Ask HN: How to ditch an established online identity and start over? - <AUTHOR> I am active and known in a certain small industry in my home country ("developing world" kinda place) after 15+ years of online presence.
Over the past years I've been feeling constrained and unhappy with that identity. I also felt very alien in my home country and culture, both afk and online. Even my mother tongue and given name are not something I like. They all associate with the world I don't enjoy nor support.
While I'm obviously not a native English speaker, I feel more "at home" while communicating in and consuming English and living in the Western society.
I moved to a western country, but online I was still "there". Now I want to ditch my established identity and start afresh, under a new name. Distance myself from the culture I grew up in.
Of course, I could do all that without changing my name, but I feel like the old world would leak and haunt me.
Recently I came across the "ex Muslim" subreddit, and felt a weird familiarity. My troubles are nothing compared to those who grew up in a religious world and found the courage to leave and be vocal about it. But I could relate in a way. They feel like "the old life" is constantly trying to leak in and poke them.
It worries me, and I thought maybe we could discuss this type of cyber-rebirth, its caveats. Maybe someone has relevant experience and wouldn't mind sharing.
- How do you make sure the old identity doesn't leak into the new one? (apart from obvious technical non-contamination policy)
- Feels like starting from scratch in 2018 is harder than it was 15 years ago. Maybe it's the other way around. I guess I'm getting cold feet.
- I want to write and create, but I'm worried that being this weird person who magically appeared on the internet just a few months ago would make people wary. Google my new name: the guy never existed before 2018. Where the hell was he?
- Will changing full legal name (first and last) bring lots of problems for years to come?
- Am I being silly? <comment><USER2> I cut ties with my old identity in two stages. First I rejected the country of my birth, and then the gender I was assigned at birth. There are similarities between that and what you're trying to achieve.

Unfortunately, I found no reliable way to ensure the old identity doesn't "leak" into the new one, because I'm still the same person, and because the changes I made were gradual rather than timed to appear as a single event.

I just had to learn to accept that if someone were to look, they'd still find my old name etc. Luckily most people don't care, and just accept what you tell them about yourself. That's to say that I found a way to be fine with it not being a secret that a change has occurred, because it rarely matters to anyone.

<comment><AUTHOR> I bet that was both exciting and extremely hard. Glad to hear you did it.

<comment><USER3> I'm semi-anonymous: if you look hard enough you could find out, but the public at large doesn't care. So I think if you change your accounts, you can keep your viewpoints (keep expressing them) -- most won't make the connection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can relate, I'm almost at the end of the same "process". Originally from eastern Europe, moved to UK 8 years ago, acquired UK citizenship (kept my original one too), changed my full name in UK to a western sounding one. Currently at the stage of getting UK passport with UK name and keeping old name on original passport - the process is not exactly straight forward, but possible due to certain "loophole" in the law. This way I will (hopefully) effectively have two official identities, won't look like a weirdo when I'm back in my homeland and won't have to spell out my original name for the thousandth time on the phone when I'm in UK. Despite of what some people will tell you, prejudice is real, so if you feel like a cosmopolitan - change your name, it's not a big deal. Don't worry about absence of history if someone "googles you", in the end you will win more than you loose.

<comment><AUTHOR> >Despite of what some people will tell you, prejudice is real

I'm constantly going back and forth between "nah, people are generally sane and good, they don't just think in stereotypes and names don't matter" and "oh, god, they all have a strong impression even before they meet me, and it's probably negative".

But in the end, I'm sure prejudice is real.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like my identity, but somehow I wanted to erase my online presence. I like to write, draw and also want to create a youtube channel, but i don't want to associate with it in the physical world.

So, I think I can relate to this question.

What I did? 1) I went ahead and deleted all possible accounts I could which appeared in the google search. 2) I am looking for a new online name now. I will then create content and be active on social media (not facebook) through that name. I'd be happy if my friends and colleagues don't know about it.

P.S my first ever comment on HN since 2008. I would just read HN before without login.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply.

Good luck! I hope your new name and online identity will be a pleasant adventure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You seem to have several problems that shouldn't be confused.

1) You dislike your home country and culture, for reasons you keep private but can be assumed to be very unpleasant. This is a concrete and objective issue (uncomfortable life in a "developing" country, enemies, etc.) and moving to a western country solves the problem quite effectively.

2)You abhor your native culture, even your mother tongue and your name, as ties to your disliked country. This is a psychological issue, and your main strategy should be not allowing it to have a negative impact on your happiness. Which brings us to…

3) You are allowing your online ties to pull you back to the country you have left. These ties need to be cut as extensively as possible, but not with dramatic means like changing your name.

Abandon social media account, possibly email addresses, personal sites, forums and the like; people disappear online all the time, and everybody will simply do without you. Of course you could easily keep a few trusted friends.

4) Stubborn and enterprising unwanted people could ask themselves whether you have new sites, accounts etc. and look for you; hiding identifying details (no photos, using pseudonyms rigorously, no addresses, date of birth etc.) can protect you from casual identification attempts.

5) Regarding less casual identification attempts, what's the worst thing that can happen if you are identified? A warrant to arrest you? Hated relatives at your door? Debt collection? Embarrassment for something you cannot undo? Traveling to your present location should be a useful barrier to entry for anyone who wants to bother you in person instead of being ignored online.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, this is very helpful.

1) Yes, this was one of the best things that happened to me.

2) Again, thank you for formulating that in such a clear way.

5) Yeah, nothing like that, luckily. No enemies I know of, no debts or hated relatives.

Your comment made me think in a refreshing manner.

<comment><USER6> From an external point of view you are just an emigrant with new personal and professional interests. Your old online acquaintances are not likely to care about your "retirement" except to wish you well or as a small loss; if there are exceptions deal with them individually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _I 'm worried that being this weird person who magically appeared on the > internet just a few months ago would make people wary. Google my new name: > the guy never existed before 2018._

I am continually surprised by the number of people I meet/know who are highly accomplished in their careers yet have no discernible online presence — no Twitter, no Facebook, no (discoverable) forum comments, no blog, etc.

I have occasionally tried to look up old classmates and found that they have _no_ online presence. They're on no social media. You can't even find a photo of them in Google images. I hear through the grapevine that they have families, own businesses, etc., but you'd barely be able to tell they exist via the Internet.

I guess that might be less common in technical fields, e.g., software development, but in general there are _many_ such people.

I wouldn't think anything was weird if one of these highly accomplished people suddenly started blogging and Twittering and such. So I wouldn't worry about that part of it.

<comment><USER8> I've been looking for a job and when I talk to some executive I'll look them up and like you noted... nothing but a LinkedIn profile and a short one at that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You talk about establishing a new _online_ identity, but also about changing your legal name. For an online identity, do you intend for it to be easily connected to your (new) legal name?

If you were using a pseudonym not clearly tied to any legal name you have or have had, I am not sure why people would think it odd that the pseudonym arrived all of a sudden.

I have been fairly sloppy in keeping my different pseudonyms separate, (though I personally don't have much reason to work particularly hard to keep them separate) so this might be less informative, but I've never really had an issue with people thinking it odd that a pseudonym of mine appeared suddenly. On the other hand, I haven't published much of note, so that might be part of why.

If you intend to use a pseudonym, but one which is clearly connected to your new legal name, perhaps you could introduce the pseudonym without connecting it to your new legal name, and then after a bit, once the amount of recognition and/or time that you think is appropriate has been obtained/has passed, start connecting the pseudonym to your new legal name?

<comment><AUTHOR> >For an online identity, do you intend for it to be easily connected to your (new) legal name?

I'm not going to change my legal name any time soon, sorry for a somewhat confusing explanation. I was just thinking if that new online identity is alive and successful (subjectively), then, in the future, I might consider changing my legal name accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't have any advice but...

> While I'm obviously not a native English speaker...

This is absolutely not obvious from your posts - don't be so hard on yourself!

<comment><USER11> I second this. Seriously my friend, I know native English speakers who don't write nearly as well as you do!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you both, this made me smile and feel really good. One of those warm moments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> don't worry, delete what you can, create new content that flushes the old to page 2 of Google, be honest about having a different past if confronted (people that can't accept that are not worth your time anyways)

enjoy reinventing yourself!

I'd only be worried if you e.g. would do political journalism on somewhat Muslim related topics. in that case a full disclosure would be better or it might be used against you.

as for disliking your name: maybe you can find an additional nickname. I'd think twice about throwing out your "real name". I hope your relationship to your origin will relax over time. over time you hopefully can fully identify yourself with who you became and who you are and the past doesn't even matter so much anymore and than there is no reason to cut any ties anymore either.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do have a feeling this might be an overreaction of sorts, so yes, you're probably right and my relationship to the origin will relax over time.

Another issue is hidden discrimination or just stereotypes. Continuing with the Muslim analogy, imagine a caucasian non-religious western dude named Muhammad with a weird last name that doesn't sound like anything familiar anywhere on the planet except for one country. This is something I had to live with. When people hear my full name, they usually think of a certain culture and religion, and it has nothing to do with neither me nor my appearance.

<comment><USER12> I'm a white western male I really shouldn't give any advice on the problems with racism...

I of course hope it would be OK to be honest and simply ignore those who are racist, but maybe being pragmatic the sad truth is that hiding it avoids racist prejudices... Still a nickname might work fine for anything but official things like applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > magically appeared on the internet just a few months ago

You mean like everyone else just after they join reddit or HN? Same for blogging - there's plenty blogging and YouTubing under some cute handle rather than their given name. Plenty change names from marriage or other reasons such as abuse, witness protection or gender reassignment. More than a few have chosen to disappear, including Why the Lucky Stiff who was quite famous for a while.

All you have to do is establish a few karma points, i.e. gain a little credibility online, and vanishingly few will care what you're called or if you've always been throwaway250618.

If you go on to instigate a huge scam _then_ people will put some effort into history and doxxing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you're right, but the importance of some history to the credibility is higher in certain areas. If I write an article and post it on HN, then yes, I don't think people here care too much about my public history, procided that the article is interesting.

But if I decide to write and sell a book or produce a paid course, then having no history related to the field I'm trying to be an expert in feels pretty sketchy.

I can say for myself: when I'm considering buying a book or a course, I research the author.

<comment><USER13> I would too for a technical book or course, to a point. Mainly as so many have managed to successfully sell garbage. ;)

A refund policy and giving away a couple of random lessons or chapters should cover credibility there. Some months blogging in that niche and some reasonably written code over on github should be enough background for casual searching. Build the rest as you go. I don't think it's too hard to stand apart from the Internet Marketer types.

You probably don't need much background for a $29 ebook or video course to sell, you probably do for a $1,999 on site course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are two separate questions here: the one on online identity, and the one on changing a "legal name" (whatever that means). Using a pseudonym online is perfectly normal, in my opinion. I seem to recall that the British police and British school teachers advise people to use a "false" name online, unless there's a good reason not to, as a basic safety tip. So schoolchildren need a good memory to remember all the different names their friends use for different social media accounts. The different names people use could easily be linked by a police investigator, and perhaps by a determined private investigator but it's all rather opaque for the casual googler.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've started the process and, except for a few places like Twitter, many online services and communities make it pretty hard to use a pseudonym. Especially when it comes to restoring a lost or hacked account, when you have to confirm your identity.

<comment><USER15> This is true and unfortunately hard to solve. Thankfully, you can prevent losing an account in the first place by replicating your passwords/secrets to more than one place (that you trust not to explode together) and being diligent about fixing failures in that system. For every account where I have done so, I have not lost credentials in over ten years.

As for having your accounts "hacked", the only advice to be given is digital sanitation: Regularly scan your machine, don't give information to places you don't know, don't download shady executables (or if you do, definitely don't execute them outside of a sandbox). These are all good practices regardless, it's just that for you they have become essential practices to keep your accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It should be relatively easy to ditch an online identity. Start with changing your email (no mail forwarding either), then set up new accounts for the services you care about.

I changed my identity on HN and reddit all the time -- just create a new account. Of course these services could probably connect new with old just by IP address, but I don't care about that. What I'm actually doing is gaurding against something coming back to bite me in the ass years later (an unpopular opinion, lapse in judgement, etc).

Cahnging legal stuff, that depends on your country.

</comment><comment><USER17> Related: [https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/47293/how- can-s...](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/47293/how-can-someone- go-off-web-and-anonymise-themselves-after-a-life-online)

</comment><comment><USER18> I think it's fine. It's just probably 10x easier to get 80% of what you want if you aren't as strict about doing away with your old one. You can do a name change and all that without completely vanishing. Does the odd obsessed fan or hater really matter?

</comment><comment><USER19> You can refer to this book[1] which lists links to delete your accounts

[1][https://inteltechniques.com/data/workbook.pdf](https://inteltechniques.com/data/workbook.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER20> I had several other pseudonyms that I use to use. One of them had half a million youtube views and thousands of subs associated with a game I used to play and I used to make guides read my hundreds of thousands of people and translated in multiple languages, I ended up deleting any association I had with it since I moved on with my life.

I had another pseudonym where I was one of the most richest players in a mmo with several million players. I used to post guides on how to make virtual money. I long since parted with that one too.

I also had another pseudonym account where I partially managed one of the largest online collaborations ever done, ironically I don't even tell people about that either. I look up that username and I see it referenced in the major news outlets.

I had another pseudonym that had too much namespace tech buzzwords associated with it, it was my github account, so I had to rename all my accounts to this one.

In another pseudonym, I had some batshit crazy moments in my life. It mostly stemmed from never talking about anything I did in the above, among other things. Because of some social stigmas at the time I couldn't really go see a psychiatrist. I ended up writing a 100,000 word post to myself, so I could learn more about why I have these insecurities. I learned about the things holding me back in my life, my regrets, etc. It mostly had to deal with superiority complex because I did lots of crazy impressive shit that no one knew in high school. I realized that growing up as well I maintained dual personalities (online and real life) from elementary to high school. Also, it was because I had multiple hidden disabilities that not even my family knew about. For the longest time I never accepted that fact. I ended up deleting that pseudonym one out too.

I don't know why but I've always had issues with attaching my name to a pseudonym. Maybe I'm paranoid, I don't know. I just have never been the type of person to showcase my work. I actually took some pride in that. I learned the hardway at my first job I ever had when I got fired from it, how its not what you do but how you showcase it

But, I made this pseudonym with the intent purpose that anyone who dug far enough can find my real name if they wanted too. But I also have insecurities about publishing things about my life, work, etc and I started as of last week to publish it openly. Mostly because I recently also decided to go to local tech meetups. I didn't realize that random people found things I do actually interesting. I have tons of interesting things I want to blog about but I don't know if it might haunt me later legally. My writing sometimes suffers as a result of privacy paranoia. I grew up dealing with legal issues my entire life so I'm always thinking of worst case scenarios.

I also intend on making youtube / DIY tutorials as well, am strongly considering setting away this pseudonym so I can have something more marketable. With my face on every video, etc. I feel like a lot of my potential is wasted if no one knows about it.

I don't know if that helps you out or not. Truthfully, online identities and whatever is just whitehat and blackhat SEO at the end of the day.

What has helped me is accepting and appreciating the old identity(s) for what it was. So long that I accept it is what matters the most. Also, accepting the fact that no one is truthfully going to dig that far deep, unless its the government,SO, an internet troll, someone that really hates you, or a recruiter. My name is considered fairly common so even if I hit the news nothings going to change.

I don't think your being silly here. Also this was very painful for me to write too. Just be grateful you aren't caught doing stupid stuff in public that went viral, etc. Or incarcerated, wrong place at wrong time in the eyes of the law, etc. That could seriously hurt your prospects in life.</comment>


Local IP - <AUTHOR> http://net.ipcalf.com/ <comment><USER2> Interesting... FWIW I've found that this can be disabled in Firefox by toggling media.peerconnection.enabled to false.

<comment><AUTHOR> That it is on by default (well it seem so anyway) is interesting from a fingerprinting perspective.</comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Help us create a startup in the gaming space - <AUTHOR> Hi all-
Recently, a fellow HN'r and I got it in our heads to build a startup in the gaming space.  We have bounced around ideas and are really not happy with what our less-than-creative minds have come up with.  As a community that can solve even mysterious medical problems (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1399450), we thought that you all could certainly provide some good insight into what is missing/needs fixing in the gaming community.  In any case, some things we have considered:
1) Social network for gamers 2) Groupon like site for gamers 3) Deals for gamers based on playing habits 4) Meetup for gamers
Anyway, would love some input.  Fire Away! <comment><USER2> An idea I've been sitting on for awhile is social networking intended for the fabricated and fractured identities of online gamers, with or without divulging the player's true identity.

A social network of this kind would be a natural place to for organized playing groups (clans, guilds, etc.) to form, organize, recruit, schedule and so on. Individuals and groups alike could display their "home" or favorite servers/shards/whatever, affiliations, and so on.

There'd have to be some thought put into the mechanics of managing profiles, as a single player may wish to have several character profiles on the system without publicly linking them (FPS vs. MMO handles), and some games may not have proxy character identities but refer directly to the player instead (Plants vs. Zombies and other casual games).

I think there have been some moves in this general direction by gaming sites that have some kind of community aspect, but nothing that really came close to this more specific concept of users managing a collection of their virtual identities which each may have their own separate network of associated teammates or friends.

<comment><USER3> This is definitely needed. If it comes down to it, I may have to write it myself. I know what I want and I'd be the first person to use it.

I've ran some numbers of this and the biggest problem is gamers won't pay for anything, they hate ads and they don't click through. So when evaluating this versus other opportunities it loses out because there are still plenty of other better options. All that being said there is a need and after you have a loyal user base there is always a way to monetize it (right!?).

I've seen a number of these sorts of sites come and go over the years. Even a few facebook apps. No one has come close to nailing it. It seems that founders are not gamers; they miss the boat and make it too social network like. And if they are gamers, they never seem to push the site out of it's alpha phase.

<comment><USER2> Solving my own need is definitely the inspiration, though honestly I don't game much anymore (certainly not as much as I used to!)

The younger net-native generation is no doubt resistant to paying for a service of this kind. The obvious strategies for making (paid) membership attractive would be discount on games and gear and access to anything exclusive and/or pre-release (beta codes, demos, strategy guides). Making that happen has its own set of challenges, of course...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Make a game out of doing real world stuff. Ie- I get points for running a 5k, points for skydiving,etc. Now people can cheat, but if you added in proofs like pictures/getting your friends to endorse that you did it, that would be cool.

<comment><USER5> For Schell, this, or some version of it, is the future (the future as such, not just of gaming). His talk was all over the place a while back, including here (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1142424>), so you may well have seen it already, but video and transcript here: [http://www.realtimetranscription.com/showcase/DICE2010/Jesse...](http://www.realtimetranscription.com/showcase/DICE2010/JesseSchell/index.php)

<comment><AUTHOR> I love this talk. Also as a sidenote, whenever I watch it, I am reminded, surprisingly, of Mitch Hedburg.

<comment><USER6> If you love this talk, you should read "Shaping Things" by Bruce Sterling. Non-affiliate link: [http://www.amazon.com/Shaping-Things-Mediaworks- Pamphlets-St...](http://www.amazon.com/Shaping-Things-Mediaworks-Pamphlets- Sterling/dp/0262693267/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275799424&sr=8-1)

It talks about the history of objects, the future that Schell talks about, and then what's next after that... 'biots.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me of a ted talk on games. There is an anti-game sentiment amongst most founders, but in the end it's the future. Game designers have figured out how to leverage and motivate more than all the academics or bosses combined.

Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world

[http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_be...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html)

<comment><USER7> You may be interested in the commentary about this movement here: [http://www.raphkoster.com/2010/06/03/what-ux-can-and- cannot-...](http://www.raphkoster.com/2010/06/03/what-ux-can-and-cannot-learn- from-games/#comments)

I largely agree with the overall, albeit crotchety, sentiment: "Just pay them". That said, <http://fold.it> is ingenious.

<comment><USER3> beautiful, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've built startups in the gaming space for the past ten years. Some are successful (esports.com was sold back in the 90's), some mediocre (gameriot.com reached over 1 million uniques for a few months), and some failures (I won't bore you with these but they never got off the ground).

I don't recommend doing the gaming thing. It's a very competitive space with very little actual 'dollars' on the advertising side. Gaming was the 'in' thing for 2009, and the people who sold ads against it still floundered.

With that out of the way, here's my two cents: 1) Gamers don't like to pay for anything. Period. They have a very high piracy rate.

2) PC gamers should be your target. Console gamers rarely do significant 'gaming' stuff on their PC. (I know this is a generalization but I strongly believe it) The exception are transactional sites (see point 4)

3) I would strongly suggest that you avoid a 'social network for gamers' at all costs. I've built a few of these and they all fail miserably. The only marginally successful ones are XFire and Raptr. Rupture never really launched but was purchased for 10m so I guess you could call it a success?

4) Tying into game API's is ridiculously hard because you have to get every 'publisher' on board. The 'Developer' of the game always wants to do cool stuff with their games, but the publisher controls the budget for external integration and API's and what not.

5) Cheat Codes is the one area that hasn't been done to death that I see some potential in. Sites like Cheatcodes.com and MyCheats are not very social, built on old technology, and are RIDICULOUSLY profitable.

6) If you build ANYTHING for PC, make sure it is focused around World of Warcraft. It's the cash cow and nothing else compares.

7) Gamers don't like to leave their houses. I know that this 'myth' has been debunked countless time but the fact is, it's very hard to get someone to go somewhere else to play a game with their friend. Just hit them on their console or computer.

8) The one idea that I've had floating around is a 'lifestream' type site for gaming. I envisioned it as a low tech solution like 'upload your kill shot, brag about it' or something like that. People just take a pic w/ their iphone, you check the timestamp against their Xbox gamer tag to see who they were playing against, then you tag the photo w/ their names. Could work w/ video too. Console gamers don't really have much that ties them to their PC, so the iPhone (or any mobile device) is one of the few ways to get them while they're playing.

Sorry for the stream of consciousness. I'm a bit jaded from being in the gaming space for so long. Recently started something focusing on another industry (hair salons, oddly enough) and it's very gratifying.

<comment><USER7> One thing I would add to this (especially the gamers don't pay for stuff outside of games and their hardware) is that gamers don't have a lot of pain points that can be served by a scrappy startup.

They have communities (NeoGAF, Something Awful, Quarter to Nine, Penny Arcade) where they connect with like-minded people. There are usually so few in most towns that its easy to find local gamers if you want to (hobby stores, mostly) but usually gamers don't. Most of their gaming friends are online, and don't need a face-to-face.

What gamers want is new, shiny, and strongly entwined to the walled gardens being run by the console manufacturers. Unfortunately, those walls means the only people able to innovate effectively in the space are those very same console manufacturers.

If something cool was to come from doing a startup for gamers, it would need to lean heavily on APIs from other games, and having recently studied this (to be presented at [1]), while there are some read-only services, there's certainly not enough out there to start doing anything interesting with. I am not even sure that the data you could get from them would necessarily be of value. Gamers are interested in their data, but there's not a lot you can tangibly create from that data, unlike say being a poster printing company that uses the Flickr API. And if they don't click through ads, what are they going to buy?

I guess I'm a big naysayer as well, but I just don't see the obvious pain points that a startup could serve gamers. My gut feeling is there's lower hanging fruit in the web app sea.

[1] <http://fdg2010.org/Main.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Copy yahoo games (I hate java) using HTML5/canvas/svg

Start easy with tic-tac-toe, checkers, backgammon then chess.

Add card games, solitaire, spades, canasta, etc

Then, when the site matures, introduce games like farmville, mafia wars, etc.

Emphasis in visuals, stunning 3D views, etc.

Focus also in the social aspect, lobbies, chat rooms, rankings, tournaments.

<comment><USER10> Isn't this space really crowded already, though? Especially if you consider flash games? Is your thinking that with HTML5 you can get onto platforms where flash won't work such as the iPhone?

<comment><USER7> I reckon if you could fashion a site quickly enough that would work on the iPhone and iPad, you would have a winner.

There's a large swathe of the population for whom <http://www.pogo.com> is the beginning and the end for games, and I would be the intersection between them and the iPad is going to get bigger and bigger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am running (4) at <http://NearbyGamers.com> now. I lovingly call it an 'anti-social network' because the entire goal of the site is to get visitors off the site and gaming with each other in person. There are a couple dozen other sites in this niche but NG is (AFAIK) the largest and most active.

I've seen (1) but didn't bother keeping a link because, well, I don't see that gamers actually have a lot in common and care to socialize based on games. Video games are so common that I don't see them as more than a granfalloon. Could easily be wrong here. (2) Dunno if you can do it without geography in your favor like Groupon, but good luck. (3) I think all of the stories of the business of video games in the last year or two (Zynga, EA charging used gamers, DLC, unlock codes, virtual goods) have been about businesses finding new ways to charge more based on playing habits, not less. That's why all the fuss about virtual currencies, you can get near-perfect segmentation.

</comment><comment><USER12> Some questions - are you capable game developers? Or more a social app developer. Aka more 'Real Racing' (native OpenGL 3d iPhone racer) or Farmville (scripting)? Not sure if I should post my mmo idea(s) or my casual game ideas.

Edit: sorry reread post - so no games, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we're not so much game developers but instead more web developers. That being said we are certainly open to all ideas. So anything that comes to mind is certainly worth a post.

<comment><USER12> That's cool, understood.

One idea i've been thinking about is an html5 game of M.U.L.E - a classic 4-player 8-bit game. After seeing the html5 versions of asteroids and 3d tetris (torus), seems like taking it to the next level with lobbies and online match-making (Aka backend web support) would make this kind of game possible now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think anything you're doing with community is going to be a massive, up hill battle because it's a hugely saturated space where you're competing with a huge range of people that will be hard to beat ... old and established networks like weblogs inc and gawker, communities, and social platforms like Sony's and Microsoft's.

Anything to do with deals is going to be too niche I think ... how often do people buy new games? When I only need to visit your site every other month it's far too easy for someone I visit every day to replace you.

Meetups I think is also going to be a tough battle, there's already (I believe) huge lan party organizations.

What does your specific interests in gaming come from?

</comment><comment><USER14> Put 3d games in the clouds. Let me play them fullscreen through Chrome from anywhere.

<comment><USER15> Or let me play Dwarf Fortress in the cloud so that I will actually be able to play the new version at a reasonable speed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha. I love the inevitable mention of dwarf fortress in any gaming post. It's like Godwin's law for games:

"As an online discussion about gaming grows longer, the probability of mentioning Dwarf Fortress approaches 1"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Beyond 4sq, MyTown, etc, check out what did scvngr did. Might give you some ideas.

</comment><comment><USER17> I blogged about this a while ago; basically i think the social space will be huge. There is a lot of gaming happening around facebook at the monent and I think there is space to disconnect it from there. Something that has logins from Twitter and fb and anywhere else and the Brings you into the games. Money ideas might be in micro payments (yeh I know; but they have to work sometime!) or even better in selling the metrics/ game recomendations (e.g. Did you know your friend X is also playing Y?)

</comment><comment><USER10> You could also join an existing start up. =) I'd be interested in talking with you guys if you want. I don't see any contact info in your profile, so send me an email at jeff at starsonata dot com.

</comment><comment><USER18> Which gaming community are you talking about? Competitive, league-based FPS gamers? Highly socially integrated guild-based MMO players? Casual bejeweled junkies? Pen-and-paper tabletop RPGers?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think we are open to everything and anything under the gaming label. As huge gamers ourselves, we have done quite a bit of playing in many (if not all) of these scenarios.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there a good HN- or Digg-style gaming news site out there? Besides the big blogs like Kotaku and Gamesradar and stuff, I mean.

<comment><USER13> There's a bunch of subreddits with ranging popularity ... gaming is the big, generalized one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> A system for virtual items. Create new types of items; give them to other people. Items can also be prizes for beating games.

</comment><comment><USER21> Have you heard of <http://www.platogo.com/> ?

</comment><comment><USER22> Wish I had seen this 21 hours ago.

I currently work in the game industry, previously worked in the game industry, and have worked for non-industry consultancies that are trying to break into the industry.

First, if you're not a gamer yourself, you're not going to get much traction. You'll be able to check reasonable boxes of features, and no-one will ever use them, and you won't understand why. The domain knowledge is cliquish and subtle and if you don't actually play games (a lot), there's no way to acquire it.

Your first idea is a great example of this, and it's the first one most people hit on, because there aren't a lot of web-based communities for gamers like there are for other markets. This is because the community is _in the individual games and on the individual consoles_. A consultancy I worked for made this same mistake, actively pitching companies by saying "we can help build community around your games" and being thrown out of offices for their ignorance. This is also why you can't make a social network that effectively ties together PC, PS3 and Xbox360 gamers: the console manufacturers and publishers don't want you to. Rupture might have gotten close, but then EA bought them, and then shut them down.

2, 3) Groupon for gamers doesn't make sense on the consoles, because you'll need to get MS/Sony/Nintendo buy-in, and Steam already runs sales on the PC, and there are already the indie game bundles that they organize themselves... there's no pain point there.

In fact, someone else mentioned this already: gamers don't have a lot of pain points that a startup can address. There's a big one in the MMO space: I get an MMO and it's awesome and I tell my friends, but by the time they pay for a subscription, the server I'm on is full and they are all on some other server, so I have to re-roll and start again. There's no good way to get everyone "on the same page" quickly and easily... and there's no way for you to do it as an outsider. That's functionality that really has to be provided by the MMO developers and supported by the publisher.

4) There is one LAN gaming center in Austin, TX left. It's dying from utter lack of interest. Gamers don't need to meet in real life. That's the whole point of networked consoles and PCs.

Security is some place you might be able to break in: a universal PC gaming security dongle. WoW already offers an RSA keyfob-style authenticator. Steam is basically online DRM like Ubisoft was doing, except the value proposition is enough to make gamers not care. Give publishers your dongle for free. Give it away to gamers. Charge the publishers and studios a retainer for integration and on-going support and servers for storing data.

Steam will be your biggest competitor in this, because along with DRM, they also offer cloud data storage across Mac and PC (and expectedly Linux).

All the other tech, like MMO servers and graphics engines, many game companies still believe they know best and would rather build themselves (NIH is strong in the industry).

<comment><USER22> After thinking about this a little more, it's not strictly true that _all_ the other tech would be avoided because of NIH.

The game industry is always several years behind research in some levels, most notably around content creation. A modern, triple-A title has _hundreds_ of artists laboring for _years_ on all of the art for a game. All the tools to export art from Max or Maya or Z-brush or Modo or whatever are custom, and buggy, and one-offs, because every engine (except for Unity, apparently) has their own custom _import_ format instead of using a standard like COLLADA and then baking out the models into a packaging format afterwards.

Just like CGI helped George Lucas eliminate actors, if you can build something that eliminates the need for more artists, you'll be able to sell that.

Things like procedural content generation: even open-source game engine tech like OGRE supports integration with systems like Speedtree, which is a specialized procedural foliage generator, because when you're making an outdoor scene, making trees and bushes and grasses by hand _takes a lot of a real person's time_ : <http://www.speedtree.com/>

The latest version of UnrealEngine3 supports procedural building generation: you tell it how buildings are made and all of the art assets that make up corners and sides and windows and walls and such, and it'll generate a building out of all the component art, _but you still have to build the component art_ : <http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ProceduralBuildings.html> (Also, this is stuff that was in SIGGRAPH papers a decade ago.)

Procedural texture generate for art is also still really in its infancy as far as adoption goes. Besides what was done in Spore, I only know of one tools company that does it: <http://www.allegorithmic.com/>

Animating characters is expensive. A lot of it's motion captured, which is expensive, and requires a lot of refinement by character animators, and a lot of it's still done by hand. Creating characters and all the outfits they wear all the time is such a chore. I once wanted to use real-time game engines and real-time motion capture to put on theatre productions. If you could get the capture equipment good enough for that, and inexpensive enough to use for children's theatre, that would be a hardware win, but you shouldn't even have to do that.

This is all something that I believe could be done procedurally.

I mean, people all have a certain set of proportions, right? With a fractal variety of differences. Generate bodies and then apply procedural _stylistic_ changes. Let artists define their character style and algorithmically riff off that. Then do the same for clothing and outfit models and textures. Content creation for games should be picking characters out of a line-up and tweaking them by turning knobs and dials, not modeling by hand. Same for monsters and other enemies. There are thousands of years of fashion design that could be boiled down to algorithms and procedural generation.

I believe you could do the same for gameplay. Some Doom map generators were excellent. Gameplay has gotten different and more complex, but so has our understand of what's fun. Generate plausibly fun maps as starting points for content generation based on the gameplay story.

All of this is several steps beyond where any game company thinks, because the development model doesn't support ongoing, repeat development. If you're an engine company like Emergent, who makes the Gamebryo tech, you'll sell to one company, and at some point early on they'll stop taking your updates because they've forked something and don't have time to re-integrate it, and then you'll never hear from them again because their game didn't sell well enough to sustain the studio.

Plus, some of what I'm talking about _isn't_ supported by research yet. There's no minimum viable product that you could build in a Y Combinator three-month timeframe. This is like Masters in graphics thesis-type stuff. :/

(That doesn't change the fact that it's what the industry needs, of course.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'd love to have a site where I could create a profile and specify all the board/card games, pen-and-paper RPG's, and video/computer games I like to play, and my geographic location, and then find other folks with matching game/location interests, and have them find me, contact each other, etc. If this already exists, nevermind, unless there's an opportunity to do it better.

<comment><USER11> I run this site at <http://NearbyGamers.com></comment></comment>


Why Lisp macros are cool, a Perl perspective (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://lists.warhead.org.uk/pipermail/iwe/2005-July/000130.html <comment><USER2> Even for those who don't need to be sold on Lisp macros, that was worth reading just for this sentence (in reference to C++ macros):

 _I forgot what rabid programming language fans are like; they can and will defend any system, no matter how dysfunctional, as long as it's _their_ dysfunctional sytem._

:-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Higher Order Perl is a fantastic book, which makes a lot of functional concepts more immediately usable for non-Lisp dynamic language programmers (the example language is Perl, but there are projects on the web to convert the examples to other languages; the concepts apply across most of the popular dynamic languages).

</comment><comment><USER4> Here is a link to the section on "what makes lisp different" that is referred to in the article -

<http://bit.ly/8yrvC>

</comment><comment><USER5> Question about the code:

      (defmacro set-sqrt (place v) `(setf ,place (* v v)))

What does the comma right before place in its second usage signify?

Also, am I right in assuming that setf turns:

      (setf (f1 arg1) arg2)

into

      (setter-for-f1 arg1 arg2)

<comment><USER6> I'm not a CL guy so I don't know how defsetf actually works, but I skipped down in that link to where that Lisp macro is, and if defsetf works like he describes (and I don't know if it does), then

        (setf (f1 arg1) arg2)

will cause an error, but

        (setf (sqrt arg1) arg2)

will expand into

        (setf arg1 (* v v))

which, as you can see, is nonsensical in terms of what it looks like he was trying to do.

<comment><USER7> Yes, as has been pointed out, he is missing a pair of commas (or more correctly, a patch to ensure that v is evaluated once and only once --- right now it is evaluated 0 times, and adding 2 commas would make it eval twice. Using the definition of (square x) is the cleanest way to fix this).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a non-Lisper:

In short, macros are cool because, instead of hacking the compiler and groveling through its weird data structures to add language features, you can add language features in the language itself, because the language is already traditionally expressed in parse trees. Phrased this way, I don't see why this is a life-changing revelation.

</comment><comment><USER9> And yet, still no example of a _useful_ macro.

In C++, you already have assignment. You don't need to roll your own.

<comment><USER10> Try this: <http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there any significance to the "=3D" in his code, or are those the same as the normal equal "="? Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER12> For a long while I've thought that Randall Schwartz was the author of Higher Order Perl. Oops.</comment>


Have scientists found a crashed UFO on the seabed? - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2021174/Have-scientists-crashed-flying-saucer-seabed.html

<comment><USER2> "Now, however, his team do not have the money or resources to examine the shape further."

If it really has any chance of being an alien spacecraft, there will be many companies (and governments) that will jump at the chance to fund this exploration.</comment>


Cloud Foundry Foundation CEO Sam Ramji Departs for Google - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/17/cloud-foundry-foundation-ceo-sam-ramji-departs-for-google/ <comment><AUTHOR> As someone involved with Cloud Foundry and really liking the platform (we're adopting it in our own hosting solution) I really wonder what keeps it from going mainstream. Kubernetes for example is doing great but is so much more difficult for developers to work with.

Maybe Sam Ramji departing for Google will bring CF more close to GCP.</comment>


Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS" - <AUTHOR> http://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/ <comment><USER2> I'm pleased to see that evil deeds have consequences, though I'd like to see Oracle suffer a little (OK, a lot) more before getting over the hump. People don't use Oracle Linux because the Open Source community doesn't trust Oracle (and they shouldn't; that mistrust has been well-earned over a couple of decades).

There's a lot of reasons not to use Oracle Linux, most of them non-technical. Oracle is simply not an ethical member of the Open Source community, and if you trust them, they will screw you, some day, some way. Red Hat may have their flaws, but they've never sued over patents and they've never attempted to destroy competing projects or companies through legal threats and bullying. CentOS may be slow to jump on updates sometimes and to get out new releases, but at least it's a good Open Source citizen.

As an aside, if you want a faster moving RHEL rebuild that has paid developers working on it, you might try Scientific Linux. It is built by CERN and Fermilab, and tends to be very solid and fast to update and invisible (i.e., I don't think about it, at all, and it Just Works). We switched from CentOS to SL back when CentOS 6 was so late being released; couldn't be happier with it. We added support in Virtualmin for SL for just that reason...so many of our customers wanted 6, it was worth the effort to add a new OS.

So, yeah, Oracle is gonna have to have a "come to Jesus" moment if they want to participate in the Open Source community. They've got a lot of repenting to do.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, I don't think SL holds up in a in all cases. CentOS (and Oracle) strive for binary compatibility. I've had cases where I needed to run vendor supplied binaries which were sometimes buggy on a non-centos EL system. Yeah, it sucks that the vendor only supplies binaries, and only tests against specific RHEL release points, but that's life sometimes.

Don't get me wrong, Scientific Linux is great, but it's not for everyone.

<comment><USER2> Yes, the priorities of SL are different from CentOS, and binary compatibility isn't _quite_ as high on the list, from what I can tell.

But, so many people are only using Open Source software, and just want a really popular, really stable, really long lifecycle Linux distro for their servers. That's the boat I'm in. I don't currently run anything that I can't get in source form on our servers, so I don't have any concerns about binary compatibility.

That said, both of our products that specifically support SL and have binary packages in their repos (Virtualmin and Cloudmin) use the same yum repository of binaries across RHEL, CentOS, and Scientific Linux. We've never had any bug reports caused by that sharing of binaries. So, binary compatibility is pretty good in our admittedly limited experience (we only provide a handful of binaries).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've run 200+ server environments on centos4, a 40+ server cluster on centos5, and now run a 50+ server cluster on rhel6. I'm pretty much dead on their target audience here.

This seems almost mean. Its a billion dollar company calling out a volunteer group of a couple of guys for being slower than them.

Part of the reason I switched to rhel was exactly this graph, I didn't have a lot of faith in centos as a going concern given the delays on 6. But also, its clearly not easy for a reason. There is a lot of work to be done, and the farther you trace your way up the rhel/epel/fedora tree the more you realize this is a community providing an insane amount of value and deserves to be funded.

So if Oracle is going to sell me on using and/or paying for their distro, being faster than a handful of volunteers isn't gonna do it. Going toe-to-toe with redhat on funding, contributing, producing and supporting open source software such that I _want_ to fund you is what'll do it.

<comment><AUTHOR> (Disclaimer: I had a hand in a lot of this)

That's not quite the intent. Look, here's the deal: I know we all like to think that corporations are evil and the presence of corporate interests actually messes stuff up.

But this really is one case where you want the oomph of bilion-dollar company making sure that you get your security updates in time.

No one else is providing that. Oracle happens to be doing so, and we're making it available to you for free, so why shouldn't you benefit from that? (And seriously, I get that you're not paying for CentOS, and I'm not interested in getting you to pay for Oracle Linux either.)

<comment><USER5> Still no good answer... why is Oracle doing this?

I don't see how this story doesn't end with a whole bunch of people having to convert back to CentOS when someone at Oracle questions the value in offering this distribution for free.

<comment><USER6> If you switch to Oracle Linux and if you have some major problem you can't fix, then the next logical step is to pay for support. It would be a simple step to take since you're already running the official version.

<comment><USER7> I'm not an Oracle hater (I just dislike them a little). But if this is true, then they have an economic incentive to _not_ issue free fixes in a timely manner. Or, (not to sound to tinfoil-hattish) to release _slightly_ broken things that don't impact an individual installation, but impact clusters.

Again, I'm not saying that they _will_ do the above; just that there is economic incentive for them to bring users into paying for support, and as long as they give it away for free, no one will bite.

There's an old wives saying (used in a different context), that says "why would a guy buy a cow, if he can get the milk for free?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh yeah! Please lock me in to your crappy Red Hat knock-off so you can screw me royally if Larry changes his mind and wants to extract some money from its users.

IMHO, Oracle is certainly the LAST company you should use any product from unless you are absolutlely forced to (like Java, unfortunately, or their bloated DB if your are in the financial industry). Once you are dependent on them, no matter if you are a partner or customer, they will definitely find a way to screw you over. If you want supported Red Hat linux, just buy it from Red Hat.

[UPDATE]: Also, how nice of the to mention Ksplice in the announcement as a quick reminder how they like to screw existing user bases of their products.

<comment><USER9> I'd be interested in hearing what you are referring to about Ksplice.

<comment><USER10> ksplice was supported in rhel.. when oracle purchased it, they announced they were going to drop rhel, and then turned it into a 30-day free trial-- after the 30-days, you must switch to oracle linux to continue using ksplice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Everyone we sold Ksplice to on RHEL is still running Ksplice on RHEL. So it's more accurate to say that we closed the door on new subscriptions for anything other than Oracle Linux, but all existing subscriptions remain unaffected (and those customers can even add new systems, if they'd like to.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Why are you doing this?

This is not some gimmick to get you running Oracle Linux so that you buy support from us. If you're perfectly happy running without a support contract, so are we. We're delighted that you're running Oracle Linux instead of something else.

At the end of the day, we're proud of the work we put into Oracle Linux. We think we have the most compelling Linux offering out there, and we want more people to experience it._

Hihihihi. Sure you are.

<comment><USER9> I think it's more like "you are meaningless to us unless you want to buy a support contract". They do the exact same thing with MySQL. Download it and use it, but don't bug us unless you have cash in your hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for the brtfs, but no thanks. I'll only touch your stuff with a GPL pole and with a non-oracle maintainer.

If you want support for Centos, please consider redhat *

I'm sure there are some good people at Oracle, and maybe this is a genuine project by some of them, but the hierarchy Oracle is under is just too fickle (as what happened with OpenSolaris).

*Not redhat affiliated. Not even running redhat or fedora anywhere. But on enough mailinglists to see that RH isn't a respected open-source company for nothing.

</comment><comment><USER9> While Oracle doesn't have the trust of the open source world, the enterprise IT world does trust it (and Ksplice is pretty awesome, too!). This is likely to become an important distribution over time.

I've known companies that used CentOS for all the dev boxes and Redhat for production to save money. That has downsides because you are running different distros in the end (there can be subtle and not-so-subtle differences) and, if you have a problem on a non-prod box, your forced to use community support.

Oracle Linux will become a viable alternative here. Run the same distro on all boxes and only pay for production boxes. Then, if you have a problem on an unsupported box, you can bump it up to supported without altering the box.

The key here, for Oracle, is whether that support is actually worth paying for.

</comment><comment><USER13> Oracle launches Oracle Linux -> People port over from CentOS -> CentOS community dies -> Oracle stops updating Oracle Linux for people without support contracts

I'd call anyone claiming this strategy a looney if it weren't for the fact that the company doing this is Oracle and I'd put nothing below them as far as a business strategy.

<comment><AUTHOR> The issue with that strategy is that it's totally untenable. As soon as Step 4 happens, someone else makes a new CentOS that everyone switches to.

Fundamentally, there is a market need for something to fill the niche of CentOS. I happen to think that free-Oracle-Linux can be a better CentOS than CentOS, but if they were both to suddenly go away, something new would come to fill the obvious void.

<comment><USER14> > Fundamentally, there is a market need for something to fill the niche of > CentOS.

You know what fills the niche of CentOS pretty well? CentOS. If CentOS goes away, you know what will fill its niche? -- Scientific Linux.

> I happen to think that free-Oracle-Linux can be a better CentOS than CentOS

I think Oracle (which is already not having a stellar reputation in the open source community) just worsened its position. People with money pay Redhat for support. People who don't want to pay, will use CentOS, and a large proportion of those don't like Oracle and out of principle will avoid it.

It seems after the litigation debacle, Oracle could have done something to improve its standing the programming community and maybe donated to CentOS, for example. That would have been nice. Instead they keep shooting themselves in foot.

Will this affect Oracle's bottom line. Perhaps not. Maybe in the longer future. But don't be surprised at the negative reaction from other programmers on HN or other tech sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For the uninitiated, RedHat was so unhappy with Oracle repackaging/reselling a nearly identical system that they started obfuscating their patches:

[http://www.itworld.com/open-source/139165/red-hat-defends- ke...](http://www.itworld.com/open-source/139165/red-hat-defends-kernel-code- obfuscation)

[http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Red-Hat-defends- chang...](http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Red-Hat-defends-changes-to- kernel-source-distribution-1202733.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> [http://public- yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/3/base/i38...](http://public- yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/3/base/i386/)

It took me some moments to realise that Oracle Linux 6.3 as a clone of RHEL will, of course, include _libreoffice_ as the office package for the desktop installation as opposed to previous RHEL versions that included OpenOffice.org.

There is a degree irony in this, but I imagine the number of customers using Oracle Linux as a desktop OS is small. I gather a number of financial institutions do use CentOS on desktops and RHEL on servers however.

<comment><USER17> This has to be the funniest thing I've read today.

A permanent reminder to whoever looks into Oracle Linux of how they've treated the Open Source community.

The sweet, sweet irony.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What a bullshit comparison.

They mean to replace RHEL (paid support) but try to win over CentOS customers (who surely won't pay for support, if they would want to, they would use RHEL and thus would have even faster security patches then Oracle Linux).

Stay away.. as far as possible.. thanks.

</comment><comment><USER19> Readers please note this is the same 'Oracle Unbreakable Linux' they've been peddling for a while. If you can read that product name without feeling some sort of incredulation, this may the distro for you.

</comment><comment><USER20> Oracle is the last company I would trust after opensolaris, etc.

</comment><comment><USER21> But, if I wanted a better alternative to CentOS, wouldn't I just go and use Red Hat? Why would I lock myself into a company that has this bad a track record?

<comment><USER22> Because with Red Hat you have to pay for access to updates.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. And I think "lock-in" is an unfair characterization. It's not like you can't switch back to CentOS or Scientific Linux.

<comment><USER23> How so? You guys are providing a script to switch from CentOS to OL, but I don't see a comparable script to switch back to CentOS.

Where is the script to easily switch back when Oracle decides to screw everyone over as many have already brought up?

<comment><AUTHOR> druiid: If that happens, I will _personally_ help you switch back any systems you switched over this way :) My email address is in my profile.

As for everyone else, yeah, a '--reverse' was somewhere in our set of desired features for the script, but ultimately this became about some combination of "Launch early, launch often" and "MVP", two topics I know we all love here :)

<comment><USER24> Can we get that in writing and approved by Oracles legal department? Or is this some kind of personal guarantee, if so can you please spell if out exactly. Thanks. Also is it for druiid only, or the community as a whole?

<comment><AUTHOR> That offer is for druiid only :), but --reverse is in the works.

(And seriously, editing the script and hacking together a quick reverse is pretty easy, but I just want to make sure we take the time to get it right in all the annoying little edge cases that inevitably crop up.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Right, except it's from Oracle.

No, thanks.

<comment><USER26> Funny how they addressed the fact that its from Oracle and there might be some hidden gimmick. At least they are self-aware. I want to not be skeptical and believe but I can't.

<comment><USER27> Just as someone ripping you off will go to lengths to explain that they aren't ripping you off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Oracle tries to do a Linux distro again? Also, that web page easily has the least appealing and professional looking layout I've seen in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER29> If they think they have the most compelling Linux offering out there, why go to all the trouble of explaining how close you are to Red Hat?

<comment><USER30> Because RHEL compatibility is an important selling point, at least in the US Linux market.

<comment><USER31> You got a very good point here. Look like the big names, it's good for image. Especially when you have a terrible image like oracle starts to have. ( or did it have it since a few years already? )

<comment><USER30> It goes further than that: There's a certain set of people and corporations that started out with Red Hat Linux, and prefer to stay in that ecosystem (known tools, available work force).

By claiming you're RHEL compatible, you "merely" compete against Red Hat, Cent OS and some other clones that some might not even have heard of (eg. Scientific Linux).

You automatically exclude Ubuntu, Debian, Suse and so on, but while reasserting that RHEL compat is somehow important, you push them to the defenses, not yourself (except from the point of view of Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, ... fans, but you won't convince them anyway, so why bother?).

That might be a reason why Red Hat doesn't bother too much about the clones: they make the RHEL ecosystem stronger, provides incentives for RHEL certifications, and RH can still try to upsell Oracle Linux users for the "original".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Frankly, given how well they've managed every other FOSS element in their charge, I have no doubt that this is not only NOT a "better" alternative to CentOS (disclosure: I have no particular love for CentOS, but you do know what you are getting with them up front...your releases will be slow, a little far from bleeding edge, but deliberate and solid) and likely has some kind of business booby-trap attached.

</comment><comment><USER33> I have Oracle Linux and RHEL servers. The support from Oracle does not meet our needs, or expectations. When I open a ticket with them, they respond via e-mail. I cannot respond to the e-mail. I have to go back to their website to update the ticket. 99% of the time I have resolved the problem myself. Some I just gave up on after a few weeks of not being able to talk to a human, or someone who has a clue. I tried to show them some of the older tickets that I was complaining to them about their service on, but their system had already deleted them which increased my ire. In fairness, someone once got back to me at about 2am, after their call center rolled over to Asia. This person actually knew what he was talking about, (Once I got past the accent). However, I always get MUUUUUCH better support from RH, and IBM-(AIX). I don't call often, but when I call, I need an answer, not "Web Ticketing System tag". If you are going to Oracle for their support, go to RH instead, or you will be sorry. I sure am.

</comment><comment><USER34> Have they improved dtrace since this released abortion: [http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2011/10/10/oel-this-is-not- dtrac...](http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2011/10/10/oel-this-is-not-dtrace/)

update: <http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2012/02/23/dtrace-oel-update/>

</comment><comment><USER5> What's their track record with Java, MySQL etc?

<comment><USER13> Fantastic, actually. They've really embraced the OSS Java community and MySQL is stronger than it has ever been.

The OpenSolaris community is also thriving, and Oracle's partnership with Google has helped move Android forward leaps and bounds.

<comment><USER18> You should've put a </sarcasm> tag in the end ;)

<comment><USER16> Yes, fortunately, I was on my work PC that has a £10 keyboard when I was reading this.

Seriously: what a palaaver that a huge company has to shove a tiny project aside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not in the least a fan of Oracle, but I think this could still be a safe move for a free EL distribution.

It don't see a major drawback here:

\- You get faster and more reliable updates, _especially_ important for security updates.

\- The release schedule will be more predictable (I know a lot of people moved to ScientificLinux while waiting for the CentOS6 release)

\- It's binary compatible with RHEL (and therefor CentOS). Meaning, that you can drop the Oracle repos and move back if you don't like the behavior you're seeing upstream.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's an accurate summary. And I think the point that you can always switch back to CentOS or Scientific Linux is an important one. Ultimately, this is a topic where a lot of people have religious devotion, so for me it's really a question of whether pragmatism outweighs zealotry.

<comment><USER35> I don't think labeling people who distrust Oracle as religious fanatics will turn the discussion into a constructive direction.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you're absolutely right, and that wasn't my intent. (If I could edit it, I'd tone it down a little.)

My goal is just to have people consider the case on its merits.

If you've thought about it and concluded "OK, I see what you're offering, but I'm distrustful of Oracle based on past behavior, and that outweighs your benefits", awesome. I might not agree, but at least we had a reasonable discussion about it.

As opposed to, e.g. "Oracle bad. Google good. Microsoft bad." (Which I'm totally guilty of myself, so I get where people are coming from.)

<comment><USER35> Well, in people's minds it's not only "past" behavior, but also the quite current Android/Oracle/Java argument. These things (just like the Microsoft UEFI topic) are discussions about very fundamental issues that could have impact on the freedoms and livelihoods of people here.

I'm not sure how much success you'll have getting people to separate their issues with the larger entity from considering your project. After all, when it comes to business decisions it is understandable that people would want to take these issues into account.

What I could imagine to happen is your project building its own separate (and good) track record from Oracle. I think some people asking for a reverse-to- original option/script might have come off as insincere, but I think it would be a crucial part. If you can say "try it, use it, and if you don't like it or _anything_ happens, there's an up-to-date and tested way of returning to the original", it could alleviate peoples fears for lock-ins.

But it'll be hard to work against things like peoples fears that one of the reasons is an attack on RedHat. The only way to deal with that will be time and good behavior (not doubting that you'll do that, but you came out of a perceived lions cage. So the gazelles will watch you for a while to make sure you aren't a lion after all).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I "heard" oracle folks got help from "centos" folks to rebuild "all" packages from redhat. Some packages just wouldn't build on koji. centos folks reportedly helped them.

This is pure "evil"

</comment><comment><USER22> The advantage of Oracle Linux that I see is the newer supported kernel version, On both Oracle Linux 5 and 6 you get 3.0, compared to 2.6.18 for RHEL5 and 2.6.32 for RHEL6.

<comment><USER37> Are you sure about this? the public repo seems to show 2.6.18/2.6.32.. This would actually be a dis-advantage in many cases, as a number of vendor utils (I'm looking at you HP) don't play nice w/ 3.x kernels.

<comment><USER22> They have the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK), as well as a RHEL- compatible kernel. I'm not sure which is the default in new installs.

[https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/entry/oracle_unbreakable_ente...](https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/entry/oracle_unbreakable_enterprise_kernel_release)

<comment><AUTHOR> From the release notes: "By default, both the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and the Red Hat Compatible Kernel are installed on the x86_64 (64 bit) platform, and the system boots the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel by default. If needed, /etc/grub.conf can be modifed to make the system boot with the Red Hat Compatible Kernel by default."

<https://oss.oracle.com/el6/docs/RELEASE-NOTES-GA-en.html>

<comment><USER16> So for the avoidance of doubt, the CentOS upgrade script will preserve the RHEL/CentOS 2.6.32.x kernel, but a fresh install from the netboot or dvd will install the UEK 3.0 install?

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Why all the vitriol towards Oracle?

Not that I care either way, I don't have any stake in the matter. I just don't have much experience with them outside of limited usage of Java.

<comment><USER13> 1\. Their database software is overpriced and bloated.

2\. They participate in strong lobbying to get governments all over the world to purchase their overpriced products.

3\. And support.

4\. They recently sued Google over seven lines of code for billions of dollars.

5\. They've let some technologies purchased from Sun languish, and have contributed to the fracturing of the OSS communities around these technologies.

6\. Larry Ellison bribed his way out of a billion dollar insider trading deal.

In short, Oracle is the poster child for why OSS users need to be vigilant and why government contracting needs serious reform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This sprang instantly to mind.

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

</comment><comment><USER40> I know that 'hackers news' folks (Google employees?) don't like Oracle, the enterprise IT world does trust Oracle. They trust Oracle much more than they trusts Google (not hard).

From outside, neutral point of view, all these corporations Oracle, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. are equally "evil" - especially from point of view of Open Source community. Am I wrong here?

<comment><USER18> Exactly, you are not, that's why i'd rather trust RedHat with my OS then Oracle.

BUT, strange enough, i'd say Sun had a pretty good reputation as software company, great engineers and minds. In the past, i'd rather agree to use Sun Solaris rather then some Oracle Linux. (Now, that Solaris is from Oracle, i wouldn't do that anymore)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I don't know what to say....

On one hand, good for Oracle, this actually sounds like a good initiative. On the other hand, Oracle consistently gives us reasons to distrust them. Consequently, while I think this is a good effort, I certainly wouldn't install it. In fact, I somewhat suspect that I'd find a way to make A/UX work before I install Oracle Linux.....

</comment><comment><USER42> haha, yeah switching to an Oracle-backed version of CentOS is going to be 'better'.

Better like Solaris? Needlessly different for it's own sake!

Hah, no thanks.

</comment><comment><USER43> Regarding trust issues, I went from trusting the CentOS team (and defending them against some criticisms that turned out to be quite valid) to being kind of disgusted with them during the CentOS 6 fiasco. There are different kinds of trust and I really don't see either CentOS or Oracle Linux as a good risk.

</comment><comment><USER44> Is there any way to find out the statistics about number of "Oracle Linux" installations as compared to CentOS?

</comment><comment><USER45> Ksplice and a few other technical features could make this a technically better choice than RHEL (although I'd focus on adding security features beyond RHEL, which breaks some compatibility).

</comment><comment><USER46> LOL! So they took it against RHEL and failed, not they're picking on CentOS (and they will fail). This is just hilarious! Can Oracle get any more pathetic than this?

</comment><comment><USER47> Pure corporate term "Oracle Linux is the best Linux distribution on the market today"

</comment><comment><USER48> Well done Oracle!</comment>


Freedom 4: Usability in Free Software - <AUTHOR> http://jancborchardt.net/usability-in-free-software

<comment><AUTHOR> I really can't stress how much I like this! JCB is a great Free thinker.</comment>


The eBay creation myth and other corporate origin stories - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1814-the-ebay-creation-myth-and-other-corporate-origin-stories <comment><USER2> Yea that seems about right for eBay. At least they didn't say the genesis of their company was when Amaterasu-omikami emerged from the cave of darkness, and became the sun over Japan.

</comment><comment><USER3> not surprising really, if that story was true, eBay would have never ended up with the corporate culture it has right now</comment>


Tesla Battery Monitoring on Blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://hypernodes.bismuth.live/?p=1318 <comment><USER2> Like the UI on Tesla screen! Can this tech also track my tires lifecycle?</comment>


Ask HN: please review my GoogleTV project, localshow.tv - <AUTHOR> http://localshow.tv

<comment><AUTHOR> localshow.tv plays music videos by the bands playing upcoming concerts in your city.

I've actually been working on this for over a year, but now I'd like to get feedback from a larger audience and show off the product of my labour.

Please give it a look! Thanks.

Also, feel free to ask me anything.</comment>


Setting up a remote digital workspace - <AUTHOR> http://scene-si.org/2015/08/29/setting-up-a-remote-digital-workspace/

<comment><USER2> I might be irrational but these "someone on the internet is wrong" style articles are terribly unengaging.

<comment><USER3> Seriously. "My way is better than your way because I think it's easier" pat yourself on the back.

<comment><AUTHOR> My way is better because it's more reliable. Sometimes easier is just a side benefit. For OP's article complexity is reduced, reliability is better and price point stays the same (seeing how he already pays about the same for a bare metal server). I am sorry, sometimes an opinion is just an opinion, and other times somebody IS just wrong. There's benefit in any approach, but there is always a better way. Coming from someone who had the same shitty remote setup with RPis, I have enough experience to advise a better way.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough, there are some real benefits, but sometimes people do things just because they _like_ doing them that way. The original person says "the setup I present here is simply what works well for me personally..."

Seems kinda overkill to make an entire blog post because you don't think someone did something the most optimal way ever with 1000% uptime.

edit: contrary opinions are good and encourage discussion, but framing it as "you are wrong and you need to change your mindset" doesn't necessarily support that goal IMO.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, some guy has a setup which works for him personally. Yet he decides to write a post about it titled "set up your remote office", advocating his view to others. It's like advocating sex, without sex education.

Sure, I might have pointed out that basically every one of his ideas is prone to failure. Aggressively. Or passionately. If you're planing to work remotely, you need to consider things like:

\- uptime, SLA \- redundancy (network, electricity, hardware, storage)

I'm not saying oh let's throw $10k and make a home datacenter with running costs at about $500/mo, but If I did, I'd gladly advocate it over an ISP- provided AP and educational low-end hardware. There's just a middle ground which is just as feasible and effective regarding cost & your time.

And I could go on. Years of remote work, and failures which are inevitable, have made me cautious. If you wanted a good remote work environment, you'd better come to me for suggestions than to use Ivan's "bragging rights" setup. Still not sure what's there to brag about. Linux today runs just about anywhere, even trashcans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Having tried both I finally settled on the use of a home server with a few vagrant boxes, live editing the same setup as production sold it for me. Albeit in my case all it does is dev, so the content is generally duplicated from elsewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Home servers are not bad per-se. Personally, if I am fine with power outages, non-redundant uplinks, I'd just go with a 8 core cpu board so I can run proper virtualization. If your laptop is not powerful enough that is - there's a thing to be said for taking your dev environment with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Talks about possible loss then suggests running on digital ocean. Heh.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have good experience. And I suggested ANY (google, amazon, azure) vm if your requirements are higher. And as in comparison with a bare metal server with 1 disk no SAN/RAID, yeah, better.</comment></comment>


Stop the autoconf insanity Why we need a new build system (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://freecode.com/articles/stop-the-autoconf-insanity-why-we-need-a-new-build-system

<comment><USER2> CMake is another useful tool. It has fewer dependencies than SCons and is significantly faster. The only downside is that CMake scripting has a steeper learning curve because it is so different than other build systems. On the other hand, it allows one to configure and build portable code across Windows, OS X, Linux, and other flavors of Unix.</comment>