller was it needed to be cross browser. The reason for this is that at work I have to use Firefox, and our testers prefer IE, but at home I use chrome. I wanted to create something which I could use on any browser, so unfortunately browser extensions were out of the question :(

Lazarus does look interesting though.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey all,

I'm Mike, one of the guys behind FormFiller.

We made FormFiller to scratch our own itch, but thought others might find some use out of it as well. (You can read more about how it came about at [http://wearecontrast.com/2015/07/month-5-introducing- formfil...](http://wearecontrast.com/2015/07/month-5-introducing-formfiller/))

Would love to hear your feedback on how we can make it better.

Cheers, Mike :D

<comment><USER4> You should make a really dramatic video where everyone in the team is presented in a chair, cutting between closeups of their face and details of FormFiller's user interface, while telling the story of the product, how it came about, how design is what really matters the most and how you will change the world with it. Jokes aside, cool idea :)

<comment><AUTHOR> HAHA yes! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5UbCRrlmlE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5UbCRrlmlE)</comment></comment></comment>


Not so great news for the future of the channel - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrJsgizanWk <comment><AUTHOR> This is the original title for the video. Sorry.

The video is about someone who created a critique video about Rick and Morty. The video was blocked by the rights-holders before they watched the video, likely based on the title alone. The creator is unable to upload the content, and now has a copyright strike.</comment>


USA vs. Russia vs. Germany: Military, Economically, Oil Resources Wise - <AUTHOR> http://www.skybuffer.com/blog/15/

<comment><USER2> Brilliant advertisement for a product (NOT)

The icing on the cake is the use of a pie chart for "Vehicles per capita" (pardon: _" Vehicles per capita (per 1000 people)"_. That's a kind of BMI for road congestion that forgets to compensate for the size of the road network), and of a 3D pie chart for "Average Monthly Disposable Salary"

<comment><USER3> And things are clear: the world only contains three powers: USA, Russia and Germany.</comment></comment>


New dimming event of the Tabby's Star - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852#May_2017_dimming_event <comment><AUTHOR> Nice to see that last year prediction about an event this month was spot on.

Also related:

• [https://twitter.com/tsboyajian](https://twitter.com/tsboyajian)

• [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bizarre-star- dims...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bizarre-star-dims-again- and-astronomers-scramble-to-catch-it-in-the-act/)

• [https://www.cnet.com/news/kic-8462852-tabbys-boyajians- star-...](https://www.cnet.com/news/kic-8462852-tabbys-boyajians-star-aliens- seti-star-space/)

• [https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/20/15668130/star- kic-8462852...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/20/15668130/star- kic-8462852-tabbys-star-alien-megastructures-light-dimming)</comment>


Vinod Khosla: "I Feel Sad Sometimes For YC Companies That Get So Much Hype" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/12/vinod-khosla-y-combinator/ <comment><USER2> Well, that's a new one, that we help the startups too much with their pitches. I suppose I should take that as a compliment, since pitches are my particular specialty.

It's simply false though that raising money at a high valuation means you don't get investors that help you. If anything it's the opposite; the startups that raise at the highest valuations also tend to raise money from the best VC funds.

<comment><USER3> I make about 5 angel investments per year, several of which are YC companies. When I'm pitched by entrepreneurs, it's because they want my help, not my money.

Khosla may have a point. The last few deals I did were five-figure investments at eight-figure valuations. Statistically (my small number of investments) and mathematically (my small piece of large valuations), I'm not going to get rich off the investments. I just do it for fun.

But there may be other folks out there like me, who feel they can help -- but who also like the idea of making money. They might be more active if valuations were smaller, as they were in the olden days.

This is hypothetical. But as an entrepreneur & small angel investor who isn't backed by $1B LPs, it's hard to justify my investments from a financial perspective. I just find 'em fun and like helping when called on. I also find blackjack fun. (I don't really find blackjack fun, but illustrating a point. maybe poker is a better example since there's some skill involved).

That said, PG (and team, and YC alumni) seem to do a fine job of investing early, at low valuations, and mentoring. In other words, PG, Vinod is worried that YC is disrupting the angel investor business. Which is kind of bad-ass.

<comment><USER4> Forgive me if these questions are well known or answered elsewhere but I am genuinely interested

How did you invest in some YC companies at 25k levels - was this Pre-yc investment?

Did you come across these (and others I guess) via friends nd family, or are you well known as an angel? (for a given value of well known)

if as your edit says you have been disrupted, where next? Or rather, if the secret seems to be finding talented teams and mentoring them (rather than great ideas), where will a small investor get attention when YC has worldwide reach?

Edit: is it fair to say that mentoring and experience are all well and good but handing over enough cash that a small company just cannot go bust (ie the 150k each YC supposedly gets) actually more useful - telling people not to do something may help but paying for their survival while they learn the lesson is pretty good too.

I have sometimes thought it would be a good idea for governemnts to pay young people entrepreneur stipend - basically YC for anyone. It has to beat some of the ways I spent my twenties, certainly must beat welfare, and probably would make mcjobs just unbearable.

ps

thanks for doing fuckedcompany - it made not being a millionaire in 2002 seem normal again instead of the nagging worry I had not noticed the free money machine outside.

<comment><USER5> "I have sometimes thought it would be a good idea for governemnts to pay young people entrepreneur stipend - basically YC for anyone."

I'm not sure that'd work out so well. For the folks who read Hacker News, sure, they're probably going to be productive (or at least work hard and learn things) if you pay their living costs. However, I know a lot of people from high school & college who, if you paid their living costs, would play video games, smoke weed, or bum around in front of the TV all day. Hell, a good number of them do that already, and live off of boyfriends/parents.

<comment><USER4> I know but ... My conjecture is that the vast majority of people, put in a situation where they are socially, culturally expected to deliver a better world, and given the time to do so, will.

I know it's pointlessly naive, but otherwise it's mcjobs all round.

<comment><USER5> They have to be given the means and direction as well. That's the main missing ingredient: a lot of people have time and expectations, but they don't know where to start. A lot of the people I know in this situation simply spin their wheel in unemployment-related anxiety because they can't think of any concrete first steps that will lead to making a better world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> LMAO. Vinod must be going senile if he forgot the KPCB hype around Bloom Energy.

Not to mention Segway, which was going to supplant the car like cars supplanted horse and buggies.

And those are just the two examples that spring to mind. I'm sure I could come up with a slew if I went back to Y2K (anybody remember the whole kereitsu hype?)

</comment><comment><USER7> I like to think about this criticism in the context of Twitter's recent API pullback and push towards advertising.

When a start-up raises at a valuation that is high, most assume current owners win and new owners lose. Yet I contend that everyone loses.

Setting a val that is too high means the profits needed to achieve a decent return are sky high. More importantly they are different from the early investors/founders.

How much of Twitter's recent strategy is being driven by their multi-million dollar investors (at multi-billion vals) wanting clarity on an exit plan? These guys put large quantums of money in and are pushing hard for dollars back. IMHO, they'll tank the company - all because they raised too much at too higher val.

At the end of the day it's best to have everyone in the company (post-deal) feeling like they got a good deal. Kinda like a partner/wife - you never want to feel like you're the one that's trading down in the relationship.

Same can happen at seed.

Disclosure: I invested in a YC company this round.

<comment><USER8> "At the end of the day it's best to have everyone in the company (post-deal) feeling like they got a good deal. Kinda like a partner/wife - you never want to feel like you're the one that's trading down in the relationship."

By definition someone is trading down. If the valuation is low, the company and its people lose out on potential money. The FB approach (extreme valuation), while discouraging most people, at least maximized value for those that liquidated at the IPO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Of course Vinod Khosla has an agenda. However, I know some very smart and helpful investors who don't do convertible notes and/or won't touch YC companies because they think they're overpriced (I'm not one of them).

There is no one-size-fits-all for this. Some companies need certain investors to help them, some are better off getting cheap capital. A smart entrepreneur would decide what his/her company needs and optimize accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER10> As someone who graduated from the last class (S12) I definitely take issue with the "too much polish" on slides comment. PG tells us many times to NOT spend weeks making a pitch deck because it will likely change dramatically during practice. Sure, we are coached and our pitches evolve, but this happens over the course of a few days and we still keep our slides extremely simple because we have 2:15 to speak.

</comment><comment><USER11> _During his TechCrunch Disrupt talk, Khosla explained that the key role of early investors is not funding, but personal attention and guidance._

This particular criticism made me chuckle as one of my fondest memories of my time at YC is of pg giving me advice and feedback in the yc kitchen while preparing the evening dinner for 50+ founders.

</comment><comment><USER12> So he's complaining that YC startups won't get the guidance they need from VCs, and hence won't be successful. But isn't that part of the model? That they now have access to a YC network that could give them guidance and insight? Possibly in place of VC?

</comment><comment><USER4> I remember very clearly queueing in Waterstones Old Street to buy a book on Marimba - it had sooo much hype that even I thought I needed to get upto speed _now_

Yes, hype is death to expectation management, but it sure beats everyone ignoring you

this is not the fault of YC companies nor even pg. Just live with it. And keep polishing those pitches :-)

edit : bit more positive

<comment><USER13> Wow, it's been a while since I've thought about Marimba and their Castanet product. Back then I was working at their competitor (of sorts,) PointCast.

Reminds me also of CriticalPath

<comment><USER14> Wow, Pointcast. What a trigger for my mental Wayback Machine. I woke up to my Pointcast feeds every morning for a long while in college, but I haven't thought about them in years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is this like 1st world problems for startups?

</comment><comment><USER10> Irony: A YC company just won Disrupt.

<comment><USER16> Woohoo! It's one I invested in. They fit my current investment thesis PERFECTLY, too.

<comment><USER17> And your current investment thesis is...? :)

<comment><USER16> businesses that are rentseeking because they have a phone number or address yet the actual work is done by a group of people who are typically independent contractors and are paid only a small % are eminently ripe for disruption.

there are hundreds of industries like this. black car service - the drivers are independant contractors. mechanics, too. there are many more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> @pud - my apologies I seem not to be able to reply directly - I suspect I edited my post after you replied.

Thank you for a fast reply. And at the risk of seeming rude, if you came on board as an advisor post-YC it was clearly for experience, but how, even as friend of friend did _you_ sell yourself to _them_ (they presumably enjoyed demo day with VCs throwing them money so there was competiton)

</comment><comment><USER18> Any downloadable slick slides that can cause "so much hype that they get valuations"? For someone who don't know how to make one, it'll be blessing.

</comment><comment><USER19> He is spot on, from reading this board it seems like people think you can use a formula to create a successful start-up, just follow YC's template and you will soon be running a successful company. Get a co-founder,produce a slick presentation...etc.

If your start-up is really good you should just be able to explain in in a few sentences a swift demo and your done, and if you really believe in it then you should not be going with X other cookie cutter start-ups to chase a few dollars from some company with not exactly a good record.

You should have multiple investor's lined up and you should be choosing them not the other way around.</comment>


DIY TV: Any hackers care to make it happen? - <AUTHOR> http://www.errant.me.uk/blog/2009/05/diy-television/

<comment><USER2> Check out MythTV <http://www.mythtv.org/> an open source, linux based DVR - this will do all of the low level nonsense for you. I suspect this does what you want - you can record the things you like and play them back. Now, I don't think you will have fancy channels etc so there will be some manual work, but most of the functionality is there. There's a whole community that talks about setting up HTPCs and once you have this open source stuff setup, you can then extend it to do what you like.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I do use MythTV - and it is from it in part that the idea was born. Doing it manually (as I have been doing a little) is just too time consuming and complicated.

As you say it can be done in part by extending and rewriting existing DVR software - but to do it _properly_ you need licenses with content providers etc. to provide on-demand content with which to build your channels.

It's a good niche for a startup I reckon (rather than just clone Hulu)

<comment><USER2> It's certainly an interesting idea that is related to the sea change in how people interact with media that has been ongoing for the last half a decade or so. As far as getting something for your own purposes, I think building something on top of MythTV is probably fastest - avoids the annoying reinventing the wheel stuff. I have shied (sp?) away from video work because it is inherently computationally and bandwidth expensive - so most of my personal work has focused on text based stuff, which is much cheaper to make scalable (:</comment></comment></comment>


YouTube warns you if a video channel was paid for by Russian government - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/fwDCH0c <comment><USER2> YouTube does variations of that for all publicly/state supported broadcasters.

See: CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

"CBC is a publicly funded Canadian broadcaster"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ- XYUR2YL0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ-XYUR2YL0)

And the BBC

"BBC is a publicly funded British broadcaster"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3boVfBStFpM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3boVfBStFpM)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link to video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Xra_HN8a8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Xra_HN8a8)</comment>


How to blow your investor pitch - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/NorthVenturePartners/fail-12-ways-to-blow-your-investor-pitch

<comment><AUTHOR> This is fairly basic information, but a great example of smart slide design. Fantastic presentation.

<comment><USER2> I disagree: all the "problems" are commonly discussed, but actually discussing the _fixes_ is awesome.

Great slides.

<comment><AUTHOR> good point, the positive/negative approach is a nice departure from the standard bulleted list of advice you find on a lot of blogs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks. I feel like the cold sweat realizations of "after the meeting" are all right there in this slide show. Nice to have them before the meeting...

</comment><comment><USER4> my eyes hurt from trying to read the text

<comment><AUTHOR> You can make it larger by clicking full screen. Totally agree it isn't optimized for that small form.</comment></comment>


Mea Culpa: Asteroid vs Satellite - <AUTHOR> http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/mea-culpa-asteroid-vs-satellite <comment><USER2> A related, though much closer to home, experience I have had is an airplane flying through the field of view during a reasonably long exposure on a galaxy. The plane's transit left two long, continuous streaks through the image, one from each navigation light on the wing tips. The streaks had different brightness, likely due to the transmission of the filter I was using for red and green light. So in principle you could use knowledge of the filter transmission curve to work out which direction the airplane flew through the camera's field of view.

<comment><USER3> Well you don't need to do that, because the left wing has a red light, right has green. So as long as you're comfortable with the very reasonable assumption that the plane isn't upside down, you know which direction it was going.

Edit: sorry, I didn't mean to say that you can't do what you suggested, more that if you were solely interested in direction you wouldn't need to. It'd still be an interesting exercise!

<comment><USER2> > Well you don't need to do that, because the left wing has a red light, right > has green. So as long as you're comfortable with the very reasonable > assumption that the plane isn't upside down, you know which direction it was > going.

The overwhelming majority of astronomical images (i.e., those not taken with a DSLR or other consumer-like camera) are monochrome images. So in any single exposure you don't retrieve a RGB color image. The color images you see from all professional and many amateur telescopes are reconstructed from multiple exposures through different filters (e.g., the one in the syfy.com article). So you would not see a red light and a green light – you just see two monochrome streaks with different brightness. Planes pass through a telescope field of view relatively quickly, so you most likely only see it in a single exposure.

<comment><USER3> Ah, I misunderstood your original post - didn't realize you were photographing monochrome through a succession of filters. Thanks for the explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Man, this is a great post. I had no idea they had such information accessible at such detail, including a sky search engine. Fantastic stuff.

</comment><comment><USER5> The way that they determined the the object was moving, and the direction, by comparing consecutive images is exactly the way that scientists are currently looking for a predicted dwarf planet quite far out in the solar system.

An excellent podcast ep from the Wholesome Show where the lead scientist talks through the process - including a mass citizen science approach to scrutinising the image series - is here: [https://soundcloud.com/wholesomeshow/looking-for-plu-two- a-b...](https://soundcloud.com/wholesomeshow/looking-for-plu-two-a-beer-with- citizen-astronomer-wrangler-dr-brad-tucker)

</comment><comment><USER6> If you were unanaware, most telescopes have data available online these days, provided their data is also public and not embargoed. There's REST API you basically do something like:

POST /tap/sync?query=select * from object a where ... HTTP/1.1

The SDSS server is probably most used.

<comment><USER7> Hmmm... do they really take raw queries like that?

Seems like it'd be open to attack :(, unless very carefully parsed and handled.

<comment><USER6> Yes, there's super-subset of SQL-92 called ADQL which is ran, but no inserts/deletes/updates are allowed. You can upload data to the services as XML files.

<comment><USER7> Interesting, thanks. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm seeing a strange white dot float at the exact center of the browser on the page. At first, I thought the page was being cute, with an "astronomical artifact" of dust in the lens, but the article didn't mention it.

[https://imgur.com/a/NZL8B](https://imgur.com/a/NZL8B)

<comment><USER9> It's an artifact of ad blocking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It will be amazing when people start doing correlation like this across stellar distances. Mars, just for starters.

</comment><comment><USER11> Just recently went to the Goldendale Observatory in southern Washington, and man was that fun. We got to look through their giant amateur telescope, as well as do some naked eye spotting.

Go on a night when there's little moon (quarter phase?) and no weather. It's a lot of fun, and the people working there are very charismatic.

</comment><comment><USER12> I looked up M77 on Wikipedia, and this image is already there, complete with asteroid streak.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dazzling_galaxy_Messier_7...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dazzling_galaxy_Messier_77.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER13> Apart from _" that, my friends, is science!"_, the follow-up he got is another nice example of [https://www.xkcd.com/386/](https://www.xkcd.com/386/) — a.k.a. "Someone's wrong on the Internet"

<comment><USER14> I don't think the XKCD really applies here, at least in my interpretation. This was more like a mystery that everyone worked together to solve rather productively.

To me, the XKCD represents pointlessly arguing over random stuff while not making any productive points. Come to think of it, perhaps I'm falling foul of it again as I type...

<comment><USER13> Personally, I always had (and still have) a much more positive view of the XKCD. I believe it actually shows an interesting way how people try to make the world better, and share their knowledge, in face of noticed errors.

I believe this mechanism can be also used with premeditation, as an interesting way to encourage collaboration and solicit help. I seem to recall, that in early days of Wikipedia, it was explicitly suggested that editors should not fix small errors and typos in articles, so as to provoke newcomers to fix them, and this way "interactively" teach them how wiki works and provoke ("positively trick") them to start collaborating. Based on this, I'm sometimes pondering whether conscious erroneous assertions (e.g in a blog article) might possibly be a better way to solicit help on the Internet (e.g. via blog comments) than explicit questions. But I'm not quite sure, and also I can't shake the feeling that it'd be manipulative.</comment></comment></comment>


Business and Friendship at a Silicon Valley Startup - <AUTHOR> http://the-toast.net/2015/01/20/business-and-friendship/

<comment><USER2> I have used Beta List.</comment>


Interviewing expert marketers - <AUTHOR> https://billmei.net/blog/marketing <comment><USER2> So basically, there's no silver bullet, to market properly you need to understand your audience and speak their language and most of the basic principles haven't changed in a long time.

I'm assuming the author didn't speak to the people running campaigns for companies like Coca Cola, Yum! Brands or any enterprise company that's more than ten years old - I assume this because he believes that great marketers don't climb the ladder. Some of the best have done just that. For example, Ogilvy on Advertising was mentioned; David Ogilvy started in sales, and worked as an account executive for Mather & Crowther for years before he started Ogilvy & Mather.

>What will you do a better job at selling: A product you spent the last 10 years building, polishing, and shipping yourself? Or someone else's product that you just learned about last week?

Honestly? I know a lot of people that would do much better selling the latter, because the former has their ego wrapped up in it. You don't have to have built a coffee machine to sell one well.

<comment><USER3> Agreed to your last paragraph. You need distance to market a product. I am horrible at marketing my own side projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This essay felt sparse on the detail. Every tech person on HN knows their product and problem domain quite well - how to market it is a genuinely different problem.

Mentioning "listening" is a great point - but this is not particularly novel (any book on sales & marketing would suggest this first step as well).

Some points I was expecting:

\- Story telling, vision setting and narrative building (I would recommend "CopyHour" for anyone interested)

\- Visual imagery (design, photos, icons)

\- Content marketing (informing your customer, aka. "thought leadership")

\- Sampling across various marketing channels, then scaling on those which perform well ("Scientific Advertising" is a very quick read here)

</comment><comment><USER5> The first point is 100% wrong in my experience. I know multiple great marketing people who climbed the ladder and do the job quite well. In my experience, the people who only market their own products do succeed for the reasons the article mentions, but they have minimal capability to break down why they succeed and translate it into success on future projects.</comment>


Ask HN: How to get started with genetic engineering or biohacking? - <AUTHOR> I am a software developer interested in the area due to advances in CRISPR and gene editing. What would you say are good starting points. Interested in books and classes that would be what SICP or CS50 are for computer science. <comment><USER2> Just to clarify, my understanding of you bio-hacking is that you are "hacking" your body to behave in an certain way.

Some already go that route via Injecting magnets or rfid into their bodies, or take drugs/ micro dose on dubious substances.

CRISPR won't really do much afaik at your age as gene editing for mammals is typically done when when the subject is still a zygote. Though, I haven't kept up with CRISPR to see if there are FDA approved therapeutics using it post zygote. So unless you're typing this question in your mom's uterus as a single cell, or you're looking to create an underground designer baby lab to service billionaires, then CRISPR won't do much.

But if you think you're smarter than the PhDs who spent decades doing this because you can write code, please go on and biohack away. I'll look for your picture in next year's Nobel Prize.

But, if you're interested in doing molecular biology, consider taking a massive pay cut and joining a lab in academia.</comment>


Show HN: AutoAPI Vehicle Web Crawler – Searches the Web to Find the Best Deals - <AUTHOR> http://autoapi.com/in/8kK8/recently-crawled

<comment><USER2> Reminds me of Carsabi (YCW12). If I remember, they built a good product and found a vein, but ultimately struggled with a business model.

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/01/facebook-acqhires- founders-...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/01/facebook-acqhires-founders-of- carsabi-who-will-sell-off-their-car-price-comparison-site/)

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems working now. (Mon July 13, 10:43 Pacific).

One thing I noticed is that the range is capped to 100 miles. An unlimited range would be incredibly useful for searching for used exotics, i.e. Ferraris, which is a valid input parameter :-). Since supply (both overall and for a particular configuration) is so limited, it makes sense to buyers to fly to see the car or to buy blind and ship the car to them.

<comment><AUTHOR> This will be added very soon. In the meantime, if you change "distance=100" in the url to "distance=all" you can search all results -- although in some cases we dont allow this (like if you havent select a make) as it is pretty intensive on the server when we have a lot of results to return.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We have done similar search engine for Turkish used car ad sites. It has been really fun to build such a thing since there are number of things to compensate and normalize data collected from various sources. I have learned a lot while doing it.

[http://www.otomobul.com](http://www.otomobul.com)

</comment><comment><USER5> What sources are you searching? I searched all for particular car and got no results. I know there are over 500 on Craigslist alone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Craigslist does not allow websites to scrape their content

<comment><USER5> I just checked Autotrader too. 46 listed there. Car search is tricky. It's something I've been thinking about for a while now.

[Edit] I'd love to see someone do car search right!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can't select the model when trying to do a search.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have Javascript enabled? When you choose a make the models are fetched on the fly using AJAX

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> down for updates, check back soon! :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Under high loads the site restricts access to non USA/Canada IP ranges

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> out of curiosity. what do you guys use for API management?

<comment><AUTHOR> Custom platform using Laravel, but definitely interested in Mashape. Have an email to discuss?

<comment><USER8> firstname.lastname@example.com

Also tak a look at the open source API gateway [http://getkong.org](http://getkong.org) and [https://apianalytics.com](https://apianalytics.com) for Visualization and Monitoring of API traffic.</comment></comment></comment>