How we launched Chrometa, flopped, and then and learned to build traction. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chrometa.com/you-launched-your-app-now-what

<comment><USER2> i just wanted to point out that there is only one single link from that entire page to the actual chrometa.com site, and it's all the way at the bottom corner under "sites i like". i had no idea what chrometa was and wanted to read their site first before reading about how it failed, and that took me long enough that i stopped caring.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really like your determination here. Sales might not have come rushing through the door but you've persisted and changed tack where you needed to in order to make it a success.

Keep at it!

</comment><comment><USER4> All of these things seem to be "get someone famous to mention you". Apparently that's the only way to get traction. But how do you do that without influence or money? Most people ignore me when I try to tell them about a relevant and good product -- they won't even tell me why they don't think it's worth writing about.

<comment><USER5> You have to climb the ladder. Target the longtail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In my opinion, Chrometa isn't at a point where it can claim it has traction. It sounds like they have 100 or so customers after 2 years. There are ~1.2M lawyers in the US and ~1.8M in the world.

<comment><USER7> you should do something about that lawyer problem. ask the aussies how they tried to deal with their rabbits.</comment></comment>


Does UPS routinely lie about delivery status? - <AUTHOR> I'm an Amazon Prime customer. Since signing up for Prime, I have found that the package delivery status has become noticeably less reliable. There were always odd seeming revisions to package status when I was using best-effort delivery, but now that I am supposed to get two-day delivery, I find that the status is misreported, indicating my package was delivered when it was not.<p>Have you noticed a similar drop in quality of status information from UPS and/or Amazon? <comment><USER2> For a while there was a UPS driver in my area who would flag me as not being home and who would not leave one of those we tried to deliver stickers on my door -- this despite the fact that I could see the apartment entrance from my window and he never even visited the building. I would have to call the national UPS customer support number, and they would call some local dispatch office, and the driver would show up super pissed off within the hour. This happened a few times until a new driver started on the route, and after that I have had no issues at all.

Probably not as bad as my neighbor who found out that the USPS mail guy was forging her signature on certified mail...

</comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone else been hit, when sending items via UPS, by UPS's "weight" calculation?

I purchased a pair of shoes that I needed to return, going back to Italy, and I received a quote from UPS - having entered the weight on the parcel I had received - of around £50. Later, after UPS had picked up the parcel, I noticed they had charged me somewhere in the region of £80-100.

I rang up and they explained that UPS doesn't use normal weight but rather a UPS specific "weight" that also incorporates dimensions (i.e. two items that are different sizes but weigh the same will have different UPS weights).

I looked on the site and they were right - there was some information about it, plus a calculator for working it out. I must have completely missed it. To their credit, they did refund the difference and I only had to pay the original quote, but I do wonder how many other people miss it and end up paying more for their postage.

Here's how to figure out the "billable weight": [http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/ship/packaging/di...](http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/ship/packaging/dim_weight.html?WT.mc_id=VAN701060)

<comment><USER4> Dimensional weight is the standard measure for large carriers now. The changeover at UPS started way back in 2007. UPS does it, FedEx does it, and USPS does it for certain classes of packages. You can thank large shippers like Amazon that often put a tiny product in to a huge box with a bunch of air bags: weight alone doesn't capture the fact that fewer of these boxes can be shipped per truck/flight than if it were packaged more efficiently.

<comment><USER3> Oh it totally makes sense - the thing that surprised me was how it was called weight on the form, so I just copied the weight across from the parcel I had received. I'm sure it was partially user error, but UPS could certainly have done more to make me aware that there was a difference.

If you're sending parcels regularly, I'm sure this is all well known, but this was the first time I'd sent a parcel myself (instead of just going to the post office and have them handle it).

<comment><USER4> They ask for both the weight and the dimensions of your package so that they can calculate the billable weight for you when you purchase a shipping label. You're not asked to calculate it on your own. I don't know what went wrong with your shipment. [http://i.imgur.com/32R1nF6.png](http://i.imgur.com/32R1nF6.png)

<comment><USER3> Hm, that form is perfectly fine. I wonder if it changed (the problem I had was about a year ago) or whether it was a different site I used (e.g. a UK site) or something. I was definitely only asked for dimensional weight.

Thanks for looking into it.

Edit: have just checked the UPS site myself and they have a much nicer quote interface than I remember, including dimensions and weight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a bit of inside knowledge of the subject having worked for UPS and been out during Christmas time delivering packages. Here is what happens:

Drivers get in trouble if they miss a commit time. To avoid getting in trouble, they will scan the package and mark it as delivered - which results in the delivery status being updated. When they make the actual delivery, they will not scan the package (because it's already left the driver's possession according to the earlier scan).

All package tracking is done based on scans/events. Some of those scans are of the actual package (like above), others are based on inheritance (a trailer containing 500 packages leaving San Francisco will show that data replicated down to each of the packages). UPS only publicizes a portion of the tracking data to its customers - there are events captured at a much more granular level of detail that you can usually get out of CSRs if you call and inquire.

:-)

</comment><comment><USER6> I really doubt UPS does. But I do think 2 things happen, one has already been mentioned about how UPS delivers the package to USPS (so as far as their tracking is concerned its delivered), then it takes USPS another day.

The other one is when Amazon uses laser (lazer) ship. I cannot stand that company. They are horribly late, constantly mark packages as delivered when they aren't and their drivers (at least in our area) treat our packages poorly. We have called Amazon and filed a number of complaints about Lazer ship and honestly in the past 4 months or so we haven't had anymore packages shipped via lazer ship. I don't know if our complaining helped or what but man am I glad. We love our Amazon Prime and order a ton of stuff using it, but it was starting to become a problem.

</comment><comment><USER7> Twice i have noticed from USPS (of all companies) that they say delivered one day but it's not actually delivered. It could just be me and me not seeing it. It happened at work and there are a lot of deliveries regularly.

<comment><USER8> Happens to me pretty regularly when Amazon ships via UPS and then the local delivery (also to my workplace) is handed off to USPS. (You can see the transfer to USPS if you track the package via the UPS tracking site.) The USPS delivery always arrives on the day after I get the delivery notification e-mail. That's also the day after Amazon promises it will be delivered, effectively making Prime a 3-day service instead of a 2-day service. Articles shipped all the way via UPS usually arrive as promised after two days.

<comment><USER7> That must be whats happening. The package, in these cases, always arrives the next day (third day).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it actually UPS delivering the package? Many of the prime packages go through lesser known delivery companies that have been accused of fudging when packages are delivered.

<comment><AUTHOR> Every time I've seen a delivery, it's been a UPS truck. But that's a good question. I'll check to see if I'm getting UPS tracking numbers. Recently I've relied on the status that's integrated with Amazon's site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Curious whether parcel delivery companies have their drivers manually validate when the package has been delivered. Or is the status an estimate based on time/progress?</comment>


Wow I'm impressed - App.net 3rd Party Apps - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/appdotnet/api-spec/wiki/Directory-of-third-party-devs-and-apps?app.net

<comment><AUTHOR> This is awesome. App.net is not yet launched yet!. But see the number of 3rd party apps it has.

Amazing.</comment>


Rust for Low Power Digital Signal Processing - <AUTHOR> https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/rust-for-digital-signal-processing <comment><USER2> Getting better performance than C without using a different algorithm?

Weird.. My hunch: the C functions lack the restrict keywords so the compiler's optimiser cannot generates efficient code.</comment>


Ask HN: How did South Korea raise in tech so quickly - <AUTHOR> I remember late 90s was when South Korea was undergoing a low phase. How did it scale to tech prowess so quickly? Can anybody suggest books related to South Korean tech entrepreneurs in English or a book which captures this growth. <comment><USER2> South Korea has the highest average IQ of any country in the world [1]. The process of democratizing the country started working early 2000s in addition to the social capital built by co-hosting the World Cup in 2002. While this was happening, government supported a lot of IT-related investment. [2]. So start with smart people, give them freedom and shared purpose, give them some money to get them started, and here we are.

[1]: [http://www.statisticbrain.com/countries-with-the-highest- low...](http://www.statisticbrain.com/countries-with-the-highest-lowest- average-iq/) [2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Korea#Sixth_R...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Korea#Sixth_Republic_1987.E2.80.93present)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your input. Any tech entrepreneur book you know of from South Korea - in a way successful person's background captures essence of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I remember a article in a magazine about 35-40 years ago talking about Asian countries and industrial development.

The points in short were the conventional wisdom was these countries were totally hosed. They were poor, run by despots, and had a huge population of young people entering adulthood and everyone assumed they'd fall into war and revolution. The authors claim was that the despots had done two things, provided some stability and forced children to go to school. And had sucked up to[1] the western governments with their large markets and excess capital.

So

1\. Elites/despots, committed to industrialization at almost any cost.

2\. Huge population of educated workers entering the workforce.

3\. Countries had ready access to US and European markets and capital.

The above fits South Korea to a T.

[1] Sucked up but did not let themselves be controlled by.

<comment><AUTHOR> From history it is evident that baton of power-and-knowledge gets passed from one civilisation to other! Im interested in understanding positive spin to these changes.

<comment><USER3> Historically the power of a civilization was based on size and quality of the arable land it controlled. 1750's onward there was a switch to the amount of energy resources it's controlled. it's why France was the dominate power in Europe until the British and Germans started using coal to fuel their industries.

<comment><AUTHOR> "size and quality of the arable land" "the amount of energy resources it's controlled"

Above are _just_ variables of time - these act on an successful individual (of his/her time) to produce companies/empires. I would like to know such stories from South Korea.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hacking Java Bytecode for Programmers (Part 2) - <AUTHOR> http://www.acloudtree.com/lions-and-tiger-and-op-codes-oh-my-hacking-java-bytecode-for-programmers-part2 <comment><USER2> I'm not being facetious. I don't know anything about the implementation of the JVM or its byte-code, and was hoping to learn a bit. But...

1\. How was I supposed to know 0x19 was the relevant byte to look at? I know there should be a load opcode somewhere, how do I know it was that 0x19?

2\. What's going on between the load opcode, and the actual string data about 120 bytes apart?

3\. Is looking up the definition of an opcode from a list really a mnemonic device?

Maybe that last bit was a bit facetious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'll clarify that bit. Basically I'm trying to convey.

\- Opcodes exist \- Here is one of many \- Don't squish them

Edit: I also should mention that my style is a show/do. I'm trying to balance how much to tell the reader, but not bog them down.

In my next post we can take a look at the disassembler javap and dive in a bit more.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the reply. Look forward to the next post. I guess I prefer to be bogged down, or at least have the ability to go deeper off some tangent and then be able to return to the main lesson.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Maybe I'm not part of the target audience for this article, but it seems to lack quite a bit of information. For example, you explain what op-codes are, but then only cover one of them. I think at least a basic overview of common op-codes and how they work together would have been great. Also, the "hacking" you demonstrate is simply replacing a string, which is certainly not Java- specific and rarely useful. A more interesting example would have been changing the control flow in some way.

Of course, that's not to say it's a bad article. I just think you could have expanded quite a bit more.

<comment><USER4> I think target audience is folks who're mucking around the low-levels using javap, proguard, Jconsole/visualVM tools (jmap, jstack etc) and other diagnostic/disassembler tools like that for benchmarking/tuning, picking hotspot command line options, looking for malware, shoehorning into android etc. Javap is pretty well documented, you could start there.

this is good, about byteman, JRebel, tools like that

[http://arhipov.blogspot.ie/2012/09/javazone-2012-taming- java...](http://arhipov.blogspot.ie/2012/09/javazone-2012-taming-java- agents.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Rather than using a hex editor, one might consider a tool like Soot from McGill's Sable group. It includes a DSL for dealing with bytecode:

<https://github.com/Sable/soot>

I had looked at Soot some time ago because of Dava, the Java decompiler included with the project.

Also, for programatic manipulation of bytecode, ASM is a great tool:

<http://asm.ow2.org/>

It includes a Java source generator which, given a .class file as input, produces a Java source class which will regenerate the input via the ASM builder APIs. Obviously, the benefit is that you get a starting point for building various re-writers, analyzes, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> :) Agreed. ASM is awesome. I'm assuming we will get there.

I've never heard of soot. Thanks I've now starred it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Minor nit pick:

"The second, and this probably goes without saying, is that data is actually stored in the compilation using hexadecimal. "

It's stored in binary, your just using an editor that displays the hexadecimal representation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Corrected! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What an annoying site to use on an iPad, can't pinch zoom</comment>


Sean Parker on Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150348392138293

<comment><USER2> Always looking to self promote

<comment><USER3> It's sad, but that's the viewpoint I came away with as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> he really doesn't polish up as well as old timberlake ;)</comment>


Anonymous questions for Facebook users - Wannaask.me (Please review our startup) - <AUTHOR> http://wannaask.me/

<comment><USER2> I can't get in. I click 'Login with Facebook' and it returns to the same page with 'Login with facebook' and share buttons.

</comment><comment><USER3> This app posted to my wall without asking first.</comment>


Hospitals are increasingly soliciting donations from patients - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/health/hospitals-donations-patients.html <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/BZ6fy](http://archive.is/BZ6fy)</comment>


Stranger than Fiction: The story of PostgreSQL and Online Poker - <AUTHOR> http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/stranger-than-fiction-story-online-poker-tracker-postgresql

<comment><USER2> The article makes it sound like poker players have become a little more database-savvy than they really have. The vast majority of poker tracker users are vaguely aware that some db with a goofy name exists, but that's about it. The number of them who know what a foreign key is is a rounding error.

And the reason poker attracts so much technology is the same reason the stock market does: there's a hell of a lot of money to be made. A $50 piece of software is worth what you pay for it 10,000 times over if it even improves your win rate by 1% (and Poker Tracker most certainly does much more). A bot that can average winning 1 cent a hand could make you a millionaire, so a year or two spent building it is easily justified.

<comment><USER3> "A $50 piece of software is worth what you pay for it 10,000 times over if it even improves your win rate by 1% (and Poker Tracker most certainly does much more)."

hehe - there's a big "if" there: _if_ you play enough and _if_ you use the info. I bought PT 5-6 yrs ago and I don't play anymore. A 1% improvement over 400 hands won't make my $50 back at the low limits :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I tried to make it, I really did, but the stories and other stuff up front made it impossible. I made it through one scroll and, by that point, I had found nothing interesting about Postgre or online poker and I bailed. Now that I come back here and see that this was submitted by "4chan4ever", I feel a bit dirty for having visited.

<comment> brown9-2 On the contrary, I thought it was actually an interesting history of poker players using software to track hand history (a subject which is very common to his blog), and how the industry/area grew into using Postgres. Its not really meant to be a technical article but rather a history of sorts.

As an aside, does anyone else ever feel the desire to start programming some sort of poker app whenever they read codingthewheel? Seems like it'd be such a fun area for a side-project!

<comment><USER4> I've you're serious about writing a poker bot, you should check out the forums at <http://pokerai.org>. I recently started developing a bot and found several useful nuggets of information on the site. Be warned though, everything feels like a hack when writing a poker bot (specifically determining the state of the game from a screenshot ... kind of a pseudo-OCR).

And finally, no, I haven't made any significant income from my bot (as it current only plays preflop on 6-max tables ... I manually takeover after the flop).

<comment> brown9-2 Codingthewheel actually did a pretty intensive and in-depth series of blog posts about building a poker bot, you might want to check it out if you haven't already. IIRC covered things like communicating with the other processes, using Win32 APIs to scrape the text and controls of the poker client, how poker clients attempt to detect bots, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is funny because a friend and I were having the exact same conversation recently. He started playing poker after a long hiatus, and was impressed with how much Poker Tracker had improved, and mentioned that it was so sophisticated now it came with an installation of PostgreSQL. I balked at this immediately, thinking there must be a better way than loading an entire PostgreSQL instance onto an end user's machine. I assumed that standalone applications that required RDBMS functionality would use an embeddable database system like Derby or SQLite. I'm most interested to hear from the developer what requirements led him to choose PostgreSQL over those alternatives. Anyone here have any thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm reading the Codingthewheel blog pretty regulalry. While I don't find this article on Postgre particularly intriguing, some others are good, for instance the one on hand evaluator algorithms: [http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/poker-hand- evaluator-...](http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/poker-hand-evaluator- roundup).

All this talk is often making me wonder whether good (and improving bots) will take over the world of online poker someday, to the point where it is just a pure waste of money for anyone else than an expert to play, on any blinds level. (not that I'd feel sad about it).

</comment><comment><USER7> I have read some other articles about poker bots and the attempts by the site operators to ban them using captchas and such. Does anyone else think it would be a good idea to build an online poker site where the bots are actually encouraged? I don't know about betting for real money but I would bet there are lots of people and/or groups that would love the build the strongest system in the world.

</comment><comment><USER8> While I'm glad PostgreSQL proved useful, I fail to understand why SQLite wouldn't be a better choice for this application.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting, if somewhat longish read.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have a feeling that article could be condensed into something way shorter.

</comment><comment><USER11> _But when you consider MySQL's web-centric history, its lack of transactional and foreign key support, and its relaxed attitude with regard to data integrity_

2 things:

1 MySQL has had support for transactions since version 4.

2 _Relaxed attitude towards data integrity_ Seriously?

<comment> brown9-2 Well if you don't support foreign keys in the main implementation (ISAM or whatever it's called), isn't it hard to say that you seriously care about data integrity?

<comment><USER11> MySQL DOES have support for foreign keys.

create table foo (blah, blah, blah) engine = innodb

Sorry, I'm not trying to start an argument. That sentence just struck me as a bit inflammatory.

<comment><USER12> The GP's point is that the default engine, and hence the one used by probably 90+% of people using MySQL doesn't support FKs and other "standard" data integrity features that you wouldn't even know to ask about, since every other major db supports them by default.

Plus if you try to create an FK on a myisam backed table it happily runs the SQL, without errors, and you _think_ you have a working FK.

<comment><USER13> It's more like the "default default" -- you can change it so, by default, every table is created using InnoDB. IIRC, MySQL comes with an example config that demonstrates just that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How UK Government spun 136 people into 7m illegal file sharers - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/351331/how-uk-government-spun-136-people-into-7m-illegal-file-sharers

<comment><USER2> The extrapolation from 1176 is reasonable (I think the error is roughly +-2% for n=1000) _if_ the sample is not biased..

But the real issues is how the question was asked. From the article:

... _11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software_

So what question were they asked? If I use Instant Messenger to send a photo to a friend, have I used 'file-sharing software'? Is Skype file sharing software? I used to write surveys that tried to get at issues like this (sw piracy), and I believe it is nigh-on impossible to get good data by asking a direct question in this way. You either make it very pointed (e.g. ".. used file-sharing software to illegal share files"), and then few people say _yes_ , or you make is less specific, and people accidentally say _yes_ because they don't understand it. That's the real problem.

<comment><USER3> A study can be designed to account for embarrassing and/or incriminating questions.

Say the question is about "illegal file-sharing" and Yes means the subject has participated in this behavior in the past and No means the subject has not. Under private conditions, have the subject perform the following:

1\. Flip a coin.

2\. Have the subject answer Yes if they have participated in the illegal sharing of files.

3\. If the subject has not done this activity, have them answer No only if they flipped 'tails' in step #1. Otherwise, if the coin came up 'heads', they answer Yes.

The true Yes proportion in the survey population of size n can then be determined by (Y_count - N_count) / n.

<comment><USER4> While that "works", what fraction of survey participants will actually do that?

I suspect that many/most folks who are reluctant to admit that they've done something won't admit it even if you tell them that other people "will" falsely admit to doing said thing so based on a coin flip. That's completely rational because I suspect that many people who haven't done said thing won't say that they have just because the coin tells them to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Title is silly. The wonderful thing about statistics is that if you have a truly random sample of 1176 people you can extrapolate from 136 people to seven million (plus or minus a certain error bar which I'm too lazy to figure out right now).

The other points are somewhat valid, but by the usual standards of political misuse of statistics this is pretty small beer.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I was immediately screaming the same thing. Arguing that "only" a tiny subset of a population is involved with a survey as a basis for rejecting its results is just plain ignorance.

The other stuff in the article does seem dodgy though, like arbitrarily tacking on 50% to reflect an assumed-but-unmeasured bias in the input sample. Ridiculous.

Still, the title is innumerate, sensationalist junk, and the poster should be ashamed.

<comment><USER7> The title was actually copied directly from the article. I completely agree that the title appears to be linkbait, but the blame should be placed on the editor and/or author of the post, not the poster.

<comment><USER8> The editor/author created the title to be sensationlist on purpose. HN is, I hope, not here to offer sensational headlines merely to grab extra viewers but as a way to share knowledge, information and wisdom. We should have higher standards for titles here IMO.

What I'd like to see is a subtitle (or tagging) system with a descriptive subtitle that can't be applied by the poster only by someone else. Poor subtitles would be downmodded too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Remember when they used to bust CD pirates and claim there were 1000s of copying machines. They counted a 56x drive as 56 copying devices.

<comment><USER5> At the risk of sounding cliched, citation required?

<comment><USER10> Sorry. I'm not going to bother digging up a source for this, but if it adds any credibility to his statement I remember this as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Everything New Labour says is a lie.

<comment><USER12> In which respect they differ from other major political parties ... how, exactly?

<comment><USER11> I'd say the Lib Dems are basically honest. Problem is they're batshit crazy too.</comment></comment></comment>


1Password vs. LastPass vs. keepass - <AUTHOR> Hi all, what are people's opinions of various pw managers? There was a lot of discussion about using Pw managers in the comments from Troy hunts latest blog post and I'm curious which ones are considered best/worst.
For general corporate use, the multi vault and sharing of vaults features of 1password are great. However the self hosting of keepass is clearly better for other users.
What are your thoughts? <comment><USER2> I use keepass on all my computers and phones synced via Google drive. It's the only thing I'll use because self hosted. If Google drive stops being a thing then I'd just use my NAS. Haven't ever had an issue with it. I don't use it for security really, just convenience. I disable the clear clipboard option and I don't use a long encryption on the database file. It's very unorganized because I can't be bothered to clean it, so I have a good history essentially of old passwords. I also use it to store other stuff attached as notes or files. Sue me, I have my keepass DB password in the clear in a txt that I just copy paste to unlock.</comment>


Ask HN: how do I collapse the left sidebar in Google Reader - <AUTHOR>

I can't seem to find this option, in the new layout.<p>Also feeds shared by my friends, seemed to dissappear? <comment><USER2> I have a similar issue with the new google reader, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3204121>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> u

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man, I didn't know the keyboard shortcut</comment></comment>


Live Minecraft server connections - <AUTHOR> http://stats.minecraft.net/

<comment><USER2> The perfectionist in me is slightly bugged that traffic from Australia to the US flies over Europe.

<comment><USER3> They should have the server or client send a traceroute with the data it sends when it logs a connection for more accurate mapping!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lots of connections from the US to a couple of "hot spots" in France and Germany. I'm guessing those are the locations of a couple of popular dedicated server providers?

<comment><USER5> Yup! OVH (<http://www.ovh.co.uk/>) and Hetzner (<http://www.hetzner.de/en/>) seem to be the most popular hosts for minecraft servers

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Greetings professor Notch... would you like to play a game?_

(sorry)

</comment><comment><USER7> Suddenly, I feel like I'm playing DEFCON.

<http://www.introversion.co.uk/defcon/>

</comment><comment><USER8> I remember this from the first node.js competition. Back then you could go to #nodejs on free node and it would show locations of messages if you were to mention someone while typing. Cool stuff

<comment><USER9> Here's the source for that one: <https://github.com/mape/node-wargames>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can someone explain me this in a layman's language?

<comment><USER11> Whenever a Minecraft player connects to a Minecraft server, the server communicates with Mojang HQ to verify that the user is actually the person they're trying to connect as. This means that Mojang gets to log a bunch of "client with address X connected to server with address Y" records.

It looks like they've used some geolocation API to guess at GPS coordinates for each address, and animated a little line connecting from the client coordinates to the server coordinates.

<comment><USER12> Does anyone know if these "connection records" are available somewhere? That would be a great source of information to study the Minecraft ecosystem...

<comment><USER6> As darklajid says, there'd be privacy implications in the way of getting the whole logs.

If you ask mojang nicely, though, they might be able to offer the logs with the users anonymised to, say, a /24 subnet, or to just their geolocation results (seeing as those aren't exactly accurate enough to single out individuals).

<comment><USER12> Yes, absolutely, I understand there are privacy implications. I am from academia so I might be somewhat naive about what companies are willing to provide, but even anonymized data (e.g., replace every distinct IP address by a random number, possibly keeping coarse/country-level geolocation) would already provide a wealth of information about user connection patterns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How do you code something like this? (without reimplementing everything!)

</comment><comment><USER14> "Data Hose Offline" :(</comment>


How to deploy your static blog on Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> http://rickyhan.com/blog/k8s.html <comment><USER2> > Ingress

> Don't use it on GKE. It's basically a CDN cache that charges ridiculous $$$.

Unfortunately not true. Ingress is not a CDN and is charged the same price as a regional load balancer (Service.type=LoadBalancer that you used in your blog post).</comment>


Chrome Experiments: Javascript Demos in Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://www.chromeexperiments.com/ <comment><USER2> I think some of these are wonderful and very creative. I'm sure they were on the internet before this site... any idea where?</comment>


Progressive Capitalism Is Not an Oxymoron - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/opinion/sunday/progressive-capitalism.html <comment><USER2> Freedom is just another lie when you can't afford it.

Sure, the marketplace provides choices - all with the same coverage in a race to the bottom, by nearly a half-dozen "health" insurance banks.

Burn down the Milton Friedman, Chicago-Boys _church_ of economics. That dogma doesnt serve anyone but banks and oil companies that refuse to grow with the market. It only pretends to be a science, a school, rationalizing the effort to encourage the worst of human behaviour.

The only argument left is about whether Keynes or Marx applies better in this perspective. And I usually lean towards Kropotkin.

<comment><USER3> You left out Austrian economics.

[https://mises.org/wire/difference-between-austrians-and- ever...](https://mises.org/wire/difference-between-austrians-and-everyone- else-—-one-easy-chart)

[https://mises.org/wire/austrian-economics-vs-keynesian- econo...](https://mises.org/wire/austrian-economics-vs-keynesian-economics- one-simple-chart)

<comment><USER2> Correct me if I'm wrong, but isnt the Austrian School just an older variant on the Laissez-Faire failure?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For the 1001th time, inequality is not by default a negative or positive thing. If it's the result of freedom and the market, then it is a _good_ thing. A rising tide, raises all boats.

<comment><USER5> And the tide comes in and out every day

Meanwhile in the non-facile analogized real world, real wages haven't budged in 40 years [https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the- historic-d...](https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic- divergence-between-productivity-and-a-typical-workers-pay-why-it-matters-and- why-its-real/)

<comment><USER6> Both real median wages and real median per capita income are growing. Part of the rise of income is the fact that people are working more hours than they used to.

[https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2018/10/1...](https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2018/10/16/u-s- household-incomes-a-51-year-perspective)

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q)

Some of the data used by your source uses the year 2000 as a baseline. This was a highwater mark and feels like cherry-picking (caveat: it is a nice round number). This narrative was especially strong during the great recession, but it is not strong today.

<comment><USER5> Yikes. Up 10% over 40 years!!... quite the antidote to my so-called cherry- picking.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


NameCheap Overtakes Go Daddy In Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.elliotsblog.com/namecheap-overtakes-go-daddy-0675 <comment><USER2> _1,019 people +1'd this_

That's what I see under the NameCheap listing, which is number 2, Wikipedia is #1, with GoDaddy at #3.

The GoDaddy listing doesn't seem to have any _+1s_ under it.

Could this be the effect of Google using G+ data to influence its search results? Thus, by giving more weight to G+, plus, GoDaddy's sinking popularity "socially", equals, a drop in its rank.

<comment><USER3> "name" is also in the URL of namecheap. It is very hard to counter legit sites with the exact keyword match in their URL, even if you have many more quality links going to you.

Try "hosting" and you'll see what I am talking about.

<comment><USER4> Not knocking your point, but [https://www.google.com/search?q=domain+registration&pws=...](https://www.google.com/search?q=domain+registration&pws=0) also shows NameCheap above Go Daddy

<comment><USER5> See how it bolds "domain names", though? Google is now notorious for this; it will search for what it thinks you meant, rather than exactly what you typed. It's silently adding "name" to your query for you.

<comment><USER6> It's quite handy though, it looks for close synonyms where it expects they will return superior results.

For instance, if I search for "how to learn Castillian", it might replace that with Spanish since that also describes what I'm looking for and will get more results.

<comment><USER7> As soon as you try searching anything related to programming or computing, where you need exact matches, you start to loathe it (of course, there is always verbatim mode). I've also had a case where it included the antonym of one of my search terms in its "auto terms". Of course, since this is google, all of these associations are probably auto-generated at some level. So weeding out bugs would probably be rather hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does NameCheap let you do (I forget what it's called) your own nameserver on your own domain for free?

i.e. having registered example.com with NC, can you set up ns1.example.com to be the nameserver for example.com free of charge? Many registrars charge a fee for this (when they really shouldn't)

EDIT

Seriously? Downvotes? It's just a question. There WAS a company that does that, it was mentioned here on HN during the great GoDaddy exodus, but I cannot recall which.

<comment><USER9> They refer to it as 'private nameservers', and it should be free.

[http://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/...](http://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/207/32/how- to-create-private-nameservers)

<comment><USER10> yes, they offer this ONLY if you have "a Reseller, VPS or Dedicated server" service with them. In other words, if you just use them for domain names, then chances are you don't get this.

Name.com offers this service for free to domain registrations: <http://www.name.com/faq/create-my-own-name-servers>

EDIT: I stand corrected, please see: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3869727>

<comment><USER11> I just tried registering my own nameservers on my NameCheap-hosted domain and it does appear to work even with a plain domain subscription.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> To verify search results with no personal settings, append &pws=0:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=domain+name&pws=0](https://www.google.com/search?q=domain+name&pws=0)

</comment><comment><USER13> Google has been testing some pretty major algorithm changes in the last 5 or so days. Everything has been extremely volatile and major SERPs are changing every few hours.

Several prominent, white hat companies have even went missing in the Google's rankings for their [brand name] this week: [https://plus.google.com/111294201325870406922/posts/NhssnKgf...](https://plus.google.com/111294201325870406922/posts/NhssnKgfefy)

Not buying this as a long lasting rankings change until it sticks around for several weeks.

<comment><USER14> Do you have some kind of article or source to back up your first comment? I'm interested in reading it.

<comment><USER13> Distilled, one of the more well-known and reputable SEO agencies have a good post on what they've been seeing: <http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/google- updates-april-2012/>

I also work with a larger number of sites and have seen all kinds of crazy things in a number of different industries the last few weeks. Fllow SEOs at other agencies are seeing the same fluctuations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I actually was just in the middle of buying a domain name, decided that while I'd like to get away from GoDaddy I can't really afford to transfer all of my domain names right now and would like them all with the same register.

Well at checkout for some reason the PayPal button was missing and I didn't feel like typing in my CC (I know thats pretty lazy) so I decided to check and see NameCheap's price and with private registration (which was free) it was going to be $8 cheaper than GoDaddy. Needless to say I'm going to start moving my domains over.

<comment><USER16> Coupon code when transferring: SWITCH2NC

IIRC you get 2 years of private registration for free when you transfer to NameCheap, but it won't stay free after that period. When your privacy service runs out, renewal costs around $2 per domain per year. But then again, you can use the WGSPECIAL coupon to make that 99 cents. Those two coupons always work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> NameCheap overtook Go Daddy for the author. Search results change based on location, your preferences, search patterns, and just about everything else. One search does not a ranking change make.

<comment><USER18> If you log out or search in Incognito Mode (basically stripping out that personalization data), NameCheap does show up first for the term "domain name."

<comment><USER19> I tried that, and Wikipedia was #1 for me, which is probably a better result than any particular registrar.

<comment><USER18> Sorry, I meant #1 as far as actual domain name registrars go.

Namecheap was #2 and GoDaddy was #3. I think the author was referring to the fact that while Wikipedia has always been #1, GoDaddy & NameCheap had switched spots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Crud. There goes my hipster cred. Been using NameCheap for years, now they are too mainstream.

<comment><USER14> Don't worry: you salvaged some of it with that comment ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I figured this will affect GoDaddy in the long term much more than it did in the short term, when people said "after all the fuss, it seems GoDaddy didn't lose that many users".

The point was that people wrote a ton of negative articles about GoDaddy then, and since that day forward virtually no one will recommend GoDaddy anymore, and instead will (probably) recommend NameCheap or someone else. I would expect the GoDaddy exodus to continue in the next few years.

<comment><USER22> yes...but all those stories would have boosted GoDaddy by quite a bit in rankings in Google

My guess is that this change is temporary and that someone at GoDaddy is calling their Google rep...and we'll see a fix shortly.

GoDaddy actually uses Adwords(and they rank #1...so they spend the most)...NameCheap doesn't appear to be(at least for the domain name search term). And they have a valid claim for being the biggest domain registrar...so Google loses nothing by playing the game and getting them to rank higher

<comment><USER23> Google is not permitted to allow the AdWord spend influence their search results.

<comment><USER24> Is not permitted, or does not? Serious question

<comment><USER23> I think US anti-trust law, and various promises that Google has made to the authorities in the past as part of M & A deals, prohibit them from crossing the line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Between their recent multi-day nameserver outage and their lack of auto-pay and their clumsy interface I'm growing increasingly tired of namecheap...

</comment><comment><USER9> Go Daddy was catching some flack[0] when it was discovered that they were appending their link to the bottom of web pages built with their web page builder tool called Website Tonight. I wouldn't be surprised if Google caught on and devalued a lot of their links with similar anchor text.

[0] <http://yoast.com/godaddy-link-building/>

</comment><comment><USER26> Now some of the aggregators need to send traffic to them also I.e. leandomainsearch.com and domaintyper.com which I love promote godaddy.

<comment><USER27> I send traffic to Godaddy too, even though I use NameCheap.

The reason? If you're trying to make a commission for referrals, then Godaddy still whoops NameCheap. Far more domain buyers will use Godaddy, so more chance for commission.

<comment><USER28> You should stop doing that because they supported SOPA. Don't sell out.

<comment><USER29> If we stopped frequenting all businesses that make political decisions we disagree with, we'd have no businesses left. That's sort of the reality of it. I still shop at Target despite donations to a republican candidate for governor in Minnesota, I still eat at Chick-fil-A despite donations to groups against gay marriage.

Are you boycotting every company that supported SOPA, including many many book publishers, Nike, Ford, Nintendo, Disney, and Wal-Mart? Do you refuse to watch movies produced by members of the MPAA? Have you stopped purchasing music from record company members of the RIAA? If not, then "don't sell out," and more importantly, don't tell the grandparent commenter what to do.

<comment><USER30> You really find Chick-fil-a appetizing and support gay rights at the same time? I'm jealous of you - I once loved it, and now the idea of eating there makes me slightly ill.

It's your own personal decision about what you want to support in this world, but everybody gets to have an opinion about it esp. if you announce it on the internet.

Inertia because inertia is not an argument, it's just what inertia is. When you shop at companies that do things that are morally reprehensible to you, while avoiding a million other options, that just sounds like apathy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Namecheap does not seize your expired domain and does not try to sell it back to you overpriced. Namecheap does not have a bloated disfunctional website. Namecheap does not have hidden costs. Namecheap is developer friendly, has an API and a sandbox. Namecheap does not fuck the consumer.

</comment><comment> Tim-Boss I'm very happy to report that in the UK GoDaddy don't even appear on the first page of results!

[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=domain+name&pws=0](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=domain+name&pws=0)

</comment><comment><USER32> I tried a Google search for "domain name" (in Chromium Incognito Window, to avoid any "social" stuff) on my Netbook.

I don't see Wikipedia or NameCheap. I don't see any search results at all.

What I see above the fold is exclusively advertisements. In the center column are huge AdWord ads including deep links. And in the right column is another stack of 160px Adword ads.

Then there are some internal Google links (sign in, Why these ads?, +You, etc).

That's it! Well done, Google.

</comment><comment><USER33> Of course Go Daddy still has the actual top result... the first sponsored result in the peach box. Along with Network Solutions and 1&1.

</comment><comment><USER34> Not on verbatim search with personalization off. This is one of the reasons I really dislike personalized search; it makes searches irreproducible.

<comment><USER35> Why is that an important property of searches?

<comment><USER34> Sometimes I like to search for things to see what kind of buzz there is about them. Other than that, there's just something unsettling and vaguely frustrating about a system that doesn't work the same way for me as it does for someone else. I can't give any examples of where there's a crucial need for short term reproducibility of searches; it's more that there are lots and lots of petty cases where it is slightly annoying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I predict the SEO circle jerk will out them soon for begging, borrowing and or buying links. Way to blow up their spot.

<comment><USER17> It's not going to matter. Godaddy already has about 100x the external links that NameCheap does (according to SEOmoz[1] and Majestic SEO[2]). If NameCheap moved up, it was for reasons other than external links.

1\. [http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.godaddy...](http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.godaddy.com&comparisons%5B0%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.namecheap.com)

2\. [https://www.majesticseo.com/reports/compare-domain- backlink-...](https://www.majesticseo.com/reports/compare-domain-backlink- history?d0=namecheap.com&d1=godaddy.com&d2=&d3=&d4=&type=1&ctype=1&entries=12&IndexDataSource=H)

<comment><USER37> GoDaddy also has north of 50 million domains registered versus 3 million for Namecheap. If I understand correctly, GoDaddy doesn't make any (or very little) of domain sales, it's the other services like hosting, email, etc that generate the revenue.

<comment><USER18> How much GoDaddy charges for domains has little to do with their SEO ranking.

They do use it as a loss-leader because most people starting a new site search for domain names over hosting when starting out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Go Daddy is on 8th place for me.

<comment><USER39> 2nd for me even though Matt Cutts (I follow on Google+) shared GoDaddy on Blogger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I am looking for alternatives to "Go Daddy". What choices do I have other than "NameCheap" ?

Thanks!

<comment><USER41> I like Gandi.net. A bit more expensive at $15.50 for a .com, but it includes DNS, SSL, web redirection, and email (nice for setting up forwarding addresses).

<comment><USER42> Is SSL free at Gandi.net?

<comment><USER43> For every domain, you get 1 year of free SSL -- when you need to renew the certificate you do have to pay for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> GoDaddy still wins for "domain names" when I'm signed out or in.

</comment><comment><USER44> Whatever it is I'm for it. F u daddy.

</comment><comment><USER45> OH! What is SOPA has done to Go Daddy. Oh my</comment>


How to Become a Gmail Jedi Master - <AUTHOR> http://www.askthepcguide.com/how-to-become-a-gmail-jedi-master/ <comment><USER2> Is it just me, or did anyone else find the information in this article pretty basic? Even something like using the '+' operator in the email address and filtering based on that, or the fact that if you have a '.' in your gmail address, skipping the dot will still result in you getting the email...

I guess I am saying I was hoping for something more, like this one from Steve [<http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/12/become-a-knowle.html>]

<comment><USER3> You have company!</comment></comment>


How I Made A Chicken Play Tic-Tac-Toe (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://steemit.com/life/@creatr/how-i-made-a-chicken-play-tic-tac-toe-a-true-story <comment><USER2> > That's almost a grand in 2017 dollars... plus whatever I earn from writing > this story. (You are going to help me make this go viral, right? Send it > right to the top of the trending list?)

I can't believe steemit is still a thing.

<comment><USER3> Just out of curiosity - why not?

Content creators get crypto for creating and promoting content that would otherwise go to social marketing platforms and ad agencies - seems like a decent idea, no?

<comment><USER2> 1) When I looked at it closely a couple years ago, all of the stories and all of the discussion were about proselytizing steemit. I would love to see a non- censorious version of reddit, but that place is so boring and self- referential. I took a brief look just now and my complaints are just as valid today. It's not a healthy ecosystem if everyone is just there for the money.

2) The business model seems nuts. I could never figure out how value was created or where the money came from other than suckers buying in, and there's going to be a limited supply of those. It just seems like a ponzi scheme with more steps. (Note, I don't necessarily feel this way about all cryptocurrencies; steemit's business model is just particularly nonsensical.)

<comment><USER3> These are valid concerns. When a platform is young, it tends to cater to acolytes, sycophants and charlatans.

I had high hopes for steemit or any similar platform given the success of its various centralized competitors especially with the wide adoption of cryptos. I can't wait to see how things turn out.

<comment><USER4> Hi, erikig,

If you have the chance, please have a look at my comments about Steemit in reply to commnts by Simon_says. Steemit is _far more_ than this comment thread has represented thus far, as I hope the quality of my article about the chicken machine might indicate.

<comment><USER3> Will definitely check it out

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Chickens see a different spectrum than humans, so _theoretically_ you could improve the illusion with individual buttons the player could see the chicken press.

</comment><comment><USER6> Steemit is being ddossed, alternative interface is here [https://steempeak.com/life/@creatr/how-i-made-a-chicken- play...](https://steempeak.com/life/@creatr/how-i-made-a-chicken-play-tic-tac- toe-a-true-story)

</comment><comment><USER7> I had a mass-manufactured knockoff years ago:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=i+took+a+lickin+from+a+chick...](https://www.google.com/search?q=i+took+a+lickin+from+a+chicken)

</comment><comment><USER8> wow, seen the games. never played myself. disappointing it's just the computer playing against you and not a trained chicken making decisions. the chicken just pecks the screen.

</comment><comment><USER9> My kids still sometimes make fun of me for losing to a chicken. I've done battle with it multiple times over the years. Where is the switch to toggle the mode?

</comment><comment><USER10> Some guy out there with no arms or legs must be getting nervous now :-)

</comment><comment><USER11> A giant chicken once gave me an expired coupon...</comment>


Ask HN: Could you critique my resume? - <AUTHOR>

I'm curious to know what others think of my resume, and what they might hire me for. I'm always looking for any help. :)<p>https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B3oNUVJ6m1i5X0crSdtpDkWF7KxcHNmHlatH4noYTro/pub <comment><USER2> I think you have great information in here! However as far as layout, I think it could be improved. Maybe try one of these free resume templates: [http://free.jobscan.co/20-best-ats-resume-examples- in-2015/](http://free.jobscan.co/20-best-ats-resume-examples-in-2015/) I always recommend them because they are "ATS (Applicant Tracking System) Friendly" or compatible which means they are easily read by the screening systems 90% of companies use to weed out applicants!</comment>