Show HN: Document Online – Create, Manage, Share Document Online - <AUTHOR> https://ducument.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I am Rocky Sharma, founder of ducument.com site.

I am looking for FEEDBACK for "ducument.com", which i created couple of days back.

Purpose of ducument.com

1\. Ease of NDA signing online. 2\. Password protection to documents. 3\. Making money with documents by setting the price.

It was for people including me, where if i had to share some IDEA or proposal to many people i don't have to create word-document and share with asking to sign NDA before and than re-sending original document after their sign.

Also due to rise in too much of virus or malware binding with docs file always intrigue me to create product where there is no such fear of getting infected.

I created this product so that freelancer or any people who shares document day-day can found it useful.

Let me know, what do you think about this product.

Thanks

<comment><USER2> A few remarks:

1\. The name of the website is confusing which is different from being unrelated to the subject matter as would be the case with a random made up name. Probably does not matter right away.

2\. It is not immediately clear how the site protects the user's documents from being read by employees/contractors etc. of Ducument.

I am curious about the technologies used to insure document security and malware protection as well as signature verification.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. domain name are hard to find nowadays, thus i had to choose most nearest match name.

2\. documents are created online with editor and the URL are generated for each docs.

Mostly nowadays doc files or pdf files are binded with trojan and RAT, thus in order to prevent user from getting infected, this product was created.

Also, NDA was PIA , thus i had to create an easy NDA option where user can right away sign online and view the documents.

In-order to prevent misleading signature, there is option where doc author can set require approval even after signing NDA, so that he can himself verify, if signature is not misleading. After verifying from his panel, he can approve or deny the view of document to user.

It's all online in portal.</comment></comment></comment>


Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast - <AUTHOR> http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html

<comment><USER2> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820201>

OTOH, that was 11 months ago and comments have closed.</comment>


Advertising as a revenue stream - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/advertising+as+a+revenue+stream <comment><USER2> Good one, Jacques (assuming you're reading this)

People get caught up in all this ranting about MFA sites and they forget one important point: an ad is just another link as a resource that you can choose or not to put inside your content.

If I'm reading an article on how to carve pumpkins for Halloween, why wouldn't I want a chance to click over and see how much carving kits are at PumpkinCo? In fact, the author of the piece can make a guess as to what I might like, put some links in, then check to see if anybody is clicking them. In this way the ad is much more than a revenue generator: it's helping the content author determine what the intent of his readers are when viewing his site.

If I find that nobody clicks on PumpkinCo but lots of folks click on a knife shop, then I can eliminate the PumpkinCo ads, put in knife ads, and, more importantly, think about writing some more content around how to best choose a knife. After all, that's what people visiting the page are interested in. Each little change I make isn't so much focused on income as it is making the perfect experience for the person visiting my page.

Too often we think of web pages as something "we do" to the reader, as if it's some huge program that we create and the users are just little bits running around in it. (I know Jacques doesn't think this way, but some folks do). It's better to think of any sort of web content as a conversation: you do something, people come by, you measure and observe, then you respond to what they want. This is the very essence of A/B testing (which talks about this is purely analytical terms)

It's a damn-frustrating conversation, but in a way it's a hell of a lot cooler than email or IM. I can take a page over time and hone my message, adjust the graphics, add in ads, mix-in video, maybe add some interactivity -- all in an effort to create an extended multimedia conversation with some guy I will never meet and who may visit my site long after my death. To me that's pretty cool stuff.

<comment><USER3> I apologize for accidental downvote, was trying to upvote, but bleh these small arrows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting stuff.

My major problem with advertising is the old classic: as soon as your revenue comes from ads, your customers are not your users/viewers/readers, they're your advertisers. And that promotes a mentality that isn't very customer- friendly - even if you think you can steer against that, it has a tendancy to sneak in through the side window.

(I speak from experience here. It's easy to start thinking "Hmm, could we get an extra page view there?" instead of "Hmm, how can we make this better?")

There's a reason that HBO have a string of awesome, critically-acclaimed series. It's because they're very good at what they do. But I suspect the revenue model might also have something to do with it.

<comment><USER5> Good point, I think there is a balance though....

For example, on a site with only one advert per page, I don't think there is any harm in having a new page load rather than an ajax call (which arguably would be the better "user experience").

What shouldn't be encouraged is sending users "around the houses" to get an extra couple of advertising impressions.... which if we were honest is likely to floor the CTR anyway.

The key in most instances is making sure your page loads fast, and let your users get to what they want quickly.

<comment><USER6> Well, if you're choosing a suboptimal solution (a new page) over an optimal solution (the ajax call) there's definitely something wrong ... FWIW, I strongly believe that a worst UX will bring less conversions, but I don't have any data to bring.

<comment><USER5> Suboptimal from what perspective? Server processing time & data transfer - maybe, user experience - not necessarily.

Ajax calls aren't by more optimal by definition, it depends on the context.

Agree that worse UX will frustrate users making them less likely to spend time on the site and have less interaction.

For the advertising that is sold on my site, the CPM is determined by the number and quality of Unique Visitors and volume is determined by Page Impressions.

So it's good to have a large number of page impressions, but actually I need to build my audience (UVs) which is more difficult (to a point).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I may be naive, but isn't $1,000 per month for 100K unique impressions (as reported in the article) per day an insanely low price? Can anyone speak to how many ads run per month?

<comment><USER8> I agree, industry standard is around 5$ for every 1000 pageviews. The site could perhaps try out other ad platforms to better make use of its inventory

<comment><USER5> The "industry standard" will vary vastly with the vertical you operate in (sports, technology, barbie dolls) and quality of your site and audience

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > we've been blocked from using adsense on ww.com, there is no recourse for > it, so we don't even know _why_ we've been blocked, same on reocities.com

This seems to be a very common problem. I wonder how large of an issue it will be several years down the line if/when Google dominates the internet even more than it does now.

</comment><comment><USER10> _we've been blocked from using adsense on ww.com, there is no recourse for it so we don't even know_ why* we've been blocked, same on reocities.com*

Could this be because ww.com sounds like a domain squatter's site? I know that's not the case because I know of the person who runs it, but if I were to see that name without knowing who jacquesm is, I would be inclined to believe it belongs to a squatter.

<comment><USER11> I didn't get you, how can a domain sound like a squatter's site?

<comment><USER10> Many people buy up misspellings of common domain names and try to monetize on typing mistakes. I guess squatting isn't the right word for that

<comment><USER12> Is this a misspelling of a common domain name? My first thought was "Wow, I didn't know Jacques ran the Weight Watchers site!"

<comment><USER13> I assume he was referring to "www".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Personally, I would definitely not put AS units on a page that discusses my AS income. I'd consider it too risky (for the reason, see AS TOS).

</comment><comment><USER15> The company I work for has a business model based solely around advertising. It's not 100% banner advertising, we run some bespoke campaigns (e.g. microsites) and do some events, but basically everything that isn't banner advertising is available to us because of the audience we have, and because we can promote it through banner adverts.

A few thoughts from our experience to some of the common concerns about advertising as a revenue stream. These are all based on our specific situation, so may not be applicable to everyone.

      It's too hard to make money, you need way too many users

All our brands are content sites, we have around 1.5m monthly uniques and 20m monthly pageviews - with around 700k registered accounts across the different sites. From this we don't have a problem making a profit.

We sell at decent CPM rates (as in, not crazy cheap - once we tried filling spare inventory with Google adverts, we got $70 for the impressions we could normally sell for 100x that), and we handle all sales internally, no agencies involved. For that we have one main guy, our Director of Sales, who's amazing, and then for bigger campaigns I and one other person will often get involved to help out.

      Because it is so hard to sell advertising yourself, that becomes the company focus

We have (I _think_ ) ten full time employees, and a few part timers as well. Between a few people, I'd say the total amount of time spent directly on the revenue side of the business (i.e. dealing with clients, making sales, and, for the bigger campaigns, then managing those) is the equivilent to two, maybe three, people working on it full time. That leaves us with plenty of work hours between the other people to deal with the business as a whole, technical issues and, most of all, content.

(Side note: we're not a content farm of any sort. Our sites are all based around video games or hardware, and they all started off as small community sites that were built up to have a good following.)

What helps with selling our own advertisements is connections. Because of our very specific audience, we have a good selection of regular clients ranging from smaller companies like Razer and Steelseries up to Activision Blizzard, MediaCom and Dell.

      Your users lose out because your focus is not on them, but on advertisers.
      (see thenomad's comment on this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359089)

Editorial independance is very important to us, and we do our best not to blur the line between journalism and sales. We've never, for example, asked anyone to change what they write to suit us or a client, and never even felt the need to.

When it comes to the idea of chosing "how do we get more pageviews" over "how do we make this better", in our experience there's little or no difference. Obviously there are ways to add more page views simply by changing the structure of the site, for example multipage articles, but we feel that, if a change like that has a negative impact on users, then they'll be put off the site, and so it won't end up actually helping our pageview figures.

Actually, on one site we did implement multi-page articles, but only after a couple of years of not wanting to do it - and the reason we ultimately made the change? It kept being requested by users who didn't like seeing one huge wall of text.

Certainly in the case of content websites, if perhaps not others, pageviews is actually a very good indication of how the user experience is. If the quality and quantity of content is rising, so will the stats we care about, so it's win/win for both us and our users.

 _Edit: one more._

      Advertising is a dead model, it doesn't help anyone

Our model isn't to keep finding new people to waste money, most of our clients have been with us for some time, and stay with us because they keep seeing a good ROI with us.

And at the other end, the advertisments are often useful for users to. Because of their targetted nature, a lot of adverts are for products/services that a lot of our readers are interested in. And for the times and people for whom that isn't the case, our adverts are all standard sizes, fit nicely into the pages and are perfectly easy to ignore. We don't do roadblock adverts ("sorry, you have to look at this advert and wait ten seconds before you can see our content") or anything like that. Well, we do have some preroll adverts on videos that we serve (again, we sell them all ourselves, and use our custom video player to display them), but we keep them short and offer users the opportunity to skip right through them if they wish.

<comment><USER4> I just checked your profile out - cool niche!

(Apologies for not responding sooner. Still figuring the HN interface out and didn't see your reply to me!)

I'm very much talking about tendancies here rather than absolutes. Certainly some very principled sites manage to keep their editorial courage - in the gaming community, for example, Zero Punctuation and Penny Arcade both run ads, and neither are afraid of pissing people off.

But it's a dichotomy I've always found uncomfortable and difficult to reconcile with when running sites myself, and I think a lot of people have the same problem - you're to be applauded for managing to steer a straight path, and I'm sure you've had to fight to do it.

(Indeed, you could view the entire content farming industry as a manifestation of the same problem - when your client isn't the person coming to your site for content, it's very easy to let the content slide.).

And even in your company, at the end of the day, if there's a strategic meeting about how to increase revenue (assuming you need to), the questions you'll be asking will tend toward discussing the advertisers' needs, not the readers' (except in as much as you'll be asking how you can increase views, of course). I know this is an impossible question to answer, but in similar situations I've always ended up wondering "How much better would our services have ended up if any revenue-focussed meeting centered on our users/readers rather than our advertisers?"

Incidentally, I'd strongly disagree that advertising is a dead model. And I agree that particularly in the gaming sector, it's possible to give users genuine value with some ads - my partner runs a gaming site and she's experimenting with the same model, with the same intention of giving users ads for things of value to them.

<comment><USER15> Actually it hasn't been hard for us to do it at all. I think once we had a complaint from a client about some of our editorial coverage of one of their products, and they were told that it wouldn't change, which lead to them taking up an additional campaign to promote that product.

It's never been a case of business and editorial staff fighting over it, if anything the business side of the company sees the importance of editorial independance even more than the journalists do.

Maybe the fact that our communities are extremely opinionated and wouldn't think twice about calling us out as soon as we do anything they don't like makes it easier for us, I'm not sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The whole bias towards ads blows my mind.

Simply put, ads are about turning money into sales.

The history of the modern Internet is the history of more efficient ways to turn money into sales, to name a few like affiliate marketing, AdWords, social media, or Groupon.

It takes a very pessimistic bet on the innovation to seriously consider showing ads as a part of the business model.

EDIT: style

<comment><USER17> And the history of all media (TV, Radio, Newspapers etc.) is to take money away from the people who want to turn money into sales.

Now it just depends on whether you want to be a media website or a product website.

<comment><USER18> _All_ media? No, I don't think so. Books, films, music, games, the list goes on. In fact it is only a quite small subset of media that have been able to successfully fund themselves through media.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I agree. $1000 per month for 3 million impressions translates to a ridiculously low CPM. You could triple the amount to $3000 per ad slot per month to get a respectable CPM of $1, and you would still get advertisers easily. You should definitely try it out.

<comment><USER7> I am not sure of your background, but what would you consider a "normal" CPM for a general website that is not in a specialized vertical? I would think that CPM rates of $1.00 would still be pretty low and yet would create more revenue for WW.

<comment><USER19> Well, a 'normal' CPM for these kinds of display ads is whatever an advertiser is willing to pay, irrespective of the niche. I think he should experiment by bumping up the pricing and find the optimum point where his revenue is maximized.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to track user fidelity? - <AUTHOR>

Hi.
I develop a price comparison website, and we track user conversions (pay by click model).
What is the best way you guys suggest to track user fidelity? That is, if a given feature is making users use the website more? This could be interesting if used together with A/B testing.
Any ideas? Don't want to use any invasive user tracking stuff though. <comment><USER2> Cohort testing. For users signing up between T+0 and T+2 weeks (or whatever), you randomly assign them to N test groups. Each of the N groups has some combinations of features turned on or off, controlled via feature flags. You collect aggregate statistics over time of the conversions in each test group. Presumably, if you want to track outgoing clicks, you have the page intercept clicks and fire a Javascript event with an anonymous ID number which your backend will score as a click for the appropriate test group. The technical implementation of this will take you between 2 and 5 days or less.

The math gets hairy and you need a metric truckload of time/traffic to do anything useful with this, especially as you get to many types of conversions of interest or many different variables under consideration, as the nature of statistics means you'll always be able to find _some_ correlation if you look in enough places. "Look doing Signup Form B and disabling private messaging decreases friend requests by 18% in month 3 with 99.999% probability!" [+]

\+ This is not actually what the math is telling you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will look into it, thanks!</comment></comment>


"The Advantages of a Dragon." - <AUTHOR> http://www.loper-os.org/?p=3725 <comment><USER2> Bastiat did it better, in a twentieth the length, and a century earlier.</comment>


Show HN: Peeps – Selfie group video chat for iOS - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/peeps/id881444366

<comment><AUTHOR> We are a product designer / developer duo from London. I'm happy to answer any questions that you have [http://www.peeps.im](http://www.peeps.im)</comment>


Busted retailers use bankruptcy to break leases by the thousands - <AUTHOR> https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/busted-retailers-use-bankruptcy-to-break-leases-by-the-thousands-1.1476347 <comment><USER2> Man, with (currently) four comments mentioning that this is "what bankruptcy is for", I think the point of the article might have been missed. This isn't some sneaky "one weird trick", and that's not the reason Bloomberg is reporting on it. In fact, the tone of the article to me is, "yup, companies do it all the time, but..." And the "but" is:

 _But the moves threaten to upend huge swaths of the real estate market and the half-trillion dollar market for commercial mortgage-backed securities._

It's not "Busted US Retailers Use Bankruptcy to Break Leases", but more the "...by the Thousands" part. Malls are going to start becoming ghost towns, especially with no anchor stores like Penny's and the since-departed Sears.

<comment><USER3> >But the moves threaten to upend huge swaths of the real estate market and the half-trillion dollar market for commercial mortgage-backed securities.

And?

Seriously. We either have to choose to be a market that is somewhat free or not. At this point, the government is choosing winners and losers. It is a repeat of 2008. Oh no, it is too big to fail.

Someone will come by with the investment to buy what is left. Perhaps they will run it better. Prepare better.

We're going through this with airlines and cruise companies now fighting for more money and loans from the government. Perhaps Delta grew too large to be what they are now. Maybe there are too many malls in existence. Maybe the method in which we collateralize mortgages doesn't make sense anymore.

Our economy has developed the too big to fail mindset and forgotten, largely, you can lose.

<comment><USER4> When corporations start buckling during sharp economic downturns, everyone's first instinct is always "let them burn."

But it's often not a choice between letting entire swaths of our economy collapse, and dumping absurd amounts of our tax dollars to prop up these poorly-run companies. We can give them loans with strings attached, force them to go through bankruptcy, wipe out the shareholders but preserve the structure of the company, bail them out but subject the industry to much greater regulatory scrutiny, etc.

Personally, I wish we had a straightforward way to bail out a company and have the U.S. government take ownership in the company until the stake can be safely unwound, or the too-big-to-fail company can be broken up. Theoretically, with a controlling stake and the corresponding board seats, you could force out the lousy management that didn't take adequate precautions as well.

It'd kind of be socialism-esque nationalization of industries with extra steps, but Japan has been doing a similar-style thing since the 90s, and I can't imagine it would be any worse than the relatively strings-free bailouts we've seen, or the collateral damage and runaway collapse that would occur from letting a monstrous chunk of the economy fail all at once.

<comment><USER5> Or you know, make up for the missed opportunity of 2008/2009, where the government could have bailed out underwater homeowners so that the bailout would have trickled up to the mortgage holders, instead of pouring money into banks and letting people suffer. Thanks, Obama.

Canada's CERB and CECRA have been doing wonders to keep ordinary people either afloat or employed, trickling up to small businesses all over.

(I don't mind your plan either, but it involves more per-company hand-holding than simply giving out generous unemployment and employment-support benefits)

<comment><USER6> > the government could have bailed out underwater homeowners

Why reward people who gambled and lost? Bust them out.

People will either buy the houses at more reasonable prices or (more likely in this case) the banks will renegotiate more reasonable terms with the original mortgage holders because they have too much supply and no buyers.

> instead of pouring money into banks and letting people suffer. Thanks, > Obama.

That wasn't possible as _liquidity_ also died. Solvent businesses couldn't give people paychecks because the banks had no cash. You had to bail the banks.

HOWEVER, what needed to happen was that the bank investors needed to get busted out. That was where Obama went wrong.

<comment><USER3> >Why reward people who gambled and lost? Bust them out.

Why reward corporations and investors who gambled and lost? Bust them out.

>People will either buy the houses at more reasonable prices or (more likely in this case) the banks will renegotiate more reasonable terms with the original mortgage holders because they have too much supply and no buyers.

Other companies will buy the businesses at more reasonable prices or (more likely in this case) the banks will renegotiate more reasonable terms with the original mortgage holders because they have too much supply and no buyers.

And this was the issue with the 2008 fiasco. The government chose to save large financial institutions instead of breaking them up so the problems would be less likely to happen again. They chose to save large corporations over homeowners.

It is happening now with the pandemic response. I get the federal government wanted to dump a ton of money into the economy through PPP, but man, you cannot tell me the Catholic Church needed it. They are sitting on assets worth billions they could have sold/borrowed against to stay afloat. Same with large private educational institutions and public corporations.

The next round, and there will be a next round, will be more of the same. Carve outs will be rampant.

The USA should have looked at other countries providing direct income replacement to citizens. 70% income replacement sent to citizens and not force them through state's unemployment processes. Other countries did this and it worked.

<comment><USER6> > Why reward corporations and investors who gambled and lost? Bust them out.

Um, exactly?

As I said, the bank investors should have gotten wiped out.

The worst part is that a _bank_ is probably the single business type that the Federal government can _actually_ replace on a short timescale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good. I like that.

Now if we can just seem to adjust whatever weird tax rules or situations allow real estate to sit largely empty and apparently not not put all that much pressure on prices... that would help too. I see a lot of commercial real estate sit empty for ages and I hear from the local businesses that the rates are still high and even going up.

A development not far from me has been at sub 50% capacity for YEARS and I've heard from locals that they're moving because they won't adjust the pricing or are demanding more...

Would be nice to see some variety beyond Chipotle or Noodles & Company or rando fitness center... or mostly nothing.

Seems like bad economic policy to have a system that has capacity, but leaves it unused save for only the highest of profit margin chains ... who probably don't pay the rate anyone else would.....

<comment><USER8> I believe in the UK landlords are on the hook for business rates on commercial property when it's empty, so the incentive to lease at more reasonable rates is there.

<comment><USER9> Landlords get a three month exemption when a lease expires. On some industrial properties the exemption is six months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is exactly why we have bankruptcy! These businesses are failing and need to renegotiate their liabilities. This is expected and healthy if you want any retailers to have any hope of survival going forwards.

<comment><USER11> > This is exactly why we have bankruptcy!

You're not wrong, and under normal circumstances this would be a blip on the radar. However, the hundreds if not thousands of locations each of these companies plan to shutter will have an unprecedented effect on the commercial real estate market. Within months we will have thousands of property owners suddenly unable to pay their mortgages because they no longer have tenants, meaning they will have to default on their loans. This will greatly affect banks and other lenders in the months and years following. It's a domino effect that will be felt for many, many years after we've wiped out SARS- CoV-2.

<comment><USER12> I hope it ends up causing residential real estate prices to fall as a consequence. Maybe then millennials will be able to afford homes.

I understand some people treat their home as savings but that's bad in every way for society and for the homeowner. I have a home and the only return I expect on it is to be able to continue living there. I'm certainly not going to depend on it for my retirement, as that would be really unwise.

<comment><USER13> > I understand some people treat their home as savings but that's bad in every > way for society and for the homeowner. I have a home and the only return I > expect on it is to be able to continue living there. I'm certainly not going > to depend on it for my retirement, as that would be really unwise.

How else can we think about an expense of hundreds of thousands of dollars? It's ludicrous to spend that much on something assuming it'll just depreciate and fall apart on you, worthless. I understand that you're not paying rent in a home, so it's serving a purpose, but they aren't exactly equivalent in terms of upkeep and taxes.

At this point, given the instability in the market I have no idea what is the wise move to put money into for retirement. Investments have tanked and I don't know at what point they'll recover, interest rates are abysmal, and apparently our homes should be worth nothing. There's really no practical, accessible way to invest.

<comment><USER14> > At this point, given the instability in the market I have no idea what is > the wise move to put money into for retirement. Investments have tanked and > I don't know at what point they'll recover

With all the instability of a once-in-a-century pandemic, the S&P is still up 1% today from where it was January 1. Specific large companies' stock like Amazon, Apple, and Tesla are up 50-300% since January.

The issue of saving for retirement is complex, thinking on a 10-40 year horizon as the world continues to change and evolve. But this is a bizarre time to be complaining about stocks as an investment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's a bit depressing to see the greed-by-framing here. I feel like the banks are playing musical chairs rather than trying to operate sustainably. It seems like a more efficient approach — one that is not as economically destructive to GDP _after_ the pandemic — would be:

1\. Retailer notifies their lease holders that a given location is impacted by public health closures, reducing revenues for products originating from that location from (100% of $X) to (y% of $X), and warns the leaseholder that the retailer may be forced to file bankruptcy if easement is not granted, reducing rent paid to (0% of $X).

2\. Leaseholder notifies their mortgage holder of this, and warns the mortgage holder that the leaseholder may be forced to file bankruptcy if easement is not granted, reducing mortgage paid to (0% of $X).

3\. Mortgage holder notifies the property tax authorities of this, and warns those authorities that the lendor may be forced to file bankruptcy if easement is not granted, reducing property tax paid to (0% of $X).

4\. Property tax authority grants a public health easement to the mortgage holder, conditional on the same easement being granted to the leaseholder.

5\. Mortgage holder grants a public health easement to the lease holder, conditional on the same easement being granted to the retailer.

6\. Lease holder grants a public health easement to the retailer.

If anyone refuses to grant the easement, they get nothing anyways, because anyone in the stack can just give up and file for bankruptcy as a last resort — and that's where we're at today. It feels like a shell game because they're all trying to extract the maximum amount of money before bankruptcy, while withholding it until they themselves can file bankruptcy. It's such a shame they can't work together to get everyone that's owed a dollar to agree to just suspend their demands for their dollar until this is over. They're not getting their dollar either way, but if they'd rather have their tenants breaking leases left and right, so be it.

<comment><USER16> You need a 4. Federal government issues $$$ to property tax authority to cover income gap. The property tax authority needs that revenue now to pay their bills (teachers, sanitation, fire, EMT, police, etc), an easement won't cut it. They need a backstop before they can do that since all of those are critical or legally mandated services and municipalities run very lean.

<comment><USER17> Yes. Property tax shortfalls leads to laying off teachers.

<comment> munk-a Securing that funding is going to be a hard sell when the Dept of Edu is really enthusiastic about scrapping the whole "public education" thing for charter schools since charter schools have an out to get around silly things like Brown v. BoE[1] and, more importantly to them, Engel v. Vitale[2].

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education)

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engel_v._Vitale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engel_v._Vitale)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The US has too much retail space. Per capita, it has 5x as much as Europe (23.5 sq ft in the US vs 3-4 sq ft in most European countries) and 8-10x as much as Asia (2-3 sq ft). We may be looking at a permanent decrease as a result of this pandemic. But even if it goes down by 20%, the US will still have way more than anywhere else.

I think we'll be better off when we use the excess retail space for something else whether it's apartments, warehouses, or offices. But the transition will be painful.

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure if retail space alone is a good measure. The US (and Canada) love massive stores like Costco, Home Depot, Walmart. And there are a LOT of Walmart's.

Those stores seem to be doing just fine during the pandemic (HD has been packed when I went).

Would be more useful to see a breakdown by retail size. Say <500 sq ft, 500-2000 sq ft, 2000-10000 sq ft and >10000 sq ft.

I'd suggest the small places are the ones at high risk (just thinking about typical tenants).

<comment><USER20> I agree, NA has massive stores because they have the space, e.g. population density is much lower than in Europe or Asia

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's basically the definition of bankruptcy that you need to renege on your obligations to someone. Landlords run that risk. They're hardly the ones losing the most -- think of the poor creditors and shareholders. The landlords are only losing the expense of finding their next tenant, plus any difference in the market rate when the original lease was signed and today.

<comment><USER22> I think everyone loses regardless, but I don't think we should prop up businesses, capitalism should be a game that you play to win or play to lose.

Government needs to stop getting involved period. Help at the bottom - prop up the citizens who the government IS responsible for, let the rest duke it out. Corporations are not citizens. Government has no duty to help corporations.

But, yeah everybody will hurt by this, sure. Malls will close, businesses will close inside malls, investors will hurt, and workers who worked at those businesses lose, even some consumers who enjoy malls lose, cities lose because they become blight, many probably get abandoned and become gang hideouts or something. Homeowners lose because home values drop, but lots of other factors will be causing a lot of the cycles above to happen to. Next 10 years is a hazardous wasteland for prosperity.

Should just start bulldozing some of them and building green spaces and parks. I have a feeling open air is going to be a big trend over the next decade (less chance of viral spread).

<comment><USER23> You can look at what actually happens in abandoned malls - bored teenagers and college students calling themselves "urban explorers" check them out and engage in some graffiti in a long abandoned site or trysts at most.

Gangs would find them goddamned useless as territory because there is no income stream there. There isn't anyone to make money selling drugs to or johns for clients to pimp out. That is why the damn mall closed in the first place!

The low traffic ironically makes it a poor place to lay low as "I saw some guy enter an hour or so ago" becomes useful instead of vague and useless.

That similar noticability and lack of good pretexts makes it a poor choice for a meth lab compared to a random trailer or basement.

They wind up such an economic wasteland that they aren't even good for criminal purposes which is vaguely impressive. That is essentially the one "upside" of their separation from residences. They aren't like the Opium Den/Crackhouse/Methhouse because they lack the attractiveness to be an attractive nuisance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not mentioned at all in the article, but what will be more interesting is when all of the landlords start appealing their property tax assessments. Obviously if the government has prevented the property from being used, it's not worth what is was previously assessed at. State and local governments are in for a world of hurt.

<comment><USER25> The federal tax writeoffs tend to make up for it, AFAIK.

<comment><USER26> Tax write offs never 'make up for' anything - if you write off $1000 in property taxes, it will reduce your tax burden by ($marginal_tax_rate*1000), which will by definition be less than $1000.

Tax write offs are distinct from tax credits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Yes, this is what chapter 11 bankruptcy is meant to enable.

<comment><USER28> I thought the same thing, these businesses clearly are out of cash and credit and need to break leases to save SOME stores compared to losing all.

The idea of harsh leases in large retail stores kinda always made me laugh: For a JCP or the like, the setup costs, warehousing, and hiring work is so great that the only case where they would close a store is to stop cash from hemorrhaging beyond control. On a large scale this forces the only move for survival to be bankruptcy after falling way too far. If you're PREIT or such one can't help but realize that the overall outcome is that you'll push a tenant of a vast majority of your stores into really bad financial states that then leads to a much harder bankruptcy and possibly dissolving of the company, ripping stores out of ALL of your malls instead of 30%.

And thats why PREIT has so many malls with empty giant rooms and defaulted loans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've owned a physical business before. What the article fails to mention is that small to medium sized businesses generally sign leases with joint and several (personal) liability attached.

Landlords can and do go after the person after the bankrupt LLC is raided.

<comment><USER30> A lot of people think that forming an LLC or corporation will protect your personal assets from creditors. When I ran my business, I learned banks like collateral, and given my business has no assets other than the cash in the bank, anything debt I took on would need to be secured by my personal assets. If you use your personal assets as collateral, you'd better hope your business doesn't run out of money before you've paid off the debt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have a heavy exposure in REITs (my only non-index fund investment). I treat these as passive investments so I had to look to see what I was actually invested in. I have no commercial exposure, but even what I have has been hit hard by COVID. AVB (residential), PEAK (life science/medical office/senior housing) and PSA (Public Storage) are all down roughly 25% YTD. I have to imagine that REITS in retail/office space are going to be doing even worse as these three are sectors that are less likely to see long-lasting contractions.

<comment><USER32> PSA being down is interesting. I might have thought there would be greater demand for storage units as people clear stuff out of their houses to make room for home offices/gyms/etc.

That said, all the people who've lost jobs or hours are probably not looking to pay $100s/month for an auxiliary junk room.

<comment><USER33> A rush to liquidity can take down even otherwise sound investments. J.K. Galbraith describes this (as a "Gresham's Law" if memory serves) in his book on the 1929 crash. Highly recommended.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I want to loop this back to something discussed on HN before. During lockdown, some optimistic WFHers were saying that the transition to WFH would up-end rental markets in city centres, as employees flood out of cities since they've been allowed to work remotely and won't pay a premium for a commutable home. Well it's looking more and more like that effect is going to be almost impossible to measure in comparison to the massive recession coming. Rents are going to drop because shops are going bankrupt, those areas are going to try to find new rentals, convert to offices or housing and that'll drive down prices.

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder how Apple will respond if malls start collapsing.

(I've heard rumor that) they pay just pennies on the dollar for their store leases because they draw so much foot traffic to the malls.

I can't imagine them keeping stores open in the middle of a nearly empty mall, but I've only ever seen pictures of an Apple store that wasn't in a mall or strip mall.

<comment><USER26> My guess would be they'd move their mall based stores to better locations. They have a lot of non-mall stores to use as examples, including every one of their flagship stores.

<comment><USER35> I just can't picture what the flagship store model would look like in e.g. Charlotte NC

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Worked in commercial real estate before the last crash and have a few friends working at big mall companies. Have seen some really cool plans to turn a whole mall into residential with the interior being common areas and parks etc. Some really neat concepts.

</comment><comment><USER22> if only the government/bank could've put moratoriums top down, freezing all rent commercial and residential. We'd be in a much better place.

Now we have economic collapse, 40 million looming evictions, people will starve, and freeze, or die in a shelter w/ the pandemic.

Businesses are failing because they have to meet monthly recurring bills w/ or w/out actual sales receipts. They still need to meet payroll if they're even open.

Could've been stopped from the lenders down, instead of try to just throw money every which direction and see which sticks.

I'm for handouts for the poorest, but i think the other handouts were horribly done, and the loan program.

<comment><USER37> I'm in the group of businesses that got handouts that the business didn't need to survive, but the handouts did mean folks were kept on staff even without work. This paid off big time for us (especially if covid had resolved by September) because we have seen demand pick back up pretty quickly in our space and the staff were ready to go.

So if the downward trends had continued we'd have been in good shape and it would have been good timing. Of course, our covid control in the US has been a total disaster relatively to other much poorer countries even - we're still trying to figure out if masks are worth wearing (20 cents to maybe save a life).

Instead of handouts the layoffs would have been a fine option, folks would have received unemployment. But the overhead and disruption of firing folks, canceling their benefits, and then re-hiring them (maybe) etc is not insignificant. The handouts meant we are ready to go once everything resolves which was supposed to be a lot sooner than it is looking like it will be.

<comment><USER22> The problem is a lot of handouts didn't help anybody. Was just wasted, or bought like 2-3 months max. Now that's over with and there needs to be another, or a better idea...

Alot of these businesses struggle because they have recurring bills: Rent, Mortgage, Utilities, etc... if all recurrables were 'frozen' or allowed 'pay what you want/can afford' then arguably everyone would be on better footing.

E.g. Big bank has ten malls, Malls go to businesses and ask for rent, J.C. Penny's is like we can only pay 10%. Mall goes back to Big Bank and says our customers can only pay 10% each, so that's all we can pay. Bank's like sure w/e it's a crisis.

Utitility companies, etc. same thing.

Obviously there's other costs of business, but that would save a lot of the issues. Do the same of course for residential/renters as well, cause everybody is in the same boat. Then we'd need less stimulus $$.

In other words try to make sure everyone's minimum (got the roof over my head) is met, and this would've been a good way to do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The question here is the same as the question when unemployment numbers come up: what will the bounce back look like? If the same people go back to the same jobs in the same locations at the same companies (maybe renamed for bankruptcy purposes) then it will make no difference. If they don't then it will. But there is no way of knowing that until the bounce back begins. And that's a few months (a figure pulled from my arse) away.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if, and how much commercial real estate might be turned into residential living spaces in the next few years. That could be a huge coup for young people in the United States.

I guess there are a lot of other lagging issues like zoning, rebuilding some places, or just redesigning, so may take quite a while, or not happen at all.

</comment><comment><USER40> I know this is commercial, but can be good if it drives down property prices and rents. I honestly think a lot of the benefits people want from universal basic income would equally come from just having lower commercial and residential rents. I recognize that's a big "just".

<comment><USER41> There are actually very simple tax schemes that go quite bit further. A high Land Value Tax + low tax on improvements (eg buildings) means the portion of rent due to the landlord's actions/investments generally get kept by that landlord, but the portion of rent _not_ due to his/her actions (eg good schools/restaurants/transit/employers nearby) get recouped as tax.

You should look into LVT, you're right that would be huge for people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Just curious, at the top of it all are municipalities relaxing property tax dues as well?

<comment><USER16> My town is already facing a ~10% gap due to loss of state aid and income tax revenue. Many municipalities have contracts with contractual pay increases e.g. 3% per year COL increases on top of the constantly increasing healthcare costs (those were ~7% last year for my town). All told, that 10% gap turns into something closer to 15% due to the structural increases in outflows. And all of this for a town that is one of the few that has a AAA bond rating. Absent radically slashing services I don't think most municipalities can afford any sort of cut.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Between this and companies going partially or fully remote I would not want to be in commercial real estate right now.

</comment><comment><USER44> In short, we could see a "tsunami" (the OP's word) of unforeseen losses in highly-rated commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBSs), because credit- risk models used to construct and price CMBS tranches never considered the possibility that a large number of retailers would simultaneously break so many leases via bankruptcy, simultaneously impacting so many malls across the country.

Quoting from the OP:

> By seeking court protection, firms like Neiman Marcus Group Inc. and the > parent company of Men's Wearhouse avoid the headache of protracted > negotiations with individual landlords. _But the moves threaten to upend > huge swaths of the real estate market and the half-trillion dollar market > for commercial mortgage-backed securities._

> "This is now black-letter law -- a debtor can cram down a landlord," said > Melanie Cyganowski, a former bankruptcy judge who's now a partner at law > firm Otterbourg PC. "If this becomes a tsunami of retailers rejecting their > leases, it's going to trigger another part of the sea change -- the > mortgages held by the landlords."

Think: something analogous to the tsunami of unforeseen losses in residential mortgages that triggered a financial crisis in 2008, but with commercial mortgages this time around. It won't be pretty.

</comment><comment><USER45> I feel like somewhere in the next year or two, Western capitalist economies really need to come up with a sweeping plan to _pause_ everything. Because this is probably not the last major crisis like this we'll see in our lifetimes (unless we are near the ends of them), and having banks continue to collect on mortgages despite on and off rent freezes across the country is a pretty obvious route to a giant mess.

</comment><comment><USER46> This will come back to haunt them. Good luck.

<comment><USER47> How so? I'm genuinely curious what the downside for retailers would be in this case. As opposed to staying in place and paying the rent.

<comment><USER48> Our Lord and savior, the banks, won't lease again to those bad men at the retail companies

<comment><USER23> We saw that shift before - bankruptcy used to be more of a scar for life on credit instead of essentially vanishing in seven years. Going all "scarlet letter" made less money than defecting and accepting redemption which reflected closer to actual risk levels compared to some spiteful imaginary idea of "fairness" or "virtue".

It is part of what made the social credit's justification such a laughable lie. We did away with honor based lending centuries ago and got better results both fiscally and morally from banks! When was the last time you saw someone engage in a murderous duel over credit rating?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Where are the opportunities for machine learning startups? - <AUTHOR> http://www.vccafe.com/2015/12/01/where-are-the-opportunities-for-machine-learning-startups-guest-post/ <comment><USER2> This article skirts around the issue, but the biggest (and most common) mistake I've seen machine learning startups make is starting with an algorithm and trying to productize it. When you do this, you end up with a solution looking for a problem, which is never a recipe for a successful startup. So in addition to finding a problem that fits your solution, you then also have to build a product around it. And chances are, if your product is really great, you can build it without fancy machine learning models and it would be just as successful.

Machine learning, in my mind, is more of an enabler that makes great products more 'magical' \- it's not really a product in itself. IMO it's a discipline that lends itself well to a consulting model - hire some ML wizards, unleash them along with a dev team on a problem for 6 months, then move on to the next one. This is mostly the "infiltrating the professions" \- most consulting companies organize themselves around market verticals for the exact same reasons.

<comment><USER3> Exactly!

Unless you sell machine learning algorithms of course :)

<comment><USER2> That's basically consulting :) There are very few truly novel applications of ML, and nearly all the major algorithms are open source. Using them together correctly and interpreting the output is the hard part -- which is perfect for scoping a consulting engagement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I work for a startup[0] that does quality control through machine learning for the beverage industry. We're focused most on beer, followed by coffee and spirits.

[0]: [https://gastrograph.com](https://gastrograph.com)

<comment><USER5> Where do you find these ML wizard conusltants? I've been looking to hire someone part time for a project to help build a model but most good people have no time and I don't trust that anyone on elance or similar is any good.

<comment><USER6> The short answer is: _you don't_. That's not how machine learning works at scale.

To quote from a great recent article: (I can't find the link, sorry)

It's one thing to create an excellent fraud detection model in R, and quite another to build:

      - Fault-tolerant ingest of live data at scale that could represent fraudulent actions
      - Real-time computation of features based on the data stream
      - Serialization, versioning and management of a fraud detection model
      - Real-time prediction of fraud based on computed features at scale
      - Learning over all historical data
      - Incremental update of the production model in near-real-time
      - Monitoring, testing, productionization of all of the above

You don't build a data team out of a single person and tack on an easy model to build a company - it takes a team to build a real data project, and those teams are hard to find, hard to recruit, and hard to make successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been getting my linkedin spammed by recruiters for a machine learning startup. I ignore them all (despite actively looking for a job). Why? It's a pie-in-the-sky idea which seems more interested in generating hype than actually delivering results. To me, the product sounds too good to be true, and is trying to replace a service which many people still do not trust humans to do. The technology "is just no there yet" for a lot of the claims proposed - and I doubt that a startup focused on making money can accomplish more than academic institutions focused on research.

</comment><comment><USER8> A machine learning startup should use their machine to answer this question.

</comment><comment><USER9> One idea is to use machine learning for training drones planes and quadcopters....that will make a startup different than others! Actually applying ML in a product will stand out in the market if the job is done properly.</comment>


Why Did Google Build a Phone? A Browser? - <AUTHOR> http://designbygravity.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/why-did-google-build-a-phone-and-a-browser/

<comment><USER2> Calling Android a rip-off of Windows Mobile is hilarious. If Windows Mobile were one tenth as good as Android, I doubt anyone would be considering non- Microsoft smartphones. But the fact of the matter is that Windows Mobile is a nightmare to use and a nightmare to program for -- and is very, very outdated.

Android may be a rip off of iPhone OS, but it's certainly not a rip off of Windows Mobile.

(I could barely even make calls on my Windows Mobile phone, much less browse the Internet in a meaningful way. On Android, those two things both work wonderfully.)

<comment><USER3> I don't think that was the point of the article?

<comment><USER2> You're right; the article quoted this statement from another, but didn't refute it. I thought I would.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I could have refuted in the article; Windows Mobile's suckage seems like a well understood phenomenon. Hee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I do think this is much more about search/advertisement than the author think. Google Chrome is Google way of removing all threats between its users and its advertisement, Chrome OS is one step further. It's a perfectly logical move.

Before Chrome & Chrome OS : You & me -> OS (Windows, MacOS X, etc.) -> Browser (IE, FF, Safari, etc.) -> Google Search -> internet / webapps

Perfect world for Google: You & me -> Google (OS, browser and Search) -> internet / webapps

Cellular phones, and the iPhone in particular, bring the threat one step further. Because what should be webapps are simply Apps on the iPhone, making Google a complete outsider instead of the gateway toward mobile apps. When you look for an iPhone App, Google is an outsider. A second choice after a failure with the iTunes Store Search.

I see Android as the answer to Apple standing between Google and its customers on the mobile market. And Apple standing in the way today sounds a bit like Microsoft standing in the way back in the 90ies...

<comment><AUTHOR> I think efforts like Wave illustrate how much Google would like to find brand new markets to compete in; I don't think they have had much like getting real advertising dollars out of things other than search.

But you're right at least to a degree -- they have decided that open-ness is better for Google. Whether it is just for search or for other future things is a debatable point I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This post is great; right on, in my opinion.

Remember webmail before Gmail came along? My free Hotmail account stored something like 2 MB - it was a joke. Google gets into lots of different domains to scare companies into action, but I'm pretty sure most of their revenue still comes from search advertising (maybe someone can verify that?).

It's a fantastic long-term strategy as they're setting the stage for even more success. More than any other company I know of, Google has an eye towards the future.

<comment><USER6> Search is 98-99% of their revenue.

<comment><USER7> > Advertising is 98-99% of their revenue.

FTFY

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the better explanations of the Google approach I've read. Google aims to shape the market to their benefit, to create new markets. They think not so much in terms of products as how those products will affect the existing structures.

<comment><USER9> I might be wrong, but it seems to me that Google just want that more people will use internet, and for longer time. That way, their ads will gain more exposure.

<comment><USER10> Yes. I would say you are wrong. Creating a phone just so people will use the internet + for a longer amount of time seems ridiculous to me. The entire point of the article was saying that Google is trying to make money by creating new opportunities for innovation by forcing standards to be higher. That does not equal " _just want that more people will use internet, and for longer time._ "

For one- I would like to see you connect buying radio stations to using the internet ` _for longer time_.` And for two- I would be shocked if Google's only business model was "Create things which will force people to look at more of our ads".

On a similar side-note. Youtube has very little advertisement- especially compared to sites like Megavideo and Hulu (kinda not related). So advertisement must not be the number one priority always. (Advertisement on youtube is a recent addition too if I am correct.)

<comment><USER11> FYI -

> And for two- I would be shocked if Google's only business model was "Create > things which will force people to look at more of our ads"

is not an argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I agree with most of this article, but I was disappointed to hear the author repeating the same old tired line about Google Voice removing the need to have a voice plan. I don't know why that piece of bull gets so much traction. Wishfull thinking maybe? Google Voice _isn't_ VOIP!!!!! Gizmo5 (also owned by google) is VOIP, but Google Voice isn't.

But far more fundamentally last I'd checked every cell provider has much greater coverage for voice than they do for 3G data, and I'd assume that VOIP over GPRS or EDGE speeds would be pretty unimpressive.

</comment><comment><USER13> Think about all the steps that you take to interact with your computer and get something done.

There are 5-6 steps in this process, from booting up your computer to looking for information on the web.

Google wants a stake in every step.

Why? Google wants to organize the world's information, so they can put ads on it!

</comment><comment><USER11> > That's kinda far from their core business, advertising.

Fixed.

<comment><AUTHOR> You could make this argument, although _all_ their services have advertising. But I bet the lion's share of money comes via search advertising.

<comment><USER13> They bought DoubleClick for however many billions to change this.

AdMob, too, is not a search-based ad network.</comment></comment></comment>


Python+OpenCV examples+GTAV = Fun - <AUTHOR> https://gfycat.com/VioletImperturbableBettong

<comment><USER2> The source code is available anywhere? I am interested in used tracking algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is cool, I'd be interested in reading a writeup of this if one existed.</comment>


Ask HN: Recommend a team work site with file sharing and a chatroom? - <AUTHOR>

I've just started working for a small games startup. At the moment theres 3 of us actually working, (2 artists and me coding) and some other guys who do admin, pay us and sell our product. I'm wondering if theres some online platform that we can use to share game assets and also have a irc-style chatroom, also some kind of forum and email system would be desirable. Something like retroshare would be good but if it was totally online so you could access it from any machine without installing software or needing a big encryption key that would be better. If its costs money or needs a server thats ok too as I reckon the company would pay for it if its worth it. <comment><USER2> We are a remote team and this is our setup: \- we use hipchat for real-time chatting with the team. We prefer it not be integrated into our pm tool. \- we use Brightpod as our pm tool of choice. Not only does it have kanban boards but also lets use message (not real time) our team members.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://redbooth.com/](https://redbooth.com/) (formerly teambox)

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://trello.com](http://trello.com) is great and free for task management. Check out [https://kato.im/](https://kato.im/) for a free (for small teams) IRC and email replacement.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ive used trello before. As far as I know it has no realtime irc-style chat or chatrooms and thats one of the main features I'm looking for.

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://slack.com](http://slack.com) \- awesome integrations, can be used together with irc as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> Trello.com</comment>


Online.net launches a preview of its IaaS services based on ARM physical servers - <AUTHOR> http://labs.online.net

<comment><USER2> A really huge project. Few seconds to have a Physical Online Cloud in IAAS. 4 core ARM, 2Go et 20Go SSD in few seconds and first PHP5 instance created. Test it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm logged on my private and dedicated ARM server in the cloud after only 5 minutes ! Impressive. Ask for an invite to @online_fr and give it a try !

</comment><comment><USER4> Very good news ! Already impressed by the quality of the service with the 15 minutes testing server. I am eager to launch my first meteor application.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very good news ! Already impressed by the quality of the service with the 15 minutes testing server. I am eager to launch my first meteor application.

</comment><comment><USER6> Impressive. This service based on ARM Physical Servers can change everything. The performance is there! Thanks for the invitation!

</comment><comment><USER7> Great job! just end an amazing 15min test session. You're awesome! Now I'll began a full test thanks to the invitation!

</comment><comment><USER8> Thank you for the invite. I'm testing a new software on it. It's the perfect tool for that :)

</comment><comment><USER9> A cool Server. and performance is quite good, great project.

The network is amazing too.

</comment><comment><USER10> Very impressive. Dedicated cloud built on a quad core ARM CPU. I am impressed in terms of performance

</comment><comment><USER11> Just asked for an invite on IRC, the 15 min trial server was great to test things out :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Get your invitation on irc.online.net /join #onlinelabs

</comment><comment><USER12> Such awesome. Much Cool. Very Wow.

Try it out, pretty impressive stuff !

</comment><comment><USER13> what did you use to build the console? is it some kind of open source or is it home made?

</comment><comment><USER14> This looks like a game-changing innovation in the hosting industry!

</comment><comment><USER15> It looks awesome. I requested an invitation on Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hey, i´m an engineer for this project, ask me anything

<comment><USER5> Hello,

I got my email registered a priori. What should I do now ? Wait for a password sent by email ? thanks in advance for the help.

cheers

<comment><USER17> You should have received an email containing what you need to know to login!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Asked for a beta invit. Waiting for iiiiitttt :)

<comment><USER18> Awesome work. The interface is smooth, and servers are up just so fast :o

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Online are the future.

LeGallois

</comment><comment><USER20> Got invite by twitter. Thx!

</comment><comment><USER21> try it guys, the beta is free ! ask for your invite on twitter @online_fr

<comment><USER22> it's faster to ask for one in IRC, heh.

<comment><AUTHOR> irc.online.net /join #onlinelabs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> looks really good! started to use one really cool

</comment><comment><USER24> Perfects project !

</comment><comment><USER25> wow, very fast and stable, thx Online !

</comment><comment><USER26> 0_o</comment>


Show HN: Wtrace – A command line tracing tool for Windows, based on ETW - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lowleveldesign/wtrace <comment><USER2> To all the commenters lamenting the lack of filtering capabilities, I would like to remind that this is a console program, which in the spirit of Unix should "do one thing and do it well."

If you need filtering, sorting, correlating, and so on, you should add pipes after this program. I believe Powershell pipes are even more powerful than plain text ones, although I haven't used them myself.

<comment><USER3> Looks like the output is flat text, so powershell pipes:

      wtrace mspaint | where {$_.syscall -eq "FileIO/Close" }

Don't yet work. I've made a humble feature request ([https://github.com/lowleveldesign/wtrace/issues/1](https://github.com/lowleveldesign/wtrace/issues/1)) if anyone is interested.

Filtering by time or file, JSON/csv output and all the other powershell goodness would be awesome for a tool like this.

<comment><USER4> That's why grep is great.

<comment><USER5> grep's good for sure but the comment you are replying to is a reply in turn to someone speaking specifically about powershell piping capabilities. personally i am a unix person, not a windows person, but i believe that for a tool to be most effective it should adhere to the workflow of the platform it is written for. since wtrace is written for windows it makes sense to expect that it should integrate well with the windows way of doing things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At the risk of stating the obvious - tracing in itself is not that useful, unless you are after just the aggregated stats. To use traces for reversing the API/IOCTLs, it's equally (if not more) important to have a good UI for filtering, analysis and cross-correlation.

There's another tool that fills this particular niche quite well [1] and having used it to reverse HP Smart Array drivers among other things I can't recommend it highly enough.

Just 2c.

[1] [http://www.rohitab.com/apimonitor](http://www.rohitab.com/apimonitor)

<comment><USER7> Took a look at the API Monitor app you recommended -- it is interesting -- can it be used as a procmon replacement in your experience? The UI seems to be a bit better (more intuitively) organized...with procmon, between one instance of running it and another, I always have to search for where the menu settings are to do some action -- it's almost like a GUI over a command line program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google also has a similar tool for recording and managing ETW traces: [https://github.com/google/UIforETW](https://github.com/google/UIforETW)

<comment><USER9> This is one of the greatest tools for dealing with ETW. And it is a great way to introduce people to ETW as well, before diving into the arcane commands necessary to drive it yourself from the command line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks very nice. For those who don't know ETW (Event Traceing for Windows): [https://msdn.microsoft.com/nl- nl/library/windows/desktop/aa3...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/nl- nl/library/windows/desktop/aa363668\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I haven't used much Windows recently, but I remember this GUI tool, which offers much needed filtering capabilities.

[https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/processmoni...](https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/processmonitor.aspx)

<comment><USER12> Yeah, but it's limited because process monitor stores its output in memory (from what I can see) even though if you use a backing file other than the swap file.

I use this tool all the time!

I really wish there was a command line version that is divorced from the GUI that you can pipe to another process or file. This might be as close as any I've found so far!

<comment><USER13> I use procmon heavily too. Good point about the mem usage. I find procmon especially helpful for diagnosing COM activation issues; being able to trace all the registry and file system accesses is invaluable in figuring why a specific DLL is or isn't loaded.

<comment><USER14> COM activation has eaten a week of mine. Any idea why procmon wouldn't load on a Server 2008 box as Admin? Gives me a driver error.

<comment><USER15> Google says:

* reboot

* check anti-virus

* requires 'Workstation' service

* try a different/older version

* verify other SysInterals utils can load their driver

* extract the 64-bit version and run it directly

[http://superuser.com/questions/211759/process-monitor- fails-...](http://superuser.com/questions/211759/process-monitor-fails-to- load)

Any further details on the error message?

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately lowly devs are not allowed access to that particular server, but I'd bet it's the Workstation service. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very nice! I really enjoy developing on Windows but whenever I read a blog post about someone on *nix hunting down a problem with strace I've felt a bit limited. I know Windows has similar instrumentation but it felt a bit inaccessible to me.

This looks perfect! Simplest imaginable interface, the output I'd need. Great work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I use a small number of ETW events (one of the reasons is that I wanted to use the console output). WPT ([https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/hardware/commercial...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/hardware/commercialize/test/wpt/index)) or Perfview ([https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=285...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=28567)) reveal the whole power of ETW, providing details such as thread context switches, DPC or APC requests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Shameless plug: my company released a free Windows tracing tool that can intercept a lot of user level Win32 calls. It is available here: [http://www.nektra.com/products/spystudio-api- monitor/](http://www.nektra.com/products/spystudio-api-monitor/) you can even build your own tool with the folowing open source instrumentation frameworks: [https://github.com/nektra/Deviare-InProc/](https://github.com/nektra/Deviare- InProc/) and [https://github.com/nektra/Deviare2](https://github.com/nektra/Deviare2)

</comment><comment><USER18> Ah, this will be great. I do miss the ease of using strace to hunt bugs. Even just being able to find out where a program is looking for a file it can't find or a network connection that doesn't work is useful.

</comment><comment><USER19> Are there any command-line tools like ltrace, ktrace, or dtrace on Windows?

Also, is there an executable for this tool? From a quick look at the github page, it looks like it's only available as source.

<comment><AUTHOR> The executable can be found on the release page [1]. I don't know any Windows ports of ltrace, ktrace, or dtrace. But you may have a look at the list of ETW events [2] supported by the Windows kernel and you should find the ones you need for your diagnosis. With each version of Windows the list of event providers for different parts of the system is also growing (you may use 'logman query providers' to list them).

[1] [https://github.com/lowleveldesign/wtrace/releases/download/1...](https://github.com/lowleveldesign/wtrace/releases/download/1.2/wtrace.zip) [2] [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/aa363799\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Pretty good, great job! It's been a long time since I last worked with Windows though...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What are the use cases when I should prefer this over good old ProcMon?

<comment><AUTHOR> This tool is not supposed to compete with ProcMon, which I consider the best tool of the trade. But... currently ProcMon can't be run on Nano Server (thus for instance on Docker). ProcMon does not trace RPC/ALPC requests either. I even suggest in the wiki that you may pipe the output of wtrace to ProcMon (I wrote a simple tool send2procmon [1] for this purpose): wtrace notepad | select-string "Rpc.*Call" | send2procmon

[1] [https://github.com/lowleveldesign/send2procmon](https://github.com/lowleveldesign/send2procmon)

<comment><USER22> really fantastic stuff, man. read both blog posts, really impressed. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: HN's guide to Vegas? - <AUTHOR>

Age: 21, Sex: male, Days: 3, Hotel: true, Alone: false, Cash-to-burn: $100. Didn't care for the movie "The Hangover" but I did enjoy "Ocean's Eleven" if that helps any. <comment><USER2> Blow it all on Penn & Teller.</comment>


Show HN: Turtl – A secure, encrypted Evernote alternative - <AUTHOR> https://turtl.it/ <comment><USER5> I'm sorry but I don't think you should call this an Evernote alternative.

\- No iOS client (Although the site does say coming soon)

\- No Firefox webclipper

\- No Web interface

\- Large / heavy application

\- No Drawing / Diagram support

\- The app is not native, it's seems it's a web frame

It's interface doesn't feel very snappy, it feels like it's built with in a Javascript framework perhaps?

Evernote has been around for a long time and has grown to 110MB uncompressed / installed, this app is 100MB and it's only in its early stages and has hardly any features implemented yet - that's worrying to me.

Looking at OSX's power utilisation Turtle appears to often utilise one CPU core heavily under load where Evernote seems to thread processes more efficient and ends up using around 60% less power on my 2015 Macbook in the use I put it through which was common activities such as adding and removing notes, copy / pasting text, launching and closing the app etc...

What I do _really_ like is that it uses Markdown, that's something sorely missed in Evernote.

I'm really sorry to be quite harsh, I really do love when people try to improve software by creating their own alternative and that's something that's sorely needed in the land of Evernote like apps, however I don't think this comes close to a possible alternative.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the honest feedback! The app IS a web frame, both on desktop an mobile. TBH it's pretty much the only way I can maintain it on 4 (and soon 5) different platforms efficiently.

I will say this: Turtl will queue encryption/decryption in background threads so it does utilize cores while doing heavy processing. As far as how it utilizes cores in the main UI, that's really up to the underlying javascript engine, which most likely will be single-threaded unless instructed otherwise.

> I'm really sorry to be quite harsh

Not harsh at all. Turtl is a start, a goal. Evernote has so many features and so many use-cases for so many people. I agree saying it's a viable alternative right now isn't entirely true, but for those who value privacy over features, Turtl is worth a look.

<comment><USER6> To your credit, the feature you're adding is far more important to me than any of the minor Evernote features the parent mentions. So don't sell yourself short.

I currently find myself stuck syncing text files using SyncThing or ownCloud or making notes in my KeePass database just to get the level of privacy I want in this.

I saw Turtl before and this makes Turtl highly appealing to me, I'll definitely be trying it out more thoroughly as it looks like mobile support has matured since last I tried it.

One thing I seem to remember having an issue with was DPI scaling support, I use 4k screens at home and at work, but everything was blurry as the apps didn't support DPI scaling - any chance this has been addressed?

Another issue I seem to remember was self-hosting, I'd most likely self-host it (though I'll definitely chip you a donation if it's all working), but I didn't see any way to configure the server used - did I miss something or has this been added now or would I need to recompile to do this?

Thanks for all your hard work.

EDIT: Just tried it again - DPI scaling on Windows is now working and there appears to be a button to change the server. Sweet. I'll be moving in to this tonight if all goes well. Thank you again. This looks like an excellent product.

I noticed your page doesn't have a donation link though and since I intend to self-host I can't send you anything, any chance you can put one up?

EDIT2: Hmm, noticing something strange here - I thought the DPI scaling was working when I saw the notes in the main screen looked very sharp, [http://i.imgur.com/BfSDcca.png](http://i.imgur.com/BfSDcca.png) but when I view notes expanded it seems to lose its sharpness. See [http://i.imgur.com/gpJ7zsC.png](http://i.imgur.com/gpJ7zsC.png)

I'm not sure what the reason for this is but I've noticed similar problems with Atom and other browser based solutions so perhaps this is unavoidable for now, in any case it's much better than it was before.

<comment><USER7> My solution to this problem is to use LastPass. The crypto is about as good as you can get, the only problem is that its not Opensource. LastPass runs literally everywhere, every browser, every device.

Markdown support in the notes would be quite nice. The UI could be improved for that usecase as well.

I really like having only app for those use cases.

I really like that I can use my Yubikey for 2f authentication over NFC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://github.com/turtl/js/blob/2ca59900d71284795e278e75585...](https://github.com/turtl/js/blob/2ca59900d71284795e278e75585787ca767e9766/library/tcrypt.js#L192-L195)

Nothing says secure like PBKDF2-SHA1 with 50 rounds.

[https://github.com/turtl/js/blob/2ca59900d71284795e278e75585...](https://github.com/turtl/js/blob/2ca59900d71284795e278e75585787ca767e9766/library/tcrypt.js#L577)

...or timing attacks on MAC validation. (Yeah, you switched to GCM, but a downgrade attack could potentially be used to find a valid MAC for a chosen ciphertext without the attacker knowing the key...)

<comment><USER9> "When the standard was written in 2000, the recommended minimum number of iterations was 1000, but the parameter is intended to be increased over time as CPU speeds increase. As of 2005 a Kerberos standard recommended 4096 iterations,[2] Apple iOS 3 used 2000, iOS 4 used 10000,[3] while in 2011 LastPass used 5000 iterations for JavaScript clients and 100000 iterations for server-side hashing"

source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2)

*Edit: Oh.. it's PBKDF1....

<comment><USER10> how can anyone take anything seriously that requires 1000 iterations. if iterations had an exponential function then the difference between 1000 iterations and 10,000 is ridiculous, like the difference between 16 bit encryption (no such thing, this would be a joke) and 160 bit encryption.

But if it's not exponential, then adding thousands of iterations doesn't do much. Maybe instead of 1 day to break it, now it takes 1000 days, or instead of spending $4,000 on CPU time now you need to spend $4M to crack it. Big deal - it's just as broken.

So can anyone explain the math here? How can they seriously suggest linearly increasing the number of iterations over time?

<comment><USER8> Attackers can use special hardware (ASICs, for example) to perform a lot of low-memory but CPU-intensive calculations quickly. Modern KDFs emphasize a property called memory-hardenss: It should be reasonably fast on consumer devices, require a reasonable amount of memory, and trading off memory usage should require an absurd CPU slowdown.

PBKDF2 doesn't have this property, so if you're forced to use it, the standard recommended iteration count is 86000.

50 is a joke.

<comment><USER10> so it's not really exponential - if ridiculous amounts of memory somehow became very cheap and available, then it would break it? this is quite different from the exponential properties most encryption has. I would expect "ridiculous amounts of memory" to mean "more bytes than the number of atoms on Earth", that sort of thing. It sounds like rather than these kinds of theoretical limits, they chose much more practical limits - which seems a lot more dangerous and less future-proof, but I guess I'm not an expert.

<comment><USER8> As attackers get better, we can just up the ante. More rounds, more memory usage, etc.

If you're building software in 2016, you want to use one of the following for turning a password into a crypto key:

        - <USER2>
        - <USER3>
        - <USER4>

PBKDF2 should be your last resort. Don't fall back to a simple hash function.

<comment><USER10> that makes zero sense. something encrypted in 2001 isn't supposed to magically become plaintext in 2016 because "attackers get better." it's fundamentally not the promise of encryption. (I thought.)

<comment><USER8> Uh, no. AES was originally only slated to survive until 2030. Advances in cryptanalysis are hard to predict, but attacks always get better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was going to rail against another app I could be interested in which forces an Android installation through Google's Play Store.

Then I noticed the link to sources on GitHub and the ability to build the APK oneself.[0] I will certainly try this. Thank you for the option.

[0] [https://github.com/turtl/mobile](https://github.com/turtl/mobile)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, creator of Turtl here. It's getting late here (2:15 am) so if you ask a question or have feedback, I'll be able to get back to you in a few hours. Thanks for checking out my project!

<comment><USER12> Hi May I have two recommendations? \- put more screenshots on the web page to apetize us \- if you provide server... provide it as an Docker image too, so it's easy to test

Looks good anyway, I am going give it a try.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Lots of people are requesting docker images, so this sounds like the way to go. I'll look into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's really neat to see that the backend is built with RethinkDB and Common Lisp. I am looking forward to setting up my own instance from source and playing around with it. Great project.

</comment><comment> V-2 I feel the UI (of the desktop version) is a bit lacking.

Within one minute from installing it, the following happened.

I added a note: a text note, fine. So a side bar opens...

Why is it only ever a side bar? I have a 1920px wide monitor - not really unusual - but you're forcing me to edit my notes in a fixed 700px sidebar, the rest of the screen estate just darkened out. Evernote lets me use all my screen.

But I've typed some stuff in. So, I'm clicking on "Add text note", the first most obvious call-to-action that catches my eye. A dialog pops up: "The note has unsaved changes. Really leave?". Well, I just clicked on "Add text note", what do you mean?

Only after a while I realized that I'm not supposed to click on the most prominent (white on black) caption bar at the top, but on the greenish "Add" in bottom right corner. Even though the title does say "Add text note", which is as explicit as it gets.

Okay, time to edit my note. It opens in preview mode by default, I still have to click on a floating button to make it editable - another little mental bump, but okay.

I can click on an eye icon to get a preview of the note. Once I do that, the eye icon vanishes, and I'm left with an uneditable note. That's quite weird, normally the "eye" icon would just be replaced with a symbol indicating return to edit mode, allowing to switch back and forth with no fuss. Makes sense, especially sice it's easy to anticipate that the preview function would often be used just to quickly catch a glimpse of whether our work (markup, etc.) looks fine, and further we go, it's not a Rembrandt painting : )

Not here, though - I click on the eye, but in order to resume editing I have to move mouse cursor to the left now, and tap on the "<-" back button. Or, as it turns out, anywhere outside of the magical 700px wide (36% of my screen) get-things-done area.

I guess I'm sort of a power user (I'm a software dev for starters), so these confusions don't stop me for more than 5 seconds each. It is frustrating nevertheless, because being computer-savvy, I'm not used to that. And when my mum clicks "Add text note" only to be asked if she really wants to cancel all changes, I can tell you she'll look like a deer in headlights rather than mumble "what's this bs" as I did ; )

I understand you're an indie dev, but hallway usability testing doesn't require hiring focus groups etc., all it takes is have a few people sit in front of the monitor and watch them go at it

</comment><comment><USER14> I saw the "pricing" link at the top and was about to shit all over this for a privacy oriented app being closed source, until I scrolled to the very bottom and saw the innocuous open source note. May want to emphasize that more.

<comment><AUTHOR> This app has been a balance between advertising the fact that it's open source and just presenting itself as a "privacy app" without shoving it in people's faces. Maybe it should be a bit more prominent (and thanks for reading to the bottom)!

To be clear, the pricing section only applies if you connect Turtl to our hosted service. If you run your own server, the only pricing that applies is the price you pay for the server you run it on.

<comment><USER15> I actually love this business model: web/api server and clients are all Free Software, and the developer or company behind it runs the "canonical" hosted service. I hope it works out for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Evernote made the mistake of going multiplatform really aggressively and too much scope creep. I'm glad to see they're scaling back a lot of their scope creep.

Goo on you for trying to do this. Be ambitious and swing for the fences. Evernote's product crashes frequently.

<comment><USER17> On which platform? I use Evernote a lot on Windows and Android, and a bit on iOS, and haven't seen a crash in a very long time.

<comment> V-2 Out of my experience it's stable on Windows, although lacking in other departments (eg. no dark theme)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm glad of an alternative, mostly because Evernote being the last bad option to date, has terrible UX. And the search is substandard. I use it because I can use it on mobile and desktop, and back it up frequently to multiple formats in case Evernote dies, or wipes my data in error.

(Please everybody who uses note apps, back them up now to external files!)

</comment><comment><USER19> I've been looking for alternatives to Evernote for a long time now, but haven't found a viable one. Thanks for making this, I'll definitely check it out!

</comment><comment><USER20> Apple notes (in iOS 9 and El Capitan) is also a secure, encrypted Evernote alternative: [https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT202303](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303)

</comment><comment><USER21> Coming from an academic/artistic background, very very far away from the TECH industry, I've found turtl really helpful for cataloging research for upcoming projects. I think it has really great potential for people working in project based industries who need confidential platform to store large amounts of research. Although many people do not have a need for privacy in their bookmarking, it is definitely a major consideration in many other professions outside of TECH. Although it may not be as smooth running as Evernote right now, I think that privacy for my research is a trade off worth noting.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is pretty sweet but the UI does leave some to be desired. It would be awesome to have a UI similarish to onenote or a few others where on the left side you have a list of your boards, then either on the left or right side (users pick) you have a list of items in the board, then the rest of the screen is whatever the item is. It is a really nice start and has a lot of potential but without a web version it just wont replace anything I use right now since you dont seem to support any of the BSDs and I do a lot of switching between Windows Linux and OpenBSD

</comment><comment><USER23> I tried it. I like this app, especially this tile interface. And it won't scramble all of things into notes like evernote. bookmarks, files, notes are separated. seems nice.

cons:

\- You need to take certifications for OSX app \- it's scare to install un- certificated apps \- Uploading file and images should be merged \- I don't want to care whether it's image or not, App should detect, isn't it cool? \- The note editor, it's too poor to use. and default height of textarea is too thin. expand it to users want to write something.

</comment><comment><USER24> [http://i.imgur.com/sDzAMjg.png](http://i.imgur.com/sDzAMjg.png)

That's a rather large font size.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well yeah, we need a callout or customers won't know where to look.

In all seriousness though, it seems the site has linux/chrome issues. I am looking into it.

Thanks for the screenshot =]

<comment><USER25> It has IE11 issues also. [http://i.imgur.com/flVRw9M.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/flVRw9M.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> On macbookpro 13", safari, header background takes 50% of webpage area. Chrome and FF looks good.

</comment><comment><USER27> Just a heads up: I'm being shown the _Windows x64_ button and I'm using a Mac (OS X 10.10) and Firefox.

There is only one button on the front page but you seem to support multiple platforms so I'm assuming this is a bug?

<comment><USER28> Same thing happened to me. If I hadn't dug around a little I would have assumed it's a Windows-only app and moved on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does it run on my own server, encrypting data with keys the server never sees?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is it possible, or maybe I should offer, to encapsulate this in docker using docker-compose? I find it easier and cleaner to try new things out running docker-compose up.

<comment><AUTHOR> By all means, if you want to take on this project I'd gladly advise and link to it from the server page. I don't know enough about Docker to be useful for that portion, but I can certainly help in getting the server set up properly.

<comment><USER30> I'll work on this tonight, EST, but if someone beats me to it please don't hesitate to link to them first. Thanks for the reply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Evernote is _so good_ that I just can't see myself transitioning. I wish the best services would offer strong encryption as a default.

<comment><USER32> This is the game these companies play - they provide a service so slick that people will use it regardless of the privacy concerns.

And of course I am one of those people... I use Evernote because I can take notes anywhere very easily (in my browser, my OS, my phone) and then have access to them always in sync very easily, online and offline. Couple that with nested tags and saved search queries and I unfortunately see no competition, regardless of privacy measures. I don't care if my data is encrypted properly if I don't have easy access to it.

<comment><USER9> Like almost all 'cloud' services, I treat all data in Evernote as non- confidential and thus don't keep private information within it and I take regular backups. Do I trust a hobby / standard web-dev project as any more secure just because they day it is and might have an extra layer of encryption - no.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is important: there's a _trust_ barrier to entry here. Why trust some random guy on the internet? You wouldn't. Nor would I expect anyone to actually pour through the source code to determine if the crypto is sound.

Sometime soon I'm hoping to get enough cash rounded up for a security audit and get a few thumbs up from the security community so at least you won't be taking my word for it. Not only that, I'd love to make the product rock-solid. As much crypto as I've studied in the past few years, nothing beats an expert looking things over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> [http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/02/prweb13198898.htm](http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/02/prweb13198898.htm) Centrallo 2.0 Global Productivity App Adds Evernote Import Wizard to Its List- Making Features and Adds Former Evernote Executive Heather Wilde to Its Team

</comment><comment><USER34> Is something wrong with the CSS on the site? Everything looks kind of overly large in my browser (Desktop Linux Chrome).

<comment><USER35> Just to add in a screenshot, here's what it looks like on my copy of Chrome on Linux: [http://i.imgur.com/6YPbAg6.png](http://i.imgur.com/6YPbAg6.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Nice app. Please please add any sort of import capability

(You can look at simplenote export/import csv/json format)

</comment><comment><USER37> I really like the idea of a secure Evernote alternative. For me, however, the by far most important feature is decentralization. Until someone builds this I'm stuck using org-mode and a git repo...

<comment><USER38> It is decentralized: [https://turtl.it/docs/server/](https://turtl.it/docs/server/)

You only use their servers if you want to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> See also [http://lexiy.com](http://lexiy.com) secure notes, but not documents.

</comment><comment><USER40> Are you using truecrypt? Isn't that a dead project with security issues?

<comment><USER28> It's a forked project with leadership-drama issues, but several ongoing audits haven't turned up any serious security issues.

The original anonymous maintainers apparently tried to kill it, for reasons that aren't clear, by saying that it's insecure. It seems to have been a red herring, and their suggestions of alternatives were comically bad.

Lots of people are still using the last Truecrypt release, or one of the several forks that have sprung up that have attempted to improve upon it in various ways (sometimes in incompatible ways, though). Hopefully the situation will stabilize with one clear winner in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Why on Earth people are not using git? on iOS it is Working Copy app. any good client for Android?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the Android client is good, but I am biased. iOS coming soon.</comment></comment>


The US army wants more robot soldiers fast - <AUTHOR> http://smart-machines.blogspot.com/2008/09/us-army-wants-more-robot-soldiers-fast.html

<comment><USER2> File under "what could go wrong?"</comment>


Challenges of Big Databases with MySQL - <AUTHOR> http://www.tokutek.com/2011/10/challenges-of-big-databases-with-mysql-oow11-presentation/#.TqcF72y5QoI.hackernews <comment><USER2> I would never have thought that MySQL could handle massive databases, but it honestly isn't that bad. You just can't expect it to behave like a normal database.

I had to use mysql to build a 200 million row 200gb database. The trick was using myisam and indexing it as little as possible (just the pk). I used sphinx to handle full text searching. Searching and retrieving records was very fast.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good insight. As to your point -- keeping up many indexes with MyISAM or InnoDB is definitely a problem, especially if the indexes grow too big for RAM. In these cases, TokuDB (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TokuDB>), a drop in storage engine replacement for MySQL, can help by replacing dated B-tree technology with more modern Fractal Tree indexes, since B-trees suffer in performance with high insertion rates (especially random insertions) into disk. By allowing for faster write performance, Fractal Tree engines allow for more indexes to be maintained, and hence better query performance can be obtained.</comment></comment>


'Power' move by male students ruffles U. of C. - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-u-of-c-mens-groupmay19,0,4707353.story <comment><USER2> It's always bugged me how few scholarships there are for white males, and how taboo it is to suggest that perhaps society may be overcompensating in certain areas.

On a related-yet-unrelated note, I think we should start a left-handed pride movement. Anyone with me?</comment>