How to Set Up a Company in Germany for English-Speaking People - <AUTHOR> https://blog.datacircle.io/2017/10/11/setting-up-company-in-berlin/ <comment><USER11> Just want to note that if you're not tied to Germany in particular, Netherlands is a much better option for US citizens looking to start a company, thanks to the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty. (yes, it's DAFT - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT)). NL is a pretty easy place to business, at least as an entrepreneur. (Things get more complicated with lots of employees, like in most of Europe.)

The tl;dr version is US citizens can get a residency permit (2 years, renewable indefinitely, considered a non-temporary purpose of stay so you're eligible for permanent residency after 5 years) to start a business in the Netherlands with very few restrictions and very little in the way of capital requirements (€4500 in the business account.) Plenty of attorneys in the Netherlands can take care of the necessary paperwork for €1500, give or take, but lots of people manage it themselves too.

A few blogs and guides of the many out there:

[https://daftvisa.wordpress.com/step-by-step- guide/](https://daftvisa.wordpress.com/step-by-step-guide/) [https://survivingdaft.tumblr.com/](https://survivingdaft.tumblr.com/) [http://passthesourcream.com/daft/](http://passthesourcream.com/daft/)

<comment><USER12> Not only that, we are considered the best non-native English speakers of the world, so even if you aren't keen on learning Dutch (boo!) you'll manage pretty easily :)

<comment><USER13> I looked this up to make sure [0]; it's true, and the countries with a "very high" proficiency are:

        01 Netherlands
        02 Denmark
        03 Sweden
        04 Norway
        05 Finland
        06 Singapore
        07 Luxembourg

0: [http://www.ef.com/epi/?mc=we](http://www.ef.com/epi/?mc=we)

<comment><USER14> I question the validity of "global" rankings that don't include regions like East, West or South Africa, where countries like Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa have very high English proficiency rates (especially given that it's also an/the official language in most cases).

<comment><USER15> I think the point of those ranking is ESL. So if English is an official language, you're out ;)

<comment><USER16> Then Singapore doesn't belong on that list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Countries in Europe now offering start-up visas (without major capital requirements):

      - Denmark
      - <USER2>
      - <USER3>
      - <USER4>
      - <USER5>
      - <USER6>
      - <USER7>
      - <USER8>
      - <USER9>
      - <USER10>

I'm currently applying for Denmark. Invest Denmark has offices all over the world (including Palo Alto) and will be more than happy to assist you through the process.

I've been in SV for 3 years, but never went for the green card. The US won't let me stay, so I guess I'll have to go suppress wages somewhere else.

<comment><USER18> And the UK which you seem to have left out. Why? Tech City Visa is well known.

<comment><USER17> Honestly I did a fair few days of research and whenever the UK is listed as an option, the figure 200,000 gbp also shows up.

Looking more into this, looks like there is a special 50k gbp if the money is coming from local VC's or government grant.

In my case I have a side product that is fielding licensing inquiries, and I'm looking to bootstrap (figure that's just as time consuming as fund raising).

I don't have 200k gbp in the bank, and I'm not willing to nor see the need to gamble with family and friends' money. So to me the UK scheme falls into the category of "major capital requirements".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Incorporating as a GmbH is the most common way to start a company in Germany (about 40%). The UG form is not very common (about 9%) and especially if you plan to do business with other companies in Germany I would not recommend it, because UGs are often frowned upon.

Founding a GmbH is not only relatively expensive, it also takes time. Many founders avoid incorporating themselves but prefer to buy a new GmbH. This is actually a business here, there are companies that keep a pool of fresh GmbHs and sell them to founders. Search for 'Vorratsgesellschaften' if you are interested in going that route.

<comment><USER20> What the article doesn't mention is the ongoing costs with a GmbH. The annual Bilanz is around 2000 EUR. Not to mention you pay lots of taxes and as a founder you can't get money out of the GmbH without getting taxed again (Abgeltungssteuer).

<comment><USER21> The taxes when you want money out of the GmbH are not the primary issue. They're structured in such a way that all earnings from the company are more or less taxed at the same rate as your normal income tax, for exampe you get to deduct the Gewerbesteuer etc. You can even use a GmbH to flatten your income and use it as a vessel to keep some money for when you want a longer holiday or for bad times. This may or may not be worth the extra effort.

The primary issue is that you can't just take money out of an GmbH/UG/AG (Kapitalgesellschaft). The act itself requires a shareholder meeting (easy if you're alone) and a balance sheet is required (less easy). You can't take money that would put the balance of the company below the required minimum, ... Basically, the money placed into the company is frozen, you mostly can only access the earnings.

You can, however, pay yourself a regular wage, but this wage needs to be treated like a normal wage: needs to be paid monthly, needs to be fixed, ... This will likely become an issue if the company has no established cashflow. You can also take shares of the earnings (Tantieme) as part of your wage, but that also requires a balance, so it's usually done when the yearly taxes are filed. They'd be taxed like your regular income and the company would not pay any extra tax on those (simplified, they're treated as wages paid, so regular costs that reduce the earnings).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you are bootstrapping, or just founding a small side business, it doesn't have to be so complicated. There is a special provision for small businesses [1]. As long as you expect to stay under 50000 € in sales in a given year, you can be treated as a private person - meaning you don't have to pay VAT to the government for sold goods, but you do have to pay it to vendors like regular customers. Once you've grown enough, you can register as a company. Note also that parts of the complications and expenses arise when you want to be a limited liability company - if you are just making websites on the side, this is probably not neccessary.

Germany has a strong culture of entrepreneurship - being not employed but "selbstständig" (occupationally independent) is held in high regards. In my experience, while burocracy can be complicated, officials are very willing to help (I haven't made the jump myself, but I know from others). And one thing that is nicer in Germany / Europe is that it seems less litigious than the US. I would be constantly afraid to get sued or to break some unknown law in another US state, whereas here if you get a good accountant and avoid a few common pitfalls, you are pretty safe.

[1]: [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleinunternehmerregelung_(Deut...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleinunternehmerregelung_\(Deutschland\))

<comment><USER21> Note that none of this has any connection with the legal form of the company, this is a tax matter which applies equally to all companies or freelancers.

> As long as you expect to stay under 50000 € in sales in a given year, you > can be treated as a private person

This is false. The conditions is that business volume [1] including taxes has not exceeded 17500 EUR in the previous year and at the same time is not expected to exceed 50000 EUR in the running year. If you're a newly founded company you need to file an estimate of your business volume with the tax authorities and if the estimate exceeds 17500 EUR you can't take advantage of the Kleinunternehmerregelung. Also note that the 17.500 EUR limit applies to the sum of all companies you own, you can't have two companies with a volume of 17500 EUR each.

It's really only good for a side business and in some narrow circumstances where you sell mostly to private customers.

If you want to bootstrap, you're much more likely to benefit from filing your VAT (anything you buy will be discounted 19% effectively, you can have your VAT filed by an accountant from the saving of buying a single expensive computer).

A fairly good summary (in german) with a handy flowchart at the bottom is here [http://www.kleinunternehmer.de/kleinunternehmerregelung.htm](http://www.kleinunternehmer.de/kleinunternehmerregelung.htm)

[1] minus VAT-free services etc. ...

<comment><USER22> I wouldn't say it is false, I was just simplifying.

If you take no outside money (yet), have no employees (yet), and don't buy many goods, you don't really have any benefit of either not paying VAT, or getting limited liability. This is for people who have a side-business of "making websites". You can register a simple business ("Gewerbe") when you have to write an invoice, or start making regular income.

Of course, if there is real capital investment involved, or once this is not just a side business, you have to do more.

<comment><USER21> No, it's false, it's actually dangerously false since you personally may be liable for the VAT not paid. The limit is actually a hard limit and it gets more and more dangerous the closer you creep to the edge. At the years turnover, when you write the next years first invoices, you need to know your tax status and you don't have at that time the previous years tax declaration. The tax authorities will not notify you of that change in status. If it turns out you had a total (vat)-taxable income of 17499 EUR, you're fine. If you miscalculated and had 17501 € and mistakenly already wrote your invoices thinking you'd be VAT-free then there's two options: if your customer is a company, you can correct the invoice and have them pay the VAT (their accounting department will absolutely love that if you come back half a year later on a paid invoice, trust me). If the customer is a private person, you get to pay the VAT. I've seen people fall in that trap and I can tell you, re- writing all your invoices for a year sucks, paying 20% of your income as VAT because you simplified the rules sucks even more.

You also need to file the registration with the tax authorities before you write your first invoice (you need a tax number for a correct invoice).

As a general rule of thumb: You don't simplify when it comes to taxes.

(Side note: This is still unrelated to registering a company or even registering with the Gewerbeamt which may or may not be required depending on what exactly you do. Members of the Freie Berufe for example don't need that.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Don't start a company in Germany if you don't have to. Expensive and bureaucratic tax system (accountants and time wise), regular accountancy checks which you have to pay your accountant for, very hard to close down and insolvency is very complicated.

<comment><USER24> [deleted]

<comment><USER25> It doesn't really stifle innovation in any way?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What a giant pain in the ass compared to a UK incorporation. Takes about 5 mins, £15 and less than a day to form.

You can also sign up for taxes online in a few clicks.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is this even necessary?

Can't they simply set up an LTD in Ireland and "use" it in Germany?

I know some Germans who did this for tax reasons, but I could imagine that Ireland formalities are easier to understand for English speakers.

<comment><USER21> You can do that, but then you'll have to deal with Irish Tax law and if you want to pay yourself a wage you'll be employed by an Irish company. This will lead to it's own set of complications. You'll probably need a bank account in Ireland etc. If you're selling things in germany you'd still need to collect German VAT depending on whether your customer is a company or a private entity, ...

Registering a British LtD used to be common when the UG didn't exist and you'd need at least 25k for a GmbH to get limited liability, but it's fallen a bit out of fashion since then.

<comment><USER28> And now there is a Brexit looming... Poor LTD owners :/

<comment><USER21> No pity from my side, but yes. Some folks will pay a hefty price for the shortcut.

<comment><USER29> Another shortcut, while still remaining in the EU is a Maltese Limited company. Very similar rules and structure to operating a UK based Limited company, but a much better corporate tax regime.

I went this route, using an accountant recommended by a trusted friend. Bought an existing "off the shelf" company and have a Maltese business bank account, all without leaving the comfort of my desk.

<comment><USER30> Have you physically been to Malta? Do you pay non Maltese taxes? Do you understand tax law? If no then it is likely you are committing tax fraud (perhaps without even realising it).

People need to understand this: there is no free lunch. If you think you can be classified as a Maltese company, sitting at a desk in <insert random European country here>, you are dead wrong in 99.9% of the cases. Get proper tax counsel (not an accountant, a lawyer -- accountants are generally sloppy with details, and details matter, e.g. a word in a contract can matter).

Technology and internet based businesses have some unique opportunities to optimise taxes, but the line between fraud and optimization is quite thin.. get good counsel, or prepare for a dispute where you take your (local) tax authority to court.

Source: a decent knowledge of corporate and tax law and plenty of tax disputes, which I've mostly won.

<comment><USER29> Thanks for your concern, but I am very happy with the professional advice I have received and am entirely confident that no tax fraud is being committed.

<comment><USER31> I read your comment, and the feedback you're replying to.

I notice that you have not mentioned the word "lawyer". Instead you said accountant and professional. I'm going to write the rest of this on the assumption you have not spoken to a tax lawyer.

You've set up a structure for years, and are likely investing tens or hundreds of thousands in equity.

A consultation with a good tax lawyer can be had for $100-$200 in most cases, or even free sometimes.

Your situation might be 100% correct! In which case, you have spent very little.

But if your situation is _wrong_? You risk the total destruction of your business, tens of thousands in penalties and legal fees, and possibly jail.

Speak to a lawyer, if you haven't.

Incidentally, I had the same idea as you: Canadian business, international clients. Could I incorporate abroad and save? My tax's lawyer's answer was no, the local revenue authorities would not see it that way.

You're in another jurisdicion, so the plan may work. But, you will spare yourself the possibility of ruin by checking with a tax lawyer in the jurisdiction you live in.

<comment><USER30> You're not wrong. I have a friend who used to work at PwC essentially handling tax avoidance tactics for clients, and she recently switched to a reputable accounting office due to unhealthy work pressure.

She's knowledgeable and is clearly aware that the advice being given by her current accounting office is much worse (and often incorrect) in comparison to the advice given by people at her previous job.

They're excellent at handling accounting, but not good at structuring (non local) things and avoiding tax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The Very Important Question is how much time and money it takes to close the company, not how to open it. Not all startups are successful, so it always makes sense to think about the shutdown.

<comment><AUTHOR> you have to continue doing taxes for another 3 years if I am not mistaken. Depending on your accountant that would be around 1k per year.

<comment><USER33> If you do a clean shutdown (= you have enough money to pay your accountant and any other debtors), you can close down a company at the end of your business year.

<comment><USER32> Isn't there a mandatory waiting period to collect claims from creditors, employees etc? If I decide to close the company few day before the end of the business year, that's unlikely to be possible to do it so quickly.

<comment><USER21> There's a one-year waiting period after the liquidation has been publicly announced in the Bundesanzeiger before the remaining assets can be distributed among the shareholders. See § 73 GmbhG [http://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/gmbhg/__73.html](http://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/gmbhg/__73.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If you don't actively seek outside investment (yet) it's much easier to start off with a sole proprietorship or a partnership (GbR) in case of more than one founder.

The caveat is this though: You and your partners will be personally liable for the company's liabilities. In most cases however this doesn't matter as much as is often presumed. This is assuming you can 100% trust your partners (which should be a requirement when starting a company anyway) because a GbR implies that each of the partners is fully liable for the others' actions and decisions made with regards to the company, too. Creditors can recoup their assets from any of the partners.

First of all, as long as it's just you and potential partners, who put in their own time there usually isn't a whole lot of financial risk involved anyway. That changes once you decide to hire employees. At that moment you quite likely should incorporate.

Secondly, in many cases even with a GmbH or UG you will be held personally liable as a managing director anyway (for example when taking up a loan).

<comment><USER35> > In most cases however this doesn't matter as much as is often presumed.

I only hope you don't fail to deliver and get sued, misuse client data and get sued, get accused of patent infringement et al.

Seen all of these happen.

<comment><USER34> Germany and the EU in general is a civil law system (the UK and Ireland being exceptions). Suing a company for simple failure is not as easy as it might be in the US (though I doubt that's very common even in the notoriously litigious US legal system).

Misusing client data is a criminal offence under European data protection laws. Doing so not only makes you liable for damages no matter if you're a sole proprietor or 'merely' a managing director of an Ltd-style company but it can also land you in jail.

Finally, there are no software patents in the EU so if you run a software startup you're fine in that respect.

<comment><USER36> With no software patents, why don't more companies incorporate in Europe to avoid being sued for patent infringement in SV/elsewhere in the US?

<comment><USER35> Because if you operate in any capacity in the US you are subject to US laws, presumably. I've worked now for 3 companies that are not US HQd but have been sued by patent trolls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Before setting up companies in a different countries than where you live: This can get very messy and you should either have the company in the country where you live or live in a country which is very tolerant (tax-wise) about having companies in other countries.

On a secondary note: Germany is the worst country to incorporate: bureaucratic, expensive, tax offices are expensive and stuff is complicated, worst privacy regulation to come (from a company perspective), Labour is expensive compared to their skill level and English skills.

One good thing though: since share transactions are done with state notaries there is more safety when doing them and less need for lawyers for simple transactions. For more complicated transactions with higher funds it gets expensive again. The Articles of Association must be German, the rest can be in English.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A few cents from my side, setting up a company like GmbH or UG helps when you target a German market. Germans are like that, they love to see the GmbH after the name of the company that they own or they buy / collaborate with.

Now an UG is young in comparison to GmbH, it is slowly being accepted.

</comment><comment><USER38> Is that correct, €25000 to start a GmbH? The Swedish equivalent (AB), probably some differences, costs ~€5000.

I think the registration cost another ~€150.

<comment><USER39> It is not a fee you have to pay, you have to guarantee this amount of capital, sort of as a signal to other companies in the market what solvency to except at least :-)

You can actually spend the money on things after the court verified the capital is present with your corporate bank.

<comment><USER38> This is the same as an AB. Many start by having €5000 and then selling things they own such as computers to the AB, to get the funds "back". I think Sweden changed from €10000 to €5000 a couple of years ago.

If the UG or GmbH goes belly up, am I in any way personally responsible?

<comment><USER21> The point where you're selling private property to your company is the moment you really really really want to talk to a good tax accountant in germany. If you sell above reasonable price it's considered tax fraud (verdeckte Gewinnentnahme) and the reasonable price is likely to be a point of contention between you and the tax authorities. Unless you haven very valuable machinery you want to place into the company it's usually not worth it and in this case you'd want a third party to certify the price. You can, however, pay yourself a reasonable wage and there are pretty clear guidelines on what's considered reasonable. Much cleaner and easier.

Personal liability is a bit a complicated topic. If you're a pure shareholder, your liability ends with the value of the shares. If you're at the same time the only shareholder and the CEO and only employee you can be liable for quite a few things. (Social security, taxes, damages for your personal actions, anything that constitutes fraud, ...)

<comment><USER30> This is simple and applies to most (Western) jurisdictionS: don't sell anything to a company you own or control, at an above market rate.

Now, there are many ways to value something, and there is generally some room for interpretation on how much to charge exactly. But you will need to find a way to justify the price at which a transaction was concluded.

With IP it gets a bit blurry (e.g. you might own some trademarks you want to transfer to your new company), but again, there are a ton of perfectly acceptable ways to value something and not face the wrath of your local tax collector. Just make sure you have a reasonable valuation, based on objective facts, and you'll (mostly) be fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> You can also found the GmbH with 12,5k EUR instead of 25k, which makes much more sense than going the UG route.

<comment><USER41> This needs explanation: You only need to deposit half of the 25k up front, the rest... really only when the limited liability is invoked in a bankruptcy.

I wouldn't call setting up a GmbH especially difficult or complicated, just slow (2-4 weeks). Your tax advisor/accountant and notary can help and advise you in case there are questions.

<comment><USER40> Yes totally, what I was trying to say is that instead of founding an UG where you have to put 25% aside until you hit the 25k, it makes much more sense to simply found a GmbH with 12,5k that comes with its prestige and it will make it much more easy to do business with others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> But why do this instead of setting it up somewhere in the US? Having an office there - if you already have HQ or something in the US - might have benefits. But I doubt choosing most places in EU would have benefits over the US.

<comment><USER43> I thought the way that one Apple subsidiary avoided taxes was pretty clever. The USA taxes corporations by their headquarters location, and Ireland taxes companies by their physical presence. So apple created a headquarters in Ireland, but did physical business in the USA. So the USA didn't tax it because it's HQ was in Ireland, and Ireland didn't tax it because it's physical presence was in the USA. So that subsidiary paid absolutely zero taxes, they didn't even file. It saved Apple a good 5 billion dollars.

<comment><USER42> Tax avoidance is another topic, I thought. Roger that, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > _A GmbH requires a minimum of 25 thousand euros_

Simpler advice; buy a ticket to Bratislava and take it from there.

<comment><USER45> Easier still, do it online in Estonia.

<comment><USER46> Yes, the e-residency is extremely cool and forward looking. And you don't even have to travel there, only to one of their embassies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> 4-5 weeks ?!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Guys I just released it also on ProductHunt! [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/how-to-setup-a-company- in-...](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/how-to-setup-a-company-in-germany)</comment>


Stateful: Flexible Hosted Dashboards (in 48 hours) - <AUTHOR> http://statefulapp.com

<comment><USER2> How about a live demo dashboard?

<comment><USER3> Good point. The demo accounts for Splendid Bacon (<http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1801964> also from the rails rumble) made it much easier to understand what it was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> i actually find it much more difficult to login with my yahoo/gmail/google/openid than to just create an account on your app.

i'll advice that you add a 'create my account' option for 'paranoid' users like me.

</comment><comment><USER5> "by allowing you to adding many different"

should be "add"</comment>


Avondale Man Sues After Google Data Leads to Wrongful Arrest for Murder - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/google-geofence-location-data-avondale-wrongful-arrest-molina-gaeta-11426374 <comment><USER2> until individual police officers are directly responsible for their actions, nothing will change. Currently they get bonuses based on the number of "arrests" and have no consequences for violations of the law, constitution, or basic decency.

None of the police or prosecutors will have to personally pay a single dollar for this gratuitous abuse of power.

<comment><USER3> Ticket quotas are explicitly illegal in some states[0]. I would imagine arrest quotas would be legally similar.

[0]:[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_quota](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_quota)

<comment><USER4> Yea, those laws mean nothing because whose going to enforce them? The department chiefs that are giving quotas to their underlings? Prosecutors that stay buddy buddy with cops?

<comment><USER2> And that's the problem - prosecutors don't want to do anything that makes police officers unhappy. That means requiring the police to obey the law. It means supporting the police when they murder people.

It's somehow considered acceptable - as in not a fireable offense - for police officers to not do their job or to prevent the prosecutors from enforcing the law.

Because police as currently operating in large portions of the US are not meaningfully different from gangs. Only they are even less likely to suffer consequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The police acted irresponsibly, an innocent man was caught in the crossfire, but without the Google data the real murderer would have gotten away with it and still be at large.

</comment><comment><USER6> perfect example of how the "well, i have nothing to hide" response to privacy concerns underestimates the scope of the issues involved.</comment>


Ask HN: Resources to find tech jobs at startups in vancouver? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8706699](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8706699)</comment>


Using The Midori Web Browser - <AUTHOR> http://beginlinux.com/appsm/midori/midori-web-browser

<comment><USER2> splain to me why chose Midori vs Google Chrome for linux? Honestly Firefox's startup time is what sets me off and hard to get Flash working (comes out-of- box for chrome) but other than that I see no need for a 3rd browser.

<comment><USER3> some people like proper gtk integration</comment></comment>


Show HN: dead simple XML/JSON to NSObjects and vice versa. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/uacaps/NSObject-ObjectMap

<comment><USER2> We have also used the core of this to create an IO class for saving state to disk and back. You can find it here:

[https://github.com/uacaps/NSObject- ObjectIO](https://github.com/uacaps/NSObject-ObjectIO)

It's a one liner to save complex objects (see demos) with encryption. We used AES-256 encryption with PBKDF2 for the key gen. That said, we would be more than happy to hear reviews on the efficacy of our method. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks very good, similar to RestKit but alot more flexible. Good Work</comment>


Python 3 "Wall of Shame" Becomes "Wall of Superpowers" Today - <AUTHOR> http://python3wos.appspot.com/ <comment><USER2> Feature request! I wish this site would let you upload (or copy-paste) a requirements.txt file and then tell you what libraries you need to focus on fixing up for your project.

<comment><USER3> Here you go; just paste it in the Javascript Console: <https://gist.github.com/4264971> (FF and Chrome tested)

Just drag and drop the "requirements.txt" file over the website and that's it.

I sent the gist to the author of the app too (not the submitter) so perhaps he will include it in the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those who missed the context of the title, the footer of the page:

> Note that this subdomain's called "python3wos" - once the status goes beyond > 50%, the title of the site automatically becomes "Python 3 Wall of > Superpowers". I kid you not.

</comment><comment><USER5> Armin Ronacher's essay on the flaws of Python 3 seems to translate to his pet projects lagging on conversion. Which is a pity because they're great small, well-focussed pieces like werkzeug and Flask.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. There is an unofficial Python 3 port of Flask and Werkzeug, apparently[1]. And Armin says he started a "secret branch" a few months ago to explore adding Python 3 support[2], but no news since then.

The sense I get from the essay[3] is that Python 3.0/3.1 were quite flawed, but that more recent minor versions have been moving in the right direction. I'll admit I haven't personally done much more with Python 3.x than kick the tires a bit.

1\. <https://github.com/puzzlet/flask>

2\. <https://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask/issues/587>

3\. <http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2011/12/7/thoughts-on-python3/>

<comment><USER7> (A.R. essay, 2011.12:)

 _'Because as it stands, Python 3 is the XHTML of the programming language world. It's incompatible to what it tries to replace but does not offer much besides being more "correct".'_

Ouch. Too close to the bone.

<comment><USER5> Unlike Armin, I think that being more correct is worth some pain because it leads to offering much more in the future.

The alternative is PHP and its fractally bad design, where the legacy of accumulated, unfixed design flaws has made advancement almost impossible-- which is why they have PHP 5.4 instead of PHP 6.0. You can add features within the context of those flaws, but at some point there are too many to execute the kind of overhaul you need.

It would be interesting to see someone fork PHP and offer a 'correct' version that's clean and sheds all the baggage.

<comment><USER6> It would be really useful if you could run both PHP 5.x and hypothetical PHP 6 code in the same interpreter process, so everyone wouldn't need to move over to the "more correct" version at once. I wonder just how hard that is to do. The approach doesn't seem to have been considered for Python 3, but, if possible, it would have saved lots of hassle.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, but I think they took a second approach that was also workable: Offer as much guidance and as many tools as possible (.e.g., 2to3, from __future__ import, etc), and then expect it to take years for the migration to occur. I don't know how possible it was to run both in the same interpretor process; I believe that it wasn't just because of the changes they were contemplating.

Lots of people like myself have been following our key libraries, but it's worth noting that, at this point, the migration seems both inevitable and not terribly difficult since 3.3 fixes most of the complaints about .0 and .1, and a lot of struggle to migrate has already been accomplished and offered lessons learned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems like Plone = 19 entries. That one fix would cut it down almost 40%.

<comment><USER9> Porting Zope 2 would probably equire about a dozen Jim Fultons...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm surprised that it doesn't list Matplotlib, which is widely popular and supports Python 3.

<comment><USER11> It goes by the number of downloads from PyPI. I guess that's lower for matplotlib, because installing it from PyPI usually means compiling from source, which is a pain for something as complex as matplotlib. Many people probably get it from a binary package manager, or from an all-in-one Python distribution like EPD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Funny, not sure how they assemble this table

Take gunicorn for example, marked green. On the website it says:

Gunicorn requires Python 2.x >= 2.6. Python 3.x support is planned.

<comment><USER13> It says the information is from PyPI, and gunicorn is in the "Python 3" category on PyPI. That might be it.

Edit: aha, that's probably the case. At the bottom of the page, it says:

> If a module is red though it supports python 3 it's because they don't have > the "Programming Language :: Python :: 3" tag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why are the packages not sorted by names ? Tornado not there ? Wtf with the background ?

<comment><USER15> I assume they're sorted by the number of downloads from the Python packaging index (PyPI).

Tornado might be one of those packages people install from their distro's package or download from the parent website rather than via PyPi.

As for the background ... <shrugs>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The big one not on this list (because not in PiP) is SCons.

<comment><USER17> I'd never heard of this module until now. Have you successfully replaced Make with SCons in your projects?

<comment><USER14> Yes, for my personal projects. It's much better than make. But unfortunately it needs to be installed while make is preinstalled on nearly all unixes. Now I always use qt creator for my personnal projects. It's excellent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This could be the year of Python 3.0 on the desk^H^H^H^Hserv^H^H^H^H...looks like we need to keep waiting. Maybe I can one day use Django on 3.0.

:(

Back to Ruby on Rails, I guess.

EDIT: Ruby 2.0 is taking a little while too--I kid because I love. <3 Python folks.

<comment><USER19> Django 1.5 is in python 3. Soon it shall be so.

Though, MySQL-python, South, and Fabric are still red. South and Fabric make django projects so much easier to deal with, especially once deployed. It will be interesting to see what happens when 1.5 is released. I presume they'll be released along with 1.5, or follow right on the heals of it?

<comment><USER20> > Django 1.5 is in python 3

Django 1.5 has experimental Python3 compatibility.

<comment><USER19> Well yes, they said it isn't recommended in production. But, it's definitely a step forward.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cymmetria (YC S15) Uses Virtual Machines to Decoy and Detect Hackers - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/27/cymmetria/ <comment><USER2> Gadi Evron has been in the security industry for a long, long time. He's a malware/botnet/honeynets guy. Mile-long resume.

This is kind of a surprising pick for YC: a down-the-middle enterprise security play, the kind of company that usually gets funded by Battery because one of the cofounders successfully sold a portfolio company a couple iterations ago.

It's interesting to see what seems to be a pretty conventional bit of security technology (sandboxing malware and exploit code into virtual machines is the kernel of several 9-figure security products) get extra attention because of the YC pedigree. Or maybe TechCrunch just got this wrong? Either way: not complaining!

<comment><USER3> It's a fun twist on that conventional bit of security technology, though* . What I'm unsure of is whether these decoy-type products really provide much value beyond alert triage. Even if we're charitable and assume they don't introduce new false positives into the system, all the old false positives remain.

* Disclaimer: I manage one of those nine-figure security products you mention.

<comment><USER4> The system will not catch everything in any way - but what it does catch has no false positives by definition. We're very happy to demonstrate live the value proposition and how alerting is one aspect of what we do.

<comment><USER3> _> no false positives_

 _> will not catch everything in any way_

This is why I'm unsure of the value. And to be clear, by "unsure of the value" I don't mean "unsure whether it has any value." It certainly has value. I'm just not sure how much, as, say, a dollar figure.

"No false positives" is fine marketing, but in practice you aren't replacing anyone's firewalls, endpoint agents, sandboxes, SIEMs, etc. All those false positives will still be there, along with many legitimate detections your system never sees.

If money were no object, then absolutely I'd buy. But given that money is usually a factor, that you're limited to detection, that you're only effective in scenarios where attackers touch your decoy systems, and that you're competing for dollars against products that detect more, detect it sooner, and often prevent it automatically, I don't know.

<comment><USER5> When you get one alert that you realize isn't false and has the forensic data tied to it, you can use it as a harness against the loads of information from all the other sensors (firewall, endpoints, sandboxes etc) to give you a definitive picture you're certain in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi all, Gadi here (CEO of Cymmetria). We are here on Hacker News and would be happy to answer any questions, technical or otherwise, and discuss.

<comment><USER6> So two questions, really. First, given _We generate one because our decoys are real machines and nothing should run on them except for what we put on them._ , won't that machine look a little different from the outside, that is, the next machine over in the horizontal network than all the other machines? And thus the attacker would be suspicious?

Secondly, who is to say that the attacking army doesn't have a lab simulating an enterprise environment with one or two of your installs there, learning how to detect/avoid/silently compromise them?

<comment><USER5> Hi, dean here (Cymmetria CTO). Two great questions:

1\. The concept being that from looking at the machine on the network we don't do anything different then regular machines, so the goal is to prevent fingerprinting.

2\. If the attacker actually attacks the decoy then we are able to capture what that attack looks like, send it to threat management while it's happening and mitigate. At that point if the attacker has found out it's too late. When Attackers will have our systems installed in his labs he'll have to find some way of identifying our machines without attacking them and that's what we've been developing to prevent.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the reply.

So I am unclear on the meaning of "attack". Is this more than a series of pings, or an attempt to do a pexec or remote viewing of the event log?

Secondly, if the sensor is placed in a pool of developer machines, does it have to have the whole development environment loaded up, for example, and occasionally do compiles?

"Doing anything different" seems to require close emulation of whatever is going on in the rest of the environment, no?

Further, if he has your machines installed in a controlled lab with properly tied off alarm end points (the things you trigger when you see something odd), what is to prevent an attack analogous to a virus writer having a lab full of each kind of antivirus hammering at his samples?

It seems the challenge for building a static alert system or sensor is that engineering talent from a team larger than yours in some other time zone is going to do the equivalent of sending a drone over your island to see what your radar response looks like. As in if they find the destination of your alerts before tickling your box and compromise that first. Or figure out how to set off an fake alarm or nine.

EDIT: typo

<comment><USER5> \- What is alerted on (or "attack") is configurable and can range from code being executed (which is the true positive alert) to connecting to ports(which has more noise)

\- It needs to look like the machine an attacker will be after when he's looking around on the network and that's much simpler then a whole loaded up environment.

\- Yes, the decoys look like an integral part of the network

\- It could be within every segment of the network and not in it's own island. But it's true that every security solution depends on it's management interface not being compromised :)

<comment><USER6> One final question.

Let's say that an attacking organization fully installs your sensor in their own lab. What is to prevent them from engineering an approach to fully defeat the sensor itself?

<comment><USER5> Like was said before, you have to attack the decoy to recognize it and that enables catching the attack traffic. Also the mere fact that they recount every single action 10 times over before acting is a huge value in and of itself.

On another note I agree that they will try and we will be constantly remembering that fact :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mass market IT tech has been hacker heaven so far but better stuff isn't making many inroads. All these desktop, cloud, etc offerings don't have a hope of stopping determined attackers. Knowing this, industry mostly focuses on reducing risk, detection, recovery, etc. Honeynets are another great tool that's under-utilized in mainstream industry. They make the right assumption (they'll get in), the right goal (let's spot it), and add extra benefit (real damage maybe averted).

With that in mind, I'm liking what I see in the article. A true pro building on honeynet tech while maxing out ease of use and knocking out false positives. That last part is huge if he gets it right: too many just make people ignore the alarms. I look forward to seeing what it achieves in the field.

Like the names, too: Deception Stack, Maze Runner... good stuff haha.

<comment><USER2> No, honeynetwork research actually dominates academic security programs. It's problematic how much of it there is. Almost all of honeypot innovation comes from schools now. They're also the ones doing large-scale longitudinal studies done from honeynetwork and "network telescopes", in which universities like UCSD are enlisting BGP peering relationships to capture malware.

<comment><USER7> I appreciate the correction. Edited the comment to reflect that. Weird how the field is fragmented enough that I can go through hundreds of INFOSEC papers (ACM, IEEE, conferences) without seeing hardly anything on honeynets then you see a flood of them in the sources you read. I expect a certain amount of this due to specialization but I think INFOSEC innovation is way too scattered compared to some fields. People end up missing key findings.

It's why I keep toying with the idea of a unified resource for INFOSEC professionals of all these fields. Collection of papers by category, tools, wikis, forum, and so on. Free or cheap to avoid exclusion the way ACM/IEEE/Springer end up causing. The wisdom of our field would be passed down more easily, all stuff in one category would be there with authors maybe discussing it, and different types of researchers would have higher chance of bumping into each other for cross-disciplinary advances. Pretty idealist, I know, but would be great if pulled off.

Epstein at NSF liked the idea but thought you'd need a ton of buy-in from Universities & private parties ahead of time. Haven't solved that one yet...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a solid idea with a great team behind it. The challenge with this kind of product is to make it easy to deploy while delivering actual value to users, and looks like they've figured that out.

(It was great meeting Gadi in the speakers lounge at a conference in Hamburg and doing the YC sales pitch last year.)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for your support!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's an interesting concept. But there's one thing that bugs me. If an attacker is already in the network, I think we need to distinguish between two types of boxes. Servers, and clients. Honeypots are nothing new, so having a few servers that are honeypots in the network doesn't seem that interesting to me.

If someone wants to break into your network, they'll probably target a small amount of users and try to get a RAT on their box to spread from their, I don't know but that's what I'd do.

If you want honeypot Clients, things get a bit harder, since you will need to mimic user interaction. But even if a box clicks every link for a decoy email account a drive-by exploit or something can easily fingerprint the system and bail out if it's a VM since it's unlikely for clients to be VMs. Depending on the exploit, that could be hard to detect.

So, we're back to honeypots as servers? I don't want to sound negative, but the article is just so vague and that seems to be the only plausible thing.

</comment><comment><USER10> Good luck guys :)

<comment><USER4> Thank you, we appreciate it. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I actually built an identical project following watching Rob Fuller's talk "Attacker Ghost Stories". I've actually built it twice.

First was a Java based service for each service I wanted as a honeypot. FTP, SSH, MySQL, etc. They basically were low interaction honeypots, for example MySQL. Prompt for password, do the handshake, say failure, and report to admin.

Second was a Go logtailer and bash script that would securely set up services, tail the logs, and notify admins when there was suspicious activity (err...any activity).

It was a ton of fun building it and very straightforward. Gen1 in Java was the most fun implementing all the authentication schemes, but Gen2 worked way better, faster, and easier. I wanted to try to turn it into a company but chickened out that nobody would ever want it. Awesome to see literally the exact same use-case software here! I guess it was a good idea! =]

Good luck to you Cymmetria!</comment>


Ask HN: why don't Ducksboard, Geckoboard,etc have mobile apps? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Geckoboard has an app: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/geckoboard/id649272477?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/geckoboard/id649272477?mt=8)

<comment><AUTHOR> but it's not an official app though...

<comment><USER3> That's an official app, by Geckoboard and linked from the Geckoboard website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry "DATACHOICE SOLUTIONS LTD © Datachoice Solutions Ltd." <\-- this threw me off

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> great question. all the apps in this space suck</comment>


No, German Scientists Have Not Confirmed the "Impossible" EMDrive - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/no-german-scientists-have-not-confirmed-the-impossibl-1720573809

<comment><USER2> Some numbers to compare:

They got 20uN with a 700W magneton, that is 20uN/700W = 0.03 mN/KW. (Probably some energy is "lost" and the "real" efficiency is higher, but when you claim to break the physics law the measurements must be foolproof.)

The maximal theoretical output of a device that don't break the currently accepted physics laws is 1/c = 0.0033 mN/KW. So this measurement is 10x bigger than the theoretical maximum.

The 18-month-to-Pluto calculation use 0.4 N/KW = 400 mN/KW, that is approximately one half of the maximum claim of any of this device family, but most experiments get much smaller results. The 0.4 N/KW is 130,000x bigger than the theoretical maximum and 13,000x bigger than what they got in this experiment. So if a device with the same output of this experiment, the trip to Pluto will be much longer.

(Disclaimer: Just to be clear, I think this is only an experimental error.)</comment>


Luna, the visual language is out - <AUTHOR> http://luna-lang.org <comment><AUTHOR> Hi! I'm Wojciech Danilo, one of the founders of Luna. I would love to answer any questions you guys have! We are supper happy to share Luna with you now. Cheers from the whole Luna team! :)

<comment><USER2> I was at your talk at Google in SF last year. Great to see this is out!

<comment><AUTHOR> nijaru <3 Great to hear from you now! We plan to travel to SF in couple of weeks / months - I hope to see you again then! After playing with Luna don't forget to share your thoughts with us! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was trying to figure out why it needed an installer instead of just an app– is it just to initialize $LUNA_HOME and run the telemetry ([http://www.luna- lang.org/alpha-data.html](http://www.luna-lang.org/alpha-data.html))?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi ics! We aim to provide the concise experience along all the platforms, including MacOS, Linux and Windows. It is crucial for us to make Luna as easy to use as possible, which includes the initial setup process. We have found dedicated installation manager allowing you to install many Luna versions alongside, manage installations and switch them on demand the best tool for it. Did I answer your question?</comment></comment>


The State of Jay-Z's Empire - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304741404575564092478617462.html <comment><USER2> He's all business. In his earlier work he was more of a lyricists. He pivoted and started selling more record, making commercial music. His timing was right and he executed perfectly. In his own words.

"I dumb it down for my audience

and double my dollars

they criticize me for it

yet they still yell "Holla"

If skills sold

Truth be told

I'd probably be

Lyricly

Talib Kweli"

The glorification of drug dealing and gun carrying is a huge turn off album after album.

<comment><USER3> "Truthfully I want to rhyme like Common Sense

But I did five mil

I ain't be rhyming like Common since

When your senses got so much in common

And you've been hustlin since your inception

Fuck perception go with what makes sense"

He is essentially saying that he started dumbing it down after doing "Vol. 2 Hard Knock Life" - which sold five million copies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I thought it was an OK read, thankfully light on the hagiography, although (like Gates and technology), I think Jay-Z is much more interesting as a businessman than a musician.

<comment><USER5> "I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man." - Jay-Z

<comment><USER6> "While white suburban kids studied rap lyrics, gangstas studied corporate culture."

\--Misquoted and without attribution. Rolling Stone, maybe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To me he represents the best of the meritocracy in action: incredible success without the gifts of money, power or connections at birth, survival and achievement though skill, intelligence, hard work and refusing to ever give up. I have so much genuine respect for him.

</comment><comment><USER8> I love love love that they added a Jay-Z song to the page in a classy, non- automatic way. It enhances the article so much. Well done on WSJ's part there.

<comment><USER9> Yeah that was fairly awesome. It's nice when news outlets make use of new media like that :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Don't sleep on these hip hop guys. They're born hungry. Look at Russell Simmons, Diddy, Jay-Z and 50 Cent, and (technically not a rapper) Usher. They all have pretty impressive business portfolios.

<comment><USER11> and for every one of those, there are hundreds, if not thousands, who piss their money away

<comment><USER10> It still takes dedication and drive to make it to have the thousands to piss away. There are tons of business owners who piss away their earnings too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "I sell ice in the winter, I sell fire in hell. I'm a hustler baby, I sell water to a well."

<comment><USER13> Best part about that line is the homophone: "I sell water to a whale."

<comment><USER14> Jay is a master of making one word flower multiple meanings. In "So appalled", he delivers the punch line, "Not only am I fly, but I'm f*in not playin' "

The way he makes "playin'" sound like "plane" and "plain" is characteristic of his whole lyrical style.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Jay-Z. An inspirational guy. Other startup folks think so too, given how often I see Jay-Z quotations on Twitter.

<comment><USER16> Really? Example? I couldn't find one thing here that wasn't embarrassingly juevenile.

<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jay-Z>

 _Niggas pray and pray on my downfall, But every time I hit the ground I bounce up like round ball_

I mean, seriously?

<comment><USER17> It's from a rap. Can't judge the line all by itself. It exists in the context of the rest of the lines, and the delivery.

Also, what you consider juvenile, others may just consider 'simple'. Jay-Z has frequently been criticized for his relatively simple lyrics and rhythm structure. But that's part of the reason why its so popular, AND inspirational. You don't need to sit there for a minute trying to wrap your head around it. You just get it.

<comment><USER18> I downvoted your(the above)comment. Why?

#1 - You contradict yourself implicitly with this defense. If a quote needs more context to have impact, then it is a shitty quote, which is what the OP said plainly.

#2 - 'Juvenille' and 'simple' are synonymous in this context. Period. Jay-z lyrics are more often then not, ridiculously vapid of substance or depth. Musical kool-aid.

#3 - Jay-z is a man who made his money ruining the lives of thousands by selling drugs, and millions more by being a horrific influence. He is a man who has admittedly attempted murder on more than one occasion. He is a man who has used and debased women proudly. He is a man of many transgressions. And I could look past all of them if he did not glorify them so.

Yet he does - so shamelessly in fact that its revolting to witness. His wealth and the adoration of the mindless sheep who buy his "music" are the justification he uses to continue to do so.

 _He says he'll always rap about variations on the same themes: drug hustling, business boasts, luxury hopscotching from Gucci to Louis Vuitton to the new Dior suit he says is a perfect fit._

I'm sorry his money and "accomplishments" and his poor excuse for music do not make this a praiseworthy man.

<comment><USER19> I'd downvote you respectfully- but I can't. :)

#1 - You're treating the quoted text as (I quote) "a quote". It's not. It's a small piece of a much larger whole. (I see your point- but it's wrong. I will elaborate in the next bullet).

#2 - Like the first statement- it's a mistake for you to speak factually on something so subjective. We're talking about art here, right? "Period" is especially offensive since clearly so many people disagree. Juvenile and simple are _never_ synonymous. That's not to say they can't live mutually, but that certainly is not "synonymous". Period. Just the fact that people have agreed suggests he is delivering the emotion he intends to with his art. Unless, of course, you can tell me what his _true_ intentions were with the lyric?

#3 - I'm going to make a fair assumption that you've lived a _relatively_ privileged life. By this- I mean I'm pretty sure you didn't grow up in Bedstuy. I certainly don't believe that relieves him of his poor judgement, but I hope it helps invoke some situational empathy. Likewise, do you consider yourself not praiseworthy because of the mistakes you've made?

Edit - I assume a downvote _one_ minute after a post is either accidental or negligent.

<comment><USER18> Quite frankly - you didn't respond to any of the objectives I raised. But I will respond strictly to the one's you've made up.

#1 - _You're treating the quoted text as (I quote) "a quote". It's not. It's a small piece of a much larger whole._

Hmm - last I checked, a small piece of a larger whole _IS_ a quote. Webster's definitively settles this in my favor.

#2 - No - there is no subjectivity involved in the claim that his lyrics are 'juvenile' and 'simple' especially when the man himself has said so on _several_ occasions, both in verse and out. (See the song: Moment Of Clarity) If the artist himself says he 'dumb downed' his lyrics, I think its purely factual to then say his lyrics are 'simple'.

#3 - Pardon me, you don't know a damned thing about me or how I grew up. So no, your assumption is not fair. I've seen the gutter in my life. I've lived in places that I gather you are only familiar with through Jay-z songs. So forgive me if I take a particular offense to this comment.

Situational empathy? Are you kidding me? I suspect this kind of careless, 'there are are few better options' mentality stems from a brutal ignorance of what inner-city life is really like. So let me just help you out by saying there are thousands of kids from these terrible situations, (many of whom I work with weekly), who do not deal drugs, who stay in school, who pursue scholarship, who do not idolize Jay-z and his calling cards, thug-culture, gun violence, promiscuity, drugs, and death. Unfortunately for all of us, these kids are in the _vast_ minority.

<comment><USER19> " _...there are thousands of kids from these terrible situations, (many of whom I work with weekly), who do not deal drugs, who stay in school, who pursue scholarship, who do not idolize Jay-z..._ "

My argument stems from my assumption that there are also thousands of kids from terrible situations, who don't deal drugs, who stay in school, and _do_ idolize Jay-Z.

If I'm wrong in the above assumption, then you're entirely right; my argument has no ground. Perhaps my optimism is blinding. If my assumption is correct, then is it not safe to say that there are _other more compelling forces than Jay-Z_ leading youth into drugs or crime? The italicized is the point that I am trying to make entirely.

I don't think we're disagreeing on facts here. By situational empathy I'm not suggesting Jay-Z has _no other choices_. It's just my personal opinion that I would rather be inspired by Jay-Z's ambition to overcome such an unfortunate situation, rather than to condemn him for his past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Y'all not remembering. My motto is simply: I will not lose."

</comment><comment><USER20> It is truly heartwarming the amount of love that HN readers have for Jay Z.

</comment><comment><USER21> Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.

</comment><comment><USER22> He is a big pimpin I guess...

</comment><comment><USER23> He talks about how people look down on the genre because of the foul language, but I have to wonder. Would Gates and Buffet and the rest of the business world put up with a foul mouthed individual? I very much doubt that he talks like he raps and more than likely he keeps his mouth in check when trying to make million dollar deals.

<comment><USER24> Didn't Joel (on Software) write about famously foul-mouthed reviews from Gates?

Here it is:

 _My First BillG Review_ <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html>

_"In my BillG review meeting, the whole reporting hierarchy was there, along with their cousins, sisters, and aunts, and a person who came along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the f-count, the better."_</comment></comment>


ArchiveTeam: Tumblr NSFW (all NSFW content will be removed on 17 Dec 2018) - <AUTHOR> https://archiveteam.org/?title=Tumblr <comment><USER2> Can confirm there is a lot of NSFW content still on Tumblr the following day - I am in the process of completing a 1TB archive of some of it.</comment>


Ask HN: What can I do to help Japan?  Prepared to travel. - <AUTHOR>

I have a large family in Japan -- no word from them yet, but most are inland -- so the earthquake/tsunami news is particularly troubling to me.  I'm a rails engineer for a large media company, and I've been thinking about taking some vacation time (I've never been on vacation before).
With all the devastation that occurred, I'm wondering what I can do to help.  Flying to Sendai and helping physically rebuild things is one thing, but I feel like my skills as a software engineer would be better used in other ways.
I don't speak Japanese that much, but I grew up around it and I've been to Japan before, so I'm somewhat confident that I'd be able to converse after a week or so on the ground.
How can I help?  Any ideas are greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> I know that in the aftermath of the earthquake(s) in Haiti, people were asked to not travel there, and instead give financially to support official relief efforts. This may be a different situation since infrastructure in Haiti was probably more destroyed than in Japan (and thus travel more impacted), but it's something to consider.</comment>


Platform limitations hurt .NET - <AUTHOR> http://haacked.com/archive/2013/06/24/platform-limitations-harm-net.aspx

<comment><USER2> I like the Scott Gu quote.

Basically, he appears to the reason that Azure is making giant improvements while the rest of Microsoft stagnates. (Obviously, his team deserves credit as well but he is making it possible for them to be great).</comment>


Computer Science Enrollments: The Real News - <AUTHOR> http://www.cccblog.org/2008/07/11/computer-science-enrollments-the-real-news/

<comment><USER2> "Stop pissing money away on "security theater" in airports"

Well at least some one is saying it.</comment>


Ask HN: Try my Jeopardy game - <AUTHOR> http://jimbojeopardy.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I built this game using the data made freely available by j-archive.com (a wonderful site). It's "multiplayer"---so you'll get the most fun out of it if you've got some chums around. But there is also a single-player "study mode" at /blast.

I'm worried that the site (made using Ruby on Rails) won't stand up to serious traffic, and so I'd appreciate some advice / info on that front. Please forgive me if you notice sloppy performance. Also, have low expectations re: bugs and the like.

Finally, I am working on a "real-time" multiplayer version using the Juggernaut plugin for Rails. I'd say it's about 40% of the way there. I'd be happy to open the code up if anyone wants to pitch in. If nothing else my rake task for scraping j-archive might be useful to other folks.</comment>


Best online resources to learn to program.  - <AUTHOR>

What/Where are the best online resources to learn to program? I want to learn for free on my own, and am seeking advice as to the best sites.<p>Thanks. <comment><USER2> Udacity, Coursera, Codecademy, Codeschool. Really, you should use Codecademy to do a few drills in the language you want to become familiar with the syntax first. Udacity is great and the problems are deep enough. Coursera has a few outstanding courses (Stanford Startup Engineering!)</comment>


Operator - <AUTHOR> http://www.operator.com/ <comment><USER2> Sites like this are annoying. "Join the waitlist!" Except that we don't know what your product is. And when I _do_ finally get accepted on to the waitlist, I'll have forgotten why I was interested in this in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER3> No idea what "Operator" is or why I would want to give you my e-mail address. You'll have to do better than this.</comment>


Building for the Enterprise with Aaron Levie (How to Start a Startup 2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd3CLs-vLtw <comment><AUTHOR> "Listen to your customers but don't always build exactly what they are telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software. Your customers are going to have a large number of requests. Your job is to instill those lists down into the ultimate product. This does not mean that you are not going to build exactly what they tell you to build. It is your job to listen to their problems, and translate those into what is going to build the best and simplest solution for them."</comment>


WhatsApp Cofounder Tells Students to Delete Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/whatsapp-brian-acton-delete-facebook-stanford-lecture <comment><USER2> "The capitalistic profit motive, or answering to Wall Street, is what's driving the expansion of invasion of data privacy and driving the expansion of a lot of negative outcomes that we're just not happy with," he said. "I wish there were guardrails there. I wish there was ways to rein it in. I have yet to see that manifest, and that scares me."

\- what Berners-Lee meant to say.</comment>


Can Facebook data be used to develop profitable trading strategies? - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eben-esterhuizen/can-facebook-data-be-used_b_1735200.html

<comment><USER2> Maybe it would help Facebook's stock.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, things like these are the only hope for facebook's drowning fortune.</comment></comment>


1.6k-Year-Old Goblet Shows Romans Were Nanotechnology Pioneers (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/this-1600-year-old-goblet-shows-that-the-romans-were-nanotechnology-pioneers-787224/ <comment><AUTHOR> >Colorimetric Plasmon Resonance Imaging Using Nano Lycurgus Cup Arrays

[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adom.2012000...](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adom.201200040)</comment>


Job start date delayed by a year by the company, what can I do? - <AUTHOR> I was offered a job as a software developer last Nov and was supposed to start working from May 16. But now they have deferred my start date to July 17. this has serious implications on my career. Is there anything that I can do? <comment><USER2> That sucks.

To me, I doubt there is actually a job. If there is an international or immigration aspect of the position, it has the features of a scam.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would assume that in a year they will have forgotten. Most probably they have offered you this delay so they don't break the offer, understanding that you will not wait a whole year for the job. So don't. If on a year you don't have found anything, try reaching out to them on that promise, but don't expect too much.

</comment><comment><USER4> That sounds really odd and a little concerning. I would immediately begin looking for a different job. They probably can't afford to pay you now, and have deferred hoping their financial situation is different in a year. If that is the case, who is to say it will be any better. Cut your losses now.

</comment><comment><USER5> If they could delay your job starting date like that, what are they going to do with your promotions, raises, etc? Find another job.

</comment><comment><USER6> Do you have a signed contract? I don't understand why you say "by a year", it sounds like two months (still bad of course).

<comment><USER7> I think he means May 2016 and July 2017.

<comment><USER6> That's so bad it didn't even cross my mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes. Work for another company.</comment>


Show HN: Bubblemon, System load meter for human beings - <AUTHOR> https://walles.github.io/bubblemon/ <comment><USER2> Reading just the headline I thought this was a tool to measure human system load (e.g. attention). Neat nevertheless.</comment>


Apple Considering Buying Beats Electronics for $3.2B - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-08/apple-said-to-be-near-buying-beats-electronics-for-3-2b.html

<comment><USER2> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717961](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717961)

Other submissions, some have up-votes, some have comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7718020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7718020)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717995)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717980](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717980)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7718106](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7718106)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7718133](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7718133)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7718137](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7718137)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7718138](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7718138)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7718158](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7718158)

<comment><USER3> "Article's behind a paywall, so I can't read it."

Hence the other submissions....

There are about 10x on the new page right now.

FT's the originating source, tho.

(the one you linked to)</comment></comment>


Lyft warns it may never make any money - <AUTHOR> https://oversharing.substack.com/p/lyft-warns-it-may-never-make-any/ <comment><USER2> This type of disclosure is quite literally standard in almost every type of public company financial disclosure. Surprised this made it to the HN front page

</comment><comment><USER3> >Meanwhile in risk factors, Lyft warned it has never made any money and can't promise it ever will, a disclaimer popularized by companies like Twitter, Square, Etsy, Box, Dropbox, Snap, Blue Apron, Shopify, Twilio, Spotify, and of course the patron saint of all profitless companies, Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not an expert but do any companies ever make a guarantee that they will make money in the future? This seems like the requisite legalese and a non-story unless companies do make guarantees.

<comment><USER5> You're right, the title is click-baity. Besides the title, the rest seems generally informative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author provides a snarky pre-response to those who point out that virtually every IPOing company is unprofitable (IPOs are fundraising events, after all) and that such a "risk factor" is S-1 boilerplate going back decades.

And proceeds to gloat over not understanding Business 101 ("invest money to make money").

<comment><USER7> One question, is how is "profit" defined? For example, if a company has surplus cash based on a given base of assets and current operating expenses, then that surplus is typically profit. However, if that surplus is used to buy new assets or pay down debt principle, I would consider that to be similar to profit because it tells me that the company would be profitable if it wasn't expanding (or, that it will be profitable once the debt is paid off, assuming all else remains the same).

<comment><USER8> Profit means income exceeds expenses for a given period of time. There are different types of profit, i.e., gross profit, is just the profit on the primary business activity (sales or services income), while net profit is the profit after all expenses are taken into consideration. There's also cash-flow profit, which is gross profitability adjusted for some but not all non- operating expenses.

And just to make things even more confusing, there's unicorn accounting profit, in which gross bookings as treated as revenue even though they are never earned by the startup (think Groupon, GrubHub, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> These are terrible charts. With the comparison to Uber and the lack of horizontal grid lines or trend lines, you can't see how Lyft is performing at all. And the comparison to Uber is only somewhat relevant in valuing Lyft.</comment>


Forget Recruiters: Hire Junior Devs - <AUTHOR> http://amydoesntlai.tumblr.com/post/34088232695/hire-junior-devs

<comment> daniel-cussen The value of enthusiasm should not be underestimated. Many times older, more experienced devs will have learned-helplessness issues around a technology or merely think certain things cannot be done. Or overengineer things, thinking a O(n^2) sorting routine cannot be seriously considered, but a good routine makes the problem so complicated the problem is impossible to carry out. Whereas a junior dev will not know what the fuck many of those things are, use the bad sorting routine, and actually _solve the problem._

</comment><comment><USER2> It's about damn time

</comment><comment><USER3> Love it!

</comment><comment><USER4> Great!</comment>


Show HN: Million Short Day 2 and 171,686 unique searches later - Version 2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.millionshort.com/about.html Thx to everyone for overwhelming support and feedback. We lauched V2 today on Day 2.
______Version 2 additions: (ordered by demand)
-Open search browser plug in
-Settings to Add sites (like Wikipedia.com back in)
-Settings to exlude even more sites
-favicon added
-Quick links to alter 'removal slices'
-Settings for Adult filtering
-Removed sites now in alpha sort order
______Quick stats:
171,686 Total Unique Searches
148,477 Absolute Unique Visitors
420,963 Pageviews
peaked at 1,500 concurrent users
+plus:
Got some HN Love
Got some Reddit Love
Got some Techcrunch Love <comment><AUTHOR> Thx to everyone for overwhelming support and feedback. We lauched V2 today on Day 2.

______Version 2 additions: (ordered by demand)

-Open search browser plug in

-Settings to Add sites (like Wikipedia.com back in)

-Settings to exlude even more sites

-favicon added

-Quick links to alter 'removal slices'

-Settings for Adult filtering

-Removed sites now in alpha sort order

______Quick stats:

171,686 Total Unique Searches

148,477 Absolute Unique Visitors

420,963 Pageviews

peaked at 1,500 concurrent users

+plus:

Got some HN Love

Got some Reddit Love

Got some Techcrunch Love

<comment><USER2> Any chance you could add in some features of DuckDuckGo regarding privacy? Examples could be not tracking search history, not sending a referrer, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Added to TODO list.

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It took me a while to realize that these search results were omitting the top 1 million _sites_ , not the top 1 million results for a given query.

<comment><USER4> You are not alone ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm really curious to see how -- or, for you're sake, if -- the traffic decays. A front-page view on hackernews will generate that level of traffic with an exponential decay over the next few days. That being said, _searches are different from views_ , in an exciting way for you.

I used it and bookmarked it for potential discovery searches in the future. It's a very interesting idea.

<comment><USER2> I wrote a quick search addon for Firefox, so I plan on continuing to use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome. Would you be able to share? We'll post it to the site..

<comment><USER2> Sure, it's pretty simple. I actually just took the icon from your search thing and added it to mine. The only difference between ours now is that I use the param tag so that it's not just one long url.

<https://gist.github.com/2572530>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been happy with the results, and may even make this my default search engine. Heck, I could use a change.

</comment><comment><USER7> I searched a few things, one being the project im working on now and i discovered very interesting things that lead me to book mark the results. One of the results even made me laugh and one lead me to some information i had no idea about ! Its an interesting project and i book marked your URL to discover things i normally might not so great job. I guess just like the physical world the deeper and deeper you go the more interesting and weird are the results.

BTW have you written your own crawlers and indexers ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thx. Yes, many crawlers and indexers. Many.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The need to have Wikipedia in search engine results is perplexing. Why not just search Wikiepdia? It is certainly not slower. They even provide SSL.

Is it the lack of full text search on Wikipedia?

I've experimented with building a full-text search for Wikipedia. But so much of the content is just copied verbatim from the sites listed in the References and External Links, it seems not worth the effort.

<comment><USER9> Because Google is better searching Wikipedia than Wikipedia is.

<comment><USER8> Can you provide an example search that demonstrates this?

If Wikipedia had full-text search, with a results page that looked like Google, and it was as fast as Google, would you use it?

Consider that Wikipedia is not, AFAIK, collecting your search data to serve you advertisements.

I have found that there's very few Wikipedia pages I can't pull up with a Wikipedia "search" that I could only get with a Google search.

e.g. [your browser] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/search_term> =one step

versus

[your browser] <http://www.google.com/search?q=search_term> then finding the right result and clicking it =two steps

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just made it my default search in Chrome. Going to give it a shot for this week then report back.

</comment><comment><USER11> is it using Google?

<comment><AUTHOR> Bing. We are working one some custom crawling/indexing to enhance.</comment></comment>


WhatsApp bans Podemos channel days before Spanish general election - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1121083347785195522 <comment><USER2> _WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, says Podemos had been breaking the terms of service by using the channel for automated mass messages. Podemos accepted that it had been using the channel for this purpose but said other parties had been doing so as well._

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/spain- electi...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/spain-elections- whatsapp-podemos-channel-close-left-ing-de-olmo-a8886481.html)

Apparently it's reinstated but Podemos is not too hapy about being singled out.

[https://www.20minutos.es/noticia/3623961/0/respuesta- whatsap...](https://www.20minutos.es/noticia/3623961/0/respuesta-whatsapp- cierre-cuenta-podemos/)</comment>


Garry Kasparov on how it all started - <AUTHOR> https://en.chessbase.com/post/garry-kasparov-on-how-it-all-started <comment><USER2> Not the most informative headline. "He has written many books, but this may be his most important." I firmly doubt it. The story is an ad for a book, _Deep Thinking_ , about computer chess, and in it "Kasparov uses his unrivalled experience to look into the future of intelligent machines" something he appears eminently unqualified to do.

Karpov said that Kasparov doesn't love chess, he loves himself in chess. That's a bit harsh; he does appear to love chess a lot. But I know what he means. After a while, Garry's endless self-glorification gets very tiresome. Everyone likes talking of themselves I suppose, but Garry takes that to an impressively noxious level. But, like he himself often says, he was probably the greatest player ever, and those qualities were part of his success.

<comment><USER3> He was a tremendously strong champion but relative to his compatriots I'd put Lasker ahead of Kasparov.

I've always had a soft spot for lasker outside of chess fans he's relatively unknown but his games where far ahead of his time.

<comment><USER2> Um, what do you mean, 'relative to his compatriots'? Lasker, relative to other Prussians/Poles/Germans?... uh... or Kasparov's? No idea what you could mean, sorry. Peers, maybe. Well, he almost lost to Schlechter, never played Rubinstein etc. Champions didn't have to play matches every couple of years like recently, and they could choose who they played! Anyway, I've never heard anyone claim Lasker was the strongest player ever. Although I'm very fond of his games and books too. :-)

Well, outside chess fans, anyone pre-Fischer is 'relatively unknown'...totally unknown, even.</comment></comment></comment>


Dealer wanted $4000 for a new hybrid battery to my Camry. I fixed it for - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/gallery/j8Bcp

<comment><USER2> Can I assume they knew they could check this and just figured they could take him for a ride? Or are dealerships really that hands-off?

<comment><USER3> Dealerships are that hands off. In the same way that many smaller electronics could be fixed with a $0.15 capacitor swap, but the guy behind the counter at radioshack has no idea about the inner workings at such a fine level. The company can't afford to hire, train, and retain employees with such a high baseline level of competence.

Proprietary parts like this prevent the kind of general knowledge that previously made mechanics more useful.

Nowadays a code tells them what's broken, a piece of software tells them what part that is, and at what level to repair/replace it.

I had a similar experience when my Accord's speedometer broke. The dealership considers the entire dash cluster a single unit for manufacturing purposes, and wanted $700 for the bulk part.

The guy behind the counter showed me the software and explained the process when I asked about why it was such an arbitrarily rigid decision.

$20 on craigslist and an hour with a screwdriver, I replaced the individual component with a salvage part.

<comment><USER4> Lots of third parties have sprung up offering services for situations where official support is too expensive or not available on a legacy product. Probably more visible and known to most of us are the people who carry out repairs on mobile devices such as replacing screens and usb ports.

I like that this fellow publicized his experience this way because it's spread around virally. For me, it seems like robbery when I have to pay for something I could otherwise DIY because I don't possess some small knowledge like a procedure or drawing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. I was about to say that you can't get a Haynes manual for Toyota Prius, but yes, there is one! [0]

However, the Haynes manual for Camry says it does not cover the hybrid models. [1]

[0] [http://www.haynes.com/products/productID/518](http://www.haynes.com/products/productID/518)

[1] [http://www.haynes.com/products/productID/682](http://www.haynes.com/products/productID/682)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wild to see imgur becoming a blog platform.

<comment><USER6> Having the imgur URL will really blow up your karma on reddit. People there consider imgur to be fast and reliable in delivering pictures, and posts imgur are expected to be focused on images with perhaps short explanatory texts.

Most blogs are focused on text with some images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very nice. Perhaps this info will reach the stealerships, allowing them to clean high voltage battery contacts when that is all that's needed, rather than replacing the entire...

bwahahahahahahahaha

<comment><USER8> They'll clean it up this way, but still charge for the replacement. Profit!

<comment><USER9> That would be illegal. What they will do though is offer you a discounted refurbished battery from the last car that came in for $3,000 and take yours. Then the cycle repeats.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there anyone doing startup (or working) in US on B1/B2 visa? - <AUTHOR> I know its illegal but still asking. <comment><USER2> I am sure there are thousands of such people, but they would be pretty stupid to admit this is a public forum.</comment>


Super Mario Bros. Crossover Xplained: An Interview with the Creator - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamexplain.com/article-64-1272509580-super-mario-bros-crossover-xplained-an-interview-with-the-creator.html

<comment><USER2> Clearly a labor of love, and very cool. But unless it's licensed, it's also a massive IP infringement. Some people think that if you don't make any money from it, it's not infringement, but that's not the case.

If I loved Zelda (and of course I do) and decided to recreate A Link to the Past and release it as a free iPhone game, I'm guessing I'd get a C&D in short order from Nintendo.</comment>


Verb - A CAD Library for the Web - <AUTHOR> http://verbnurbs.com

<comment><USER2> I have looked at basically all available open-source CAD kernels, and verbnurbs is the absolute cleanest and most well written I have ever encountered.

Verbnurbs beats the pants off OpenCASCADE, OpenNURBS, CGAL, BRL-CAD and a hundred others, any day of the week. Most existing implementations are huge and written by large teams that don't completely understand the entire system, and as a result they all end up bloated, poorly written and poorly maintained. It doesn't help that OpenCASCADE (for example) does not distribute the majority of their tests, making it hard for open source contributors to refactor or delete their code. Verbnurbs has been able to maintain trajectory all the way up to curve-curve intersections, and I am sure surface-surface is going to work pretty well.

Here's what the competition looks like: [http://diyhpl.us/wiki/cad/opencascade](http://diyhpl.us/wiki/cad/opencascade)

As for the others complaining about usability, I would guess that something like [https://github.com/dcowden/cadquery](https://github.com/dcowden/cadquery) would be a suitable direction....

<comment><USER3> >It doesn't help that OpenCASCADE (for example) does not distribute the majority of their tests, making it hard for open source contributors to refactor or delete their code.

So you're saying that this[1] isn't the whole test suite? I've been considering using OpenCASCADE, but if they don't open source their tests then that's a huge red flag.

[https://github.com/tpaviot/oce/tree/master/test](https://github.com/tpaviot/oce/tree/master/test)

<comment><USER2> Well... more like this stuff:

[http://git.dev.opencascade.org/gitweb/?p=occt.git;a=tree;f=t...](http://git.dev.opencascade.org/gitweb/?p=occt.git;a=tree;f=tests/bugs;h=91f464799202d78722c76dd032898d210e23ca1f;hb=HEAD)

And then all the other not included tests....

Btw, the OCE team has done some great work, especially considering what their task is and what they have to work with. If you must use OpenCASCADE, then use OCE.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I'm still not following you. OpenCASCADE is the upstream; OCE is the downstream. OpenCASCADE is LGPL 2.1 and OCE is LGPL 2.1, so that means OCE can pull every single line of code from OpenCASCADE.

Are you saying OCE is not pulling certain tests downstream despite being free to do so? Or are you saying that some OpenCASCADE test are still close sourced? If so, then what would be the motivation behind keeping these tests close sourced?

<comment><USER2> > Or are you saying that some OpenCASCADE test are still close sourced?

Yes, that's the one I mean. There's even lots of references on the public parts of their bug tracker to these tests.

> what would be the motivation behind keeping these tests close sourced?

There are so many that I can't even begin to speculate which ones might be the case here... maybe they lost them, maybe they have Top Secret commercial data (like BRL-CAD's other test suite, which contains military data), maybe they don't want anyone to do major refactors without putting in the effort to make new tests..... Like I said, lots of possible reasons. I haven't asked them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a very nice 3d primitives collection, but I don't see how it is CAD (at least in context of mechanical engineering). \- First of all, as a mechanical engineer, you're not dealing with surfaces, you're dealing with 3D objects, created using sets of operations: extrusion, revolution, sweep, etc. (ideally you want to reproduce the manufacture process of a part; in some systems then you can export these operations into series of commands for CNC machine). \- Secondary, if the output is not CNC machine, it's usually paper. Then the end result of CAD 3D modelling is a series of sections, projections, tools to annotate dimenstions, put tolerances, etc.

<comment><USER5> Correct me if I am wrong, but our work with 3D CAD models in revit, Max and autocad all point to surfaces/meshes being created when 3D functions (extrusion etc...) are applied. When we look at the file hierarchy within an FBX for example we see surfaces/meshes as the core geometry regardless of how they were built.

Are you saying there is a functional difference between a vertex/spline/NURBS square that has been extruded and a similar block built as a native 3D object? AFAIK the latter just basically "automates" the extrusion process from the outset instead of having a function or second extrusion step.

<comment><USER4> There're different point of views:

\- If you're 3D modeller, then yes, you're operate in terms of splines, surfaces, NURBS curves, etc. 3D model is your product.

\- If you're mechanical engineer (and CAD usually appear in engineering context), then in most cases 3D model is just a tool to produce something useful for manufacturing. Engineer models manufacturing process by applying specific primitive operations in specific order(order is important) which will emulate available manufacturing operations (like sweeping, drilling). In other words, when I need to add hole in a part, I don't create surface (or bunch of these - in case if hole intersects other surfaces), I just add extrusion operation; an operation tree will log info "extrusion with diameter 6 at this coordinates from base A and B", not "surface a,b and c". CAD will build all necessary surfaces for me as well as will have all necessary parameter for CNC machine. In 99%* you don't interact directly with surfaces/meshes. At least that's what you do if you work with Autodesk Mechanical Desktop/Autodesk Inventor/SolidWorks/CATIA/Unigraphics.

* 1% are rare cases when you have to deliver something really complex like auto body parts (though making those is a whole new story).

<comment><USER6> Funny thing, most commercial CAD tools (AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor, CATIA, SolidWorks) are built on a single C++ library from Seimens called Parasolid.

<comment><USER7> Ex Parasolid (1989-1995), D-Cubed (1995-2000), and SolidWorks (2001-2002) dev here.

Many are built on Parasolid, but many are not. Of your list only SolidWorks is built on Parasolid. Siemens own products (NX, SolidEdge) are built on Parasolid.

CATIA uses its own CATIA kernel. Dassault would like to move SolidWorks to the CATIA kernel, but they will encounter user resistance.

Autodesk has its own kernel ShapeManager ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShapeManager](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShapeManager) ) that it uses in Inventor and probably AutoCAD and Revit. ShapeManager was forked from Acis. There was a court case over the fork. Before the fork Autodesk used to use Acis.

Dassault owns Acis ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACIS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACIS) ) which is also widely used, especially amongst the smaller players. SpaceClaim uses Acis.

IIRC ProEngineer has its own kernel.

<comment><USER6> Ah, you are right. I overestimated Parasolid's reach, although its reach is pretty extensive as this list implies:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasolid](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasolid)

I would love to pick your brain about CAD and their kernels if you had the time, give me a shout at firstname.lastname@example.com. We are looking to expand Clara.io into the CAD space and could use some advice.

<comment><USER7> I emailed you.

Clara.io looks wicked! Also, it looks like it was a lot of hard work to write.

Parasolid, Acis and ShapeManager have a lot in common because they all originate from the same Romulus family tree in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Parasolid is probably the most widely used in serious high-end CAD because it is used in SolidWorks, NX and SolidEdge. Replaying history based feature models is a very hostile evolutionary environment for a b-rep modeling kernel, so Parasolid is battle hardened in a way that would be hard for Open CASCADE say to match.

If you are moving into CAD, then OnShape (VC funded cloud based MCAD by the founders of SolidWorks) might by a competitor. Do you know what they will use for their in the browser kernel? Unless they are roundtripping everything to Parasolid/Acis in the cloud like Lagoa ([http://www.worldcadaccess.com/blog/2014/04/logoa-going- from-...](http://www.worldcadaccess.com/blog/2014/04/logoa-going-from-simple- rendering-to-cloud-based-cad.html)) that is.

At the minimum, an in-the-browser sketcher would be good for cloud MCAD. I have thoughts, but not enough energy, strength and time right now to write one of those ...

Edit: grammar

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool work by @ptrbyr. Wondering what his big picture idea is, because CAD libraries are not exactly easy to just pick up and start building one's own dream CAD client on (for example).

<comment><USER9> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasolid](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasolid)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We, [https://Clara.io](https://Clara.io), would love to integrate this into our 3D editor and work with you on that. Are you interested?

<comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I just posted the link. I'm not the author.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very cool. Seems like it would complement OpenJSCad ([http://openjscad.org](http://openjscad.org)).

<comment><USER6> Very nice. Is OpenJSCad considered stable and compatible with existing CAD formats? I'm interested in expanding my 3D polygon editor to CAD: [https://Clara.io](https://Clara.io) Basically if I can find a stable and fast kernel, I can integrate it and get great results -- but I only want to do this with a kernel that works well in all cases.

<comment><USER10> Not sure, just a fan, and a dreamer of an existence of a powerful online CAD program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there a way to export to STL file format?</comment>


Show HN: Subdomains that should be reserved in a multitenant app - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nkkollaw/reserved-subdomains <comment><USER2> Nice, but missing who knows how many. `developer` is on the list, but not `dev`. Not sure how to avoid that kind of confusion systematically, but I appreciate the attempt.

Honestly, this is essentially why I have no interest in letting third parties dictate anything that shows up in DNS records. /slug/rest-of-url works great for me -- I'd almost recommend a lot of developers see this _so that is dissuades them from using dynamic subdomains_ more than recommending it as a technical countermeasure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I've added a lot of them in the meantime (and added a validator written in PHP).

I think it will be hard finding a list that makes sense for everybody. It's a tricky problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You know, I had a similar list for an API-based side business during development. The closer I got to launch, the more I would add, until I finally dropped support for subdomains and simply went with nested URLs. Is it less pretty? Sure. But I've already made plans to use multiple sub domains for sub- products that I wouldn't have put on that list.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely.

I was considering adding 2-letter language codes, and that list only is > 100 items.

I already thought about breaking up the list into multiple categories, I can really see how it can get complicated (and ugly) pretty quickly.

A subdomain makes the app look a lot more trustworthy IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Use the opposite: a yourservice.customerdomain.tld cname.</comment>