A low-mass planet candidate orbiting Proxima Centauri - <AUTHOR> https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/3/eaax7467 <comment><USER2> 1.5 AU from Proxima (so 50% farther than earth is from the sun), which is itself much less luminous than the sun? I'd imagine it's a very, very cold planet and receives many times less light than earth does.

Neat to find a planet, but it doesn't sound like one humans would want to have much to do with.

<comment><USER3> Plus at 5.8 times (+-1.9) Earth's mass it's only low mass compared to most extrasolar planets.

Still, there may be life that's happy with slow and heavy.

<comment><USER4> Keep in mind that surface gravity depends very much on density. The earth is pretty dense, having a core of mostly iron. Even a rocky planet can be a lot less dense if it's iron-poor, and so could have a reasonable surface gravity (by our standards) even if several times the earth's mass.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. I learned this the hard way when I made some claim to a political science roommate about the local acceleration due to gravity near one of the outer planets and was corrected and embarrassed. It's easy to forget that gravitation is the result of many tiny things all pulling on each other, not just a few big and small things.

I looked through the paper and didn't see anything about the radius of the planet candidate. I suppose it's quite difficult to determine it from so far away. Is a value known? If so, that would obviously give a good idea about the local _g_.

<comment><USER6> The radius is often not known. Radius is found most easily with transiting exoplanets, which are easy to detect but also only visible if you're lined up along the plane of the exoplanet's orbit.

You can also possibly find it via imaging, but even then, since you can't directly resolve it better than a point light source, you're making assumptions about albedo that lead to a wide dispersion in possible radii. High resolution optical imaging would require a telescope roughly 1-2km in diameter. Pretty tough... and because of the glare of the star, would be nearly impossible to image with an interferometric (i.e. non-filled-aperture) telescope since the light gather power would be so low. However, astronomers are incredibly clever at pulling data out of tiny points of light, so there may be some way.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for this, it's quite interesting.

I have a friend who used to work in a lab doing super-resolution microscopy (i.e. beating the diffraction limit by various means) for use with bio/medical applications. Some of the techniques he told me about have to do with more or less taking lots of data from many images and assembling it all into something meaningful. I suppose what you're describing as "pulling data out of tiny points of light" is kind of the same thing. It's just that the scale is different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Trisolaran home world

</comment><comment><USER8> I get excited every time I hear about a possible habitable planet, but after 10 seconds I remember that this means nothing and will mean nothing for a few centuries as we won't be able to reach any other planet that's billions of kilometers away.

<comment><USER9> Some sort of cryogenic hibernation for space travel is not unrealistic within the next few decades.

[https://www.airspacemag.com/space/hibernation-for-space- voya...](https://www.airspacemag.com/space/hibernation-for-space- voyages-180962394/)

<comment><USER10> Even with that I hope we get to see missions where they send unmanned craft in that direction in my lifetime. I mean it's still only Voyager and New Horizons (afaik) that have been sent on a trajectory out of our own solar system on purpose. (faux edit: looking up the wiki page, it's the 5th to escape the solar system).

An unmanned mission would probably have to go even faster, and probably has to be a bigger craft with better on-board power supply (with backups) and a big communications array. Maybe it would even need similar craft following it after a while to form a chain of communications relays on their way out.

<comment><USER11> Nitpick: 5th to reach solar escape velocity. New Horizons, Pioneer 10, and Pioneer 11 have not passed the heliopause yet, which is usually considered the "boundary" of the solar system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sid Meier's Proxima Centauri

<comment><USER13> Related HN discussion I guess [1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21901268](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21901268)</comment></comment>


What 1967 Thought 2001 Would Look Like - <AUTHOR> http://mentalfloss.com/article/48739/what-1967-thought-2001-would-look

<comment><USER2> Jeffrey Tucker's "It's a Jetson's World" < [http://mises.org/document/6528/Its-a-Jetsons-World- Private-M...](http://mises.org/document/6528/Its-a-Jetsons-World-Private- Miracles-and-Public-Crimes>); has a few chapters that discuss how technology in current times are in some ways much better than imagined in a futuristic fantasy world.

The book is available there for free -- there are some articles that some many not agree with politically, so pick the chapters you want to read first :)</comment>


Hitsuzendō - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitsuzend%C5%8D <comment><USER2> That was a disappointing lack of examples and comparisons to "regular" calligraphy

</comment><comment><USER3> So that's where the AMD Zen icon[1] comes from.

[1] [https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/zen- core](https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/zen-core)

</comment><comment><USER4> This can equally be achieved through computer science

<comment><USER5> ...what can? the "vitality of eternal experience"?

<comment><USER4> Yes, before the downvote army begins their barrage, the attainment of enlightened wisdom can be reached through many means and computer science is a sublime form of art and logic which contains many universal truths and can create very complex forms of understanding within the human mind

<comment><USER6> I don't necessarily subscribe to your viewpoint, but upvoted you anyway.

Downvotes makes sense for pure flamebait or trolling.

But carpet-bombing somebody with whom I don't agree for the sake of disagreement alone is just sad.

<comment><USER7> HN has become Reddit in that regard, even though they obviously tried to be different by enabling downvoting only for accounts with high karma, and disabling downvotes on a comment after 1~ day, but now they're shying away from discussion on this system.

It's easy to farm karma; just jump on the "winning" bandwagon during any polarizing discussions (usually politics, FAAMNG royal rumbles or PC vs. Mac)

Too many accounts have enough karma to downvote now, and too many perfectly valid comments being grayed out.

Maybe add another criteria like needing to be active in the last week and getting at least N new karma recently?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Killer Product - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/id/135150 <comment><USER2> Talking about stopbadware.org, he mentions this is what he's trying to do:

"It's stuff you download to your machine that reports back its vital signs and running code to the rest of the herd. Then I can ask the herd, before I run new software, how many other people in the herd are running it. We'll be able to figure out several things, like how many self-described experts are running it versus clueless people, when the herd first encountered it, and is it brand new. That will help users decide if they even want to run the code."

\----

This is a pretty useful scenario. There's a fantastic startup idea, no doubt, in that as well-- to replace Windows's "Do you trust this program" UI with something that uses the knowledge of all the other people using the same software. Maybe someone here might want to run with it? A small group of talented hackers could probably put out a better product and really get it in the hands of users.

I look forward to reading his book, but I hope he takes time to really delve into the issue of how openness is at odds with great user experience. At the end of the day, great products can only be achieved through razor-sharp attention to detail. This usually means from within one organization, and there must be hard but fair rules for 3rd parties.

Look at what Apple has been assuring by semi-closing their iPhone through a rigorous app approval process -- they're trying to assure that apps sold are solid and not buggy. You won't miss calls because of some errant game you download.

In an era of increasing device and software complexity, that type of peace of mind just might be worth a walled garden.</comment>


Simpleflake - Distributed ID generation for the lazy - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.custommade.com/simpleflake-distributed-id-generation-for-the-lazy/

<comment><USER2> Though this is a great idea ( similar to one I had created in the past) there is a major problem I think users should be aware of, concurrency.

Usually using a ID generating system is used when data needs to be shared or asking for an ID from a database is just not an option. It is not typically used in small environments.

I think this solution has an upper bar of effectiveness that is just to low for the problem this is trying to solve. The use of a pseudo random number generator ( python's random module) is too vulnerable to not generating "random" numbers and so many collisions can occur at high concurrency.

Most pseudo random number generators usually are seeded with the time on the host system. As stated in the docs, the best way to use simpleflake is to setup NTP so all the servers times are in sync, the random module on all the servers/processes could be seeded with the same time ( like after a code push). If all the servers get seeded with the same time and the objects being operated on take a uniform time the probability of collisions go up and slow down all processes trying to interact with the objects, as they generate new IDs. As new Ids are being generated you lose the time sort that you originally wanted by including the time in the ID.

I do not mean this to be insulting. I am speaking from experience from having debugged a problem caused the the ID generator at the company I formerly worked for. We used a similar generation technique to identify messages passing through the system, but we included more meta data in our IDs such as sender and recipient of the message and even the server name. With all of that when we ran 150 processes on a 4 core server, there was a .01% of collisions, but that jump significantly once the servers were upgraded to 16 core machines and at that point in the process there was no way to regenerate a new ID, the data was simply dropped out of existence.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, this is pretty insightful and not insulting at all - I always love hearing about the experiences of others.

The RNG being used is not the random.random() Mersenne Twister one, it's the OS-provided cryptographically secure one:

[https://github.com/SawdustSoftware/simpleflake/blob/master/s...](https://github.com/SawdustSoftware/simpleflake/blob/master/simpleflake.py#L48)

But in any case, the reason you need NTPd sync is not to seed the RNG, but because the IDs themselves are prefixed with millisecond timestamps. This is to ensure that you're not using the same sub-keyspace for that millisecond over and over again from multiple processes.

If you're seeing that many collisions, obviously, it's time to change methods like you mention. Data being dropped out of existence sounds like an application code issue, and not an inherent problem with your IDing scheme. That sounds like a place where ops should get a big honking error message ("tried to insert twice, collided both times"). In any case, the contingency plan for that for us is to just switch to snowflake, since with this specific scheme it should take a while before we hit that barrier, as calculated in the article.

Adding more metadata is definitely an option, but I'm not a fan of it since data schemas (and data itself) have a nasty habit of changing over time, meaning you have to change your IDing scheme. Completely surrogate IDs don't have this issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The arguments against UUID just don't seem strong enough to me.

Even with huge datasets queries against UUID keys/indices have never been any kind of bottle neck or major performance hit compared with other more complex queries within the application.

Add that to the fact db's like Postgres have native support for UUID types and stable extensions for UUID1-4 generation, I just could not see myself wanting to sacrifice such a well known solution for one that offers such slight gains.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for commenting! I think DB support is great. I'm especially jealous of postgres, which like you mention, has native UUID types. UUID-OSSP is especially great: [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/uuid- ossp.html](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/uuid-ossp.html)

Postgres handles all the gunk for you in terms of efficient storage and display, AND you can cluster by a different field than the UUID one.

For those of us not unfortunate enough to be using a DB that has such niceties, things are different :)

As for performance I think this will always depend on your what your queries look like. For random reads or for reads when your dataset is not larger than RAM, you won't see any degradation because of caching. But if you need to make tons of range queries on a dataset that doesn't fit in RAM (or even worse, the _index_ doesn't fit in RAM), things can get a bit crazy.

I wish I had time to also do a benchmark supporting this, but I've hit this issue before. Other people also seem to have hit it here:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2365132/uuid- performance-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2365132/uuid-performance- in-mysql) (comments and answers)

or here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5310662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5310662)

or here:

[http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/03/13/to-uuid-or- no...](http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/03/13/to-uuid-or-not-to-uuid/)

So, it really depends on your use case, I guess. Hope this helps!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> MongoDB ObjectID's are designed with similar goal in mind - time based, distributed, uncoordinated, "probably" unique: [http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/object- id/](http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/object-id/)

I say "probably" unique because they depend on the 'machine identifier' being unique, which the ruby driver implements by grabbing the first 3 bytes of the hostname's md5 hash.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep! In essence, this is not too different. I think the main difference is that ObjectIDs are 96 bytes vs simpleflake / snowflake's 64, which fit into standard DB types better. (Don't have to muck around with BINARY and such).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for this, I had been looking for a good/simple ID generator in Python and was about to resort to building it myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I loved your article on partially applied functions in C, by the way (that was you, right?)

<comment><USER5> Nope, that wasn't me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What about simply having one do odd and the other even?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, fair point! I think this would definitely work, but only in the case where you have just two things (or in the more general case, a fixed number of things based on modulo n) generating IDs.

You're essentially dividing your keyspace into two from the beginning. So then, to add another generator, you'd have to have a scheme that transparently updates all of your generator nodes to do mod 1 mod 2 mod 3 etc.

It definitely could work though, if that's what you need.</comment></comment>


TestFlight Pulls Off Awesome Gorilla Marketing Hack  - <AUTHOR> http://infochachkie.com/guerrilla/

<comment><USER2> Title mis-quoted, it should be "Guerrilla", as in a small fighting group battling a larger force, or, in this case, a small and cheap but effective marketing effort in a advertising culture dominated by big media and AdWords.</comment>


Show HN: Learn Algorithms by Solving Challenges - <AUTHOR> https://www.learneroo.com/subjects/8

<comment><USER2> I think its cool, I never got the chance to go into depth in algorithms because my university never offered the course (what a shame). Thanks for making this.

</comment><comment><USER3> proof-read please! two errors on the first sentence alone ^^ _intenntionaly,_ inaccessable.

*introductary

and so on. I'd love to read the book when it's ready. Good luck!</comment>


Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails - <AUTHOR> https://futurism.com/mailchimp-is-shutting-down-ico-and-blockchain-related-emails-and-people-are-freaking-out/ <comment><AUTHOR> When Facebook banned blockchain-related ads it was understandable - they are a closed platform and can chose to accept whatever content they decide to.

When Google banned blockchain-related ads it was a much more serious issue - millions of websites are supported by Google ads through AdSense and AdX. Google is the main revenue source of the vast majority of publishers on the open internet. It seems incredibly unfair to punish researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiasts for a technology that is used by millions of people.

What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not.

A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott. My company is a Mailchimp customer and has never sent an email mentioning blockchains, ICOs, or anything related, but this news means that we will never use them again.

<comment><USER3> Strongly disagree. A cornerstone of Mailchimp's value proposition is its email deliverability, and its one of the best in the industry at landing emails in people's inboxes. Anything that could compromise that reputation would be a huge blow to their business. ICO and blockchain emails can make spam filters go crazy, I've seen this first-hand. Mailchimp can't control how spam filters work, but it can control, in a broad sense, how it permits customers to utilize their platform.

Mailchimp shouldn't fall on its sword and harm the delivery of its thousands of customers because some people like the blockchain.

<comment><USER4> A middle-ground alternative might be to say, "Hey, delivering blockchain/ICO emails costs _us_ _n_ % more than your average email. Therefore, we will still deliver them, but at _n_ % the usual price."

It's a little like UPS/FedEx charging more for hazardous-material shipping.

If _n_ is large, it will have a similar effect without feeling like MailChimp is out to censor cryptocurrency.

<comment><USER5> The problem is that the cost of Blockchain / ICO spam does not just fall on Mailchimp as a company, it falls on MailChimp's customers, who have to suffer through reduced email deliverability (for the same cost they are already paying).

Other than that, MailChimp is a private company, not the government, and can damn well serve who they want.

<comment><USER6> They could use a dedicated shard of their IP addresses for sending high risk emails.

<comment><USER5> But why should they? Doing that brings very little upside for MailChimp and a lot of potential downside if Google decides to blacklist MailChimp's entire IP range.

And then they have to devote engineering / moderation resource to routing emails to the correct IP shard.

<comment><USER7> So charge more?

<comment><USER5> SaaS businesses operate on volume - they don't make margin by offering custom engineering to anyone who asks for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a lot of handwringing over whether Mailchimp did the right/wrong/good/bad/neutral thing, or why ICOs in particular.

But ICOs did this to themselves. This is the collateral damage from our terrible stewardship of Blockchain and cryptotoken reputations.

In the sprint to massive investments and skirting regulation, the whole cryptotoken space collectively harmed it's whole reputation. Fraud, scams, poor security -> hacks, flagrant money and securities crimes, etc; the list keeps growing! That collateral damage is why Google, Facebook, Mailchimp, and many others are pulling out of this. The winds of winter are howling for cryptotokens because we weren't stewards of our collective reputation. Who would _want_ to operate in such a cesspool?

A lot of people will reference the Dot Bomb era, but a more fitting example would be the Video Game Market Crash of 1983 [1]. After Atari vs Activision opened the floodgates, loads of low quality but expensive games flooded the market. ET is the crowning turd, but that was atop a pyramid of turds. Customers, unsatisfied with the products they bought, deserted the market en masse and games disappeared for two years.

Both video games and cryptotokens have very low economic utility. Nobody wants to play a bad game, much less pay full price for it. Nobody wants to have a useless token, much less pay a high premium for it.

The classic Market For Lemons is setting in. As customers leave the space, stung by these lemon tokens, the reputable providers will start to exit the space as well. Mailchimp, Google, and Facebook are some of those reputable providers that left. They don't want to be associated with the taint ICOs are leaking from every pore.

Winter came, and it was us.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983)

<comment><USER9> My preferred analogy is with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania) : enough fraud can collapse a country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > We asked a few more questions about how MailChimp can actually delineate > between emails from people involved in the shilling and profiteering of > blockchain and ICOs versus people having news-related discussions of > blockchain and ICOs (because, LOL, in the current moment, most non- > algorithmic humans have a justifiably tough time distinguishing between the > two)

The fact they can't is of course the _most obvious justification for_ a blanket ban on hosting mailing lists focused on a topic which frequently involves securities marketing campaigns of questionable legality even when not outright scams.

Their AUP policy also discriminates against "work from home" and credit repair services for the much the same reasons; it's really not worth their effort trying to scrutinise which services aren't shady when so many of them are for a few bucks a month in mailing list fees. That's especially the case for a business like MailChimp whose continued existence also depends on staying on the right side of spam filtering services.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised they claimed the issue was legality and not deliverability.

I still get ICO emails that slip through from time to time and they always get marked as spam.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sentopia.net founder here, I don't believe this is just Mailchimp, we have received a warning from Paypal entitled "Cryptocurrency warning." where it states "(...)we noticed that your activity involves the trading or transfer of crypto currency which is prohibited under our Acceptable Use Policy. As this is not permitted on the PayPal platform we ask that you cease any activity that results in the trading or transfer of crypto currency."

We are a digital marketing business.. we don't trade or transfer any crypto, so this can only be because several of our customers have sent blockchain related campaigns and the campaign title shows up on Paypal's product description on checkout. If this is the case, then it doesn't seem fair at all.

Edit: we have no plans to restrict crypto related campaigns for our current or new customers.

</comment><comment><USER13> Every time something like this happens when company XZ decides they will block any content about YX or people associated with it, there's always a lot of discussion about it being considered censorship or why it isn't because they aren't the government but instead a business.

I don't really understand where the line is drawn though in censorship/discrimination. This mailchimp case is a really bad example but it's on the topic which has been coming up very frequently over the last year where we have seen a lot of sites like Google, Youtube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter banning topics/people/content from their platform.

I'm wondering how close they get to the case of the infamous bakery people who were determined to be illegally discriminating against the gay couple for not making them a wedding cake [0]. I'm curious when one of these bans is going to be challenged in court and what might happen as a result.

[0] [https://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally- discriminat...](https://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally- discriminated-against-gay-couple/)

</comment><comment><USER14> It makes more sense if you consider that accounts relating more directly to cryptocurrencies and ICOs are juicier targets for spear-phishers, which makes Mailchimp a target for social engineering and direct intrusion.

If there is an account that announces a sale on semigloss paint at Brick'N'Mortar's this Saturday, that's not much for Mr. Blackhat to work with. If there's an account that announces that phase 2 of their ICO is going live this Saturday, Mr. Blackhat might want to hack in and send out an "update" just as that is happening, to trick people into sending Bitcoin into his own account, while also preventing legit e-mails from going out.

It's not just that ICOs and cryptocurrency mailings are more likely to be spam. Information-based money transfer systems allow manipulation of information to be more easily monetized, which puts an information- dissemination hub at greater risk.

</comment><comment><USER15> Not sure why people are so upset with Mailchimp when they are simply reacting to what the _blacklist_ operators do, which is their whole value proposition. They don't want to send content that triggers blacklists, whether that content is for ICOs or Beanie Babies.

Shouldn't the ire be directed at the blacklists?

</comment><comment><USER16> People are getting real confused about "blockchain" as a technology and several specific use cases (cryptocurrencies and ICOs). The article seems to only draw a distinction between crpto and news about crypto.

Is Mailchimp banning all blockchain related content, or just cryptos and ICO- related content?

</comment><comment><USER17> So now there will be blockchain-specific mail deliverability providers? Seems like a straightforward enough business.

21.co/Earn (the pivot to bounty-paid spam inbox) is interesting, but not a great implementation of the "email anti-botherance bond" idea from the mid-1990s.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think this make sense for Mailchimp. The tweet says in 4 weeks advance which I consider long enough to migrate out.

Mailchimp also doesn't lock you in. It's easy to export contact out. I run a news letter and use Mailchimp to manage subscriptions, but sending email with SES(Export contact out to csv and call out SES). So I know how hard it's to ensure the complain, the bounce rate...

</comment><comment><USER19> Hm.. We use Mailchimp for our rather smallish mailing list at hashcash.io, and we are "producing", so I guess we are about to be slashed..

For other projects recently I started using Mautic + Sovereign Ansible playbooks to setup mail server. You are on your own to get trust from big mail providers, but after that you will have full control over whole process. Probably worth it.

</comment><comment><USER20> What alternatives to Mailchimp would folks recommend? The ideal alternative would have the following desirable components:

\- A reasonable to use API

\- A transactional component (or integrations with Sendgrid/other provider)

\- Not painful to use

<comment><USER21> Big fan of Mailjet (mailjet.com), biggest email provider in the EU and their API powers SF companies like Product Hunt and MileIQ. Both marketing emails and transactional

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I filed two abuse reports with Mailchimp just in the last week over unsolicited ICO mailings. One was for an AIDS vaccine ICO (I don't even know what that means and I don't want to know).

I hear they also shut down some legit blockchain newsletters in this sweep though so that's unfortunate.

</comment><comment><USER23> I would really appreciate it if tech companies stopped acting like everybody's nanny and allowed people to take responsibility for their own actions.

</comment><comment><USER24> Will this affect those who directly signed up for a newsletter?

</comment><comment><USER25> blockchain is a legit technology what's with the hate?

<comment><USER26> Never understood why blockchain is referred to as a "technology".

Do we talk about Red black tree _technology_? Linked list _technology_? That sounds silly, doesn't it?

<comment><USER25> never read a more irrelevant comment actually. no blockchain as a tech is not the silly thing here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm sure there are many people who think this is ok, because it's not the government doing this, but a "private company". Who needs a totalitarian dictatorship when plain old capitalism works as well if not better?

<comment><USER28> The difference is that no one is prohibited from creating a marketing automation (spam) organization to deliver ICO and blockchain information over email. In fact, anyone with an email server can do it. If there is a market for ICO and blockchain related email then MailChimp has just created a business opportunity for someone.

What would be totalitarian is forcing a company like MailChimp to expose itself unwillingly to the ethical and legal liabilities associated with this field.

<comment> vertex-four Actually, not anyone with an email server can do it. That's literally MailChimp's value proposition - that they have servers that are trusted by the major email providers and so have high delivery rates. In order to compete with them, you must ensure that your servers are similarly trusted - <USER2> process by which this happens being an undocumented black box that is different for each email provider, which often involves having personal contacts at those providers.

In other words - there's a high barrier to entry and you can't provide the service at all if you don't have a certain amount of volume to make a certain amount of profit to cover operating costs. Targeting a niche will not provide that volume.

<comment><USER29> And the reason that MailChimp's servers are trusted for delivery to third parties is that they do front-end filtering to keep spammers and scammers off the platform so that third party mail recipients have a reasonable expectation that they can rely upon MailChimp's due diligence legwork. In this case MailChimp is deciding that the vast majority of ICO and Blockchain marketing is spam/scam email and continuing to allow it has a negative impact on those high delivery rates.

Anyone with an email server can try, but given the nature of this particular community it is more likely that this competitor would soon find their email delivery rates hitting 0%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Well, guess I am shutting down my mailchimp account for this reason. I planned on using it for my marketing purposes but I guess I will go with leadpages or DIY.

Anyone have any ideas for alternatives?

<comment><USER31> They've been doing this from the beginning. Are you specifically marketing ICO or crypto?

<comment><USER30> I plan on doing it. Also, my consulting is related to ICO and crypto now so I don't want to be associated with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I thought MailChimp is a forward thinking company and by the looks it's not

<comment><USER33> Forward-thinking?? They basically deliver spam on a large scale.

<comment><USER34> In the spam economy, up is down and left is right. If they used plain understandable language, they'd never be able to look in the mirror.</comment></comment></comment>


Do you prefer your app blinking or upside down - <AUTHOR> http://slashdot.org/submission/2220775/do-you-prefer-your-app-blinking-or-upside-down-video

<comment><AUTHOR> It looked like a simple bug: an OpenGL application that blinks in full screen ([http://www.taodyne.com/shop/en/blog/39-could-someone-at- amd-...](http://www.taodyne.com/shop/en/blog/39-could-someone-at-amd-explain- this)). But the rest of the day was an infuriating tale of Kill All Humans installers and Beware of The Leopard DRM restrictions. And at the end of the day, an unanswered question remains. What kind of driver bug could possibly cause an OpenGL application to blink in full screen, unless the display is rotated?</comment>


NYC hotel wants to use a $400M cryptocoin offering to sell ownership like stock - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/19/kevin-oleary-new-york-city-hotel-hopes-to-launch-400-million-dollar-coin-offering.html <comment><USER2> Please don't let this company start with T.

<comment><USER3> That's right: TrumpCoins

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> a perfectly loggical thing to happen. i hope there'd be more of it soon. ICO seems like a perfect instrument for construction businesses to attract investments at lower CoCs. Eagerly waiting for the first ICO in timeshare as well.</comment>


Regulation, not technology is holding back driverless cars - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/business/economy/29view.html <comment><USER2> My dad works in the airplane industry and had an interesting story to tell me that relates to this. (I'm not sure exactly how accurate it is or what the source is, sorry). Apparently, it is illegal for pilots to read while flying. Even if they are heading in a straight line with no one around for miles. This is because one time an pilot wasn't paying attention and due to a series of software failures, the plane turned into a mountain. Interestingly, the plane was tuning at a very exact amount so that the number of Gs remained constant.

In any case, this single crash caused regulation to state that computers can never fly planes by themselves. This strikes me as rather unfair. If a single human crashed a plane, it does not make it illegal for humans to fly planes by themselves.

Another example is that in London, subways must be driven by a human. Even though driving a subway may be trivial (there is no way to steer), Londoners apparently do not feel comfortable being driven by a non-living thing. They want to be sure that if they die, the driver dies too, adding a level of accountability.

It seems that this sort of wide-spread mistrust of machines is driven more by socially normal paranoia than any kind of logic. I for one am rooting for machines to take over all forms of driving. There may be a few mishaps, but it will probably become hundreds of times safer eventually.

<comment><USER3> "Londoners apparently do not feel comfortable being driven by a non-living thing."

Does not surprise me. Most Europeans have not even adapted to automatic transmission in cars, and still believe that a human can switch gears better with manual transmission (which has not been true for decades now). Makes me wonder if they ever adapt to fully automated driving.

(And yes, I'm saying this as a European).

<comment><USER4> Clearly that's not universally true, otherwise racing drivers would use automatic gearboxes. It may be true for everyday driving, but I'd need to see some citations for this claim.

Frankly, I'm a little dubious of automatic transmission. Perhaps I've just been driving the wrong cars, but I haven't found an automatic gearbox that can match a human being. For instance, if I'm descending a steep hill, I'll stick the car in a lower gear, but an automatic always chooses the higher gear.

<comment><USER5> Automatic transmissions avoid engine braking. If you want it, you need to choose it manually.

And personally I never do for the simple reason that brakes are a lot cheaper than transmissions. And I rarely descend a hill long enough and steep enough that brake heating is a serious problem. (And when I do I usually just slow down, and stay slow.)

<comment><USER6> I downshift on hills because that keeps more of my stopping power ready to use. Brakes heat up when you use them continuously, reducing their effectiveness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No surprises there.

The transition to driverless cars is (IMHO inevitable. At some point it will be cheap enough that the additional cost will pale in comparison to the lives that will be saved as well as the simple convenience of being able to do something else while commuting somewhere.

Likewise I see this kind of thing replacing many forms of public transportation. There will simply be a fleet of cars. You'll say where you want to go and some system will route people and cars to destinations.

But, the transition won't be quick or easy. You need look no further than the aviation industry to see why.

Basically, automation in modern aircraft is a double-edged sword. It seems to erode the ability of pilots to actually fly [1], software errors causing deaths [2] and (I can't find the link to this) I also read a study that in more automated planes, pilots are more likely to believe erroneous instruments rather than their own senses and experience.

The issue won't be how the car normally behaves because as demonstrations have shown, current systems require very little human intervention.

The issue will be extraordinary circumstances plus the huge liability problem of any errors.

Example: if someone runs a red light and causes a crash, killing someone, that person is responsible. If an automated car does the same thing, the manufacturer will be responsible.

That alone will impede adoption.

Instead I think you'll have what we already have: slowly adding automation to cars. Cars already have radars and can stop themselves from colliding, they can park themselves and so on.

But at some point the driver will need to go away and that will be a tremendously challenging leap forward for society.

[1]: [http://www.tourismandaviation.com/news-4530-- Pilot_Reliance_...](http://www.tourismandaviation.com/news-4530-- Pilot_Reliance_on_Automation_Erodes_Skills_)

[2]: <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/8.77.html#subj6>

<comment><USER8> I couldn't get past the (unclosed parenthese in the second sentence. It's like my inner programmer went into OCD overload...

<comment><USER9> I couldn't get past the use of "parenthese"[ _] as a singular noun in the first sentence. It's like my inner pedant went into OCD overload.

_ 1:Parenthesis :: >1:Parentheses

<comment><USER9> ... hoist on my own petard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Speed limits are another realm in which regulation can hold back the development of driverless cars, besides merely allowing them on the streets in the first place.

With computerized drivers, it will finally be possible to fully enforce speed limits, by introducing some ceiling to the speed attainable by the car. I'm sure some "well-meaning" legislator will make it his or her priority to ensure that speed limits are never exceeded. However, at least in Massachusetts, if you go on the highway, everyone (including police) drive at ~75 MPH even though the posted speed limit is 55 or 65 MPH. Few will buy a car with this kind of handicap, were it to exist -- and I worry that it will. Many speed limits in the US were imposed decades ago, with less safe and responsive cars -- it would be a pity if potentially revolutionary technology advances were thwarted by this fact.

Legislation has already crippled or made useless many useful automotive innovations. In the US, technologies that allow for adaptive cruise control (maintaining a distance to the car in front of you) can only decelerate the car, and not accelerate the car. This forces the driver to have to constantly accelerate, greatly reducing the effectiveness of this feature. Many computer- laden vehicles with navigation systems are similarly crippled -- they automatically "lock" when the car is in motion, and some (like in Lexus vehicles) cannot even be overridden by people sitting in the passenger seat... often causing unintended risks like drivers pulling over on busy highways just to readjust their GPS target.

<comment><USER11> Or they introduce a robot-only lane where the cars can decide for themselves what a safe speed it, making speed limits obsolete. When cars can communicate with each other about dangers, much higher speeds are possible with less distance between cars.

<comment><USER12> An absolutely fantastic idea. It's a shame it will never happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article doesn't make its case very well. The core problem people are presumably worried about is safety, and saying it they have a "good safety record" is hardly enough to reassure the senators, etc. who would presumably be responsible for relaxing restrictions.

For example, what about edge cases? Suppose the Google car does just fine in normal driving conditions, but in a blizzard w/ 26 mile per hour gusts of wind (as I drove in recently), or when a tractor trailer flips over on the road in front of you? Humans have a certain intuition that allows them to do bizarre twitches in extreme situations (even including supernormal strength) that presumably no machine intelligence will be able to approach for a long time (if ever).

Or what about the possibility of someone hacking the car? Could a worm engineered by some hostile government take millions of cars off the road -- or, worse, cause them all to steer into the median and cause mass damage and thousands of instant casualties?

It is, frankly, irresponsible not to consider edge cases like these when drafting legislation, and while I'm all for gradual introduction and more testing, the author of this article has convinced me that senators sitting on their hands not doing anything are probably acting on the interests of the people much more so than those who wish to simply hand over driving and navigation functions to machines as soon as possible.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if driverless cars could start out as a tool for people with disabilities. If such use were challenged, I can imagine the supreme court taking seriously a case by a person who is quadriplegic or blind demanding the right to use a self-driving car. If they can prove them safer, it will be hard to find a compelling government interest that could offset denying the use of this assistive technology.

<comment><USER15> They appear to be starting as 'driver aids' on new cars. Today's higher-end cars have adopted technology that alerts you when you drift out of your lane, watches your blind spots, safely follows the car in front of you, performs emergency stops, parallel parks itself, and adjusts vehicle dynamics in a multitude of ways.

My assumption is that this is a first step towards driverless cars, as it provides the manufacturers a way to test critical technologies in a safe environment. If the dealerships aren't downloading data from these systems, and sharing it back to the engineering groups, thats an enormous wasted opportunity.

<comment><USER16> I believe your assumption is correct as well. All of these 'new high tech safety toys' are the tip of the iceberg. With all of these components being used and people becoming comfortable with them, we will soon see more adoption towards driverless cars.

I think another major milestone towards this will be the next generation of GPS, with the increased accuracy it will help guide the cars where they need to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One idea would be to make some long haul roads, or sections of them, completely driverless. Maine to Miami along a section of I95, or NYC to LA. We could start the test with tractor trailers. Let them drive for a few years and tune the system. There would be a huge economic benefit to allowing trucks to run 24x7 without drivers.

<comment><USER18> > There would be a huge economic benefit to allowing trucks to run 24x7 > without drivers.

What would happen to the current drivers? Which new jobs should they pick?

<comment><USER19> Who cares?

There was a time when 80% of the population used to work on farms. Now much less than 10% work on farms in the western world. Do we have 70% unemployment?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> We don't need driveless cars, we need carless people:

<http://www.carfree.com/>

<comment><USER21> This would make riding my motorcycle much safer, I like it.

<comment><USER22> If driverless cars start reducing the car road toll then motorbikes will start to look really dangerous:(.

I suppose we could get self driving motorbikes but that would be missing the point of riding.

<comment><USER23> given that a huge proportion, maybe even the majority, are caused by people in cars turning in front of or merging into motorcyclists I doubt it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> >But it's clear that in the early part of the 20th century, the original advent of the motor car was not impeded by anything like the current mélange of regulations, laws and lawsuits.

They did try in the 19th century though, at least in the UK, with the Locomotive Acts[1]. The way those laws went out of their way to protect the status quo (i.e. horse-powered transport) is an interesting parallell to today's possible transition from human-controlled to computer-controlled transport.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts>

<comment><USER25> "The Locomotive Act 1865 (Red Flag Act):[5] Set speed limits of 4 mph (6 km/h) in the country and 2 mph (3 km/h) in towns. Stipulated that self-propelled vehicles should be accompanied by a crew of three: the driver, a stoker and a man with a red flag walking 60 yards (55 m) ahead of each vehicle. The man with a red flag or lantern enforced a walking pace, and warned horse riders and horse drawn traffic of the approach of a self propelled machine."

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Some things aren't brought into focus here.

(1) Off-highway driving happens. That means that the algorithms have to manage an uncontrolled environment where 'anything' can happen.

(2) It is very expensive to create bug-free software.

(3) You can't iterate by failing fast on life-critical systems after it is released. Failure means killing someone.

(4) Legal liabilities. It's not going to work to say something like, "This car's driver software is not warranted free from defects".

(5) Humans can manage situations utterly outside the norm; algorithms can not see beyond the vision of the designer.

I work in an industry which operates _below_ the levels of software assurance that the medical/flight industries work at, and it is incredibly painstaking as it is. A fully automated car will be very expensive to build.

I am not a paranoiac regarding software. I am a paranoiac regarding software bugs and the limits of the software designers.

</comment><comment><USER27> I suspect that this kind of "risky" technology will be deployed first in more adventurous countries, like China.

</comment><comment><USER28> Regulation and fear are to be expected. The question is, what to do about them? I predict the largest PR campaign in the history of technology. Public opinion generally drives regulation. So less public fear will lead to less regulation.

While I have no way to prove it, I'd bet my right hand that Google's PR people made this story happen. I'd bet they also made the first NYT piece blowing up the Chauffeur project happen and they made it look serendipitous for authenticity. I think "The Suit is Back," and I think it's going to come back again and again.

Prediction: Driverless cars will be portrayed in a very positive way in a major motion picture within the next year.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is the crux of the matter:

> imagine that the cars would save many lives over all, but lead to some bad > accidents when a car malfunctions. The evening news might show a > "Terminator" car spinning out of control and killing a child. There could be > demands to shut down the cars until just about every problem is solved. The > lives saved by the cars would not be as visible as the lives lost, and > therefore the law might thwart or delay what could be a very beneficial > innovation.

It's otiose to point out that the premise of personal motor vehicles is _not_ called into question every time a human driver spins out of control and kills someone.

<comment><USER30> Human psychology operates in a realm only dimly linked to logic, my friend. Consider the response in the US to the "risk" of terrorism, which in quantitative terms is tiny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm not sure I trust the underlying architectures that are being developed with my life...

DDOS and MITM attacks take a whole-new meaning if the networked entities are 3-ton objects moving at 65 mph.

</comment><comment><USER6> Its possible to prove that driverless cars can be safe. And that's by keeping cars from having accidents. If safety systems can keep human drivers from having accidents by stopping vehicles before they can have an accident, they can do the same for robotic vehicles.

Such systems would place limits on how fast you could accelerate, turn the wheel or apply the brakes. And they would also brake for you when other vehicles, pedestrians and animals appear to be on a collision course.

Such systems will have to be proven in the real world. And we are starting to see them. The newest Mercedes have such features. I predict that full blown systems will dramatically lower accidents for older people, teenagers and those who drive under the influence. Eventually all new cars will have these systems.

And by then it will be a lot easier to trust the machines.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> So much of technical progress happens through delivering most of the value of the previous solution at a fraction of the cost (email vs postal mail). Society seems to rule this kind of progress out for a few industries like health care, I assume something similar is happening here.

<comment><USER32> The problem with healthcare is not that progress is being ruled out but that healthcare is highly labor-driven. So far there's no machinery that can replace a doctor.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect>

<comment><USER33> > The problem with healthcare is not that progress is being ruled out but that > healthcare is highly labor-driven. So far there's no machinery that can > replace a doctor.

As a matter of policy, the FDA will not approve any device that makes a medical diagnosis without human intervention. [1]

Recently there have been numerous studies and much punditry accusing the American medical regulatory environment of stifling innovation and driving up costs. [2][3][4] The arguments are strikingly similar to Cowen's argument re autonomous cars.

[1]: <http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/37596/> [2]: For a quick summary, see [http://reason.com/blog/2011/05/25/will-fda-regulation- kill-t...](http://reason.com/blog/2011/05/25/will-fda-regulation-kill-the-m) [3]: A much discussed recent report [PDF] is at [http://www.nvca.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc...](http://www.nvca.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=668&Itemid=93) [4]: An article in JAMA opined similarly [PAYWALL], <http://jama.ama- assn.org/content/305/15/1523.extract>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Ars Technica did a great series on the technology and economics of self driving cars a few years ago:

[http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/future-of- driving...](http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/future-of-driving- part-1.ars)

</comment><comment><USER35> A somewhat similar note put very nicely by James May from Top Gear;

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS0IxnxwJSU>

</comment><comment><USER36> Perhaps it's because software has an obvious history of being buggy. A web service won't be down for a while if this fails, hundreds of lives being at risk on a 24 hour a day basis. Maybe a little wait-and-see is a reasoned approach for a complex interactive dynamical system like this?

<comment><USER12> I don't think there is a computer in the world that has a worse uptime than myself. Even old cheap Windows ME boxes did a fair enough job of being able to run without impairment for more than 20 hours or so.

<comment><USER36> The complexity of the applications will be far greater than Windows ME. Good article on The Long, Dismal History of Software Project Failure - [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/05/the-long-dismal- his...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/05/the-long-dismal-history-of- software-project-failure.html). Before we let everyone's self-driving mashup on the road it might be good to figure out if they work first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005."

Can we stop calling all motor vehicle crashes accidents. If the driver was drunk or purposely distracted it is NO more an accident than if I was randomly firing a gun hoping no one got hit.

</comment><comment><USER38> Maybe we just need to emphasize the negative impact of long commutes. Suddenly you have that commute time to do something else. :)

</comment><comment><USER39> _No state has anything close to a functioning system to inspect whether the computers in driverless cars are in good working order, much as we routinely test emissions and brake lights._

Having lived in Oregon, Arizona, and California, I have never had anything other than emissions routinely inspected. Demonstrate a car smart enough to monitor its own brake pad wear, alert on burnt out bulbs, and provide a clear readout of all detected issues (i.e. not a coded blinking service light, or plug interface) before you start trying to make it drive itself.

(I do love the idea of an automated train of cars, and driving my drunk self home, though)

<comment><USER40> > Demonstrate a car smart enough to monitor its own brake pad wear, alert on > burnt out bulbs, and provide a clear readout of all detected issues (i.e. > not a coded blinking service light, or plug interface) before you start > trying to make it drive itself.

I don't know about other cars, but all model Porsche's will do exactly this. Granted, it doesn't have as many sensors as I would like--leading to it only giving an 'engine warning' light for innumerable problems, but when it comes to breaks, oils, lights, etc. it has a pretty fine grained detection pattern.

<comment><USER41> Same with the jaguar XJ since 1988. brake pads low is neat to see show up in the display. The XJ has more sensors so it gives more than just check engine.</comment></comment></comment>


An Interview with Computing Pioneer Alan Kay - <AUTHOR> http://techland.time.com/2013/04/02/an-interview-with-computing-pioneer-alan-kay/

<comment><USER2> I'm a little disappointed that the interview didn't mention COLA/STEPS as I think this is by far the most interesting thing Kay has worked on of recent. Obviously he's been an innovator throughout the history of computing and it makes sense to interview him abotu the overall direction of the industry, but it'd be great to hear about COLA especially as there's very little written about it aimed at a non-academic audience.

<http://www.vpri.org/vp_wiki/index.php/Main_Page> is the primary resource about COLA at the moment, if you're curious.

<comment><USER3> His work on Squeak [1], a dialect of Smalltalk, qualifies as both recent and interesting. Similar could be said for his work on OLPC.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeak>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
        Apple with the iPad and iPhone goes even further and does
        not allow children to download an Etoy made by another
        child somewhere in the world.

Kids can publish native apps if they want to, there are plenty of examples around. But regardless, you can share _anything_ over the web. What about Android? Does it "not allow children to download etoys" too? This is pure vitriol.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure what an "etoy" is, but I imagine it's essentially a program and associated source code (e.g. so that you can learn from it). iOS bans, for no reason, compilers or interpretors. Android allows for these. The majority of children will not be publishing native apps.

<comment><USER6> Check this out...

<https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/codea/id439571171> <https://github.com/TwoLivesLeft/Codea-Runtime>

<comment><USER7> You can't export or import your code there, you can only type it in. (Unless something's changed lately.) Even micros in the 70s could save/load cassette tape.

(Codea is pretty neat anyway. I get sad to see the potential locked up.)

<comment><USER8> If we're talking about getting a kids to learn how to use these wonderful tools, that's a feature, not a bug. I for one know that I learned to program precisely because I couldn't just swap cassettes with the other kids. I had a crappy computer that no one else had, so the only games I had were the ones I typed in myself. That act of typing (and hence reading) the source code was how I learned to program.

<comment><USER9> This is neither a feature nor a bug. It's a restriction forced by Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Alan Kay is 74, despite the fact that he looks 20 years younger. A couple grad students should follow him around 24/7 with a microphone, a tablet computer, and a digital camera and record any ideas he throws out there. He's like the Phillip K. Dick of computer science. He's shaped much of the perception of the world and his weakest works somehow surface 15-20 years later as tacit assumptions.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd say it's not modern computing he's unhappy with, but modern _people_.

<comment><USER12> OK, he was pretty grumpy and cynical. But is he wrong?

Wouldn't a society of people who are reading and writing, thinking and creating be a better place than one where people are capable of no better than SMS-speak and TLDR and letting Siri do their thinking? What if our society turns into YouTube comments?

<comment><USER13> I think the reality is that there's always a group of people who are creators and thinkers and the vast majority just wants to be entertained. People like Alan Kay are hoping to somehow convert the majority to be more creative.

<comment><USER14> Most people live in the Box, some live outside and some collect the rent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "There was always a "cloud" in the ARPA view of things — this is why we invented the networks we did."

All part of the plan.

<comment><USER16> The "cloud" is overhyped precisely because if you scratch off the marketing, what you're left with is just another word for the internet.

I suppose it's a better metaphor than "cyberspace", but still...

<comment><USER17> To me, "cloud" is the growing phenomenon of removing the need for individuals and organizations to own their own hardware. That's quite different from the existing network of networks.

<comment><USER18> Actually "cloud" can be traced to relatively old ideas like utility computing. It just was not very feasible back then.

EDIT: "If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility... The computer utility could become the basis of a new and important industry." (John McCarthy, 1961)

<comment><USER17> The idea may be old, but what's new is that it's becoming possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19>
        "much of the iPad UI is very poor in a myriad of ways."

Why does he say this ?</comment>


Ask HN: Is my product priced too high? - <AUTHOR>

I want to gauge feedback from startups and entrepreneurs here who are in the pitching phase - whether it be to investors, partners or anyone else. Mainly looking to see if the pricing of my product is too high and what other HNers think about it.
My product is www.getapitchdeck.com and it allows any startup or entrepreneur to create an attractive pitch deck for pitching investors, partners, an idea, concept, service and so on. A license includes the source files (html, css, .psds) for editing and a video walkthrough. In the future I want to create this as an online service, but I'm in the validation stages right now and making it a service is a much bigger project.
Here are some benefits and my goals with this product:
• Make pitch decks the new standard for pitching instead of powerpoint.
• A pitch deck on your own URL makes it easy to share versus sending a bulky   attachment
• Pitch deck makes you stand out: its interactive and tells a story which keeps the user engaged
Some questions:
• Is the price too high? (Its a $1000 value)
• Is this something you would find useful? (more focus on your startup rather than spending tons of time creating a deck from scratch)
• Anyone here interested in giving it a test run for free?
Appreciate all the help and feedback <comment><USER2> I was just about to purchase the most economical option at getapitchdeck.com but stopped because of the Paypal checkout. I would offer traditional checkout method with the drop down menu of credit cards. I have had too many issues with Paypal over the years and even the guest option turned me off. However for those that use it all the time it is nice to see, I am probably a minority in that aspect.

Your pricing seems fair, the demo video could be expanded and show more of how information is inputted and from the viewpoint of a new user instead of the finished product. It does look sharp and I hope it is easy to make but I was left wondering exactly what I was purchasing and how long it would take to make our final product. Website design is sharp, we love it! Overall looks like a great product and we may purchase later on today if we don't find something else to suit our needs. Keep up the great work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate your response. We are going to tweak our homepage and payment options very soon. Email me at firstname.lastname@example.com as I'd like to answer any more of your questions and talk a bit further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hmmm ... I personally think it's overpriced. Your initial users will probably be technology startups who can easily hack an HTML pitch deck. They can even use a blogging platform and there are a bunch of JS libraries that gives powerpoint style presentation. So your best bet is to lower the price as much as possible to give a better incentive for them not do it manually and then you can make money on the volume of subscriptions. Anyways, I like the look and feel of the whole thing. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate your feedback. I'm getting mixed opinions on pricing - some are telling me its good, others are saying to lower it. I'm going to A/B test the pricing. What do you think is an acceptable range? $20-$30?

<comment><USER3> I would personally pay $15-$20 if need be. And A/B testing on the prices won't be fair to the B category. Don't you think :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How did you figure that its a $1000 value? You're providing 3 pages of text and graphics.

Can pitch decks produced on your site generate _results_? If you can point to even one success story with your product, your value goes up in my eyes, but right now it looks like and fluffy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Custom design & coding from a legitimate company would cost $1000+: <http://deckfoundry.com/pitch-deck-design/>

Besides that I am looking for a startup or a few to take free copies to use as a case study / get feedback

<comment><USER4> If that is the case, you could show a side by side comparison of the prices involved with alternatives, like Deck Foundry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea - I appreciate your response

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another question:

I'd like to add a "live demo" of the product in action but I'm afraid of people ripping the source or doing a file > save as hence the video on the homepage. Any ideas on how I can show the product without the source being ripped?

<comment><USER5> You can consider putting one long screenshot of the page as demo. This is the closest you can get without putting the actual thing out there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea. Perhaps the video + a screenshot, although with the screenshot some users may not realize that the deck is built with jQuery for the navigation (slides to each deck).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a really nice product and the price is just right IMHO.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> hm. At the end we have done our pitch deck as a "Google Docs Presentation". We considered reveal.js by Hakim or even Apple Keynote.

The best thing about the service is that it gives you a good starting point. Why not give the template away for free and offer custom support for a good amount of cash?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting concept - thanks for sharing. Ours come with documentation and video walkthroughs along with support. I'm afraid if we are targeting startups (who tend to be hackers), there won't be much money in providing just support. I like what reveal.js has done. We are a bit different in the sense that we follow a more standard pitch deck - I think reveal.js can get a bit confusing or overwhelming for an older crowd.</comment></comment>


I would like to work for a startup but only for a couple of months - <AUTHOR> I love the startup pace and the possibilities of the early days, however I want to work on my own projects and ideas. Does one excludes the other?<p>How would you feel if I, as an applicant to your startup, tell you that I want to work with you but just for a couple of months (max. 4 months)? <comment><USER2> Not a chance at our 3-yr old startup. That's less than a summer project, and nobody expects much from summer interns. Maybe you haven't written highly async Go services in containers orchestrated by kubernetes. You would spent those two months just ramping up on our code base and customer issues just to be productive. And if by some miracle you actually produced production code, nobody wants the author of that code to immediately walk out the door. Experienced programmers understand that 80% of the cost is in the maintenance over the lifetime of the code. That is a lot easier to do if the author is still around.

</comment><comment><USER3> It depends on your seniority and speciality. It takes quite a while to warm new team members into real productivity on mainline technical labor. Often, the first month or two of a new hire has a negative impact on total team efficiency. It's a similar principle to why you can't just staff up at the last minute before a deadline.

The exception is if you're an expert in some specialty that's relevant and underserved on the team. In that case, the relationship becomes more of a consulting role, where you do a very specific thing very effectively _and_ in a way that it can be smoothly handed off to long-term maintainers.

Another opportunity is direct contracting for very early stage entrepreneurs. Building the prototypes or MVP's that help them understand and articulate their ideas. Even then, four months can be pretty narrow window in the real world and there's often a bias for people who'll stick around for the next phase.

One final possibility -- and the least reliant on other people's accommodation -- would be for you to just expand the period of your cycle. Can you commit 12-18 months at a time? That's actually pretty normal in the startup world, and if you manage your finances well, it can set you up for an equally long stint of solo work.

<comment><AUTHOR> MVP's and rapid prototyping are my specialities. Where do you think one can find people looking to develop rapid prototypes? Projects that are meant to be a proof of concept and then discarded

<comment><USER3> Outside of just mining your existing network, the first places I'd look would be AngelList and local tech networking events. Upwork could yield fruit too, but it can be a noisy place.

You'll generally be looking for people who are new to the industry and are just putting a toe in. More experienced entrepreneurs often have people in their network that can already help them through this phase.

Pursue smaller contracts than your ideal and expect them to grow into the relationships/opportunities you have in mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a very wise advice swatcoder. Thank you very much

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What do you want to gain from this? How important is compensation?

If you want a full-time job to see how life at a startup compares to a more traditional work environment, four months are not enough. You'd need to stay at least a year or two because only then will you have acquired sufficient responsibility to be in a position where everyone else on your team depends on you and your output and what it means to deal with the pressure of deadlines and so on.

If compensation is not that important or your objective is to work with lots of new technology or build stuff from scratch, offer non-technical entrepreneurs to build their MVP. Depending on your experience level and feature scope you may be able to implement a prototype in four months.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd roll my eyes. It'd take a month just to onboard you, and then I'd have to go through the miserable hiring process (which eats tons of time I don't have and takes long enough that I should probably start on your first day of work) to replace you. Consider looking for contract work if you want short-term gigs.

</comment><comment><USER6> You may want to look into consulting, specifically around rapid prototyping for non-technical founders if you're looking to work with early stage startups but want short term engagements. There is a market for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds like a right approach. Do you know about a place/website where I could find something like that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the perspective of a startup you would cause too much expense. They have to pay your onboarding and until you produce real value 1-2 months will pass. In this time they already have to pay you. If you leave the company after 2 further months their expense for you will be higher than your earnings if you are not highly specialized and more a consultant than an employee.

However: In Germany most companies have a time of probation for 3-6 months. In this time you can leave the company whenever you want. So you could simply join the company and leave it after 4 months.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wouldn't bother unless I have specific project that will fit in that time frame and is a one-off/never looked at again type of project. At that point, it's basically a short term contract project that I can outsource to anyone.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm interested in similar but in BigCo's, aka internships or mini-sabbaticals for experienced/mid-career devs.

<comment><USER10> There should be a way for mid-career devs to do job trades -- like I do your job and you mine (with help from the other person to ramp up kind of like a buddy) for a month or two. It would give companies access to senior talent they could evaluate like internships, and all they would have to do is keep paying the original employee. Even doing this within a big co as an inter-team thing (getting a team rotation or a new team assignment past your first few years) is pretty difficult since your original team is presumably relying on your acquired knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sure, if you wish to work and will work 4 months for free remotely, ping me.

<comment><AUTHOR> What kind of tasks do you offer?

<comment><USER11> Backend golang & Frontend development angular

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have experience in either. More like aws (lambdas, sqs, dynamodb, ecs, emr, kinesis, etc...) and reactjs or vuejs

<comment><USER12> wow that is exactly the help that i need i created this thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17860708](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17860708) i need help to scale my product would be great to work together</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Build the React Native Continuous Deployment Pipeline of Your Dreams in 1 Hour - <AUTHOR> https://blog.theodo.com/2019/04/react-native-deployment-pipeline/ <comment><USER2> The biggest issue I have right now with CircleCI is that they don't support Windows builds. If they had Windows then I could test all platforms.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> @bazizi thanks! :-)

@burtonator do you build React Native on Windows? Are you constrained to do that?

</comment><comment><USER3> Very comprehensive. Nice work</comment>


Successful Cold Fusion Claimed By A Japanese Scientist - <AUTHOR> http://www.dosci.org/physics/successful-cold-fusion-claimed-by-a-japanese-scientist/ <comment><USER2> no he didn't</comment>


Show HN: Crypto Crumple Zones: Enabling Limited Access Without Mass Surveillance [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~cvwright/papers/crumplezones.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> With the topic of "exceptional access" in the news again, I thought HN might be interested in this work that we did a couple of years ago.

The idea is, you can have my decryption key as long as you're willing to spend a million dollars to get it. Not willing to spend the money? Then it must not be so important after all.

NOTE: We are NOT hoping to get something like this deployed. This is a research project. Just trying to get the ball rolling on finding a way to satisfy government demands while maintaining as much security as possible, with as strong protections as we can come up with to limit misuse. I'm afraid that, sooner or later, we're going to need it.

<comment><USER2> That would likely be a non-starter. The Government wouldn't like it, because you can set your price point arbitrarily, thereby maintaining the possibility to refuse disclosure. Plus, nothing stops you from changing out your key.

Besides which, if you know it, and they need you to reveal it to them, they are screwed anyway by the Fifth. Although, makes a hell of a nice windfall for the falsely accused.

The fact is, there is no shortage of Amendments you'd have to throw out to make this kind of exceptional access regime the only legal option. 1st, 2nd, 5th...

We need to get over it. Encrypted data might as well be synonymous with your own thoughts in terms of how inaccessible they are to law enforcement, and that's just how it's got to be.

Land of the free, home of the brave; eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty.

Safety is not guaranteed, and investigation is _hard_. This is simply how life has to be for a country that truly values Liberty for it's citizens.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope you are right.</comment></comment></comment>


The Merchant Fleet of Late Medieval and Tudor England, 1400–1580 - <AUTHOR> http://www.medievalandtudorships.org <comment><USER2> This is based on archives dating back hundreds of years. We really need to spend time and effort on making sure that there will be comparable archives of our time. Databases are neat and all, but how can we make them last for hundreds of years..?

<comment><USER3> Archaeologists are getting quite a lot of their data and clues from literal garbage. (See eg [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden) )

We are producing quite a lot of very durable garbage these days: aluminium cans, plastic, etc.

So even if archive.org and Google etc go under and we lose all their disks, we will leave plenty of evidence in the archaeological record.

<comment><USER4> That's only for prehistoric record. In times when people were writing stuff down, we got a heck of a lot from what they wrote.

<comment><USER3> Mostly agreed.

Alas, people mostly write down the boring stuff like what kings reigned when and what laws they passed. The more interesting everyday stuff tends to be less well preserved in writing. (One of the reasons the cuneiform tablets with commercial and marriage contracts are so interesting.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While a fascinating resource, the UI is really bad because of the grouping on the maps.

Those grouping plugins are utterly useless. I've made the same mistake in using them, they are utterly pointless.

<comment><USER6> I've worked with customer's on different clustering algorithms but, in all cases so far, they have proven unsatisfactory. We always end up with just a lot of points on the map instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> 'S funny how ships - moving stuff around - generated merchant wealth for quite a few republics, from Athens and Carthage to Venice and the Hanseatic League.

Classical Rome seems exceptional as a republic of landlubbers, who actually cast a beady eye on merchant wealth.

<comment><USER8> Well, they couldn't steal _everything_ from the greeks, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone know why the Bordeaux Customs Accounts are in the UK National Archives?

<comment><USER10> Maybe because of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquitaine#English_Aquitaine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquitaine#English_Aquitaine) ?

> Aquitaine passed to France in 1137 when the duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine > married Louis VII of France, but their marriage was annulled in 1152. When > Eleanor's new husband became King Henry II of England in 1154, the area > became an English possession, and the cornerstone of the so-called Angevin > Empire. Aquitaine remained English until the end of the Hundred Years' War > in 1453, when it was annexed by France.</comment></comment>


Using Google Cloud Pub/Sub to Connect Applications and Data Streams - <AUTHOR> http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/03/using-Google-Cloud-pubsub-to-Connect-applications-and-data-streams.html <comment><USER2> I had the chance to test it out during the Oscars [1], receiving about 1.2M tweets via Twitter Streaming API in 6 hours, publishing them in Pub/Sub, pulling with another process and storing in BigQuery. I still need to find time to blog about the experience, happy to collect a few extra questions here.

[1] [http://ecesena.github.io/oscars2015/](http://ecesena.github.io/oscars2015/)

<comment><USER3> Did you get any feel for the latency between publishing and consumption? I'm definitely interested, but I'd be looking for no more than a few second delay between publish and potential consumption.

<comment><USER2> We didn't collect precise timing data, but I hope to release the code soon, and it's pretty easy to setup a test similar to ours, e.g. with high volume hashtags such as #nowplaying.

What I can tell you is that we published messages in batches, closing a batch every 5 seconds or 100 tweets (at the highest traffic rate, we were receiving and publishing about 100 tweets every 1-2 seconds). This is way below the quota limits.

On the subscriber side, we received batches of at most 10 messages. I didn't investigate if this is a limit or a config param. The sensation was to receive the messages pretty much instantly (I was looking in parallel at 2 shells, one publishing and one receiving), but again, I don't have precise measurements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was one of the most rock-solid internal services that I very much miss, now ex-Google.

<comment><USER3> Could you elaborate on what you liked about it? Rock solid as in availability, feature set, or other?

<comment> a-robinson I haven't played with the cloud version yet, but internally it's rock solid in terms of its quality. It's very highly available and reliable, extremely and effortlessly scalable, and has dependably low latency.

<comment><USER3> > and has dependably low latency

I am particularly interested in this part. If you are able to share any anecdotal experiences, I'd love to hear them.

<comment><USER5> We won't have a cloud SLA until GA but for end-to-end latency our goal is to be only slightly slower than inherent network latency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ah now that it's been publically announced people might find the mode module I wrote for it useful

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/cloud- pubsub](https://www.npmjs.com/package/cloud-pubsub)

<comment><USER7> That's great! Looking forward to see it rolled forward to the new API revision (v1beta2, which we don't expect to change significantly). Also, please check our gcloud-node repository out, which also offers idiomatic Cloud Pub/Sub library and the team is planning to move to v1beta2.

gcloud-node: [https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gcloud- node](https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gcloud-node)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I assume this will replace Appengine's Channel API?

<comment><USER9> I'd suggest Firebase for scenarios that need real-time notification all way to a device, app, or browser.

Google Cloud Pub/Sub is better aligned to server-to-server messaging, similar to other Cloud queuing services, service buses, event logs, or open-source systems such as RabbitMQ or Kafka.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a free of charge beta release - in other words, no way to figure out if their pricing model is going to be attractive for your app.

[https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/pricing](https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/pricing)

<comment><USER11> _During the beta period, the service is available for free. Once it comes out of beta, developers will have to pay $0.40 per million for the first 100 million API calls each month. Users who need to send more messages will pay $0.25 per million for the next 2.4 billion operations (that's about 1,000 messages per second) and $0.05 per million for messages above that._

[http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/04/googles-cloud-pubsub- real-t...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/04/googles-cloud-pubsub-real-time- messaging-service-is-now-in-public-beta/)

<comment><USER12> This is cheap considering the amount of work if a company build/operates on their own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Oh man, Pub/Sub, there's a term I haven't heard in a few years. It was a pretty big thing in XMPP [1] not so long ago (standardized only 2010?), and I remember people being disappointed that the HTTP-based and Google-driven PubSubHubbub [2] was gaining popularity faster. In retrospect, this was a sign of XMPP's loss of steam as a general web protocol :(

Google Cloud Pub/Sub is HTTP(S), so I guess it's based on PubSubHubbub?

[1] [http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html](http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html)

[2] [https://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/](https://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/)

<comment><USER14> From the FAQ [1]: "While Googlers were closely involved in originating PubSubHubbub, its strengths in RSS and content syndication generally are not use cases that Cloud Pub/Sub is designed to address. Aside from the name, they have very little in common."

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/faq#pubsubhubbub](https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/faq#pubsubhubbub)

<comment><USER7> Yes, you are right. BTW, the use cases are different, but both are using the same core infrastructure that is widely used within Google, which is proven to be scalable and robust :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Used it, hated it, switched to RabbitMQ on GCE, saved my life

<comment><USER16> Would you be willing to say why you hated it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Like the idea of future cloud portability? Go ahead and use this service -- Google dares you.

<comment><USER18> PubSub messaging is definitely a PaaS feature more than an IaaS feature, so it's going to be less portable until we have the problem so well surrounded that we get some sort of open source abstraction to the whole problem and all of it's semantics. So, yes, there is a level of lock-in.

However! I know of a number of PaaS products that provide similar functionality, and with some effort, you can build it in AWS or Azure features, or you can build your own on top of RabbitMQ or Apache projects. The characteristics are going to be different, but it's doable. It might be like a MySQL to Postgres migration, or it might be like a MySQL to Mongo migration, but there _is_ a migration. Using a vendor product with unique advantages as a dependency is a known engineering problem with known risks. Take your dependencies carefully, but it's riskier to take no dependencies and fail to deliver a useful product.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to propose "we should merge companies"? - <AUTHOR> 1. If company A and B are both early startups with complimentary services, and a merger objectively benefits both A and B, how is the topic broached? How would B sell A on a merger?
2. Now what if A and B are competitors?
3. Enter big public company X that A and B both want to partner with. A is independently in conversations with X about partnering, but B is not. How would B bring up X and suggest an A+B+X partnership? <comment><USER2> After getting an opinion from a competent lawyer. Perhaps an antitrust lawyer. The gist of what you are asking is: "I'd really like to illegally collude, re a negotiation that's already started, rather than compete in that negotiation. How can I do this without getting caught?" Step one - don't drop a comment at HN.

<comment><USER3> This sounds like the OP is asking about something like when Elon Musk and Peter Thiel formed PayPal from their payment processing companies.

How did you jump to illegal collusion from opening talks about a merger?

<comment><USER2> Musk and Thiel's firms had no market power, then: both firms were in trouble - but I wouldn't be at all shocked if I learned they had talked to a lawyer, anyway. These two startups seem to be healthy and are in the market; not just ideas. They can't fix an "auction" being held by a third firm, or give the appearance of that.</comment></comment></comment>


EA forces password reset but tokens don't expire after use. - <AUTHOR>

In response to the LulzSec password leak, EA forces a password reset for everyone. However, the token doesn't expire after it is used.
A screenshot of the email with the token removed of course. http://min.us/mvfYihP
Sweet.
edit: updated title to reflect that they may expire after a certain time, but not after use. This also raises the question, what happens if they expire but you don't use the link before the token time expires? <comment><USER2> Yeah, I ran into the same thing. There was no way to force it to no longer be valid, even creating a new forgot PW request left the old link active.</comment>


Show HN: Remember everything you learn on Khan Academy - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailykhan.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my first django web app. Would appreciate your feedback!</comment>


Making the argument for Node.js - <AUTHOR>

So my company is planning on introducing a new platform for our clients and they are planning firing up a new team to do so. I think it will be a relatively small with 4 or 5 devs. Right now the rumblings are for either Java or .net, primarily because of the ease of finding developers in our area. Currently everything is made in PHP and turn around time has been a huge problem, the codebase is also a huge mess for various reasons.
I want to make the case for switching to Node, but I'm struggling on how to make this argument to managers that are less technically inclined. What they are looking to accomplish isn't that complicated and believe that it could be rolled out dramatically faster with node.
Has anyone had to deal with recommendations like this in the past? How would you make the case for Node?
I'll try to keep up with the comments as much as I can through the day to answer any questions people may have. <comment><USER2> Resource consumption of Node is quite good. The JVM is a massive beast. So right off the bat you're going to be paying less for hardware.

Also explain to them that the technology inside of Chrome (v8) is what Node is based on. Google has no incentive to make Node good but they do have incentives to make v8 crush its competition when it comes to performance.

If Node uses v8 then one could say that they are piggy backing on a technology that's likely going to continue improving very rapidly.

So now you have this low resource high performance platform to develop on. Finding devs isn't too bad because Javascript is extremely popular, more so than .NET or Java for sure.

The only problem is finding "good" Javascript developers is a little more tricky but you're going to have this problem in every language I think, but it's more apparent in JS because a lot of people made a textbox disappear once on a web site 8 years ago or know how to implement a jquery slide show and put "experienced javascript developer" on their resume.</comment>