BBS Graphics History: Pretty awesome, until the web showed up - <AUTHOR> https://tedium.co/2020/07/21/bbs-graphics-history-ripscrip-naplps/ <comment><USER2> Interesting the article didn't mention the one thing I remember vividly about RIP graphics, which is the rendering process. I always assumed it was vector based because of the way the image would get rendered segment by segment as it was downloaded. It looked like you were watching a video of the artist painting the image. Shapes and lines would get created and filled in and overlayed. On a 2400 modem it was interesting to watch, which was important when you were waiting for data to trickle in. Here's an example: [https://youtu.be/XtWmPO-cLR8](https://youtu.be/XtWmPO-cLR8)

<comment><USER3> Basically the same effect happened with a lot of DOS shareware drawing programs in the day. The file formats were often instructions like:

      Line (20,500) (45, 520) (15)
      Line (200,523) (65, 520) (15)
      Circle (300, 300) (100) (30)
      Fill (50,30) (16)
      and so on

If you had a slower computer, or the software wasn't optimized that well, you'd be able to sit and watch your drawing re-draw every time you loaded the file or made certain edits.

<comment><USER4> Not just DOS, Windows as well. The WMF (Windows Metafile), EMF (Enhanced Metafile) and EMF+ formats are exactly that, except that primitives correspond to GDI or GDI+ calls. And they're still fully supported. Even MSPaint in Win10 can still open them, although it's not listed among supported extensions when you do File -> Open.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> According to the article, RIPscrip came to market in 1993 and it was being widely advertised to BBS sysops by 1994. From what I remember of this era, that was simply too late to stand a chance against the juggernaut of the web.

NCSA Mosaic (the first popular graphical web browser) came out in 1992. By the time I first got web access in the fall of 1994, the web was already far larger and more fascinating than any BBS I had ever used. And then Netscape Navigator 1.0 was released on December 15, 1994, and I remember that all my geek friends had concluded that the world was about to change. The early web was _captivating._

In 1994 and 1995, a proprietary graphics format from a 6 person company stood no chance.

I do miss BBSs. The shared a lot of the good aspects of forum culture in the mid-2000s, but for a local audience. And they definitely had a true geek spirit. But the early web brought the world to your fingertips.

<comment><USER3> Part of the beauty about a BBS was that you could access it using anything, even an old or spare computer. All you needed was a modem and text display. An old 286 with a CGA card and 640k RAM was the perfect machine for a BBS, and with an EGA card you could dial in to the few RIP boards that existed.

Sure, you could do so much more with an HTML/browser, but you needed megabytes of ram, a high-res graphics card and monitor, a mouse, and OS like Windows or Mac, a fast CPU...

<comment><USER6> While it's certainly true BBS access had lower requirements than graphical web browsers, by the time graphical browsers appeared there was a huge population of home systems that could run them.

By 1994 Windows was installed by default on consumer PCs and you'd be hard pressed to buy a new PC that wasn't multimedia capable. The multimedia trend had been pushed by CD-ROM content since the start of the decade. Within a year of Netscape becoming available Windows 95 was the default OS on new PCs. AOL, CompuServe, and MSN also all existed by 1994 and had graphical clients.

So by the time Netscape was first released a majority of PCs in use were easily capable of running it. The number of just AOL users likely dwarfed the number of BBS users even at their peak popularity. C64 and Apple II die hards might have still been dialing their local BBSes but they weren't a majority and BBSes weren't really offering the ease of use as online services and then the web.

<comment><USER3> True - but by that time BBSes were basically dead anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can't talk about ANSI and RIP graphics without covering the art scene that existed around that..

A lot of it was banners for pirate boards, but the art that those folks managed to squeeze out of text characters was amazing.

Textfiles.com has a good archive: [http://artscene.textfiles.com/ansi/](http://artscene.textfiles.com/ansi/)

Tip: use the (?) next to the source file to view the rendered PNG

<comment><USER8> And [https://16colo.rs/](https://16colo.rs/)

<comment><USER9> The ansi scene is alive today and more vibrant than the past decade. Be sure to pay a visit to 16c and view some of what ansi wizards put out using just those same 16 colors. alpha king / blocktronics

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ah, an opportunity to share my favorite RIPscrip art of all time: [https://16colo.rs/pack/sadist04/K%21LIGHT.RIP](https://16colo.rs/pack/sadist04/K%21LIGHT.RIP)

One of the magical things about RIPscrip is that some (most?) viewers drew the art as it loaded in layers, so you got to see the vector art be assembled as your modem worked. Do yourself a favor and download PabloDraw (linked from the article) and view that k!light.rip file (it's part of this pack: [https://files.artpacks.org/1999/sadist04.zip](https://files.artpacks.org/1999/sadist04.zip)).

<comment><USER10> Also, I just can't miss an opportunity to plug [https://artpacks.org](https://artpacks.org)

<comment><USER11> Where are these still coming from?

<comment><USER10> There have been a few packs released this year, even. It's a fairly tight knit community with most of it on IRC, Discord and Facebook. Check efnet #16c for one of the more active places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My friend ran his BBS with Excalibur.

Entirely graphical (you could design pages using drag & drop, use vector graphics, etc.) and ran on Windows.

The company closed shop in 1999.

Example screenshots: \- [https://infofiles.org/uploads/posts/2018-08/1534836516_pic1....](https://infofiles.org/uploads/posts/2018-08/1534836516_pic1.png) \- [https://infofiles.org/uploads/posts/2018-08/1534836564_pic2....](https://infofiles.org/uploads/posts/2018-08/1534836564_pic2.png)

<comment><USER13> Awesome reference to Excalibur. I think there are probably a surprising number of other "long tail" attempts at better BBS graphics.

One I used as a kid was OMNI BBS (sometimes written O-M-N-I BBS) which ran on windows: [http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/software/IBM/WINDOWS/OMNIBBS/](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/software/IBM/WINDOWS/OMNIBBS/)

Only a few of my friends ever dialed in but it was a next generation replacement to a custom qbasic bbs that I had written.

The OMNI BBS admin interface seemed to borrow heavily from Visual Basic and even included Basic scripting features so that you could program entire games and experiences. Unfortunately it was very buggy and combined with my amateur coding skills I didn't get very far with anything beyond the basic built-in features of email, message board and file repository.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just throwing these two links in to the pen.

[http://artcity.bitfellas.org/](http://artcity.bitfellas.org/) \- Amiga artwork

[http://www.wab.com](http://www.wab.com) \- CSS/Javascript demoscene intro's

</comment><comment><USER15> I remember being at an early BBSCON, perhaps in Tampa. I bought something at a vendors booth. He got on a PC and typed in my order. I asked what he was doing and he explained that he was connected to their BBS in Denver. Once it charged my credit card it was going to print out a mailing label with a bar code. An employee would scan the code, find the book, put it into an envelope and slap on the label.

That book was waiting on my doorstep when I returned from the conference. This was maybe 1989 or 1990, I told my boss that our brand new FAX machine was toast, I'd just seen the future. The really funny thing is that thirty years later that FAX machine (or it's replacement) is still being used.

</comment><comment><USER16> RIPscrip never took off in my area; but I still BBS to this day and it seems to me that it failed to stick.

Consider the LORD dragon presented in the article in both ANSI and RIP: the _ability_ chasm between the artistic representations is enormous!

ANSI was lovely because it was only a small abstraction beyond text; and the chunky lo-fi art made it accessible to many, without getting ugly.

Consider nowadays where the low-ability alternative to that high fidelity dragon would likely be rendered in shaky mspaint blobs. There's good reason we don't see much of that, and yet in the days of the BBS there was ANSI _dripping_ off the text.

</comment><comment><USER17> I ran a Searchlight BBS that used RIPScrip.

At the time, it was beautiful. I'd run a WWIVBBS prior to that, and the users loved the change.

Fast forward 6 months, and the world.wide.web was just too attractive to keep using a BBS platform. RIP RIPscrip.

</comment><comment><USER18> I used to run a C64 CNet based BBS (Tomcat BBS's were very popular in my area). One thing that CNet did that none of the others did was allow you to buffer ANSI/ASCII keystrokes and then play it all back. This resulted in a 'stop motion' style ANSI art "movies". Some of my users were quite good at making these movies, incredibly entertaining too.

<comment><USER19> s/ANSI/PETSCII :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The problem I had with RIPscript was back in the 90s on my Mac there were no RIPscript viewers available. It was a DOS only technology, while the Web worked on not only the Mac but also my FreeBSD box. The company was also trying to make a living off of the tech while Mosaic and Apache were free.

The other aspect was that it was relatively hard to make a RIPscript image. You needed a vector graphics artist. The web went with simple raster graphics instead which opened up the talent pool considerably. The bandwidth and memory constraints that RIPscript were built around were quickly demolished in the 90s as computer power skyrocketed and relatively fast modems became cheap.

<comment><USER21> But then Mac users had FirstClass, TeleFinder, and NovaLink (though I never used that one).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ah nostalgia! I "volunteered" at TeleGrafix in HB back in the day. I used to ride my bike an hour after school just to package up RIPterm/paint floppies and use that horrible FedEx PC in the back. I was a fledgling code junkie and had hoped I could glean some of the genius that went into making RIPscrip, though I'm sure it would have gone over my head anyways. I was definitely a bit sad they never "made it big", on the other hand, they never paid me for all those hours I put in (and I never even got to look at any code).

<comment><USER23> Yep. Nostalgic times! Memory flyby to a bygone era!

Wish could time travel and live that life again!

Not a fan of the current developments though! Sadly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Robo/FX was another graphical BBS that came out in the early 90s. I remember migrating from RemoteAccess to Robo/FX; it was quite the change from ansi art.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBOARD/FX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBOARD/FX) [https://www.reddit.com/r/bbs/comments/5eo8pz/roboboard_and_r...](https://www.reddit.com/r/bbs/comments/5eo8pz/roboboard_and_roboboardfx/)

</comment><comment><USER25> In 1986 I was a developer for IBM's IBM PC support BBS. You could access knowledge base articles and patches. At that time we wanted to add graphics and were looking at adding NAPLPS support.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's interesting to note that the only terminal I use that rendered the VT-100 torture test perfectly is Apple's Terminal. All others balked at double height/width.

Few implement a full set of ANSI SGR commands. VTE and Konsole are the only ones I found that can do overlines (useful in status lines).

Also odd that so many people reinvented wheels - when sixels, Tektronix, Minitel, NAPLPS and others were available, people still invented new "standards", to the point standards became mostly useless.

</comment><comment><USER27> Back in 1995 I wrote a library for creating BBS Door games using RIP graphics, in QuickBasic 4.5. Also created a RIP Door Game of the classic Battleship game. It never went anywhere as most of my local BBSs started shutting down the following year.

I wrote some JavaScript that draws RIP files into a web canvas, and an experimental RIP to SVG converter. It's still incomplete. Here's the source: [https://github.com/cgorringe/RIPtermJS](https://github.com/cgorringe/RIPtermJS)

Here's a Demo page where you can see some RIP files rendered in a canvas and as SVG: [https://carl.gorringe.org/pub/code/javascript/RIPtermJS/](https://carl.gorringe.org/pub/code/javascript/RIPtermJS/)

Specs for v1.54, v2, and v3 can be downloaded here: [https://carl.gorringe.org/pub/code/javascript/RIPtermJS/docs...](https://carl.gorringe.org/pub/code/javascript/RIPtermJS/docs/)

Some issues with the RIP format:

1\. RIPscrip v1.54, the most popular version, was targeted towards 640x350 px EGA graphics, which is an odd resolution with non-square pixels. They tried fixing this in later versions, but they weren't as popular.

2\. Non-standard bezier curves and the flood fill algorithm caused issues with rendering. I've had a lot of issues trying to get it working right as the flood fill would leak through holes in lines which aren't rendered exactly like RIPterm did. And the specs don't give details on how they did it.

<comment><USER28> hey, this is pretty cool! i've actually been looking for something like this as there is quite a collection of RIPscip files in the archive: [https://16colo.rs/tags/content/ripscrip](https://16colo.rs/tags/content/ripscrip)

while they convert to PNG just fine, the realtime rendering was at least half of the experience, especially with the ones that used 'dithering' :) there was a similar issue for viewing ansimation, this was addressed by using the javascript version of ansilove ([https://16colo.rs/tags/content/ansimation](https://16colo.rs/tags/content/ansimation))

i'd surely be interested in integrating this in case you find the time to resolve the last issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The best way I remember enhancing the graphics of my door games, was with those local versions of the game you could install that'd connect using its own protocol to the BBS. Versions of The Pit where you'd get local images and sound files. In a lot of ways that feels closer in step to the web, which focused more on protocols and structure of your data than on how to render your image. RIPscrip maybe intersects with the <form> element.

Flash seems like the more direct competitor that he touches on. It's easier to see in hindsight, but they really won by taking care of the content creators. I tried a few times to make RIP graphics back in the day but could never really figure it out. Flash, in contrast, had an experience for the designers and artists that is still remembered fondly today. It set the course for a whole new generation of animation.

<comment><USER30> BBS Door Games, I ran a few on my bbs. Unfortunately by 1996 I was getting only a couple of people dialing in any more. Everyone glued to the world wide web even though the world wide web didn't have as many features at that time.

[https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-forgotten-world-of-bbs- door-g...](https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-forgotten-world-of-bbs-door-games)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> You know, I've been doing a lot of linux / ssh work recently, and I'd love to have something in the console that could give me more of a graphical interface. The midnight commander is good, but a file manager, document preview tool would be awesome. Particularly since so much of the content we produce today is graphical in some way. Something that we could use over SSH without setting up RDP / VNC - I don't need an entire desktop, and often don't have the bandwidth to make it viable anyway. Do you think that something like RIPScript could be used for that? Would there be a way to create a linux graphical terminal?

<comment><USER32> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel) for displaying static images or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReGIS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReGIS) for vector graphics. Sadly I think only xterm fully supports these. Though the modern alternative would be an escape sequence to request a file descriptor into which to just dump an html document. Your OS already has a browser, the terminal should be able to just embed it above the commandline to display graphics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Wow, seeing the LoRD screen was a punch in the feels! It reminds me of a guy on our bbs who would set his alarm to coincide with the daily Trade Wars reset so he could get his turns in before anyone else.

<comment><USER34> Many a player was killed over Violet and Seth the Bard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I am eternally ashamed to admit I never did manage to beat the Red Dragon. Many years later I downloaded the game and ran a local BBS just so I could see what the result was.

</comment><comment><USER36> Am I misremembering that RIP also added a very boring download step? Like if you play LORD for the first time you have to download a bunch of images that get cached locally. Then the sysop updates to a minor version and you have to download some of the new art.

I thought it was all too slow (both downloading and drawing menus) and the RIP art I saw was mostly very underwhelming, in particular compared to ANSI art.

<comment><USER37> No, that's how it was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I have a very distinct memory of a graphical BBS that ran on the Apple II in the late 80s. It's possible it only ran on the IIGS, but I don't think so. I think it used hires mode. My memory is that it was called gbbs, for graphical bbs.

There was something called Greg's BBS, but that's not what I'm referring to.

If such a thing ever existed, I can find no trace of it on the Internet. :-(

</comment><comment><USER39> Even before reading the article I was going to mention RIP and how it came along _just_ as the web was spinning up. Even if the web never became a consumer-level technology, it was clear that modem speeds were starting to ramp up around this time and BBS systems were starting to take serious looks at moving beyond ANSI and ANSI-like text-mode systems.

RIP was notable because of how much it looked like more serious commercial dial-up systems like the Prodigy On-line service (pre-internet) [1]

One of the ones I remember the best was the FirstClass BBS system for Macs. I think a modern version is still around for school systems. It offered a full GUI, I believe it could transfer multiple things at once, and had pretty good graphics support. There's pitiful little information I can find on the internet for what it used to look like in the mid-90s, but here's one of the best screenshots I can find. [2]

IIR there were maybe 2 or 3 other similar systems, each with their own server- client system and protocol -- these all seem to be lost to time.

The main problem of course is that user-uptake needs to be massive to really make these a success. With ANSI systems, pretty much any dial-up client could connect to any BBS systems regardless of what server software it was running. Even in the case where a weird character set was being sent back (like say when a MS-DOS system connected to an Amiga) you could more or less still use the BBS. But for RIP BBSs (and others like FirstClass), you needed a specialized client to dial-up just the one or two BBSs in your area that provided it, and if you were an avid BBSer, it really took you out of your normal "flow" from your main BBS terminal software. Once you were connected, the content of a RIP BBS may not have been all that compelling as BBSs were _really_ driven by the interests and passions of the Sysop.

For those that don't remember those days, the average BBS user's workflow looked something like this:

1 - Fire up your dial-up software

2 - Start dialing every single BBS you've been able to dig up and add to your dialer phonebook, this is automatic, but you'll get mostly busy signals since most BBSs are run off of one line.

3 - Eventually connect to one, maybe 20-30 minutes later. Is it one you're really interested in?

4 - Do some things, you only get a few minutes each day.

5 - Disconnect, start dialing again.

Having to jump out of this fairly automated flow to fire up another different client just to dial in to one or two boards was just never going to fly. However, around the time the Web started to really take off some terminal clients were starting to integrate RIP and most RIP servers had an ANSI fallback.

One of the reasons I think the web really took off was that you only needed to connect to your provider, and then _all_ the sites were accessible. You didn't need to jump around between different applications or clients or anything. Just connect once, and you can go everywhere even if the content at that time was more or less the same and graphics and display capability weren't really much beyond what was theoretically already available.

1 - [https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=prodigy%20on- line%2...](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=prodigy%20on- line%20service%20-site%3Apinterest.*&tbs=imgo%3A1&oq=prodigy%20on- line%20service%20-site%3Apinterest.*)

2 - [https://www.flickr.com/photos/57572221@N00/88477451](https://www.flickr.com/photos/57572221@N00/88477451)

</comment><comment><USER40> What a blast from the past. I had completely forgot about RIPscrip after I got internet access in 1994, but I remember how awesome it was after years of text-based BBS's.

Some example RIP files: [http://www.kwasstuff.altervista.org/RIP/](http://www.kwasstuff.altervista.org/RIP/)

</comment><comment><USER41> I watched (literally in Cleveland) getting RIP into Searchlight with LaRosa and Rossiter. TeleGrafix had near-zero footprint in the BBS world. There was no other BBS that used RIP until Searchlight, yet the article does not mention this.

How come BBS + RIP article not mention Searchlight?

</comment><comment><USER42> I ran a Maximus board connected to FidoNet for a few years. I lost the ansi menus. They were purposefully more simple than what was around, but I thought they were elegant and pretty. Upgrading to rip killed the board for me. I shut it down within a month of that.

</comment><comment><USER43> Personally, I much preferred (and would still prefer) nice ANSI color all-text BBSes to this AOLish crud.

Plus, you could access those using a vt100 terminal...which I often did.

</comment><comment><USER44> I have seen RIPscrip used on the internet, although I had no software to render it so I just got the text based display instead, which nevertheless is fine.

</comment><comment><USER45> It's kind of amazing to think that if we hadn't gone the HTML route, we might've gone the RIP route..

<comment><USER9> One thing to note in why RIP could have never been successful, aside from originally being closed-source, is while it was vector-based in nature the specification called for a static sized view port of 320x200. Future revisions of the spec could have fixed this but it would have missed the window to be relevant going from BBS to WWW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Pretty until the web showed up, says the website with 25 different domains linking Javascript alone.</comment>


Oculus is dropping the Oculus Go from its business platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/21/21075920/facebook-oculus-business-go-dropped-vr-headset-support-quest-metrics-q4-2019-earnings <comment><USER2> No shock really, the Go was clearly a stop gap and test bed and the Quest is the real deal.</comment>


T-Mobile rolls out free global data to existing plans - <AUTHOR> http://how-to.t-mobile.com/t-mobile-global-coverage-frequently-asked-questions/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great news. We visit Canada about once a year and T-Mo simply has no presence up there, forcing us to cast around for expensive 2-week international SIMs. This looks like it will solve that problem neatly.

Since the AT&T merger was cancelled, T-Mobile seems to have been aggressively building itself up as a viable alternative to AT&T/Verizon, providing relatively relaxed kinds of plans like month-to-month, bring your own device, free tethering, and a pretty decent customer support system.

The one thing they need to work on now is more towers. Many's the time I've been stuck in a dead zone while friends with AT&T or Verizon do just fine. Frustrating. At times it makes me want to switch to AT&T, but never quite enough to make the leap to the dark side!</comment>


How to optimize your caffeine intake with an app - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/118369-how-to-optimize-your-caffeine-intake

<comment><USER2> I developed a similar app for Android about a year ago. Check it out...

<http://www.rogansoftware.com/caffeinetracker/>

<https://market.android.com/details?id=com.cafapppro>

<comment><USER3> Cool, thanks. Will add a link to the story.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Price clarification: $1.00 in US. 1.00 GBP in UK (lowered from 1.28).

Also... there is a free ad supported version

<https://market.android.com/details?id=com.cafapp>

<comment><USER3> The story of my life: Getting screwed over on dollar-to-pound conversions.

<comment><USER2> All prices now equivalent of 1 USD (0.64 GBP). Was experimenting with pricing, and had not set all back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there any reason apps like this have to be tied to a specific platform? Seems like this would be easily done in Javascript and distributed widely. I especially don't get the craze of putting simple things in iOS apps but not in web apps.

</comment><comment><USER5> I want this for beer.

<comment><USER5> Oh come on boozehatemafia. I was actually serious. I do want this for beer. Being slightly tipsy is much nicer than being drunk.

<comment><USER6> Honest question, can't you moderate yourself? I always have, but perhaps my body chemistry is such that it "works". I do have a pretty big "buffer". I can drink a _relatively_ high quantity of alcohol and I've only been SICK once - never had a hangover.</comment></comment></comment>


WeChat and the Surveillance State - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-48552907 <comment><USER4> I was explaining what it's like to live in China to someone and it's like explaining a dystopian cyberpunk novel, but with a level of surrealism and just plain absurdity. A Gibson novel filtered through some Philip K. Dick. You have a gigantic surveillance state with unprecedented reach and control...banning people from referencing a cartoon bear. You have a society with an extremely sophisticated cashless economy——beggars will take WeChat Pay——yet no clean water and horrible pollution.

<comment><USER5> Oh come on. Pollution is highly localised. Yeah, there's a few bad cities but it's a big place and 99% of it is fine. And no clean water, really? That will be news to the billion plus inhabitants who haven't realised they're dead yet from lack of clean water, sixth sense style.

Nit picking aside - that surveillance state is maybe 5 years ahead of the west. I'm continually amazed that western governments have allowed strongly encrypted private communications to become a thing, even an expectation - <USER2> is totally unprecedented and a radical upset to the balance of power between the state and its citizens. I expect it's only a matter of time before strong end to end encryption is totally banned in the west, too.

<comment><USER4> How many native Chinese do you know who drink tap water? Almost all I know either drink bottled water or only hot, boiled tap water.

As for pollution, only 84 out of 338 cities reached the national standard for air quality [1]. That's not exactly "a few bad cities". The government has been working on improving it, but they still have a long way to go.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_in_China#Air_polluti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_in_China#Air_pollution)

<comment><USER5> > Almost all I know either drink bottled water or only hot, boiled tap water

100% of them drink boiled tap water. But isn't this proving my point? Not like it's poisoned with heavy metals?

As for pollution, of course they have a long way to go, but the dystopian picture you paint is hardly fair. It's not perfect but you make it sound like Blade Runner 2049. It's not. I live in Bangkok right now and it is WAY worse than Shenzhen or Shanghai. But I never hear Thailand invoked in one of these "pollution hell" threads.

Look, what you said isn't technically incorrect but your level of hyperbole irked me. I always come across as defending China or something in these threads but I'm not really, I just want it to be fact based. China is not THAT bad. Yes, I know a lot of Chinese people, and they express no pressing desire to leave. It is very far from the worst place on earth to live.

<comment><USER6> > 100% of them drink boiled tap water. But isn't this proving my point?

No, it's exactly disproving your point, or at least strong evidence against it. To be explicit: if 100% drink boiled tapwater then 100% feel pollution is present which strongly suggests pollution isn't localised.

As for introducting heavy metals, you're trying to fudge the issue: pollution may include, but is not limited to, heavy metals.

> I always come across as defending China or something

I take your point and will accept you're arguing in good faith, but a sloppy post like this simply undermines yourself.

<comment><USER7> We drink boiled water just because we like it warm. It's part of the culture. It's also one of the reasons why there are few epidemics when natural disaster strikes.

The tap water quality varies from place to place, but it's generally good enough, granted it is not as good as the first world countries such as the US or Japan or much of the Europe, but after all we are still a third world country.

We are a surveillance state and it's worth discussing and condemning in every aspect, but talking about tapped water just dilutes the topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I absolutely hate WeChat (not necessarily just for the reasons in the article, but many other _technical_ reasons) but I'm forced to use it because all of my friends and my entire social life happens on it. And I live in the Bay Area. If I don't use it I would basically be locking myself up in a prison where I would never see my friends.

Even the majority of my friends who work at Facebook and Google use WeChat to organize social events. Hell, I've visited friends at Facebook's HQ and had to tell them by WeChat that I'm downstairs in the lobby.

I personally totally get why this happens, and the network effect is so strong that my first instinct to contact my friends is via WeChat as well. I too organize social events on WeChat, because I know my friends don't really check anything else, so in the process, I too am guilty of propagating this network effect.

I still hate the app though. I just don't hate it enough to want to ditch my social life.

<comment><USER9> TBF. This is because you only hang out with asian people. I live in the bay too and I don't know many people using wechat :|

<comment><USER8> Mostly, not only, but in any case I'm not disputing that. I'm just expressing that despite the fact that I use WeChat a lot, and need to use WeChat a lot, I still don't actually _like_ the thing. I just like my friends enough that I will grudgingly use WeChat because "everyone" (in my circle) does.

<comment><USER10> I feel that someone who really respects their privacy should not hang out with friends who don't respect their own privacy. Because inevitably, their friends will post enough material to compromise the privacy of everyone in the circle.

A year after I stopped using Facebook actively, all of my friends have stopped hanging out with me. It's just me, my family, and my coworkers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I used to hold a kind of naive hope that the ham fisted Party would eventually be replaced with democracy. I remember back in 2011 my friends that were placed in moderately distinguished positions were sending their kids to Canada to collect foreign dual citizenship, fully expecting the collapse of the PRC in their lifetime.

But now I think the Party is too good at maintaining itself. It's augmented by technology like WeChat to know exactly what is going on across the whole country. Access to dissident conversations will make it even easier to tailor the kind of subtle propaganda they're getting very good at.

Will the PRC just continue to exist as it is, forever? My last remaining hope is for massive power grabs by xi jinping (already happening), followed by government ineptitude as he ages and underlings squabble, followed by chaos upon his death. Beyond that I can't see any way out.

<comment><USER12> Maybe there's a third option aside from continue the state quo or convert fully into a democracy? Maybe the party can evolve into something that's more and more benevolent to the people it governs?

As a Chinese who emigrated because of the many social problems of China, I'm not sure switching to democracy right now will be beneficial for regular Chinese. You've all heard stories about how bad mannered Chinese tourists are, but those are still somehow better than the average Chinese I'd say. Think about people who still eat shark fins today, who have no problem buying rhino horns or pangolin skins. (there are more extreme stuff, one example: [https://www.animalsasia.org/intl/media/news/news- archive/fiv...](https://www.animalsasia.org/intl/media/news/news-archive/five- things-you-need-to-know-about-bear-bile-farming.html)). If you ever visited mainland China you probably noticed many public restrooms have no toilet paper. Some places tried to put toilet paper in but people would steal all of them right after.

I am not sure democracy can work with people like that. I fear it wont. I fear not enough educated/informed people will make democratic decisions that are harmful to themselves. I fear a democratic China will become the next Russia, the next Brazil, the next Turkey. At least the current party has done more poverty fighting than most of the third world democratic countries. (data available on world bank website)

Does China have problems? Absolutely. The question is if you really understand what are the problems, before we even start talking if the proposed solutions will work or not.

>Will the PRC just continue to exist as it is, forever? My last remaining hope is for massive power grabs by xi jinping (already happening), followed by government ineptitude as he ages and underlings squabble, followed by chaos upon his death. Beyond that I can't see any way out.

If that happens, is that a good thing? To you, or some Americans who see China as a foe, maybe. I doubt such a chaos is what the average Chinese wants.

P.S. PRC doesn't allow dual citizenship.

<comment><USER11> I hear you and understand you, but your argument is essentially nullified by the existence of Taiwan.

We have proof positive that the Chinese culture is not only compatible with democracy, it flourishes beneath it.

<comment><USER13> I think its a bit premature, but do you really think China under a democratic system would be better for the world?

What would Chinese populism look like when it eventually emerges given more democratic features?

Are you sure we are ready for a Chinese Trump? and for the silent majority of China to dictate foreign policy?

I'm from the school of "be careful what you wish for".

<comment><USER11> We have a competent Chinese Trump today in the form of xi jinping - <USER3> difference being instead of being limited to merely separating children the children of Other from their Parents and throwing them in jail, Jinping is directing the wholesale imprisonment and "reeducation" of entire religions, and occasionally just taking their organs from them.

I'll take a democratically elected trump that is gone in at most 8 years over the now irremovable xi jinping.

So yes, democracy is unilaterally the better option for China.

<comment><USER12> have you talked to any Chinese people and how many of them oppose this reeducation of entire religions? I'm just curious whether that will still happen in your planned democratic China.

<comment><USER14> Could be argued that anyone who watches propaganda on Chinese TV daily isn't particularly fit to have that discussion.

It's not like in the West where people are critical of this kind of stuff. They've really excelled at developing a "hive mind" mentality with what the state media put out.

<comment><USER12> Assuming you are not living in China, could you please go ask some Chinese around you? There are really plenty of Chinese living abroad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is indeed very scary especially now it requires facial recognition part... to sign up for WeChat, you need to have a valid phone number; to use WeChat pay, you got to provide real-name and official ID, bank account, etc. From the WeChat social network, relationships are easily identified.

The mere existence of such tool is destine to be misused, regardless who made it. This is what real power looks like.

<comment><USER16> There is practically no difference in these requirements versus what Facebook is requiring. Try to create a Facebook account and they will soon flag your account to require a photo for facial recognition. You can't signup for Facebook without a valid mobile number. And if Facebook does not like the photo you provide for facial recognition, they want a government ID.

<comment><USER17> Mmh no? I've been without FB account for 3-4 years, and recently opened a new one from scratch because some friends _only_ use FB and absolutely nothing besides confirming my email was required.

Yes, it does suggest that I add my phone, and that I verify my friends, and that blablabla, but nothing else is required for me to add few friends and join a chat.

<comment><USER18> My bet is that they were able to internally link your previous account and the new one. And probably kept building your profile while you were "without" an account.

<comment><USER17> Oh interesting point of view. I was thinking they might have linked my "ghost profile", not the previous one, but yeah that's a possibility

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> And yet facebook wants to be more like WeChat[0].

[0][https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/8/18256226/facebook- wechat-m...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/8/18256226/facebook-wechat- messaging-zuckerberg-strategy)

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm glad this article was written. I think the general public is unaware of how China operates, and through education we can better protect our own civil liberties (and better understand why the China is the way that it is).

<comment><USER21> I do wonder how long it's going to be before we see WhatsApp and the surveillance state articles.

<comment><USER11> I dunno. We're not anywhere near the level of China (here in the USA).

To achieve that, we'd need

1\. The fourth estate to become a government agency (functionally)

2\. Facebook to have government agents on-site that employees have to follow the orders of

3\. The existence of a "department of cultural well-being" with total authority to regulate art, media, news, etc

4\. Laws on the books outlawing esoteric orwellian concepts like "distributing harmful rumors" or "disrupting the cultural well-being of the United States."

Certainly any one of those steps would have me in front of the capital with a big bottle of water and a picket sign, ready to settle in for the long one.

China is very far removed from us.

<comment><USER13> Facebook's board of directors doesn't include goverment agents (even if retired)?

<comment><USER11> (even if retired) being the key point.

The PRC has active bureaucrats working in nearly every info company in the country. They are the Party's Cultural Representative and their word is law.

There is no equivalent in the USA, not even close.

<comment><USER13> Seems like a difference without distinction if the outcomes desired by the government are achieved through retired agents and a variety of pressure points.

The illusion of "average citizen control" is more common in USA population than China it seems, whether this control is real is debatable.

<comment><USER22> The current American government regularly issues proclamations that major news organizations are publishing fake news. It sure doesn't seem like they're achieving their desired outcomes there. Maybe that's not a fair comparison - have any major Chinese companies been able to say "yes, we understand Xi Jinping wants us to do X, but we think he's authoritarian and wrong so we won't do it"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Very good article, and the video on that page is a must-watch to understand the perils of a state/tech/media alliance that runs too deep.

</comment><comment><USER24> The bit about face recognition and voice imprinting is most certainly being used to populate some database, but it also serves as a CAPTCHA of sorts.

Advancements in procedural face and voice generation could create a powerful tool to beat CAPTCHA advancements, and to preserve anonymity against creeping surveillance.

Of course, China has hooks into the device manufacturers so doing this is an order of magnitude harder than it already is.

<comment><USER25> If posting photos from a 6/4 vigil in Hong Kong got the reporter from zero to the first tier watch list, I have a feeling any biometric mismatches would quickly escalate him to the next tier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This maybe implies a use case where deepfakes could actually used be to the benefit of society.

<comment><USER27> I honestly see it going the other way. Deepfakes being used to create fake material that falsely incriminates someone. So if they have the biometrics of an account on file already, they would match a fake video circulating the service to that account and presto you are on a watch list.

<comment><USER28> I could imagine a "resistance" bombarding wechat with so much garbage that the PRC wouldn't be able to trust intel gathered from it.

<comment><USER27> Now that is an interesting thought. They could incriminate party members and government officials to sow distrust in the ranks.

Having seen though how certain groups of the population have been dealt with in China does make me wonder if they would not just round everyone up and send them for "re-education".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I once tried downloading WeChat from Google Play but the registration process required another existing WeChat user that I may know to recommend or vouch for my account first so I couldn't complete it. Strangely enough, a few months later I needed to use it for work and this requirement disappeared. Has this ever occurred to anyone?

<comment><USER30> Yeah they occasionally get paranoid and clamp down it seems. I had installed it, made an account, then uninstalled it. When I reinstalled, I forgot my password. That flagged my # as suspicious and then it required another WeChat user(who had an account longer than, IIRC, 6 months, and who hadn't validated anyone else lately) validate me before I could continue.

A few weeks ago I tried again and all they wanted was a facebook auth to create a new account. I think they're trying to broaden adoption now. Probably a good strategy for a spy app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> What is more scary is that there are many Chinese Americans using WeChat to connect with family members. There is no doubt some of them work in the U.S. government or other sensitive companies or agencies. By tracking their location alone, the Chinese government can obtain huge amount of data.

<comment><USER32> should we ban wechat? probably yes. it's a quintessential threat to privacy, freedom, and democracy practice. but are we able to? not at all. All big corporates and even some in government are on their side. China is where money is to make and ruling is to learn.

<comment><USER33> The question is what is the due process to ban wechat. An executive order from Trump? If wechat is banned, should all other Chinese apps and websites be banned because every Chinese company is tied to Chinese government? If someone objects to the ban, should he/she be banned for colluding with a foreign threat? If you go down the slope, then at some point the US will become as oppressive as China. China can't make US more authoritarian, but paranoia can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> [https://advox.globalvoices.org/2017/12/27/dont-call-xi- the-b...](https://advox.globalvoices.org/2017/12/27/dont-call-xi-the-bun- chinese-netizens-are-being-jailed-for-chatroom-jokes/)

</comment><comment><USER35> It's thing like this that I wonder if the the US will always have a bit of an advantage in the coming cold war. Similar to how the Soviet Union gave the West continual propaganda victories, China seems to be replicating the same mistakes. The US has done so many bad things, always seemed to win the propaganda war because the Soviet union was so unequivocally repressive.

<comment><USER36> Maybe. But both, the Soviet Union and the US had to offer something.

US: Idea of freedom and democracy

Soviet Union: Idea of equality and communism.

China lacks an ideology that can attract foreigners. Also, in all super powers since Rome it was possible for able people to become a citizen and to be part of it. Even Nazis became American (think von Braun).

It is not possible to become a Chinese citizen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> That's enough for me, I'm uninstalling the app and my Chinese friends better upgrade to WhatsApp or Telegram.

</comment><comment><USER36> Yes. China. I love WeChat I must say. Much better than WhatsApp.

Yes, Tiananmen Square. Westerners in China call it "The day when nothing happened". But I also heard different views from Western Politicians that were deeply involved with the Chinese system. The amazing thing is that the students were actually allowed to protest for a long time.

The guy in the video is just an asshole. He is harassing normal Chinese people who might get problems.

I love Chine. I understand and respect "sensitive" issues. In the end I can not become Chinese and always will be a "tolerated guest".

<comment><USER38> What is this weird notion of "respecting sensitive issues"?

Is that just a polite way of saying, "I don't discuss human and civil rights violations." Why should I respect a person's desire to not hear about their own government's crimes?

<comment><USER22> What makes the problem so challenging to fix is that it's not an inherently weird notion. I respect sensitive issues all the time; I don't make light of tragedies around people who've recently experienced them, I don't discuss controversial issues at quiet dinner parties, and so on. The Chinese government has just hijacked that entirely natural mechanism to justify driving some conversations out of the public sphere entirely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why so focused on democracy? Is democracy a value by itself?

Have a look at this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon%27s_New_Map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon%27s_New_Map)

[https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nCSXvCM3ogI/WZhtafxpPoI/AAAAAAAAX...](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nCSXvCM3ogI/WZhtafxpPoI/AAAAAAAAX70/3-pJ90SPWuksD1bfMnPtVvGzSqJ6Tbh5gCLcBGAs/s1600/Gap%2BCountries.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER39> Just copy the idea of Apple "Find my" as they had for e-wall, wechat .... and reprogram to enhance this.

As Leo or is it Smith would say ... "upgrade".

The matrix totally own you.

</comment><comment><USER40> _Then came a stage I was not prepared for. "Faceprint is required for security purposes," it said.

I was instructed to hold my phone up - to "face front camera straight on" \- looking directly at the image of a human head. Then told to "Read numbers aloud in Mandarin Chinese".

My voice was captured by the App at the same time it scanned my face.

Afterwards a big green tick: "Approved"_

</comment><comment><USER41> In NYC there's been a growing trend towards merchants going cashless. There are bills to prevent this. Losing ability to pay with cash means a loss of privacy and anonymity.

The WeChat dominance in payments reminds me a bit of this trend. Luckily some US local governments care about maintaining some level of privacy.

</comment><comment><USER42> The West has to be wary of becoming a surveillance state. More often than not tech companies in the West are using China tech as an example of how they should operate. We have to protect our civil liberties. I grew up in a post- communist country in Europe, riddled with corruption and dictatorial tendencies, and it is really not a nice place. It's strange that as technology becomes a bigger part of our society, the more it is used against us.

</comment><comment><USER43> Tiananmen Square, 1989 -- Revisited [http://www.unz.com/article/tiananmen- square-1989-revisited/](http://www.unz.com/article/tiananmen- square-1989-revisited/)

</comment><comment><USER44> Another hit piece by bbc; move along there is nothing to see.

</comment><comment><USER32> basically Chinese government doesn't want its citizens to talk anything cultural, political, spiritual, religious, etc. If you wanna talk fashion, food, travel, music, and the likes, that's absolutely fine. and it seems Chinese people are perfectly content with it. I heard that wechat is transparent to Chinese authority. Last year, a dozens of college students who are Marxist activists and advocate for workers' right in Shenzhen(yes, that techy wonderland so much applauded on HN) were arrested and disappeared since. Some say the authority can watch their every move via wechat.

<comment><USER21> Well worker rights is a fantasy in the west too.

Google and facebook track our every moves and the NSA can watch over our every move. The scary thing is few journalist are left to talk about it over here.

<comment><USER11> The NSA can't watch our every move, that's illegal.

We learned from Edward Snowden that they do so for some people anyway, illegally. It's bad and wrong.

It's not nearly at the level of China.

America doesn't have xinjiang reeducation camps for political dissidents that also happens to be full of people charged with the crime of being religious.

America isn't harvesting the organs of its prisoners against their will.

The consequences of being caught by the Chinese surveillance machine is far, far worse in China than it is in the USA, which really doesn't even have it at the same level.

<comment><USER45> If we're talking about what a state considers to be marginal groups, you must not compare your own imagined experiences if you're not part of a marginal group. The consequences of being caught by the police as a black man, for example, is far far worse in the US than it is in China or many other places. This is also a much more likely event.

You might want to try arousing the suspicions of your own state to see how it really reacts. You might be disappointed.

<comment><USER46> > The consequences of being caught by the police as a black man, for example, > is far far worse in the US than it is in China or many other places.

This claim is almost impossible to evaluate. What do you mean by 'caught'? Are you referring to guilty people being punished in accordance with the law? Innocent people being unfairly targeted for investigation? Or illegal police brutality?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Whatever WeChat's links with policing in China, I believe that they have an equivalent of Face ID to authenticate users. Keeping in mind that WeChat is used as an electronic wallet and almost bank account in China.

It would have been better journalism to mention this instead of only going for the angle of state policing. It's likely that WeChat already had the person's biometrics details because of the above.

Of course that's less catchy than implying that they requested biometrics details because he had posted about Tiananmen commemorations. (though the end result is likely the same)

<comment><USER48> Apple does not have my faceID biometric details and does not need them outside of my own device. Wouldn't that make your assumption just as bad?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> No, it's an article by and for anyone with western values. You know, the values that resulted in 99% of the innovations in this world.

<comment><USER11> You can correlate, directly, the "Western value system" with 99% of innovations in this world?

Wow! I have questions!

1\. What is the west?

2\. What is the homogeneous value system of the west, in its entirety?

3\. What is list of the inventions this value system?

4\. How do we know it was these values that generated these innovations instead of other causes?

As you might expect, I am extremely skeptical! I'm particularly curious how you're going to deal what I view as a very non homogeneous concept of "Western values" (it is news to me to hear them lumped together like that), and where you'll draw your border on "The West." For example, surely your West definition must include the Arabian peninsula, for giving us mathematics, 0, and eye surgery. Surely also it must include China for giving us gunpowder and extensive bureaucracy? Oh and Japan for innovations in education systems!

<comment><USER49> Western values: freedom of speech, the ability to remove bad leaders, etc.

IMO, all of the historical innovations you mention in the Arabian peninsula, China and Japan happened during periods of relative openness in those cultures.

<comment><USER11> Interesting - so those values existed well before our modern concept of "the west," in a place we probably wouldn't call "the west" during a period of time when "the west" was very "not open?" For example, during the dark ages, Inquisitions, etc?

Why call it "western values?" Why not just specifically refer to the values by name?

<comment><USER49> They are called "western" values because their current form began with the Enlightenment and scientific revolution in Europe and have stuck around since then. But yes they've popped up temporarily in other past cultures like Ancient Greece. If you know of a better name than "western values" let me know.

<comment><USER13> They are called "western values" thanks to a very eurocentric (and somewhat ignorant) view of the world that was exported thanks to colonialism.

Many of the inventions and values attributed to "Western values/culture" are derived from non western civilizations (including a tremendous amount of math/science knowledge which was imported from the east).

Propoganda and lying through ommission is quite prevalant in western accounts of history, it may require studying abroad to realize the scope of this activity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The digital war will be won with pencil and paper.

Jun 06 2019

Me

</comment><comment><USER51> Facebook/Twitter have been used to manipulate politics in many countries. China does not want WeChat to be used in a similar way. Somehow here in the US/West everyone gets the real news?

<comment><USER11> The Chinese government will use WeChat data to arrest and make dissidents vanish.

Fakenews is not a threat great enough to justify this.

There is no equivalence between what is happening in China and what we are dealing with in the USA.

<comment><USER13> Kind of like the US government using Facebook data/communications to arrest people?

Sounds very equal.

<comment><USER11> Interesting, I hadn't heard that the United States government was wholesale surveilling its population, with no oversight, with an open tap in Facebook data, and using that information to imprison people for thought crimes such as having a religion.

False equivalence doesn't pass for me. The USA has surveillance issues, but it isn't the prc.

<comment><USER13> In many ways its worse, PRC doesn't arrest or extrajudicially murder people that have never visited China from what I understand.

Julian Assange would be surfing in Australia with his family right now if he exposed Chinese war crimes.

<comment><USER11> > Julian Assange would be surfing in Australia with his family right now if he > exposed Chinese war crimes.

We certainly don't know this to be true or false, because China hasn't had a Julian Assange yet.

What we can work with is available data - China has tens of thousands of thought-criminals in reeducation camps, and is actively killing them for their organs. America has leveraged its extrajudicial international powers twice in recent memory - once for Julian Assange, once for Kim Dotcom.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do big web sites roll out new versions? - <AUTHOR>

The operations of <i>big</i> websites fascinate me. Sites such as http://highscalability.com/ give an glimpse into the architecture of Amazon, Twitter, and other large systems, but leave out the operations side. So, can anyone explain how they deploy new versions of their sites? For instance, I can't imagine Amazon choosing to go down for even a minute, so what do they do? Am I wrong? Thanks! <comment><USER2> They'll take a few webservers and their associated middle tier boxes out of service on their front-end loadbalancers, wait for all the sessions to migrate/fail over to others, upgrade them and put them back into service. The loadbalancers will be smart enough to do affinity (put this customer onto this pool of servers if possible). At any one time after the roll-out begins, x% of the customer base will be on the new code where x->100 if things go well, or if something unexpected happens, (100-x)% of customers will never even see it, and the rest (x << 100) will see only a glitch before the loadbalancers swing them back across onto the old code.

In apps like this the policy is to only _add_ columns to tables and new tables, never to remove anything, so the database can be upgraded hot, and the old code can continue to run on it, only the new code will see any new columns/tables.

<comment><USER3> And when all the servers run the new code, are the databases changed to remove old columns or is it an absolute no-no with ever-expanding tables?

<comment><USER4> Once you are sure you are never going to roll back to the old code you can wipe out the old columns.

<comment><USER2> In practical terms you generally don't tho'. You might need them again, for example, for some as-yet-unplanned new feature. And doing so is of limited value anyway in many databases, you won't get the space back without a re-org and that's a costly operation to do hot, if you even can at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For a moderate-sized upgrade, the description given by gaius is pretty accurate. Working at Yahoo, I've been around for a couple pretty huge property changes, and then the deployment process is very different.

Basically, hardware is much cheaper than downtime, and very big web companies have lots more money. So we don't swap out old servers gradually: instead we buy and set up an entirely new set of servers, deploy to them several weeks in advance of the planned launch, and run QA against these production-level boxes. Then, when we are ready to "launch", all we're really doing is a relatively low-risk DNS change: all the potentially tricky deployment issues having been ironed out beforehand.

After a couple of weeks/months of operation on the new hardware, if there have been no major problems, the old boxes are decommissioned -- either re-imaged and put back into service to expand capacity, or more often taken out of service entirely (I've no idea what we do with old boxes when we stop using them, funnily enough).

<comment><USER6> What is the magnitude of this, and how many servers do you have to buy to do the deployment?

Also, while the DNS is switching there would be some major database inconsistencies between the two server stacks. How do you deal with that?

<comment><USER5> The number of servers you have to buy is totally property-dependent. It can be anywhere from 2 to several hundred, but is usually less than 20 in total for the median-sized Yahoo property.

Could you clarify what you mean by database inconsistencies between stacks?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You roll out incrementally, and keep interfaces between components backwards compatible for all versions presently out and any you may need to roll back to, if you possibly can.

When you cannot, I, personally, believe in partitioning traffic across concurrent versions. This can be done dynamically or statically -- really it depends on the nature of your system, in general something will stand out as obviously right for your situation.

To take an example, if your service is primarily user centric, you can partition the system by user and roll out accordingly. Let's say you have four interacting systems: a font end proxy which understands the partition boundaries, an appserver, a caching system, and a database -- pretty typical.

The front end proxy in this system is shared by all users (this need not always be true as you can do subdomain and dns games, but that is a different major headache), but everything behind it can be dedicated to the partition (this is not necessarily efficient, but it is easy).

Now, let's say we need to make a backwards-incompatible,coordinated change to the appserver and databases associated with the partition. As we cannot roll these atomically without downtime we pick an order, let's say appserver first. In this case we will wind up rolling two actual changes to the appserver and one to the databases.

The appserver will go from A (the initial) to an A' which is compatible with both A and B databases, then the databases will go from A to B, and the appservers from A' to B. You'll do this on one small partition and once done, let it bake for a while. After that, you'll roll the same across more. Typically going to exponentially more of the system (ie, 1 partition, 2 partitions, 4 partitions, 8 partitions, etc).

This means you have a, hopefully short lived, interim release of one or more components, which is probably grossly inefficient, but you wind up in a stable state when complete. The cost of doing this is not pleasant, as you basically triple QA time (final state, interim state, two upgrade transitions) and add a non-trivial chunk of development time (interim state). That said, this is why most folks just take the downtime until the cost of the downtime is greater than cost of extra development.

This is, of course, a pain in the ass to coordinate. It is easy to do with relatively small big systems (less than a few hundred servers, say, assuming you have good deployment automation), and probably the pain of coordinating is still less than the pain of baking component versioning into everything... for a while.

An alternate model, which requires significantly more up front investment, is to support this in a multi-tenant system where you don't (for upgrade purposes) dedicate a clone of the system to each partition. Instead you can bake version awareness into service discovery and dynamically route requests accordingly.

A very traditional (of the blue-suited variety) is to use an MQ system for all RPCs and tag versioning into the request, then select from the queue incorporating the version. This makes the upgrade almost trivial from a code- execution point of view, and can even help with data migration as you can queue up updates during the intermediate state database and play a catch-up game to flip over to the end state database. This is the subject for a blog post, though, rather than a comment, as it is kind of hairy :-)

</comment><comment><USER7> Here is basically what one of our big financial clients [1] does twice per year:

Integration, or sytem testing had taken place over the previous 1-2 month period.

They have 2 large datacenters, let's call one "production" and the other one "disaster recovery" (abbreviated "DR"). Between these and the internet are some large routers (the Cisco ones that cost about what a house costs). At the beginning of "migration" the routers are switched to point from production to DR, so that all internet traffic points to DR.

At this time, the servers are being updated with the new code. This can take some time, especially if large databases need to be restored as part of the migration, or if the update scripts take a long time. There are a lot of servers involved, a ballpark is about 100 servers: some Sun, some WinTel, some IBM mainframes. Some mirrored, some clustered, some all by their little old lonesome. Some applications are Java, some .NET, and some Cobol[2].

Approximate timeline [3]:

People start dialing into the main conference call about 5:30PM eastern [4].

Switch to DR about 6pm eastern.

Code in production is migrated/installed, servers rebooted if necessary. Done about 9-11pm eastern.

Testing [5] starts and continues until about 3AM.

GO/NO-GO decision is made sometime between 3 and 4AM[6].

Rollback if necessary.

Switch routers to point to production at 6AM.

Preliminary postmortem report generally done by 2PM.

If no rollback, then repeat the following evening for DR.

Notes: 1 - They're a Fortune 100 company, I'm not telling who they are.

2 - That I'm aware of. It would not surprise me at all that there are a number of other "brands" of servers or programming languages involved.

3 - The actual timeline is usually a spreadsheet that's at a minimum, 50 pages long, plus about 10 more pages of first, second and third contacts in case something bursts into flames.

4 - It is common to have 100+ people monitoring the main conference line, and 1-2 dozen other conference lines used for individual components/products. One has to be awake and alert in case you're "called out" on the conference line.

5 - In general, because the main URL/URI/Hostnames are now pointing to DR, hosts files are changed so that configuration files don't get edited.

6 - Sometimes the decision gets delayed until almost 6AM if there are some problems.

</comment><comment><USER8> i remember reading somewhere that ebay changed the background color of their homepage from gray to white, gradually, over 6 months, as not to alienate customers who were used to the gray. can't provide links, and sorry because this isn't really related. i just thought that was interesting. :)

<comment><USER6> Wow, that's fascinating. If anyone has any more info on this, I'd really like to learn more.

<comment><USER8> found it here:

[http://www.cennydd.co.uk/2008/can-we-avoid-redesign- backlash...](http://www.cennydd.co.uk/2008/can-we-avoid-redesign-backlash/)

"In a nutshell, a meaningless background was removed from a seller page. Pandemonium. After strong resistance the background was reinstated, to everyone's satisfaction. In fact, the rebellious users were so placated that they failed to notice the designers slowly adjusting the background's hex values over the next few months. The background got lighter and lighter until one day—pop!—it was gone."

<comment><USER6> More info is here, linked from the above article: <http://www.uie.com/articles/death_of_relaunch/>

Look under the title "eBay.com: Satisfying their Users with Gradual Evolution"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I worked at a fairly large "adult dating" website, we would:

1) Up the code from our development environment to our staging server.

2) Personally test the shit out of it. We didn't have any QA people, so have fun finding your own bugs after looking at the same screen for X minutes/hours/days/weeks.

3) When all is good, have one of the senior developers run our sync script which would rsync the code off of our staging server to our master production server into a directory called something like: live_20081228.

4) Log into the master production server and run another sync script that would copy the code from the folder created in step #3 into the live directory. Sync script would then sync that directory to all of our other production servers.

5) If there's problems: 5a) Immediately roll back 5b) Pray that you still have a job.

The process, overall, was pretty terrible and allowed for a lot of problems to arise (which happened regularly).

</comment><comment><USER10> From their whitepapers you get the sense that much of the point of Amazon Dynamo, Google Protocol Buffers and BigTable, YAHOO PNUTS and UDB, Facebook Thrift objects, etc is to release big systems from the tyranny of the SQL schema.

When you can run multiple versions of code against the same dataset, upgrading the application layer one bit at a time becomes much easier.

</comment><comment><USER11> Here's a couple of interesting videos, obviously very specific to the particular apps:

"Developing Erlang at Yahoo" <http://bayfp.blip.tv/file/1281369/> \- Talks about the transition of Delicious from Perl to Erlang, including live migrations of the DB.

"Taking Large-Scale Applications Offline" <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cePFlJ8sGj4> \- in particular, the section on "Versioning and phased rollouts: what to do when you can't assume all servers have the same code"

<comment><USER12> for the last time, delicious does not run on erlang. erlang was used to in part of the migration of data

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's totally different for different types of sites. Facebook is different than Amazon is different than Yahoo is different than Flickr.

In general, I'd say, most sites data is sharded or clustered. Amazon, I'm guessing, basically has many many different instances of their app running on different clusters all over the world (multiple clusters per datacenter). So they upgrade a cluster at a time, and their databases all synchronize with others of the same version.

Facebook's data is, obviously, sharded by network. So any given cluster runs x number of networks. Upgrades are then, again i'm guessing here, rolled out network by network. The data layer can be different from network to network.

Most of the time though, updates to large scale services aren't changing db schemas or making huge changes to the data layer, so it's as simple as updating the code and rebooting some app servers.

(Obviously I don't know exactly how they do it, cause I don't work at any of these places, but deploying it's that hard of a problem to solve)

<comment><USER2> On FB I've often seen account unavailable while they do maintenance, but I've _never_ been unable to log into Amazon or place an order. Sharding is very much overrated. However it's physically implemented, Amazon have _one_ logical database and a customer's data is _always_ available.

<comment><USER13> How is this contrary to what I said? I didn't say Amazon sharded. What/why would they shard? Clustering != sharding.

They most definitely have multiple instances of the app running around the world, which synchronize data with each other, which is why you've never been unable to buy something. It's highly unlikely that all their instances would be down or overloaded at the same time.

Also, they most certainly don't have a single logical database. They use all kinds of things, including SimpleDB. You think product information is stored in the same database, or even in the same away as customer information?

<comment><USER2> The product data will be in multiple physical replicated shared-nothing databases each of which has the _entire_ dataset - a single logical database. The principle of sharding is that each database has a _subset_ of the data and you place some logic in front of it to direct the query to the right place. Now if I'd been able to buy kitchenware but not garden tools one day, then I might say their product database was sharded. But Amazon is smarter than that.

<comment><USER13> Are you still arguing that I said Amazon sharded their database? Because I've re-read what I said, and what you said like 4 times and I can't see where I said they shard.

<comment><USER14> Actually, Amazon is kind of sharding their database: They encapsulate every kind of data into a program that manages it:

>What I mean by that is that within Amazon, all small pieces of business functionality are run as a separate service. For example, this availability of a particular item is a service that is a piece of software running somewhere that encapsulates data, that manages that data.

(see <http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1388773>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Gradually. Except in very rare circumstances, not every visitor has to see the changes immediately. The main challenge is consistency of the data model, which should be separate from the presentation layer anyway, in an MVC-stylee. If you can upgrade the data model without affecting existing versions of the presentation layer, your presentation layer can be rolled out gradually.

</comment><comment><USER16> Haven't done anything of the like, but perhaps using something like apache mod_proxy to redirect visitors to machines that are already updated?

<comment><USER2> Right idea, wrong technology, this is done in hardware.

The "secret sauce" is an invisible layer in front of the webservers. The client's connection terminates in this layer, and the loadbalancers establish new sessions with the web servers - the client never actually touches the server. This extra layer lets you do all sorts of clever stuff that was unimaginable back in the day when all we had was Squid and round-robin DNS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well, when Google App Engine comes into play, this problem isn't big. They have something called versioning (in the admin panel) which allows you to change the app to the next version or revert back to an old version.

From an amateur POV: But when usual servers come into play, I have had no clue abt big ones.

Infact a couple of months back, when my home server had a burst of traffic from my mobile app, it couldn't handle it (256kbps connection, 256MB ram with a 1.3 GHz P3 processor. well suited to serve a high bandwidth mobile app of 1000 users and also for constantly collecting data from APIs). But due to sudden traffic outburst, I had to string a friend's comp to mine.

My procedure: I first stopped updating data from APIs to my DB and kept it static. No updating the DB. Copied it to my friend's fast comp. I had my computer interfaced with a mobile which accepts input from the user mobile phones. That was the app's requirement. So I had an advantage of lining up requests right there in the mobile phone while I was switching the server. That trick should help if you are developing a mobile app on a very limited resource (a hobby project).</comment>


Should I finally drop QWERTY? - <AUTHOR> https://honza.ca/2017/04/should-i-finally-drop-qwerty <comment><USER2> Why do you want to drop it? It seems like not using it would cause more problems when trying to use other computers besides your own. Might be fun, if you can actually learn it as well as you are now with qwerty.

</comment><comment><USER3> Two big problems with this:

1\. How much faster do you have to get to offset the time you spend learning it?

2\. Other people's computers are going to become nightmares for you.

</comment><comment><USER4> no

<comment><USER5> Any constructive criticism as to why? I was thinking no because of the availability of keyboard. I don't see any Dvorak keyboard in my country ever but then again I was being biased.

<comment><USER6> I switched to dvorak for 10 years and made the switch back to qwerty because you have to type on other people's computers when you collaborate or teach.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: GDPR for CMS SaaS app? - <AUTHOR> Let's say you have a SaaS where your customers can create mini-websites which have sign up pages, members area, etc.
MY question, what is the SaaS for the data of those users who sign up on the customers' "mini-portals"?
Is it a processor or a controller? The SaaS customer can customize pages, send emails etc...so it looks like the controller is the customer and the SaaS is just the processor, but after talking with some lawyers I'm not so sure about that.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> Both I think you're responsible for your scope and also customers if they have access to APIs or export feeds.

Any data about final users should be available and controlled via consentement mgt ui

</comment><comment><USER3> This ICO guide can help know the difference between the data controller and the data processor:

[https://ico.org.uk/media/for- organisations/documents/1546/da...](https://ico.org.uk/media/for- organisations/documents/1546/data-controllers-and-data-processors-dp- guidance.pdf)</comment>


Our YC Interview: A Scottish Startup's Perspective - <AUTHOR> http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/06/our-yc-interview-scottish-startups.html

<comment><USER2> I think one of the most common problems incredibly smart hackers have is working on "businesses" with no real viable... business. They probably don't expect you to know everything there is to know about a given market, but it would be a little silly to make an _investment_ in a group that can't think through money and evaluate how worthwhile something could be.

<comment><USER3> Totally resonate with this comment, when the article said:

 _"So our lesson learned is that, if you're a Scottish startup and want to apply for YC, make-up some numbers, and multiply them by 10, then walk into the interview and confidently say that you can make that much."_

In my mind I saw potential investors rolling their eyes and saying, "Oh, one of _those_ types."

Places like Google or Apple with billions of dollars in free cash flow can spend money to solve 'problems' for which their are no customers, startups cannot afford that luxury. There is a place where the goal is to come up with a novel solution to a hard problem, its called a 'research lab.' And something I always look for in people is where they sit on the spectrum between research and development [2].

The good news is that you can use this to guide your thinking about what the next steps are when you find yourself all revved up to solve a problem. Ask, "Would anyone pay to have this problem solved for them?" and if the answer is yes, figure out how much. And once you know that you know if there is a business there. And you can defend that number using your research.

If you don't know if anyone would pay for it, and after trying cannot figure out why they would or how much, then you are still doing research.

[2] Startup types need to be much closer to the 'development' side than the 'research' side.

<comment><AUTHOR> mrkurt, ChuckMcM: As my co-founder mentioned in another comment a bit further down "We had been approached and offered investment as well as a global IT company asking for an exclusivity deal. However, I think the numbers that the Valley works on is on a different scale and that's what we are trying to convey in the blog post (not bulshitting without basis)." (<http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4112064>)

So I think we're passed the research stage, and we are actively developing software at the moment (no more research). Overall, as I mentioned in the post, the experience of going through a YC interview is definitely worth it, specially for guys like us who're doing our first startup. But we got the feeling that YC is after more consumer-oriented startups that can scale to huge numbers.

<comment><USER3> Fascinating, I don't think the ycombinator guys run the 'hackerne.ws' site, it looks like a pure MitM type deal (registrar name.com, hosted by ThePlanet in Houston TX?)

I don't doubt you're past the research stage, my comment was that your advice to 'make up numbers, multiply by 10, and then bullshit' is really _horrible_ advice, Scottish or not.

My opinion is that if someone can't providing the reasoning behind their numbers from first principles then you're not in a 'business' you are in a research project.

I've heard dozens of pitches from folks who 'hand wave' around numbers and I sigh. They say "You can't know this, we'll just have to try it and see." And its true you cannot _know_ what sort of revenue you will get but you can do the research to isolate what you know and what you don't know, and then you can come up with some tests for what you don't know which might inform the possible answer.

You're blog post advice tickled a bit of scar tissue that a lot of people reading this share.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So wait.

You note that nowhere in your YC application do they specifically ask you about money stuff.

But, you talked to some YC Alums before the interview and they all asked you about $.

And since you didn't get selected you now assume that the YC partners really only care about the $? Sorry, I think that's a leap in thinking that might be in the wrong direction.

I applied with a website that let people name & share color... There wasn't billion dollar company sitting in front of them. There were a few guys with a passionate community and the ability to build great product. We were never asked in our interview about $ and didn't need to bullshit anything.

Yes, the Valley hype scene is heavily influenced by who's the next billion dollar company and puts little success on people making $5-10M/year in great businesses... But that isn't YC.

PG has on a number of occasions given me advice that is all about us as the founders being happy. Not about YC getting the biggest return possible.

So yeah, hopefully your idea could be a big business. But I would argue the opposite of what your post says. YC mostly cares that your idea is big and that you are a team that might be able to pull it off.

And IMHO... Try not to bullshit. It'll eventually catch up to you.

<comment><USER5> In the most recent application round, they did specifically ask about money in the application. And they asked my team about money in the interview as well (with a visibly negative reaction from an interviewer when the number we gave was smaller than he apparently wanted to hear). Please don't assume that your experience is the same as everyone else's. Perhaps the fact that you already have a strong community gave you a free pass with regard to money issues.

<comment><USER4> My bad. Mistyped. He specifically said they didn't focus on $ in the app. Yes there is a question that asks about it. (We review applications too), But that isn't a core focus in the application.

And its a bit ironic to tell me no to assume my experience is the same as everyone else's on a blog post telling everyone else how to treat the YC interview, no?

I've said this many times before and perhaps need to include it on every comment regarding startup advice. There are some common concepts, useful general practices, etc. But it's a very different experience for all of us. There is no general advice that will work every time for everyone. Take ideas that work well with you... leave the rest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who's both conducted interviews for an incubator, and been through the YC interviews, I think you're focusing on the wrong thing here. "The team" goes a lot beyond paper qualifications, and I think a lot of your shortcomings are there if anywhere:

* You changed your answers quickly before your interview because you hadn't thought them through before-hand. * You weren't confident. * You weren't committed. This is the big one for me. If this is a great idea, why is putting your PhD on hold conditional on getting into YC?

YC often accepts startups with ideas they don't like. We got a phone call right after walking out the door even though half the partners still weren't convinced of our idea. The important thing isn't having amazing figures at the start, it's being able to think things through. The YC partners can help with tuning to get the most impact. (It honestly doesn't seem like this is the biggest issue for them, either.)

<comment><AUTHOR> As I mentioned in the post, we changed our answer because we were overwhelmed by the YC Alumni placing an important emphasis on the figures.

You can't advise someone to put their PhD on hold if it's a great idea without knowing the status of their PhD progress. I'm very close to finishing, I only have to write my introduction and conclusion chapters, the rest is all done, and I have published several papers. So I don't think it would be wise to put it on hold when I'm so close to finishing.

If I was YC, I'd be placing my bets on the companies who say they can give me bigger returns. So I think YC's final decision might be heavily influenced by figures.

<comment><USER6> I understand wanting to get into YC, but if your figures were wrong, you should have known that long before the interview. If your figured weren't wrong, and you changed them for the interview, that's also a pretty big problem. We got in with half the partners disliking our idea. I don't know how they can make it more clear than the "no idea" application - they care about the team so much more than the idea.

The biggest thing for me is this: if you were willing to put your PhD on hold with YC, you should be willing to put your PhD on hold without YC. The fact that it changes your answer is probably one of the biggest reasons you weren't selected. pg has stated before, YC doesn't want to make companies succeed. They want to make companies which _will_ succeed more successful. Successful teams know they're going to be successful with or without YC.

If you were turned away for low numbers, they would have said so in the rejection email. I find it unlikely that they did, or you would have posted it, I'm sure. The fact that so many people are giving you advice as to actual problems, and that you're ignoring them, is a pretty big issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's great seeing the Scottish startup scene represented on HN :) Well done for getting the interview, even if you didn't get in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Were you at TechMeetup in Edinburgh last night by any chance?

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately not - the programme looked interesting, but I skipped out on it to go watch the Olympic torch go by :) I don't regularly make them, but I was at the one at the Amazon offices a while back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you just made up numbers you don't believe, it's no surprise you were rejected. Bullshitting is not a success pattern.

<comment><AUTHOR> We didn't just make some numbers up, we made assumptions (e.g. 1% of users would signup to premium version), BUT the problem we had was that we've been brought up in a culture where people look down on you if you say you can make $5M/year, they say that it's bullshit. So although we knew we could make that much, we needed to be more confident in communicating it.

<comment><USER9> Having been in both SV and the UK, the difference you mention is one of culture.

In SV you are supposed to be super-enthusiastic and ambitious, the world is your oyster, etc. Any deviation from that will have investors worried that you don't have enough confidence.

In the UK, on the other hand, the approach is more defensive, and encourages you to avoid over-stating your case,in case you are wrong.

I always found Dragons Den to be a bit disappointing in terms of the ambitions of the people pitching. A 1/2 million per year business is no bigger than a cafe in a popular spot.

<comment><USER8> Bullshit, this isnt about culture. Read my response above.

The only possible cultural angle here may be coming from an academic background and having bizarre/naive ideas about business.

<comment><USER9> It is cultural, at least in part...

Specifically: the enthusiastic, go-getting, I'm gonna win, we've got the numbers, it can't fail attitude that you encourage ("Get going. Dive in. Make stuff happen.") is _not_ encouraged in the UK, and in the UK is described as "bullshitting" (this may be different from the US understanding of "bullshitting"). The reason being that these projections/ambitions for success are not based on hard facts, but on the ambitions of the presenter.

Where SV, and yourself it seems, differ is they _accept at the outset_ that failure is a possibility, but that avoiding failure is not only a matter of soft or hard facts, market conditions, etc, but also of the character of those involved.

Thus, an enthusiastic and ambitious UK team may focus too much on why they "won't fail too much" (i.e. their ambitions are not too unrealistic), whereas a US team would focus on how they are going to whip ass.

<comment><USER8> That's not the cultural issue he raised. He suggested that Scottish seed investors wouldn't ask about projections or market size because the Scottish just don't talk about such things. Yeah right: [http://www.archangelsonline.com/content.asp?Page=399&Men...](http://www.archangelsonline.com/content.asp?Page=399&Menu=395)

Regarding your comment on SV culture: exaggeration is a losing strategy when dealing with SV investors. They want realistic sobriety, and dislike naive cocky projections.

Regarding your interpretation of my comments: there is not one shred of "enthusiastic, I'm gonna win, we've got the numbers, it can't fail" attitude in my comments. Much to the contrary: I was saying he's completely unprepared to do a startup, but the best way to remedy that problem is to dive in head first, start failing, and learn from the school of hard knocks.

There are plenty of people in SV who are deathly afraid/ashamed of failure too. They just don't tend to start companies.

There are plenty of superb UK born entrepreneurs, both here and in the UK. Where do you think the industrial revolution began? The only bullshit I'm detecting here is the inclination of certain people to hide their shortcomings behind convenient excuses.

<comment><AUTHOR> The culture issue that pcrh mentioned is what I was referring to. It's not that Scottish seed investors don't ask about projections, it's that if you're a Scottish startup and what to apply for YC, you have to be thinking about much bigger numbers and get into that mindset of "go-getting, I'm gonna win, we've got the numbers" that pcrh mentioned.

Eitherway, thanks for the discussions and comments. I've emailed you a quick question :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As someone who's been there, it's super interesting how different everybody's interview experience is. I get the sense they tailor their strategy for each company, whether it's advance prep or just going with their gut. YC seems to have a nose to sniff out the most likely place a startup will raise a red flag. (One failure mode for them is if the interviewer guessed wrong.)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, they go through so many interviews (around 370 in our batch) that they probably develop gut feelings about which startups to pick. But like you said, they might have guessed wrong in our case.

<comment><USER10> Sorry I wasn't clear. The guesswork I was referring to was to figure out the most probing question to ask of each startup. If you guess right you just learned something relevant to the decision. But if you guessed wrong, if you could have asked a more probing question, you might end up accepting a startup you shouldn't have.

I don't know enough about your situation, and I wasn't implying any judgement either way. I was just trying to put myself in their shoes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you've been through the YC interview process, we would love to get your views on this.

<comment><USER11> We weren't quizzed much about our numbers (I don't think money was really brought up at all) but asked more about the product (what it does, who uses it, why they use it, etc). That may have been because we're in the enterprise market (project management) and our competitors are quite well known, so they would already have an idea of potential revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think bullshit is the answer, just appreciating the difference in scale between the UK and the rest of the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely agreed about a difference in scale between US (your comment said UK, typo?) and rest of world. We knew we could make money but it seems like YC is after more consumer-oriented startups that can scale to huge numbers. So if you're like us from the UK, where the culture is much more conservative, what choice do you have? We spoke to groups that were telling us they could make upwards up $20M in 2-3 years! How can you justify that when you've just launched 2 months ago and have made 0 so far.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's something new you learned today? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> You can make broccoli couscous: [https://travelcooktell.com/broccoli- rice/](https://travelcooktell.com/broccoli-rice/)

Resounding successs, using this recipe: [https://www.directoalpaladar.com/recetas-de-legumbres-y- verd...](https://www.directoalpaladar.com/recetas-de-legumbres-y- verduras/falso-cuscus-de-brocoli-con-huevo-a-la-curcuma-receta-saludable-y- muy-facil)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've read an article How Leaders Create and Use Networks: [https://ivypanda.com/essays/how-leaders-create-and-use- netwo...](https://ivypanda.com/essays/how-leaders-create-and-use-networks/) That's a point of view I never thought before about. Really interesting.</comment>


Ask HN: HN Spreadsheets - <AUTHOR> http://www.fauzism.com/2010/10/hn-spreadsheets I am making a list of HN Spreadsheets. Please help me get as many as possible <comment><USER2> Just opened the "new startup ideas" sheet.

Jeez. If "follow celebs" is the elevator pitch I just can't wait to see the product!

Sorry for the sarcasm, it's great to see ideas being shared, but they're just a bit lacklustre in how they're being sold.

</comment><comment><USER3> I also maintain a list of spreadsheets here: [http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_114326995294656...](http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_114326995294656&view=doc&id=114585111935511)

<comment><AUTHOR> Damn! I do not have a facebook account. I will create one and get your list and merge it with mine.

<comment><USER3> Welcome to the HN Facebook group :)

I will also update your links in the FB group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this some retro thing I'm missing or is a site dedicated to hacking really using spreadsheets to organize data?

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is this list not a spreadsheet? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good One! I thought of various solutions. First I thought of making a spreadsheet app and importing all the sheets onto my app. Thus I would be able to help users maintain their spreadsheets. But sense prevailed and I didnt waste my efforts there. Though I still think it will be a good exercise for me, even if no one ends up using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Somebody please get a free appengine/heroku account and move all spreadsheets to webapps.

<comment><AUTHOR> If this spreadsheet management is really something that people need, then I wont mind making an app for that. However. I think all of us should contribute in deciding the features needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> i'd like to say the domain name swap thread/spreadsheet moved to <http://hntrades.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Added it to the lists

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for this. Not sure what the exact focus of your list is but browsing it made me think of this. I would also recommend this great financial model spreadsheet for startups in the funding stage - most complete and very fast to use - the best I have seen for software companies: [http://en.origoterra.com/2010/05/startup-financial-model- is-...](http://en.origoterra.com/2010/05/startup-financial-model-is-there-a- template/) Cheers Dan

<comment><USER8> Not sure why you donwvoted me here. Could you please at least explain. I truly think I was adding value. Cheers!</comment></comment>


The Genealogy and History of Popular Music Genres from Origin Till Present - <AUTHOR> http://musicmap.info <comment><USER2> This is cool too [http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html](http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html).</comment>