Google Pay - <AUTHOR> https://www.blog.google/topics/shopping-payments/announcing-google-pay/ <comment><USER2> Forgive me, but isn't this what Google Wallet was, at one point? Then at some point Google Wallet was split out into Android Pay. And now it's Google Pay? It's made all the worse by the fact that these names/logos/etc are reflected on actual physical hardware distributed to stores around the world. Those old names aren't going anywhere soon.

Google has done this so many times now (Hangouts/Allo/Messenger, anyone?) that I wonder if there is anyone behind the wheel any more.

<comment><USER3> Google has caught MMD (Microsoft Marketing Disease), in which companies endlessly rebrand and rename products that are successful, but not market- leading, in an effort to become the market leader, but end up fragmenting their own brands further by alienating existing loyal users and confusing late-adopters and casual observers who don't follow the branding news. This marketing-driven disease spreads to other parts of the business, as engineers see a rebranding as a legitimate time to break backwards-compatibility, but they aren't given the lead-time or budget for a full rework, so the new product is similar enough to the old product that it's obviously just a rehash, but different enough so that nothing that worked with the old thing will easily work with the new thing.

MMD keeps managers, marketers, product teams, and engineering leads busy, and makes executives believe progress is being made since all the metrics look good: there are tech blog articles, Twitter mentions, Hacker News threads, maybe a mainstream media hit or two; all the teams have finite task lists that are getting done; and there's an initial jump in brand awareness and new user engagement. The actual damage to the brand doesn't happen until long enough down the road that the brilliant minds who came up with the idea have collected their bonus checks, awards, and promotions, and moved onto better things.

And now the executives start talking up the need for a new marketing strategy... lather, rinse, repeat.

<comment><USER4> _Google has caught MMD (Microsoft Marketing Disease)_

Microsoft was exactly my first thought when I read this. "Are they pulling a SkyDrive here, and it's just rebranded Google Wallet?" And I use SkyDrive as an example because I lost count of how many times Microsoft renamed their online storage, to the point that I just gave up and used Dropbox.

It must work, or companies wouldn't do it. But it just alienates me. Is this the new boss, same as the old boss? Or a new product with new things I should take a look at? Does it work better than when I tried to use Google Wallet when I had Android? Aww, fuck it, I'll just keep using Apple Pay.

<comment><USER5> Not to try to invalidate your point (because Microsoft is definitely guilty of this practice), but SkyDrive was rebranded for legal reasons*, instead of marketing reasons.

[https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/28/uks-bskyb-wins- judgement-a...](https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/28/uks-bskyb-wins-judgement- against-microsoft-over-use-of-skydrive-name-in-europe/)

<comment><USER4> Yeesh, out of all the choices available, I had to pick the worst example, eh? Feel free to substitute "Live Mesh" or "FolderShare". :-)

<comment><USER6> Lync / Skype for Business?

<comment><USER7> Lync -> Skype for Biz -> Teams

<comment><USER8> It's been renamed again? Word of this has not yet trickled down to my group.

I wish they'd put some of the renaming energy into improving the reliability of their Mac and iOS apps....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> <WTF rant>

\- cards listed are only viewable as huge generic CC images and you can't customize either the image or even give it a name. Why this terrible skeuomorphic mess? I have different cards for different types of purchases and they all look identical and I have to scroll through them because they are huge. WTF?

\- When making payments there is no quick way to select which card you want to pay with. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who sometimes uses different personal cards, credit vs debit, or company vs personal. WTF??

\- There is no user purchase validation step! I just swipe my phone and transaction is done. I get this is the same as using a CC but in theory there is such a huge opportunity to improve the experience. How about popping up a thing where I confirm the purchase, even add a tip or sign for some purchases? WTF???

\- Pretty much zero updates for _years_. WTF google????

</WTF rant>

Honestly any of these issue are almost deal breakers but I do use it mainly because I get a geeky thrill out of it still when it works. Are some of these limitations imposed by the CC companies and banks? Like Wells Fargo saying they'll only participate if Google uses the exact full size card image? Or is this just an example of insanely bad UX in a totally dysfunctional product team? I have no idea but the current app is mind-blowingly crappy.

<comment><USER10> > There is no user purchase validation step! I just swipe my phone and > transaction is done. I get this is the same as using a CC but in theory > there is such a huge opportunity to improve the experience. How about > popping up a thing where I confirm the purchase, even add a tip or sign for > some purchases? WTF???

I disagree with you here. I want the payment to be as fast and painless as possible. A "tip" screen, a "sign" screen, etc. would all be very annoying. I suppose adding these optionally somehow could work though.

On a technical note, it's not quite the same as swiping a CC. There's some authentication to start - you must authenticate on your phone (via fingerprint or pattern or whatever lock mechanism you have) before you can make a payment. In addition, a one-time token is sent instead of your actual CC number, so the retailer couldn't reuse your payment info. In other words, it's much more secure than "signing" ever was and you get some nice security benefits by using your phone as opposed to swiping a credit card.

<comment><USER9> Good points. About validation step, how about a notification that counts down and auto accepts unless you cancel or something? Never thought about it before but having a guy in a random skeezy mini mart say "3.75" then I just tap and it is done without me every seeing if he ripped me off seems sketchy. And that is more sketchy than most CC machines because usually it actually does ask you to confirm the amount which google pay does not.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. Buying with a card is like handing over your wallet for the cashier to fish out the correct amount; a new system using a phone should be taken as an opportunity to put you back in control. The only friction would be _one tap_ to confirm. The tap could double as your action of choosing which card to pay with.

(Confirming on the vendor's reader still requires you to trust their machine, not yours.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Buyer beware. Your one Google account is trendils into everything. For example: I uploaded some clips of an old 90s show and got flagged for copyright. Now I can't upload/comment/sign into Youtube.

How does this affect Google Pay? What about Google Domains? Bleh. I don't really like all-in-accounts anymore. Much rather have separate silo'd accounts.

<comment><USER13> I agree. Over a decade ago when I was a freshman in college I participated in an AdSense click ring with my dormmates. We made $200 or so each, which was cool at that age. Within a few months we got caught and banned from AdSense. Now I have a YouTube channel with tens of thousands of viewers but I can't monetize it at all, even though YouTube wasn't even part of the same company as AdSense when my silly freshman experiment went down.

<comment><USER14> Sorry, why should that matter? Google doesn't trust you to honor your advertising contract because you didn't in the past and they know it because they literally caught your fraud themselves.

You seem to be arguing that a technicality should allow you to use other ad mechanisms, but that's not how real work risk analysis (or morality!) works.

You get the same treatment from banks: default on one loan and they'll tell the others (via credit reporting agencies), because that information is something they need to make good business decisions.

<comment><USER15> > You get the same treatment from banks: default on one loan and they'll tell > the others (via credit reporting agencies), because that information is > something they need to make good business decisions.

At least in the US, negative events on your credit report disappear after 7 years.

<comment><USER16> Try going to the same bank you defrauded and getting a loan?

<comment><USER17> True. The statute of limitations (or whatever the consumer credit regulations equivalent is called?) doesn't extend to what individual organisations already know about you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Google's payment solutions are shockingly diverse. Google Checkout, Google Wallet, Android Pay, and now Google Pay. Checkout failed so they replaced it with Google Wallet; Wallet failed and they replaced it with Android Pay.

The Google Pay API developer site [https://developers.google.com/payments/](https://developers.google.com/payments/) has the audacity to call it "The newest way to pay with Google." I wouldn't be surprised to see yet another brand (and yet another API) within the next three years.

<comment><USER18> Also, they have had Hangouts, Messenger, Talk, Voice, Allo, and Duo... most with the same functionality. What is up with Google's product management? Is there a strategy?

<comment><USER19> You forgot Google Meet: [https://meet.google.com/](https://meet.google.com/)

<comment><USER20> Which is also branded as one of "Meet" [1], "Google Meet" [2], or "Hangouts Meet" [3], depending on where you go.

[1] [https://meet.google.com/](https://meet.google.com/)

[2] [https://www.google.com/search?q=google+meet](https://www.google.com/search?q=google+meet)

[3] [https://itunes.apple.com/US/app/id1013231476](https://itunes.apple.com/US/app/id1013231476)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> They're not stupid, surely they must know that constant change and fragmentation of their products just weakens thier offer to the consumer?

Whats their gameplan? Are they just throwing as much as they can against the wall to see what sticks, a survival of the fittest attitute to their apps?

<comment><USER22> In this case, it's a welcome consolidation of different existing wallet/payment products.

All large companies seem to have trouble with branding as politics take over and each group wants to have its own spotlight. Apple arguably had better luck due to strong centralized leadership, although that's also become undone in recent years.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is quite literally a consolidation in name only. "Google Pay" is a brand name for all of those products, not a unified API. Hopefully a unified product strategy will follow…

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Their lack of customer service makes me cringe at the idea of paying through them.

<comment><USER24> For the only Google service I pay for (Project Fi), customer service is _stellar_.

<comment><USER9> Google in general has become pretty amazing at customer service. You can get someone competent on the phone 24-7 for Home also.

<comment><USER25> Yeah I think we can conclude that they are good at customer service if you are paying for the product.

Good luck getting your blocked GMail unblocked if you weren't lucky enough to have the blog post detailing your story go viral.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think I've only seen one person pay with Apple Pay in the last four years. It was at Walgreens. Maybe I'm missing something obvious but please do tell me HN readers do you use Apple Pay or Android pay at all ? and if you do use it how often every month?

<comment><USER2> America is _far_ behind the curve compared to the rest of the world. About the only place I use Apple Pay in the US is at Starbucks. But in the UK, I literally use it for everything. Restaurants, the London tube, taxis, pubs (to pay for a round of drinks!). It's incredibly useful, and it amazes me that America is taking so long to adopt it.

Even more amazing is that the US even changed payment systems to a chip-based system just a couple of years ago, but apparently didn't mandate that everyone adopts contactless payment when updating their hardware. Foolish.

<comment><USER27> Ha, you should visit Germany. Apple Pay doesn't even exist here [0]. Contactless payments with debit cards are slowly becoming a thing, but that seems to be the height of it.

[0] [http://isapplepayavailableingermanyyet.com](http://isapplepayavailableingermanyyet.com)

<comment><USER28> Visiting Germany earlier this year, many (perhaps most) stores I shopped at had contactless terminals. Maybe it's unevenly rolled out?

<comment><USER27> Yeah, you're right. They mostly are a thing now, at least in bigger stores (as in chains). But I do have a feeling Germany is one of the last countries where there's loads of stores where cash is the only accepted option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The toughest part of immigrating from Canada to the U.S. was figuring out the mess that was Google Play Store, Google Wallet, Google Payment Profiles, and Google Pay to get myself recognized as being in the U.S. and thus able to download U.S.-only apps.

<comment><USER30> (I work for Google payments, opinions are my own)

I believe this process has been improved in the last year to more easily change your country. I'm not sure when you went through it, but understand that it can be a complicated problems due to different regulations for payment related activity and digital goods. Like some countries Google is required to verify your tax id with the government to even buy 99 cent app.

<comment><USER31> I wasn't able to get my country changed after I somewhat accidently opened a merchant account years ago. I have never used that merchant account. It also didn't tell me that I won't be able to change my country if I open one.

I've now been living in the UK for six months and three months ago I had a 3hr phone call with a very lovely support lady that tried to help but we didn't manage to change it. She told me that maybe I could just open a new account but then I said that my whole life is on this account and that is not an option. If I have to start over I'd rather make sure this won't happen again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Are they trying to manage their projects with some kind of AI? Google works in mysterious ways and I don't understand most of what they do outside of Google search.

<comment><USER33> There is probably a lack of executive tlc to go around for all their stuff. I don't get it either, they break things that work already -- I simply cannot trust anything they put out that isn't search/Android/Google AI stuff anymore. Wasn't there some heuristic that a large company can only have 3 strategic priorities? Guess these 3 are it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> They shouldn't keep renaming products, especially when they don't control the ecosystem. I know a few apps and many merchants that still have Google Wallet branding - which should have been updated to Android Pay two years ago. Now there is another layer of confusion.

</comment><comment><USER35> Why did Google cut Android Pay out of Wallet if they were just going to do this? It's as if Google's consumer product teams all turn over every 2 years and each one reverses the vision of unity vs fragmented, specialized, self- competing products, executes their vision, and then leaves...

<comment><USER36> > Why did Google cut Android Pay out of Wallet if they were just going to do > this?

They didn't. Android Pay was a renamed of an acquisition that was originally planned to be integrated with Wallet but wasn't (well, until now), it just looked like it was cut out of Wallet because they killed Waller's similar NFC payment functionality. From the fact that they now for a while have had "pay with Google" that can use cards from Wallet, Android Pay, and some other superficially siloed single-app payment systems at Google, I would assume they've actually finally integrated everything to use the same infrastructure as Android Pay, so now the siloes can go away.

<comment><USER35> Very interesting insight into what happened on the technical side!

The progression of events certainly does make a lot more sense with that perspective, though understanding the details of what actually happened inside the backend doesn't really change the fact that, from a customer perspective, we really did see public-facing messaging indicating that one app was split into two and then later public-facing messaging indicting that (more than) those two apps where then brought back together again a couple years later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Glad they've finally started to recognize app duplication as a problem for consumers.

How many messaging apps does Google have again? I can't keep track.

<comment><USER38> I'm not sure they've recognized _anything_. They go through this consolidate- branch cycle pretty regularly with so many of their products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I am at least happy they are going to stop abusing the "Android" brand. Android became popular primarily because it offered an open source solution that manufacturers and phone byers could heavily customize (you can argue whether that's a good idea, but that was its main value proposition nonetheless). That Google took as a brand and then started exploiting it to push products that are entirely closed and have no real connection whatsoever to the actual core value proposition associated with Android has always irked me.

</comment><comment><USER40> The screenshots look like they did a find and replace apple logo with the G logo...

Probably makes it easier for all the merchants who might be getting tired of all this repackaging and rebranding

</comment><comment><USER41> This bit is a little buried, but it's the biggest win IMO:

> With Google Pay, it'll be easier for you to use the payment information > saved to your Google Account

On the web/in Android apps this allows you to pay with any credit card stored on your Google account. If you're on an Android device you can use your Android Pay card as well. Both with the same API for an ecommerce website or app.

</comment><comment><USER42> Hey Google, You got your fingers in too much of my life already. I'm going to avoid you also being my bank.

<comment><USER43> G Pay is not a bank, it's payment processor like Stripe. They don't hold any money. Though you are right that this gives them information about what you're purchasing.

<comment><USER44> Well, it's not exactly a payment processor either. They're like a payment initiator. They funnel the payments through your processor in the end, according to their docs: [https://payments.google.com/solutions/onboarding/](https://payments.google.com/solutions/onboarding/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Has Google said what they do with the information they collect when people use Google Pay? Does it get added to my profile? I don't see anything under "My Account" on the Google website.

</comment><comment><USER46> I'm not surprised there's yet another rebranding in Google world. You can pretty much track rebranding, not based on features or coherency, but rather someone being promoted. And on top of it, the Peter Principle has been thrown out the window so we get shit that's constantly being replaced with different shit, because when you're not improving Ux the only thing left to make your job relevant is to make the Ux different.

</comment><comment><USER47> Is it just me who read it as Google Play instead of Pay?

</comment><comment><USER48> One thing to consider: Google Pay, at least now, checks if bootloader is unmodified. This means it wont't work for you on many devices if you prefer installing pure android (like AOSP) instead of vendor provided. Uniting online payments under one google Pay umbrella will make experience for such people (me including) worse. Would be nice if Googlers would consider this.

</comment><comment><USER49> FYI, linked from the post is a support article for

"Get $5 off your Fandango tickets with Google Pay" and others

[https://support.google.com/googlepay/answer/7625564?p=tc&vis...](https://support.google.com/googlepay/answer/7625564?p=tc&visit_id=1-636510568382544558-4236394179&rd=1)

</comment><comment><USER50> The alt attribute text for the large "G Pay" logo is not "Google Pay" as one would expect but the cheerful "Google Pay Lockup". Who or what is being locked up is up for you to decide.

</comment><comment><USER51> Glad they're doing this. I found myself wondering just last week, "Do I want Google Pay or Google Wallet? Which is which? Can one hold my library card bar code?"

</comment><comment><USER52> Across their diverse payment solution names, they actually have all the tech to build a Stripe competitor. Looks like they finally got their act together (hopefully!).

<comment><USER53> Except I would trust Stripe a thousand times more than Google.

Edit: trust them not to cross reference me to hell and track my every move. Security would be as good on either side.

<comment><USER23> And their CSS is better :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> How does this relate to Samsung Pay? If a retailer takes Google Pay do they automatically take SamsungPay with Samsung phones? Or vice versa?

</comment><comment><USER55> I wonder if a payment service provider is using google as their cloud. If so, they should consider moving !

</comment><comment><USER56> I'll stick with Samsung Pay since it actually works with legacy credit card swipe machines.

</comment><comment><USER57> Does this offer anything above existing solutions like Apple Pay or Samsung Pay?

</comment><comment><USER58> Will this work on ios? I'm using wallet and it would be great to continue using it.

</comment><comment><USER59> So another google service we can't access from China.

<comment><USER60> Sounds like a China problem.

<comment><USER59> Yes, the GFW blocked all google services...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Does it work for Brazilian merchants?

</comment><comment><USER62> For Google products please always put in the title if it is new product or discontinued product, thanks.

</comment><comment><USER63> Sticky header and sticky footer. Only 60% of my screen is being used for the article content...

<comment><USER64> I think frontend designers should design with a 13" laptop and NO ADITIONAL MONITORS... only the laptop screen.

Then you wouldn't see more designs like this one.

<comment><USER65> There are some that seem to work like that. And then their site is a tiny thing lost in the middle of your 24" monitor... :)

You.cannot.win!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> You know what bothers me about giants like Google? They can absolutely suck at delivering an app or service for many years but because of their vast resources, they can keep throwing people and money at their projects until something sticks. Makes it very difficult for even very competent startups to compete against them.

</comment><comment><USER67> I might start caring about Google/Apple pay if they add support for Bitcoin and lightning network payments. Until then, there's really nothing new or innovative to be seen here.

<comment><USER68> You ready to deal with paying capital gains tax every time you purchase something?</comment></comment>


ThreatConnect Follows Guccifer 2.0 to Russian VPN Service - <AUTHOR> https://www.threatconnect.com/guccifer-2-all-roads-lead-russia/ <comment><USER2> > Very few hackers with Guccifer 2.0's self-acclaimed skills would use a free > webmail service that would give away a useful indicator like the originating > IP address. Most seasoned security professionals will be familiar with email > providers that are more likely to cooperate with law enforcement and how > much metadata a provider might reveal about their users.

Unless of course they want you to follow breadcrumbs and jump to conclusions.

This whole thing is stupid and I don't think we can trust any organization that says "Aha! We know who the _real_ actor is!"

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR: The server which emails to media was sent from (IP 18.104.22.168 from email headers) has the same SSH key fingerprint as other servers that belong to Elite VPN service (vpn-service.us) with Russian origins.

PR/research ratio of the article: 80%

Russian VPN is the most reasonable choice if you are doing a leak about US politics and don't want to be traced by US.

</comment><comment><USER4> Even if the leak ultimately comes from Russia, there is still no evidence that this is a state-sponsored act. At this point, to claim that Moscow is controlling the dissemination of information is conjecture, and needs to be backed up with more proof than a lack of technical expertise and the location of a vpn.

</comment><comment><USER5> Remember when the US decided North Korea hacked Sony ? [1]

President Obama used an executive order to impose more sanctions

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Pictures_Entertainment_ha...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Pictures_Entertainment_hack#U.S._accusations_against_North_Korea)

</comment><comment><USER6> Of course no-one else but a Russian person could have signed up for a Russian VPN company that has an English version of its webpage..

</comment><comment><USER7> 15 _' ThreatConnect' \+ 42_'we ' = 57 times... Good job! Have a pizza now, demon fighters</comment>


Why I Quit My Job, Killed a Company in Six Weeks, And Still Feel Great - <AUTHOR> http://www.drtomallen.com/1/post/2012/08/why-i-quit-my-job-killed-a-company-in-six-weeks-and-still-feel-great.html

<comment><USER2> I find it pretty refreshing to have someone candidly discuss their failed ambitions. The selection bias of insanely successful startups on HN can lead to a skewed perception of actual success rates. These are the kind of posts I need from time to time to keep myself grounded in reality so I can make better decisions.

<comment><USER3> Perspective, perspective.

1) They say: 95% of businesses fail.

2) I say: 100% of the remaining 5% are successful.

<comment><USER4> Heh. The lesson I take: Well, then I'd better try this a bunch of times. Which means I need to make the tries cheap and quick enough.

<comment><USER5> or so it would seem. Don't rule out chasing an idea for years before you find it's successful. AirBnB, Pinterest, Craigslist etc etc

 _"Most successful men have not achieved their distinction by having some new talent or opportunity presented to them. They have developed the opportunity that was at hand."

— Bruce Barton_

<comment><USER6> Don't forget to add the even more ambitious Elon Musk into your list... SpaceX and Tesla.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "I didn't care enough about money to run a startup."

There's the rub. A startup cannot be about the money - it's about changing the world and the way people live. If you are already doing that and feel fulfilled in your job (which most entrepreneurs simply can't), then more power to you.

You don't start a company for the sake of starting a company, you start a company because a startup is the only possible means by which you can bring to pass the change you want to see in the world and live the lifestyle you want to live. Michael Arrington compared it to becoming a pirate. "The potential for riches was just an argument for the venture. But the real payoff was the pirate life itself."

That having been said, I love the refreshing honesty about the reality of startup failure. A small part of me wishes more people wrote the stories of their failure; TechCrunch would be 90% people running through savings and eating ramen and 10% successful exits. Thank you for giving a real perspective into what entrepreneurship can be like.

<comment><USER8>
      There's the rub. A startup cannot be about the money - it's
      about changing the world and the way people live.

My reading of the post wasn't that the guy only cared about money - just that a start up operates in the intersection of exciting world changing technology and commercially viable technology.

And the guy's exciting world-changing ideas weren't his commercially viable ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> More the opposite - I care about money only to the extent that it allows me to stay out of trouble. I don't want to be a millionaire, I'd just like $5M sitting in a bank account at 5% so I don't ever have to think about money again.

The technologies/products I was exploring - while awesome, some verifiably so according to the customers we spoke with - weren't likely to lead to profitable businesses. I had to learn the difference between a good idea and a good business model. This is a valuable lesson for any entrepreneur.

As something to play around with as a hobby or technology demo they're still great ideas, but as businesses they're not viable (and in one case, perhaps just not yet.)

<comment><USER7> Ah, I definitely read that wrong. That's a whole different dilemma if the issue is, "I love this technology but it's more than the market will bear." So will you go back to your old job? I know you have a runway for a while should you choose to use it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one who wants to know the answer to this question: what now? You quit a great job, tried building a startup and failed - you have a family and mortgage to factor in to the equation, where to from here? I am guessing that the author has some savings to live off, but I want to know how it all ends. What does your wife think of all of this? So many unanswered questions that have my head buzzing with nervousness and curisotity here.

<comment><USER10> His wife is most probably furious. Women are in general much more averse to risk-taking than men (especially after having kids). At least that is the case with my wife. Every crazy idea I have, I run it first through my wife. She shreds 99% of them ;). "Think of the children", "How will we pay mortgage", "In fall we have to renovate older child's bedroom". Etc.

<comment><USER11> This comment comes across as pretty sexist, by the way. Taking experiences with a small set of people and generalizing them to all people based on their gender is basically the definition of sexism.

<comment><USER10> I am sorry you feel that way.

I don't agree with you, by the way. And there's loads of research suggesting that males are much more prone to risk-taking than females. And not only in humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "I don't care enough about money to run a startup business."

It sound like you don't have to worry about connecting a job/business with your desire to create.

Build a great workshop at your home and work on projects that you are passionate about. If you start to build something that you think has market viability you have the experience needed to vet the idea in the market. Something that can be done on a lunch hour or over weekends, depending on the demographic.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll have to worry about money eventually, but I'm one of those risk-adverse engineers so by the time I quit my job in the first place I'd saved up almost two years of runway.

I'm definitely still creating. Watch this space.

<comment><USER13> I'm just wondering if you're not working on any of the three ideas at all, why not mention them atleast? Someone else may benefit out of it. On the other hand, if you plan to re-visit them in the future...

<comment><AUTHOR> Well they're still described on the company website, but I didn't want to drive traffic to them when I'm not actually going to pursue them (commercially at least).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What impressed me most about your experience is how disciplined the process was, and how you approached building a startup in a way that takes most entrepreneurs magnitudes longer to learn.

While it may look like a failure, if anything you've achieved an incredible success and compacted a long, arduous process into an incredibly short timeframe.

Congratulations.

Money begins as the driving force to launching a company, but I've learned that once you get going, you quickly forget about money as the reason for building a company, and begin to appreciate the process of BUILDING.

As much as you think you're done, I see the underpinnings of an entrepreneur, if you can stomache it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't stress enough that it wasn't just me doing this - I had a great pair of co-founders, even though they weren't as committed and ultimately walked away from the business. They helped a lot with the cold-calling and face to face meetings. A large part of what I learnt was that I really dislike cold calling!

But you're right I'm probably not done. I still like this world; making stuff, fixing people's problems, innovating, etc. What I've learnt is that I certainly don't want to be the CEO/hustler. I like technology more than money. I should sit on the CTO/product side of the fence if I do it again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> First, I want to say thanks for putting yourself out there.

However, I think there's one thing that needs to be reiterated, for everybody who's reading hacker news and thinking about starting a company:

The world probably does not need yet another incarnation of project management/collaboration software.

If I had a dollar for every first-time entrepreneur who told me they were starting a new project management tool for team collaboration app, I'm probably have enough to A-round my own company.

That's not to say it's not possible to succeed here – Trello is a case in point – but one has to realize that Joel has been in the project management space for probably close to a decade. It's even probable that he would've failed except for the fact he has such a large online following that just happens to be his target audience.

To use the example below, if 9/10 startups fail then probably 49/50 of project management/collaboration startups fail.

By all means, do a startup, but at least give yourself a fighting chance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Where did you get the idea I was doing project management/collaboration software? We were building a hardware device to allow collaboration through existing physical whiteboards. Not another online whiteboard application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This was a great post. I have a lot of respect for you for being so honest and open. Do you want your next gig to be related to robotics?

Side note: I remember when my first phase of 'burnout' hit me and I literally got sick at a meeting with a bunch of investors. There's a whole post to be done on taking care of yourself in a startup there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I lied a lot as a teenager, became _really_ good at it, then realised my life would actually be easier if I just told the truth all the time.

I hope my next gig will be somewhere amongst the union of robotics, consumer tech, useful, helps humanity, and scalable. It wouldn't have to be robotics (but robotics can be arbitrarily vague anyway), as long as there's room for me to learn and I can actually see people using what I've created.

<comment><USER16> Yeah I had a history of bending the truth until I realized it just got me in more trouble than it was worth. Interesting article in Esquire on 'Radical Honesty' you might enjoy here: <http://www.esquire.com/features/honesty0707> \-- You have to take it with a grain of salt, but a good read at the very least.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was a fun read. A bit further than I take my honesty however...

<comment><USER16> 100% agreed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not even sure this should be regarded as a 'failure'. You took a risk, approached it the smart way through customer validation, and realized early enough that it wasn't going to work out that you didn't damage relationships with anyone. This is actually showing a smart, intelligent process at work.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a honest post and very valuable.

"why did I quit a job that met all these criteria? The easy answer is that I knew I didn't want to be an academic. But since the job was a stepping stone to a similar, higher paying job in industry, there's a more complex answer hiding away in here somewhere."

That answer could be: Freedom.

</comment><comment><USER19> Could his "magic torch" product be repurposed to stabilize a laser pointer? I just sat through a presentation and the guy's laser pointer was shaking like crazy the whole time.

Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER20> Judging by the title I would say you are bipolar in manic phase. =P

But it's a pretty inspiring post. =)

</comment><comment><USER21> I want to hear about how you are paying for rent and food now with no job and a failed company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Savings. I had almost two years runway to start out. I've only burnt two months worth.</comment></comment>


Tell HN a Spooooky Halloween Story: "All Hallows" - <AUTHOR> http://marcochacon.livejournal.com/758793.html?view=1286921

<comment><AUTHOR> It's late, but it was too good to pass up. Share yours, too!</comment>


A 19th-Century Illustrator Found Beauty in the Slimiest of Sea Creatures - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/this-19th-century-illustrator-found-beauty-slimiest-sea-creatures-180967625/?no-ist <comment><USER2> Harvard has a collection of jellyfish models made from blown glass from around the same time. There were meant to be used for teaching and research, they are three-dimensional reproductions because the animal can't be preserved and colour photography was in its infancy then. The realism and the mastery of the craft is truly astounding.

<comment><USER3> Any chance there are photos of any sort online? That sounds really interesting and if the photos in the article reminded you of them (the images were gorgeous) I'd imagine they share that trait of gorgeousness.

<comment><USER2> [http://mcz.harvard.edu/collections/blaschka_coll.html](http://mcz.harvard.edu/collections/blaschka_coll.html)

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

<comment><USER3> Thanks, Harry!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is the Smithsonian so desperate for revenue that it needs to ask me to both enable "notifications" and sign up for its newsletter the second the page loads? Who needs _notifications_ on smithsonianmag.com?</comment>


Lessig would step down after fixing campaign finance corruption - <AUTHOR> https://lessigforpresident.com/

<comment><USER2> Lessig's proposal, per [https://lessigforpresident.com/the- act/](https://lessigforpresident.com/the-act/):

        1. Make election day a national holiday

        2. Implement ranked-choice voting[1], and draw districts for equal
           representation[2]

        3. Give voters campaign donation vouchers and limit lobbying, described as a
           hybrid between the Government By the People Act[3] and the American
           Anti-Corruption Act[4]

[1] [http://www.fairvote.org/reforms/instant-runoff- voting/](http://www.fairvote.org/reforms/instant-runoff-voting/)

[2] [http://www.fairvote.org/reforms/fair-representation- voting/](http://www.fairvote.org/reforms/fair-representation-voting/)

[3] [https://sarbanes.house.gov/bythepeople](https://sarbanes.house.gov/bythepeople)

[4] [http://anticorruptionact.org](http://anticorruptionact.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> Larry puts forth a number of very wise points. I think we need to go further by eliminating PACSs altogether and that limited donations may come from named individuals _and_ must go to a specific candidate _only_ ; neither organizations, issue PACs, super PACs nor "personhood" corporations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I find it honestly surprising that people can both lament the state of campaign corruption in the U.S., and then dismiss someone who displays -- by all appearances -- a genuine intent on fixing the problem.

I swear I see comments endorsing constitutional amendments to this effect _daily_ on HN. You can question the likelihood that Lessig gets elected, but you certainly can't fault his program.

A program doesn't have to fix _everything_ in order to be a significant step in the right direction. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that you people don't actually want to fix anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Amen (and I'm an atheist). Two sources probably: I think people get acclimatized to the situation and fear big improvements because it involves change, and change is scary. And also, there is an amount of jealousy and resentment directed towards anyone whom may have a real shot at successfully fixing things because they won't get credit in history books. (This last one is also commonly experienced by anyone whom becomes much more successful in whatever they're doing. It sucks, but friends and peers fear being left behind.)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Larry listened to Aaron Schwartz'es clear insight... the political operating system must be fixed _before_ any other meaningful issue reforms can be discussed.

His singular focus on that specific, hard issue combined with a pledge to step down after fixing just that is interesting, in a George Washington-revivalist manner. I think he needs a lot of coordinated "muscle" from broad support in order to push this massive "boulder" up and over the "mountain" of institutionalized resistance (the rich, lobbyists and entrenched politicians will fight this one to the death, so he needs to prepare to fight World Wars III, IV & V).

</comment><comment><USER4> I think it's great that Lessig is interested in running, but I think the intent of being a single-issue "referendum president" is, to be polite, misguided.

It's not actually the choice of the president whether a single issue is the _only_ issue, regardless of how much he might want that to be the case. If elected, he would have to run the executive branch, which means he would need to select a cabinet, unless he is planning on just hanging on to the previous guy's choices until he has finished his quest. We're going to judge him on his perceived ability to do that, as well as everything else a president has to do.

Further, if he is perceived as competent enough to do all that, why would I vote to hire him as chief executive of the nation when he has stated he is going to quit soon after he is elected? His running mate will have be chosen far more carefully than normal. Also, why would I be willing to leave the decision about the _replacement_ vice president to a bunch of people in Washington? By pledging to quit, he is effectively eliminating our direct voice on half of the ticket.

Mr. Lessig, if you want a chance at my vote you have to run for real and commit to serving your full term to the best of your abilities. I hope you do—I think you are up to the task.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure I follow. If Lessig were to step down and hand power over to the vice president, then couldn't the vice president freely appoint a new cabinet?

Even if we got stuck with a crappy cabinet for four years, it would be survivable (see 2000 - 2004) and the good that would come out of fixing campaign corruption would be immeasurable.

>Further, if he is perceived as competent enough to do all that, why would I vote to hire him as chief executive of the nation when he has stated he is going to quit soon after he is elected?

Because he doesn't think he is competent to run the country; he thinks he's competent to fix a specific problem.

I just found out about this guy 10 minutes ago, but I very much welcome this kind of discourse and honestly wish there were more of it.

<comment><USER4>
       If Lessig were to step down and hand power over
       to the vice president, then couldn't the vice
       president freely appoint a new cabinet?

Lessig would have to govern until he finished enacting his agenda. That could take years. Plus, selecting a good cabinet would off-load distractions from him, allowing him to focus more on his core objectives.

      Even if we got stuck with a crappy cabinet for
      four years, it would be survivable

A "survivable" term isn't the threshold I personally use when voting for candidates. :)

<comment><USER3> >A "survivable" term isn't the criteria I personally use for choosing presidents. :)

That's fair enough, but I would counter that:

1\. We've been settling for "survivable" terms for the past 10 years

2\. Some people will take a hit for the greater good. I really wish you would be willing to do that too. That said, maybe you don't think Lessig's agenda would be serving the greater good, in which case I'd be interested in knowing why.

<comment><USER4> I think his agenda is great. (I might quibble about things like ranked-choice versus approval voting, but that's immaterial for the moment.) I just think he's going to have to govern while trying to achieve that agenda, and I suspect he can do that successfully, so I'd like him to run for real rather than planning to quit after he's done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a great idea, but it would take two terms just to make that proposal stick. It's going to take a lot more work to take money out of politics. Signing some papers and walking away won't work.

<comment><USER6> Some people call it the "Green Lantern theory of presidential power" \-- that for one person with sufficient purity of intent and force of will, anything is possible. But the President doesn't get a magic ring of cosmic power, and the American political system was specifically _designed_ to prevent rapid, radical change without comprehensive and unified support from all three branches.

<comment><AUTHOR> Larry Lessig, George Washington and all other figures are/were human beings like the rest of us; it's only other people which catapult them onto pedestals. I think we should take stock in the coming socio-political fight for social justice, which needs a strong and wise torchbearer, so that it does not devolve into a French Revolution, but instead an insurrection in the spirit of democracy's promise of continual revolution. Because without a equality functioning across-the-board, history has shown time-and-time-again, that people inevitably seek country justice if city justice doesn't work for them. (It's not "right," but it's human nature.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What motivation would Congress possibly have to cooperate with an intentionally lame-duck President? The President is not able to unilaterally push through legislation, and the idea of using a presidential election as a referendum is deeply flawed.

However, his platform is admirable and I hope he draws more attention to electoral and campaign finance reform. Perhaps this movement could be redirected toward a constitutional amendment? That would be both more feasible and more effective (since it wouldn't be vulnerable to repeal at any time).

<comment><USER7> I've always understood his position as implying that he'll pocket-veto anything else that passes his desk, and nothing interesting (like, oh, passing a budget) can get through today's Congress with a supermajority. It's in Congress's interest to get the stupid reform bill passed as quickly as possible so that a normal president can sign the rest of their bills. (Presumably this would be most effectively paired with an establishment candidate as VP who intends to run for re-election, so that he/she is answerable to the party bosses as usual.) And they have pretty good political cover for voting in favor of these bills: they can tell their constituents that it's all the fault of this ridiculous Harvard academic that the outgroup voted for.

Rolling Stone did an interview where they asked him what happens if something goes wrong in the timeframe between when he takes office and when Congress realizes they should just pass the bills: [http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/meet-the- president...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/meet-the-presidential- hopeful-whod-quit-after-signing-a-single-law-20150819)

 _RS: But what happens if you get elected president, and then — before your big bill gets passed — Iran goes crazy? Who, then, deals with the ayatollahs, or ISIS, or whatever the crisis is?_

 _LL: The person who is elected the president. That person has to convince the public that, in the case of something extraordinary, they could act as a kind of leader that the nation needs at the time of crisis._

 _RS: You 're saying you've got the qualifications to make those kinds of decisions in the interim?_

 _LL: Absolutely. If I 'm not qualified to be that person, I shouldn't be president._

I trust Lessig to be a reasonable-enough person that in the event of war or some other national emergency, he'll suspend his pocket-veto policy, and either act like a real president or resign unconditionally and let the VP take over. I agree with him that if you don't trust him to do that, you shouldn't vote for him.

<comment><USER6> This is all assuming that Congress wouldn't (with some justification, frankly) view the maneuver as an unconscionable assault on the constitutional separation of powers and adopt a total war stance against Lessig. I have no trouble believing that it would be easier to get a veto-proof majority of Congress to pass enough funding to keep the government running than it would to get a simple majority to pass Lessig's platform.

You'd end up with only bills that represented the bipartisan "center" in DC, which means lots of money for the security state and cuts for social services. No appointed offices that would require congressional approval would be filled (and would Lessig even appoint anyone?). It could very well be the biggest constitutional crisis since the Civil War, if things went badly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't see what's to stop special-interest-funded candidates from using their already existing money to advertise to the people and get as many _My Voice Tax Credits_ from them as possible (if only to dry up money for the other candidates).

And I also think the Anti-Corruption Act he's promoting will eventually be gutted by the Supreme Court, as they've done to similar laws in the past: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Campaign_finance)

A Constitutional amendment would at least trump the Supreme Court. I wish Lessig would just insist on getting Congress to pass an Amendment he wants. But the states are already on their way, bypassing Congress: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_PAC#Progress_in_particula...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_PAC#Progress_in_particular_states)

I like the other solutions Lessig is promoting, especially FairVote.

</comment><comment><USER9> Lessig is the embodiment of the great ignorance that a lot of people in tech have for politics. This comment is going to come off as nothing more than an ad hominem, but it would take multiple paragraphs to fully explain everything that is misguided about this plan.

<comment><USER3> Then please write the several paragraphs, else:

1\. Your comment serves no purpose

2\. I might be tempted to vote for the guy out of ignorance</comment></comment>


Minimal containers for Go binaries - <AUTHOR> https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/07/osx-static-golang-binaries-with-docker?hn

<comment><USER2> Looks like an interesting article, but I can't read it on my iPad because their website loads some bar across everything that I can't close.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ouch! Author here, I'll check with the team and see if we can fix it quick. Thanks for the headsup!

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I was able to read on my laptop. Great article! I really like the idea of cutting out all the cruft and shrinking the image down as much as possible.</comment></comment></comment>


WebDriver Support in Safari 10 - <AUTHOR> https://webkit.org/blog/6900/webdriver-support-in-safari-10/ <comment><USER2> This looks really great. Baking in support for test automation seems like a no-brainer and a welcome step forward for web development.

Are any other major browsers taking a similar approach to Safari in terms of native WebDriver support? I saw this Microsoft blog [1] on Edge support of WebDriver, but it's not clear to me what approach they have taken (you still need to download a separate server for instance).

 _Only one Safari browser instance can be running at any given time, and only one WebDriver session can be attached to the browser instance at a time._

One downside to this approach is that it limits the ability to parallelize tests on a single machine for efficiency purposes.

1\. [https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/07/23/bringing- auto...](https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/07/23/bringing-automated- testing-to-microsoft-edge-through-webdriver/#H4L5S5Z3PsxJazie.97)

<comment><USER3> "Are there any other major browsers taking a similar approach to Safari in terms of native WebDriver support?"

Let me tell you about the "world domination plan" for the Selenium project. In the beginning of the project, no browser had a good automation story. It was a constant battle to catch-up and fix things every time a new browser version came out. With Selenium 2, in addition to merging in WebDriver, the grand strategy was to move the maintenance of each browser driver codebase to the browser vendors themselves. Opera, Mozilla, and Google quickly jumped on board with the idea. To further this strategy, we moved Selenium's IP to a neutral 3rd party (Software Freedom Conservancy), and worked towards a W3C browser automation spec that looks suspiciously identical to the WebDriver API. Now with Microsoft and Apple also on-board, we can all raise our glasses and yell "Cheers!"

Of course, there's no rest for the weary. The battleground for good test automation tooling has now shifted from desktop to mobile (and possibly TVs, cars, watches, IoT, etc.)

<comment><USER4> I wonder... Boss - "I see you expensed a Tesla" Me - "Yes, its for browser testing..."

<comment><USER3> You kid, but at some point over the years, I had that same epiphany: If you want a built-in justification to play with any new toy, pursue a career in test automation! (I don't have a Tesla, yet, but I'd be happy to be invited over to the test track to talk shop... But seriously folks... I'm very curious how they test the software running on their dashboard and center console.)

<comment><USER5> Google's advice was always emulation--the tests running on dozens of Dell servers were faster and more reliable at bug hunting than physical hardware. Obviously there are limits, but the advice in 2013 was to prioritise automated tests in simulators instead of on real devices. Note the emphasis on automation, though -- you can totally expense that Tesla for the manual/acceptance testing ;-)

<comment><USER4> Emulation, and specifically domain modeling, goes a wicked long way and has huge speed advantages in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is fantastic news!

The blog post doesn't mention iOS. Does anybody here know whether iOS Safari 10 will also support Webdriver?

<comment><USER7> According to the docs: yes. [https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/relea...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/releasenotes/General/WhatsNewInSafari/Articles/Safari_10_0.html)

<comment><USER8> Where are you seeing that? I'm seeing:

>Safari on OS X supports WebDriver, which lets you automate web-content testing. It provides a set of interfaces to manipulate DOM elements and control the browser's behavior. You can enable Remote Automation in the Develop menu and then launch the server using /usr/bin/safaridriver. For information about library integrations as they become available, see the information about Selenium WebDriver.

Notably, the "on OS X" bit. (Shouldn't that be on macOS? I thought "OS X" was done for!) Equally, you obviously can't launch the server using /usr/bin/safaridriver on iOS.

<comment><USER9> From article: "Starting with Safari 10 on OS X El Capitan and macOS Sierra, Safari comes bundled with a new driver implementation that's maintained by the Web Developer Experience team at Apple."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a good thing but they are really late to the party in supporting Selenium.

</comment><comment><USER11> _ensuring a good user experience across multiple platforms and browsers is a huge challenge for web developers and QA organizations_

It's a shame we've been fighting this battle since the 1990s and are still fighting it.

<comment><USER12> Why would this be an easy battle? Creating design and code that works on billions of devices, on independently-developed browsers for multiple operating systems, viewed through wildly-varying physical dimensions and I/O, seems like it's one of those battles that would seem to be perpetual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> welp, scrapers rejoice

</comment><comment><USER14> Now if we can only get tabs to suspend themselves to free up RAM. Safari is awesome to work with, for the first hour.

<comment><USER15> Are you by any chance leaving Google Docs pages open for a long time? Safari runs great on my machine, with windows and tabs open for weeks at a time, and the only problem I ever have is with Google Docs, because Google Docs is a gigantic memory hog. If I leave a Google Docs page open for a day, it usually ends up consuming several gigabytes of memory all on its own. For a company whose focus is the web, I don't know why Google can't get their memory usage under control.

(Caveat: I haven't actually tried leaving a Docs page open for a day in a while. I stopped doing that when I discovered how badly it behaved. It's possible Google's fixed it, though I doubt it)

<comment><USER14> Negative on Google Docs.

<comment><USER16> I don't see this either, but I don't have Flash installed. Could that be the culprit?

<comment><USER14> I haven't had flash installed for a couple years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Part of me is thrilled by anything that makes validation easier. Part of me is frightened by the expansion of the attack surface of the browser, particularly given how Apple has been losing their quality edge of late.

<comment><USER15> > _particularly given how Apple has been losing their quality edge of late_

I know this is a subjective opinion and I'm not going to touch upon whether I think it's true or not, but I want to know why you even said this bit? The common claims about Apple's quality slipping don't have anything to do with security. If anything, Apple's security is getting better and better over time.

<comment><USER17> It is very noticeable that their software quality is dropping. It is parsimonious to assume this will impact complicated API surfaces negatively.</comment></comment></comment>


Java applets: Time to ditch them - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Is-it-really-the-time-to-ditch-Java-for-a-more-secured-programming-Language/answer/Cameron-Purdy

<comment><USER2> I don't think that is the point that is being made there.

> Also, to the best of my knowledge, every single one of the publicly reported > and publicly encountered Java applet exploits has been resolved by now in > the currently available releases of Java.

(Cameron Purdy, SVP Engineering of Oracle Middleware)

Also the use of Java applets is negligible now, which is a point he also makes. It seems that the "time to ditch them" was somewhere in the past.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll rephrase it (but it's more than 80 chars): "If you haven't already ditched Java applets, you should have" ;-)</comment></comment>


Radar.apple.com broken? - pow-tac https://radar.apple.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> what services does radar.apple.com provide?

<comment> pow-tac I thought it was the bug tracker but I was wrong. The correct URL is [https://bugreport.apple.com](https://bugreport.apple.com) and that works fine.</comment></comment>


Lessons from Building a Rocket Alarm App - <AUTHOR> http://www.codelord.net/2014/07/28/lessons-from-building-a-rocket-alarm-app/

<comment><USER2> This is actually a great little post about building an popular app. The bit about the accessible mail form being triggered is SO true. I did support for a top 100 app and we had tons and tons of blank emails. The difference between Send and Cancel, when you just want the email to go away seems to not matter to most :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great post!</comment>


Real Market Value of Social Networks - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/23/modeling-the-real-market-value-of-social-networks/

<comment><USER2> Not flamebait, and actually interesting. How can his metrics be improved?</comment>


Five languages in seven lines, or how not to do web development - <AUTHOR> http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddsmkn6m_46j7qxfct4

<comment><USER2> Truth be told, it's not too bad considering all it does. Each language is being used for its strengths.

Programming at that level requires HTML and Javascript. Python is integrated as part of Mako; calling them separate languages is valid but questionable. (Given that the author is maximizing the number of languages, I'm a little surprised jQuery wasn't included in the list.)

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't call jQuery a language. jQuery is JavaScript.

<comment><USER2> jQuery is JavaScript in approximately the same way CLOS is Common Lisp. Sure, jQuery is implemented in and uses JavaScript, but idiomatic jQuery differs enough from idiomatic JavaScript that it might be considered another language.

...And, if that handwaving fails to convince you, jQuery's selector string format is at least as much a language as the pager formatting string that merits its own language in the article. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So in Rails best-practices, you'd still have 3 "languages", they'd just be spread around in 3 files.

I'm a Haml fan, so I'd have a view template like:

      = paginate(@employees)

      %ul
        - @employees.each do |employee|
          %li
            = employee.first_name
            = employee.last_name

and then a helper to fill out the "paginate", or some plugin to handle it for me, and finally an unobtrusive js file.

So I get 3 languages. The only real WTF I see here is the "onClick", and for an example in some documentation about a framework, its forgivable. Could also be broken up into separate files, because the pagination part is a bit complex for a view. Again, though, its a documentation example, on the paginator helper, no less.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think "$('#my-page-area')" is #6 actually (doing a CSS-style selector probably via jQuery or something)

I'm not sure that it's "how not to do web development", but it's certainly "this is common: what's a better way?".

</comment><comment><USER6> The point as I see it, normally one thinks of programming in "a" language, not 5-7 at once! Just imagine trying to rewrite this paragraph in multiple foreign languages...let's see, nouns in Japanese, verbs in French, adjectives in Russian, and the remainder in Taglish? Illustrates just how demanding web development is. And consider, not only are there best practices to follow for each real language, the conclusion reveals there must be implicit best practices (or at least opinions) for mixing them as well.

</comment><comment><USER7> Even when using serverside javascript, you still end up with at least 4 languages; javascript, html, css and occasional sql queries.

Rails is actually not that bad, letting you use ruby for everything from javascript and html templates to sql queries and configuration. The future is languages that can be tweaked to express anything like lisp, ruby, python, groovy and one day also javascript.

</comment><comment><USER8> Bug in parsing: line 2 is mostly javascript, not mako.

</comment><comment><USER9> Python, JavaScript and HTML puts you at 3 and that's the least you need for web development.

Or are you supposed to do nothing but back end in Python, or just HTML front ends?

</comment><comment><USER10> Nothing wrong with this example. Would you rather see XSLT? Really?

<comment><USER11> There are other ways to build HTML without templating. Take a look at Template::Refine, for example:

[http://search.cpan.org/~jrockway/Template- Refine-0.02/lib/Te...](http://search.cpan.org/~jrockway/Template- Refine-0.02/lib/Template/Refine/Cookbook/Interpolate.pod)

[http://search.cpan.org/~jrockway/Template- Refine-0.02/lib/Te...](http://search.cpan.org/~jrockway/Template- Refine-0.02/lib/Template/Refine/Cookbook/Attributes.pod)

(Those are two different examples, which is unclear due to news.yc's URL truncation.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's even more worrying is people posting here defending it. It's plain ugly.

Call me old fashioned, but I'm pretty much a one language per file guy.

<comment><USER13> I'm curious to know how do you do web development. Mind sharing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> yikes, missing two languages. everyone knows number of lines should equal number of languages.

<comment><USER15> Technically the first 3 lines have all five languages.</comment></comment>


The Best Algorithms of the 20th Century [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.uta.edu/faculty/rcli/TopTen/topten.pdf <comment><USER2> For more on #5 (original Fortran optimizing compiler), including the source code, see <http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/> .

For more on #7 (Quicksort), I especially recommend Hoare's paper in the Computer Journal, which explains many details about the algorithm that are unfortunately not widely known (such as the correct way to partition for Quicksort): <http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/5/1/10.abstract> (the full text is freely downloadable).

</comment><comment><USER3> Khawrazmi was a Persian Muslim. I stopped reading right there.

<comment><USER4> What does religion have to do with algorithms?!

<comment><USER5> Suppose the article was about the greatest boxers of the 20th century, and it talked about the Arab boxer Muhammad Ali. Would you object to someone pointing out that Ali was not Arab, but rather an American Muslim? His being Muslim is relevant not because it is his religion, but because it explains why an American of his era has such a foreign name--he changed his name when he converted to Islam.

Same thing is going on here. The article says al-Khwarizmi was an Arab. He was actually a Persian who followed the Arab religion (Islam), which probably explains the Arab-appearing aspects of his life and work.

Does it matter if he was Arab or Persian? Some might argue that all that matters is what he discovered. The counter argument is that by mentioning things like nationality, ethnicity, religion, etc., in these kind of articles, it helps reinforce the idea that science transcends national borders, ethnic boundaries, religion, and so on. I believe I read something by Asimov once where he said that was the reason he always included the nationality of scientists he wrote about.

<comment><USER6> So is it somewhat equivalent to saying someone is protestant when they are catholic, and being outraged at such a mix-up? I still don't quite understand why it has emoted such apparent disgust as to stop reading, but then I am not a religious person.

<comment><USER7> It's not about religion. Equivalent would be something like saying an important Mexican scholar was Canadian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> FFT FTW!

</comment><comment><USER9> Hmm, let's see: One of the algorithms is the fast Fourier transform (FFT). It is sometimes described as a form of matrix factorization and multiplication.

Another algorithm is Dantzig's simplex algorithm for linear programming: It is basically just elementary row operations much as in Gauss elimination on a, usually, vastly 'under determined' system of linear equations. The math for the simplex algorithm is mostly nicely presented via matrix theory.

A third algorithm in the list is the QR algorithm for finding eigenvalues.

So, of the 10 algorithms, at least three are closely related to just matrix theory. Amazing.

Then, for computer science I would add an observation: A few days ago a venture firm principal asked me about my project, "So you have an algorithm?". I had to respond, "Well, yes, but by itself an algorithm doesn't have much to recommend it and, thus, doesn't mean much.".

Well, this list of 10 algorithms supports my observation: For a problem as complicated as those solved by the 10 algorithms in the list, an algorithm by itself doesn't mean much, really doesn't mean anything. Instead, to take any such algorithm seriously, we need something we can take seriously and logically prior to the algorithm.

Well, as in the 10 algorithms, what is prior is just some applied math, typically with theorems and proofs. Then due to the theorems and proofs, we take the applied math seriously. Then we take the algorithm seriously because and only because it is a careful implementation of the data manipulations in the applied math. So, net, what is really crucial for such an algorithm is the logically prior applied math.

Of course, at times we can proceed without any prior applied math and work just with an algorithm that we got, say, from just heuristics. Then we may be able to take the algorithms seriously after a lot of empirical testing.

So, here's my point: For reasonably complicated problems, the key is some applied math, and we take a corresponding algorithm seriously only because of the logically prior applied math.

Or, computer science: The most important work with algorithms is work with logically prior applied math complete with theorems and proofs. Work with algorithms without such prior applied math is close to hopeless.

Venture firms and limited partners: If an entrepreneur has some crucial, core 'secret sauce' in running code that can be called an 'algorithm', what is crucial (prior to already having a financially successful company based on that code) is the corresponding applied math, not the 'algorithm' and not just the code.

Information technology entrepreneurs: If your business is trying to solve a serious problem with an algorithms and some corresponding code, then don't start with the algorithm and, instead, start with some applied math.

Computer science students: If you want to do good work with algorithms, study appropriate topics in a math department, not 'algorithms' in a computer science department.

Computer science professors: Algorithms are crucial to your field, but your approach to algorithms skipping prior applied math complete with theorems and proofs is bankrupt, with no good reason to take any such algorithm seriously, and will lead to a long walk on a short pier and blocked progress for your field. What's just crucial for your interest in algorithms is in the math department and not in your department. Sorry 'bout that!

<comment><USER10> It's an article from SIAM. Of course it's heavily biased towards applied mathematics. It's not only biased against computer science, it's biased against pure mathematics. Do you doubt that Buchberger's algorithm will reverberate down through the millenia? Even within applied mathematics, the list leaves out multigrid methods, the only linear-time algorithms in their class, which seem a shoe-in given their criteria for inclusion.

It would hardly be difficult to make a very long list of pure CS algorithms and data structures that could stand head to head against the likes of the multipole method in both industrial application and scientific value.

Your knowledge of computer science is evidently shallow. Educate yourself and you might think twice before making such ignorant pronouncements.

<comment><USER11> I wonder what proportion of "pure" CS algorithms can be conceptualized as an application of one of the fixed point theorems and/or properties of monotone operators. There has got to be _something_ useful about the functional analysis perspective and people doing serious work in algorithms are certainly familiar with it as a group.

<comment><USER10> > I wonder what proportion of "pure" CS algorithms can be conceptualized as an > application of one of the fixed point theorems and/or properties of monotone > operators.

You might enjoy [http://www.amazon.com/Graphs-Dioids-Semirings-Algorithms- Ope...](http://www.amazon.com/Graphs-Dioids-Semirings-Algorithms- Operations/dp/0387754490). It has some cool ideas, but you'll first have to wade through a sea of abstract nonsense a la Bourbaki.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best e-commerce solution for an online record label? - <AUTHOR>

I've been asked to help put together an e-commerce store for an online music label. They are popular within a niche genre and those who know them are likely to visit their site so providing sales directly from it seems wise. In return for my efforts they are willing to offer me a cut of their profits.
Having done a bit of research my options seem to be:
- Write a site from scratch using Codeigniter - Use Joomla + Virtuemart (open source) - X-Cart (a framework with licensing charges of around 200 dollars a year) - Try to find an existing solution from the 100s of hosted services (most of which seem unreasonably expensive and inflexible)
Although I'm fairly comfortable with writing my own simple projects with codeigniter I'm daunted by the task of writing a full ecommerce solution with payment facilities, security issues, etc. I have no prior experience and I feel that the time spent learning how to put a solution together might be better spent concentrating on the business side.
What's best for me? Are there alternative options I've missed? <comment><USER2> Have you considered just putting together something that ties together the amazon shopping APIs and a blog. If your client is making cds and getting the UPC/EANs it should be trivial to sign up for amazon services and this has the added benefit that your product becomes available through amazon itself and through the various shopping formats they make available.

this link <http://bit.ly/yaIpc> goes to the sign up page. From looking at it you need at leas the pro version if you want to create new products.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good suggestion. They currently sell CDs and vinyl through traditional distributors. They might also sell other merchandise too. Amazon would be a good way of tying it up.

The only objection might be is that they are part of a very independent/non- corporate scene which might see using Amazon as "selling-out" (not my view, but some people seem to think like this...). Still, Amazon's definitely something to investigate, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> are you going to hit the China market? email me at paul.pajo [at] asiapay [dot] com - we also have some turn-key solutions ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the interest, but at the moment the focus is on Europe, US and Canada.</comment></comment>


Craigslist Shuts Down International "Adult Services" Sections - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/12/craigslist-adult-services-international/ <comment><USER2> I'm hopeful that someone on HN will provide a substitute shortly.</comment>


Ask HN: Should i put online courses in my resume? - <AUTHOR> I take a lot of online courses to keep my skills good, seeing the bad quality of education we have in my country, i find that online courses that i have taken contributed to my personal development more than my university courses, however i don't know if i should list such a thing on my resume, I am EE student and i have taken a lot of OS and Algorithms classes that i am pretty much comfortable explaining the concepts with full details but that can't be seen on my resume, you think i should list such things on resume ? <comment><USER2> Yes, but don't over-sell it. Just throw it into an "other education" or "continued education" sections.

It should be something someone reading your resume nods at but doesn't challenge you about in the interview. A lot of people continue to view education as: "if there is no qualification it didn't happen." So you'll find people (particularly older people) asking you what qualification you got then outright discounting the entire thing if you got none.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would recommend doing it if you already have a lot of white space on your resume. If you don't, then I wouldn't bother, as personal projects have more value than online classes.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, put all of the ones you feel comfortable talking about (being asked questions on) down.

If there's a manager that knows about MOOCs, they'll notice.

If there's a manager that doesn't know about MOOCs, they'll either gratefully receive a new thing to try, or will not care.

I don't see a downside.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would only put courses that lead to a degree on my resume under the Education section. If you have extra knowledge that you want to mention, a Qualification section would be the best place to add a line about it in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes.

It indicates to employers that you have an inherent drive to learn things (i.e. beyond what is required as part of your formal education). And that is a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Some comments talk about "resumé" while others talk about CVs.

It depends on which country you're in and where you're applying.

US-style resumés are VERY different from, say, European-style Curriculum Vitaes (also used in 3rd world countries like mine).

In a CV, I would definitely add them. In an US-style resumé, I'm not so sure how they fit (seems like UnoriginalGuy has some good advice)

</comment><comment><USER8> It depends on what your degree is. If you have a CS degree (or other degree where this course should have been taken), putting Introduction to Algorithm course makes you look unprofessional. The same happens, if you have math heavy degree and have Introduction to Calculus course.

</comment><comment><USER9> Depends on the class. There's a series of excellent Coursera Scala courses taught by the creator of the language, those will stay on my resume for a while.

</comment><comment><USER10> It shows an interest in refining your craft in your personal time, but as other posters have said, don't oversell it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes, if it's important to you then you should try and find an employer that values it, hence it should go on your CV.</comment>


Old English Wikipedia (or at least I think it is) - <AUTHOR> https://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C4%93afodtramet <comment><USER2> There's a modern English introduction here, under "Help": [https://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Inno%C3%BE](https://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Inno%C3%BE)

</comment><comment><USER3> See also the anglish wiki which imagines a more Germanic English with made up Germanic words replacing French, Latin, etc. [https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Main_leaf](https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Main_leaf)

</comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone have good resources for learning Old English? I have Mitchell and Robinson's "A Guide to Old English" from a college course I took years ago but it's a little old-fashioned and I've found it less than ideal for self-study. I have to imagine there are internet based resources that could help with the oral aspects as well.

<comment><USER5> I like King Alfred's Grammar ([https://people.umass.edu/sharris/in/gram/GrammarBook/KAGramm...](https://people.umass.edu/sharris/in/gram/GrammarBook/KAGrammar.html)). It's designed as an intro (and actually suggests Mitchell & Robinson as a followup) but it's well done. Not that much coverage of oral stuff, but unless you have a time machine you haven't told us about, that's not really the reason people study pre-modern languages.

<comment><USER6> My understanding is that aside from what can be inferred from meter / rhyme in poetry, nobody really knows pronunciation before a certain date. Is that correct? If so, what is "that date"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Vicipaediam is nice too [https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicipaedia:Pagina_prima](https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicipaedia:Pagina_prima)</comment>


Ask HN: How to handle a cease and desist? - <AUTHOR> I'm a solo developer and have a successful SaaS business. I've received a cease and desist from a very large company my product works on top of.
For people that have similar experience, should you take a cease and desist email serious, or wait until an actual injunction has been filed?
I honestly don't believe my service breaks any laws, but I obviously can't battle one of the largest companies in the world all by myself.
I don't want to shut down my business because I received an email that could very well be a scare tactic. What should I expect next? I assume an injunction that demands I stop the service and/or battle it in court? <comment><USER3> In the US, copyright damages are basically profits made times a multiplier based in willfullness. Once you have received a cease and desist letter, any further copyright infringement gets mega-multiplied damages.

Other areas of the law work similarly with big increases for willfulness.

One example is Hulk hogan vs the-media-company-that-will-not-be-named. Not only did they not remove the video after a cease and desist, they also refused a judge's orders. This led to epic damages in the final court ruling - <USER2> million and it put them out of business.

So this is something that cannot be lightly ignored. If you do anything other than stop doing whatever the other company is mad about, you absolutely need to check with a lawyer first.

This will cost money. I'm sorry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the detailed answer-- I assume an email from said company would constitute a "cease and desist letter" although it was not signed by a judge, etc?

The email essentially said I have 72 hours to cease or they will pursue legal action.

<comment><USER3> Correct - they just have to notify you. It does not have to be signed by a judge.

They may or may not be bluffing about 72 hours, but if you decide to continue you need to have talked to a lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The most honest answer you're going to get is the one you already suspect you will: get a lawyer, and don't underestimate how easy it is for $EVIL_CORP to bury most people or orgs with legal costs alone however unjustifiable (or not) the cause for their ire might be.

</comment><comment><USER5> Lawyer up. Only legal advice will help you here. I would remove this post.</comment>


Show HN: TidyFinder - <AUTHOR> http://tidyfinder.com

<comment><USER4> Assuming this is to make some actual money, and not just a proof of concept -- sites like this live or die on the strength of their SEO. People need to find it when they're searching Google for storage products.

You need an individual product page with its own URL for every item, and you need a strategy for getting inbound links, including to those deep product pages. You need content on those pages - reviews and ratings (scrape Amazon, maybe, or product catalogues).

In other words, to make some cash out of this (and the five gajillion other sites you could set up in other niche verticals), you have to content spam the holy hell out of the Internet. Not something friendly to the HN crowd, but that's what works.

Once you've done that, and you have some traffic, you can sell CPC traffic to online stores in exchange for favorable placement. And once you've done _that_ , you're probably making enough money to start measuring the expected value of a user for each inbound search term and buying more, paid traffic - <USER2> when your SEO doesn't have you in position #1.

And then you'll have a comparison shopping site, which can print money - <USER3> Google updates its search engine and pulls the rug out from under you. Print the money, but put it in your pocket.

Immediate steps for expanding your product selection / hopefully making more cash - most of the major comparison shopping sites today have affiliate product feeds.

<comment><USER5> Thank you very much!

 _"content spam the holy hell out of the Internet"_

How? (In what way would you go about doing that?)

<comment><USER4> Well, back in the day, it was stuff like setting up blogs that linked back to your site, making somewhat-relevant blog comments elsewhere, submissions to directories, issuing 'press releases', making forum posts (especially with signature links), making somewhat-relevant contributions to wikis, 'contributing' to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, providing somewhat- relevant answers on Yahoo! Answers, you get the idea. If you could stick a link in it, you stuck a link in it.

For all I know any or all of these tactics could _currently_ be the search engine kiss of death - so don't do any of them without doing your research first. Search engines have probably gotten a wee bit smarter.

The other, more ethical way to do it is to produce great content (reviews, tutorials, photo shoots, etc.) that people might actually want to link to of their own free will, but this is time-consuming and hard to scale up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This thread is useless without Ikea.

But seriously, Ikea's EXPEDIT series should be in here, at the very least, and considering they have a whole "Storage Furniture" section, is a better target than Target.

        Storage furniture:

        Pantry
        Wardrobes
        Bed storage
        Headboards
        Nightstands
        Dressing tables
        Bookcases
        Cabinets & sideboards
        Chests of drawers
        Clothes storage systems
        Drawer units
        DVD & CD furniture
        Filing cabinets
        Heavy duty storage systems
        Shelving units
        TV stands & media solutions
        Wall shelves

I was planning to drive to Ikea tomorrow and was thinking about a search that would show me the options that fit the wall space in question.

Your app is great -- just needs the goods.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many retailers aren't on the site. Target and Amazon are the first I added, but I felt it was good enough to release and get some feedback.

<comment><USER6> This is feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Many times I go shopping for something relatively expensive where I don't know exactly what I want. In almost every case I am disappointed with the typical online research/purchasing decision and wish there were way more intelligent vertical shopping engines.

Recently I can think of this happening to me for video cameras, regular camera, honeymoon spots, projectors, health insurance, apartments, outdoor camping gear, etc. Flight & hotel search has made real progress in the last couple years here but there's still tons of opportunity.

I can't say this category of items is super important to me, but I certainly welcome the idea of making purchasing anything online smarter/easier. With so many affiliate programs out there they should also lead to decent/good businesses.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've worked on elaborate projects with the goal of world domination over the past few years, and all have failed. Now, I'm working on building a portfolio of smaller apps to slowly build passive income (with the potential for a big win).

TidyFinder is the first step towards that goal. I'd appreciate any feedback/criticism/suggestions that you can offer. I value the HN community's thoughts. Thanks.

<comment><USER7> Would love to hear some details on how you built it / got your data

<comment><AUTHOR> Some basic details below, maybe I'll write a blog post with more thorough descriptions...

App and scrapers are written in Python with MongoDB storage. I was pleasantly surprised with MongoDB's query speed given I only index keywords. There are a small number of products in the database, but its still very fast.

To get the data I've created scrapers for each site. Currently, only Target and Amazon are implemented (with Container Store soon to come). Target and Container Store provide a product feed when you sign up as an affiliate. They FTP their product info to your site and I use that to parse the links. Using each link, I then scrape the page to store the relevant information for various products in the database. Amazon provides a nice API and there is a Python wrapper which makes it easy to query (python-amazon-product-api).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is storage furniture the best niche for this? I wouldn't know, since I'm not in the market for that, but I don't think the pain of comparison shopping in that subset is particularly high (I could be wrong of course). Another slight foible - how often does someone buy a dresser? You only have a brief window to acquire a user between the time they decide to buy but before they make the purchase. The polar opposite would be something like diapers where parents purchase on a regular basis. Are there any niches more like that?

<comment><AUTHOR> These are all good questions, of which I don't have answers for (yet). I created this in response to my cousin (a professional organizer) complaining about finding products within certain dimensions. If she had this problem, I figured others might to. Only time will tell if this will actually provide value, but its certainly not all dressers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this just furniture? I searched 3-6 x 7-9 x .5-1.5, which is about the size of art supply box I was looking for a while back, and it couldn't find anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, this is not just furniture. It is everything in Storage & Organization categories from Target and Amazon. I'm not sure whether the art supply box fits that category, but I'd hope so. I do not have the dimensions for all products as they are not always formatted identically on product pages, and my parser is fairly dumb at the moment.

As people may notice, there are some issues with the dimensions search. For instance: how do you differentiate between width/height/depth when there is no real "front" of the product. The dimensions depend on the orientation the user expects, not necessarily what is stored in the DB.

These are both issues I hope to fix, but at the moment I still think it performs fairly well. (and will improve)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Kinda cool- it's clean and very focused. Reminds me of <http://milo.com/>, but more specific.

</comment><comment><USER11> Pretty cool.

Make the price adjuster control move in increments of at least $10 (maybe $100).</comment>


Want to download anime? Just made a program for that - <AUTHOR> http://www.rm2kdev.net/anime-download-manager/

<comment><USER2> Or for same price can get a month of crunchyroll and legally support the studios while enjoying 1080p videos on demand. I have some guest passes backed up if anyone is interested

<comment><USER3> Would love a guest pass!

<comment><USER2> MZ35G7VYQ5R, 7DZ6G7FB3MU, LDMBCGAYRGD, UGE5SE9TNWE

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be nice to see some details beyond just a couple screenshots and a "Download Trial Here!" link. Charging for this kind of thing also seems a bit dishonest.

Are you hosting all the content yourself? If so, there may be legal issues as well as scaling issues. Otherwise, just making this a frontend for existing ddl/xdcc/torrents seems again rather dishonest. I'd personally prefer to go track a download down myself at the quality and sub group that I prefer.

Might be good for people who just want to click and be able to watch a show without the hassle, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello! no I don't host the content myself the application acts as a search engine / index for content that a spider aggregates from the internet. However having seen a lot of the feedback thus far I'm going to make an update to the application that adds more transparency about where the video is being sourced from and downloaded from. it basically connects to streams from about 8 different websites where the users who upload the content have agreed to have the rights to do so and extracts the video links then downloads and manages the folders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now plug it into hummingbird.me's API for episode tracking.

I don't see anywhere in the screenshots about it allowing you to pick the subbing group, though?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To all: The application merely acts as a search engine / agrigator for publicly available content hosted on sites such as youtube, dailymotion etc.

Its a search engine, as for legality, the users who upload the videos have agreed to having the required rights to upload said content.

The site / application are not affiliated with any of these users and merely scan, index and organize content that is publically available elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think this is along the same argument that a lock pick isn't illegal but picking a lock might be illegal.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't see the crack, where is it ?

</comment><comment><USER8> Pretty cool, but is it legal?

<comment><USER9> Most likely not. Until evidence is presented that proves otherwise it would be smart to assume it isn't private either. Doing it yourself with a Seed Box is the secure(r) way. I echo the "cool" sentiment though.

<comment><USER10> Using seedboxes is also part of being a good torrent neighbor -- most private trackers have upload ratio requirements. These requirements are infinitely easier to meet when using a seedbox.</comment></comment></comment>


How I turned a coding challenge fail into a job offer - <AUTHOR> http://www.nujob.co.uk/blog/You-have-45-minutes-to-complete-the-coding-challenge!?id=59308

<comment><USER2> Good article, I feel your pain when you got the notice of failure. It's a lot of blood sweat and tears that go into coding challenges. Much more than some companies realise, 5 days to respond is bad manners in my book.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers - definitely not 45 minutes when they say 45 minutes either are they! Plus you probably have two or three on the go at the same time.</comment></comment>


Topology: IBM's Mathematica Peep Shows - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTJ_tjVJBf4 <comment><USER2> So that's where the ray casting point in polygon algorithm comes from.</comment>