Snapchat is Intrinsically Worthless - <AUTHOR> http://roymurdock.com/essays/2013/11/snapchat-is-intrinsically-worthless/ <comment><USER2> I loved this piece, but perhaps not for the reason Roy wrote it.

One of the common themes in investing is "what am I missing?" and this piece is a great walk through through a reasoned set of parameters that might make a company or project more or less valuable. The assertion that SnapChat is 'Intrinsicially' worthless is of course false. For something to actually be "worthless" in a free market would require that either no one would offer any value in exchange for partial ownership, or there would have to be outright fraud. We say a 'fake' Van Gough is worthless because it is worth much less than an original, but someone might buy it because they like the painting and they can't afford an original. As a painting it would probably be worth more than a print. But not actually "worthless."

So what is he saying? He says that Snapchat's recent valuation was much higher than he would have put it. And we can ascertain that like the forgery vs. actual painting the difference in the two numbers is large.

So what is the basis for this disconnect? It is this:

 _" $4bn for an easily replaceable service that is little more than Microsoft Paint duct taped to a disposable camera? A service that voluntarily throws away its own data in the golden age of data hoarding? A service devoid of the nature of competition that is the driving behind every other profitable company in the world?"_

The focus here is on the tech and not the market. A pet rock was 'worthless' (the rock was just a rock) but the connection with a generation was valuable. So often in our business we look at something that we feel like we could build (or could be easily built) and a valuation, and focus on those two things. The parts we don't see we give little value to (350M snaps? Seriously? That is a boat load of engagement). Making anything that get 350M 13-23 yr olds engaged is a pretty huge deal. _That_ is what is valuable with Snapchat, not the tech.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. This is why Snapchat is attractive, and the model of "get users and content now, monetize later" _has_ worked in the past. So this is simply a scaled-up challenge. I'm curious to see how Snapchat makes its money.

Here's some of my ideas and they all involve in-app purchases:

* Corporate deals that allow you to place products in your snaps, kinda like Photoshop. Example: you pay $0.99 to be able to place a character from South Park in your Snap.

* High-quality snaps, that take advantage of your camera's full resolution

* Sound snaps, so you can record 30 seconds of audio and send it to a friend. Great for sharing tracks you make or music you're hearing, or just to record some idiot yelling on the bus.

There are many more possibilities. Snapchat can almost be thought of as a "social game", a sort-of cross between FarmVille, Instagram and Twitter. You can still share basic things to your friends, but you can pay to send even better things. My ideas may or may not be shitty, but they still prove that the service probably can monetize, in my opinion.

<comment><USER4> This is, to me, like an advertisement for the Amish lifestyle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Imagine a beach. People come to the beach, play, build sand castles they later destroy. It's one beach on a long stretch of coastline. But this particular beach is incredibly popular, where lots of young people go to hang out with each other.

How much would you pay to own that beach? How would you justify that investment -- would you plan to charge an admission fee? Would you wrap the beach in ads and sponsors? Would you charge to build sandcastles? Would you sell concessions?

I think it's helpful to think of SnapChat and many other businesses with this metaphor.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, and then all of the sudden it starts raining and the kids flock to another beach with a newer DJ and fresh faces.

End game.

<comment><USER7> I believe FB Poke tried to make it rain but look how that turned out

<comment><USER8> To be fair though, snapchat isn't old enough to be "lame" while facebook is, and snapchat isn't doing anything to piss off users yet (which they will have to in order to monetize most likely).

We'll see if snapchat can hold the throne after serious monetization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I thought I was taking crazy pills when Zynga got valued more than Electronic Arts. Yeah, a company with games that practically aren't even games which makes money via spammy offers, is worth more than a multi-decade-old company with a gigantic catalog of games, which people actually pay cash for, spread out over every continent and every console, handheld, and PC. When I saw that story, I was like "do any of the journalists on the story actually stop and think for a second?"

<comment><USER10> It turns out smart people do dumb things all the time. The trick isn't being smart all the time, which is difficult.

Rather, you want to be smart at the right time and convince other incredibly smart people to do something incredibly dumb in that fleeting moment.

Last I checked, most of us have never created a messaging app that grew to 350M messages in two years. More importantly, most of us didn't also then convince smart investors to let us cash out at some ridiculous valuation.

Props to the Snapchat guys and I hope they figure out monetization but at the end of the day, they got their FU money and built something huge. That's a win in my book.

<comment><USER6> Yes, yes they do.

But like you said, that's fine.

Props to the SnapChat guys for cashing out, raising a ton of venture from sheep VCs and getting millions of users? YES, absolutely.

Props to the SnapChat guys for creating something of value, substance, technology, IP, etc. None, zero. Just another BS app riding the wave of the top-10 in the appstore.

It's not a WIN for society when you create garbage that has some sort of value to it. It's just more clutter. But maybe it doesn't matter, people need entertainment, people need dick picks, bad Hollywood movies, Miley Cyrus - these are all business commodities. And if you're capable of that vs. nothing else, good for you.

"You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don't do too many things wrong." Warren Buffett

<comment><USER11> "Props to the SnapChat guys for cashing out, raising a ton of venture from sheep VCs..."

Is this what our industry has come to? Congratulations for raking gullible investors? Like, that's not only socially acceptable, but a worthy outcome that should be applauded?

<comment><USER12> Probably a lot of people's goals around here? Whether they're going to state it so bluntly or not.

<comment><USER11> Evidence that if you pile enough money up in one place the sociopaths will rush in like someone pulled a drain plug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't know if you know much about Victorian farming techniques, but it was around then that bat guano was discovered to be an excellent fertilizer. This started what amounted to a gold rush, as people set off to make their fortunes from harvesting it. That is the origin of the modern term "batshit crazy".

I just mention this apropos of nothing.

<comment><USER14> Not really: [http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38354/where- did-t...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38354/where-did-the- phrase-batsht-crazy-come-from)

<comment><USER13> I think you may be missing the point I am making. See other recent threads about bubbles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps their endgame is to use a vast collection of compromising images collected under the pretence of privacy to extort protection fees from their users.

<comment><USER16> Slight possibility of a lawsuit there.

<comment><USER17> Unless the extorter was a "third party" "hacker"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _$4bn for an easily replaceable service that is little more than Microsoft Paint duct taped to a disposable camera?_

Oh please!

Sure you can recreate the app pretty easily which, you can also do for most services (this does not mean scaling to the users they serve) _but_ that is not the value of the service.

It's also why 'hackers' typically don't make great investors see: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha you caught me. Had to poke a little fun at Snapchat after a long day of writing about such a simple little service :)

Snapchat is firmly entrenched in its spot due to its first-to-move position (see Facebook's failed "Poke" project) but the point is that if it tries to change the service in an annoying manner then there is nothing to stop people from moving to an identical (or better) service that does not annoy them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Irrespective of present revenue, the acquisition value of Snapchat to Facebook, Google, Yahoo and co basically puts a floor on the valuation. E.g. if I am an investor and I think Google would pay $5B for Snapchat, it makes sense to buy it at $4B. So I guess the trick is not to figure out how much revenue Snapchat will generate on its own, but rather how additional revenue Google could generate if it owned Snapchat (which will drive the acquisition price).

<comment><AUTHOR> I address this in the article: Snapchat doesn't want to be acquired because it thinks its creating its own new market where it has 100% market share.

I agree with you that Snapchat is intrinsically worthless, hence the title of the article.

Even if it was eventually acquired, how could the service be augmented to funnel users into a parent company (Google, Facebook) when the very nature of the application is to create media, then delete it. This builds no links or references to outside sources, no galleries of images, no way to generate ad revenue.

<comment><USER19> Every small, well-funded tech company ever has claimed that they weren't interested in acquisition. I certainly don't think that will keep the M&A folks at the big tech companies from chatting up Snapchat's investors.

For the second part, Google makes billions figuring out how to get ads in front of its users. I'm sure they'd be able to do something for Snapchat.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. If anyone can figure out how to monetize this mess, it's Google.

Or maybe the return on the $4bn investment isn't worth the brain and manpower necessary to wrestle the app into some kind of monetization scheme?

<comment><USER19> One other thing to consider: Google is sitting on something like $56B (and growing) in cash and short term investments. They could set $4B on fire and it really wouldn't alter their balance sheet significantly. Given its big push into "social" over the past couple of years, I could make the case that it's worth spending some of its cash to try and acquire a bunch of (admittedly fickle) users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Your Cart:

* 350m snaps per day + potential growth \- At least 3 interaction screens per snap (pre-view/view/post-view): that's over 1bn places you could put, say, ads _per day_. Do the CPI/conversion math on that. * User data for 200m+ users + the ability to extend and refine * A direct line to 200m+ home screens via push notifications * Enough inertia to mitigate the threat of competition ( _Facebook_ challenged with the Poke app, that failed) * The potential to change/extend the feature set to more revenue oriented streams * All other possible things you could do with an enormous and massively engaged captive audience...e.g. walking past Starbucks - they're having a slow day. Receive Snapchat from Starbucks with scannable special offer code and super quick expiry. We've just made Groupon for the high street. * Rights to all the above until the end of time

Total: $4bn

Doesn't seem so crazy to me.

</comment><comment><USER21> I published an article about Snapchat a couple of days ago. Yes, it is. Snapchat is not a "sustainable business", it's a trend or a bubble. People are using it now, because it's cool; but in a couple of years, there will be another trend and so on. Even if they are still alive after 5 years, the valuation is ridiculous. Entrepreneurship is not about money, but at some point you need to face this problem and have a solution in your pocket. They are worth $4B and they don't have a clue. I guess this is just another groupon. ([http://greatpreneurs.com/startups-dilemma-trends- businesses/](http://greatpreneurs.com/startups-dilemma-trends-businesses/))

<comment><USER6> Totally.

It's how the wind blows these days in "tech". It's reminiscent of a bubble with all of these mobile apps calling themselves "companies" when most aren't even profitable. It reminds of the early 2000s when "how many eyeballs do you get monthly" was the question of the day.

Does Pinterest really need $400M+ in venture to operate? What are they doing over there? Advanced robotics with neural implants? Burn rate of $30M a month?

Utter bullshit.

Like I said before, VC's aren't dumb but they're also not very smart, most at least - they don't need to be. They flock to whatever's hot and popular (trendy) and invest. Their exit strategy is simple: a highly overvalued IPO where the public market will buy based on hype or an acquisition.

These unsustainable trends in extremely overvalued companies/apps will continue for a while, unfortunately.

Until the shit hits the fan and one of these giants of venture capital infusion tank.

Unfortunately, it's so much more than an issue of Snapchat being worthless, it's a large chunk of the tech community today being generally worthless by looking for the EASY WAY OUT - building some stupid app, getting 5M+ users for a few years of engagement and raising large rounds and cashing out. There's no intrinsic value of any kind in this.

It wasn't like this before the App Store.

There is still great technology being developed out there, but most people (and human nature in general) flocks to the easy way out, the replication factor, globalization, the art of copying something, or as Peter Thiel would say" "the 1 to n of globalization."

<comment><USER22> I'm unsure why you chose to pick on Pinterest. It seems to have a very real business model that is powered by very real and powerful engagement metrics. Pinterest could very well be as solid as facebook.

Why does Pinterest need $400M in venture to operate? Lets ask ourselves why a glorified status feed, Twitter, needs over 100 engineers. Why does Twitter need to rewrite almost every aspect of real-time stream processing? Because there is huge value there, and at that scale I'm sure the financials look a lot different from your weekend web app.

Back to snapchat, this tech doomsday bubble, everyone is parrotting is a single lone horse in what are many successful and sustainable companies such as DropBox, Uber, RocketFuel and Square. And its not like snapchat is an imaginary app. Snapchat shares over 350M photos a day, people aren't lining up and seeing snapchat success overnight.

I'm having trouble seeing that the current tech industry is in a "bubble" when the only evidence for it is that SnapChat, with an incredibly huge userbase, is raising ~3B. For whatever reason the other 39 "unicorn" companies don't count.

<comment><USER6> Maybe because they're unprofitable? Maybe because what's the point of pinning random items on a virtual pin board? Maybe because what's the need for $500M in capital for a website? Maybe because what good does Pinterest do for anyone or anything aside from waste time?

In Twitter's defense, while they might not "need" 100 engineers to rewrite their code, they are certainly infinitely more than just a glorified status feed.

Twitter has allowed millions of people across the globe to share insight into what is happening in their back yard. While for us Americans, this might include the dog taking a shit on a Macbook, in the Middle East it's far different. Twitter and FB have been responsible for a lot of insight and uprisings, especially during the Arab Spring.

Additionally, Twitter is an innovation in communications. Just like Skype is, but perhaps less so or just differently. Marc Andreessen said it perfectly: "Twitter is instant global public messaging - for free." That has some value vs. pinning my dress on a pin board.

Point is - SnapChat is worthless, Pinterest is less worthless but still has little value. Sure, advertisers and brands flock to the net since their old- school TV/print models are being replaced by technology - but very few "apps" are companies/businesses. And young users, particularly teens are very prone to jump ship like fleas off a dog when the "latest and greatest" comes about. Do you see SnapChat existing in 10 years? I don't think so. Pinterest? There will be something newer. FB? Twitter? Dropbox? Yeap, they'll still be around. And probably doing better than ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Am I missing something but I always assumed that valuations at this stage of a company is to do with huge/vast sums of money being removed from the table by the founders and they've done this by selling a good stake of their equity/voting rights in their company.

The founders are now rich.. but the company isn't.. and if they raise a next round, their true valuation will shine through...

<comment><USER24> Anytime stock changes hands in exchange for money it's reasonable to use that transaction to value the company. It doesn't matter if it's the company selling a piece of itself or employees selling stock to an investor. Someone is still paying money for ownership.

If anything, employees selling shares probably makes it easier because it's common instead of preferred shares being sold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What Snapchat has is millions of users who have formed the habit of opening the app every day and using it to communicate, sending 350 million* snaps a day. You can go ahead and make clones of Snapchat (or Facebook or Twitter), but building a clone does not guarantee that you will get the number users that Snapchat (or Facebook or Twitter) have. The investors are betting that the folks at Snapchat will experiment to find ways to extract money from some small subset of Snapchat's users (e.g. let's say Snapchat has 350 million users and they find a way to extract $10 a year from 1% of their users, then that's $35 million a year). This is the bet that the investors of Snapchat are making. It's a risky bet, but they're OK with that. They're used to making risky bets. Most of their bets don't pan out, but the ones that do...well, you're smart, you get the picture.

* This number was taken from the article.

[Edited to fix typos.]

<comment><USER26> That's a steal. Buying at 4bn and earning 35m a year, it'll be paid off in a short 114 years. After then, it'll be smooth sailing.

<comment><USER25> Ha! I should have used larger made up numbers! How about $100/yr from 5% of their users? Anyhow, you know that the investors are betting that the numbers will grow.

My main point is, Snapchat has a lot of users who have formed the habit of opening the app and sending snaps, totaling hundreds of millions of snaps/day. Simply cloning the app in no way means that you can generate those kinds of numbers. The numbers are stellar, and the investors seem to think so as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can someone who understands the strategy behind fundraising explain why they would want to raise at such a high valuation? To be clear, one point left out of the article is that the $3.5B - $4B valuation is a rumored valuation being "considered" by the startup (Their most recent round of funding valued them at $800MM). When I read about the "rumor" my immediate thought was: Snapchat leaked that to the press to gauge the response from potential investors / acquirers. The thing I don't understand is: what is their goal here? It seems like raising at a 3B+ valuation limits their options for an exit to either an IPO or an acquisition by one of maybe 3 companies. Raising at such a crazy valuation also seems extremely risky considering the volatility of apps in their space and the fact that they haven't even begun to explore monetization. What am I missing?

</comment><comment><USER28> If somebody would be looking for "bubbles", Snapchat at 4B is a clear sign of one.

<comment><USER6> Please be sure to include Pinterest in this one.

They might be valued higher than Genentech at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'll suggest a simpler framework for valuing Snapchat: probability of becoming another Facebook. If you think it has a 5% chance, then it should be valued at around 5 billion (relative to Facebook's 100 billion).

<comment><USER30> I think there is literally 0 chance for another Facebook. Google tried with Google+ - billions of dollars, millions of man hours by brilliant engineers, crazy bundling strategies by Google. Is Google+ another Facebook yet? Nope, not yet, maybe not ever.

Your strategy has merit, but simply making another Facebook is not going to work now (It would have back in Myspace days). Now there is not an untapped market of people - almost everyone has things vested in social media companies. 1\. Companies need either to do better then Facebook (Once again Google tried. Do not get me wrong, there is a fair chance that eventually Google+ will prevail, but very few projects have full might of Google paving their success.) 2. Or have different punchline than Facebook does to attract users (This is what Snapchat did). *typoed

<comment><USER31> I agree. For better or for worse Facebook is the World of Warcraft of general purpose social networks, anything trying to go head to head with it will lose.

It'll probably die off eventually but what replaces it will probably look nothing like it and will exist in a much different climate.

<comment><USER32> I'm betting on Orkut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think its important to point out that tech blogs always want a breathlessly huge top line number, and that investors play along (The same thing seems to happen with sports contracts). But the details are often vastly more complex and full of earnouts, triggers, board seats, etc, etc. And according to the allthingsd article linked to, the deal hasn't been closed yet:

"Sources said the round being raised — up to $200 million — will come in part from China's Internet giant Tencent and value the self-destructing mobile messaging startup from $3.6 billion to $4 billion."

</comment><comment><USER34> I think Snapchat are crazy if they don't put ads in there soon.

I see Snapchat as a faster Youtube. It's basically content that you want to see - Youtube from the masses, Snapchat from your friends.

The Youtube advertising model is clearly fantastic. From things I've read some time in the past I know they kill it on a $/user basis vs pretty much every social site on the web.

Putting a 2 second static 'brand flash' in front of every snap would probably not put people off using the service (in the same way that people still use Youtube - even though video hosting is a highly replicable thing). And from a brands point of view 2 seconds is probably all you need to get into someone's subconscious.

Bonuses for being an app:

1) Full screen take over. 2) No distractions from other tabs. 3) I'm sure they could find out age and sex quite easily if they wanted to. So they would have - age, sex and location. POWERFUL.

The sooner the better. Explain that the app needs to make money to it's users. People get used to things.

<comment><USER35> I think you're onto something. Just imagine if the _sender_ gets to pick the snap sponsor from a list of 5-10! Double-monetization.

I disagree with the "snapchat is worthless" analysis of the original article. Perhaps from the point of view of the current monetization needs and mechanisms, but my feeling is that snapchat's "ephemeral" model, like it's users, is a young and fresh approach. They will invent something new. Of course, they may also die out like so many others, but it's pointless to say the indusrty shouldn't be that way. The developers may aspire to greater goals, but the consumers still dictate what they want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The comment about stickers makes me think you don't understand how much money they make and how much people use them. It's massive. Look at Line made 17 million from stickers in Q1 this year, Kakao made 311 million in revenue and I'm not sure the breakdown but stickers is significant enough that it's mentioned in with gaming as the main source of revenue.

Stickers, whether it's reasonable or not, are a great way to monetize on messaging.

Snapchat also allows you to find someone to talk to that no other service does as seamlessly. From my understanding anyway, people will send out snaps to a group of people, many time everyone they're connected to and after a few snaps back and forth with one or two of the responders, they'll switch to another channel and chat. One could argue adding messaging here would increase the stickiness, but I think snapchat is right in that adding it in would just be distracting.

<comment><USER37> I think if your main source of income is stickers, that's risky. They will (and already are) become commoditized - with MessageMe, Path, etc... all jumping onboard.

I'm guessing that stickers (siloed in each app) are a fad that will eventually go away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Competition could be a good way, once you figure out how to gameify self- destructing photos. Some sort of scavenger hunt model, perhaps? Giving out clues? Maybe adding a Snapchat Games section for companies to host these treasure hunt promotions? Or some sort of art contest?

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm particularly surprised about seeing Snapchat with twice the valuation of Whatsapp. Here in Amsterdam, Whatsapp seems to have close to 100% market penetration (i.e. almost all smartphone users use whatsapp), yet I've never heard anyone about snapchat here.

<comment><USER35> This too is the future: no apps will be global, but multiple fairly similar apps will carve out geographic niches, some larger than others. I can't really say which app should be valued more, but I would tend to think the one with the American teen audience will have more monetization opportunities (more disposable income and less discernment--or susceptibility to adverts).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> As you correctly analyzed, snapchats value is majority in user-base. I believe it is specifically the attention of users that gives it value. We measure that with metrics like reach, views, clicks, messages sent etc. The attention comes from the novelty of it, as you adequately put, it has a low barrier to entry due to it's 'low pressure'. It must maintain that attention through low pressure to maintain value.

FB went the ad route a la google and then moved towards analytics. Twitter is doing the same. If snapchat went down that route they would have to analyze the photos taken, pictures drawn etc. to provide data to customers in the same way.

Not to get too meta, but there is always value in self-expression.

<comment><AUTHOR> Value for the user and the audience, not so much for the medium of expression. Excuse the lame metaphor, but the canvas Van Gogh painted Starry Night on can't exactly sell itself ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Since a lot of people have trouble imagining why Snapchat is popular, I wrote a blog post on it a while ago: [http://www.brianchu.com/blog/2013/09/11/photo- embarrassment/](http://www.brianchu.com/blog/2013/09/11/photo-embarrassment/).

One thing that bears noting is that Snapchat is closer to mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp than it is to photo sharing / social networking apps like Instagram or Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER42> A 3.5bn valuation does seem insane for a service like snapchat without any source of revenue. I did read the other day about their extraordinary growth of sent messages however, (up to 350 million a day!)and perhaps it is simply a premium for said growth.

Regardless, I feel that the ephemeral nature of snapchat is likely to reduce long-term user retention. You have no tangible investment into the platform because everything is deleted.

</comment><comment><USER43> With WebRTC, can someone make a ephemeral peer-to-peer, one-to-one or one-to- many messenger?

I think that would be more private. Sever the 3rd party.

<comment><USER44> I'm not sure most people would grasp the difference between a company that says it doesn't keep your data and a company that says it can't keep your data.

<comment><USER43> Probably not, but it could still be useful for privacy minded individuals. Especially if it was open sourced on GitHub.

<comment><USER45> Part of the problem here is that the privacy users care about here is not from a third party, but from whomever the recipient might otherwise choose to share the content with.

And that pretty much _requires_ a party other than the recipient whose interest it is to lock down the client as much as possible to at least increase the hassle-factor in violating the senders trust.

Otherwise, if the recipient had the "EvilReplicatingToFacebook" fork of the app readily available, it'd quickly destroy any value in the app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think Om Malik said it best "...when you have revenues, you can't get people into giving you mega valuations." [https://twitter.com/om/status/394698596320169984](https://twitter.com/om/status/394698596320169984)

</comment><comment><USER47> Is it because the more people jump on the more valuable it becomes and I just sell my stock and I've just made a whole bunch of money?

</comment><comment><USER48> Their present valuation is a glitch in the Matrix. Enough of them and you will realize the existence of said Matrix.

</comment><comment><USER49> Is Yelp honestly with TWO BILLION? What about Uber?

<comment><USER6> Yelp, no way in hell. Uber, closer for sure. Uber is a valuable service at least in the Top-20 cities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> While I agree with most of the points the author makes in this article, I disagree with the ultimate thesis.

Snapchat offers what? __Engagement __

So how do you monetize that? __Get users to engage with brands __

Allow me to elaborate. Twitter 's Amplify partnership program is a brilliant example of the amount brands are willing to pay to engage with customers (both existing and potential). Twitter used to be in a unique position to offer that engagement too: with huge penetration, easy integration into existing media (putting a hashtag in the corner of a TV broadcast, for instance), and an incredibly low-friction engagement process. Twitter made it easy for a brand to create a sea of voices engaging with a brand. I believe Snapchat is now in a position to make a similar offer.

Before I go on, I'd like to pose a question: how many people read event- centric tweets after an event? Aside from journalists reporting on said event looking for memorable tweets, my guess is not many. Hell, most people barely pay attention to the stream during these events. At most, you have a tweet that's at the top of a feed for a few seconds before being quickly pushed down by a dozen more, __never to be read again __. I 'm sure by now you're connecting the dots: Snapchat offers a similar service in that respect.

The thing is, there's a major core difference between these two. Twitter is a public forum, and Snapchat is strictly peer-to-peer communication. This gives Snapchat a unique offering, in that it allows brands to communicate one-on-one with customers.

Imagine, if you will, a broadcast of The Walking Dead (I use them as an example for two reasons: 1.) I'm a huge fan, and 2.) They're big on the second-screen experience so this seems plausible). As part of your second- screen experience, one might find a stream of picture responses to various moments in the episode. Major character dies, suddenly the stream is full of shocked faces (maybe some rage faces or big goofy grins, depending on who). Now imagine this stream is powered by Snapchat.

This is already possible with Twitter, to a degree, but with Snapchat there's less inhibition which will drive greater participation and greater engagement. Not only that, but Snapchat would also allow TWD to engage back with the user on a personal level- maybe respond with a snap that contains a marketing call- to-action ("Want more scares? Check out the exclusive behind-the-scenes footage online"), or just responds with a zombified version of the image you sent in (how cool would that be?).

I'm sure there are many more awesome use cases than what I just stated, but I think this example speaks to the fact that Snapchat can be a real force for engagement without requiring brands to spam the hell out of the platform's users. This is where Snapchat outperforms against any other social product when it comes to driving brand engagement: because the users are so fanatically engaging with the product already, __brands don 't need to spam __. They can just interact with the users in a meaningful or entertaining way - and I don 't mean this "Get a coupon that you have 10 seconds to screenshot" bullshit, or "Let brands send snapchats that last forever" or any shit like that. Just give the users a fun way to interact with your brand, and the loyalty (and purchases) will come.

So, here's what I would do, if I were to monetize Snapchat:

\- $20/yr developer program

\- Free API access for up to 2,000 snaps sent/received per month

\- Pay-as-you-go model: $XX for every additional 10,000 additional snaps

\- Hashtag support (maybe)

\- Analytics

\- Offer consulting at a premium to help brands effectively leverage Snapchat

Notice the generous pricing structure. I think one thing that Snapchat can cash in on is the uniqueness of its platform, and the eagerness of the hacker community at large to build on top of it. I want you to recall the modest success of App.net, which doesn't have nearly the engagement metrics or penetration that Snapchat currently enjoys. I for one have several small projects I'd like to build on the Snapchat platform, and would be more than happy to pay a modest premium for the opportunity. The pay-as-you-go structure keeps your hackers happy (I doubt anyone would pay $100+ for toy projects), and also maximizes revenue from larger brand campaigns.

In conclusion, I think the assertion that Snapchat "has no intrinsic value" is complete bollocks.

</comment><comment><USER51> This just dances around the issue that snapchat is probably used to take lots of nude pictures. Yes, you can take a screenshot, i bet loads of people don't know / trust the other party to not to take one.

</comment><comment><USER52> People are outraged over being spied on, but can't see the value in an private chat tool?

Edit I meant private, not anonymous.

<comment><USER53> You think Snapchat is in any way anonymous or private?

<comment><USER54> Yes, in every way that matters to most people.

<comment><USER53> Except for the ways in which people are outraged over being spied upon.

<comment><USER54> I feel you, but you're conflating "angry, principled nerds" with "most people". If you really think people outside your filter bubble are "outraged", look further.

<comment><USER53> I mostly agree, but I was responding to sp332's suggestion that Snapchat does anything to solve the NSA "problem".

<comment><USER54> Ah, I must've read your comment out of context. My bad!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Very rough first version of project, could it be useful? - <AUTHOR> http://foorious.com/playground/goals/app/#login

<comment><USER2> It's a really pretty looking implementation, but for something so early, i'm surprised it has DoubleClick advertising built in?

<comment><AUTHOR> It does..?

That must be Google Analytics. I don't even store emails, yet.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How you send the file after the PayPal purchase - <AUTHOR>

Let say you want to sell icons or templates and the payments are made with PayPal, do you use some external services like http://www.e-junkie.com/ or do you use PayPal Apis  or something else. <comment><USER2> An external site is always easier, but they tend to take a cut of your profits.

If you can handle some basic programming, PayPal has IPN (Instant Payment Notification) in which PayPal will load a specific file on your server passing it info about the completed/failed payment. You can very easily use data that to allow the buyer access to files.

Full details here - <https://www.paypal.com/ipn>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I didn't know about that option.</comment></comment>


Conspiracy theories: How to be a smarter news consumer - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37344846 <comment><USER2> "Twixt truth and madness lies but a sliver of a stream". Things are rarely as facile as portrayed in the news and at some point we seem to have forgotten that their primary job is to sell papers, not to educate and inform.

The way you improve your news consumption is to stop treating it like a prepackaged digestion and start asking questions for yourself before someone told you how to feel about it.</comment>


Cookiez – Chrome extension to track cookies - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/cookiez <comment><USER2> Will it be open source?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are still thinking about it</comment></comment>


Google Plus' Magic Number - <AUTHOR> http://tomasztunguz.com/2011/09/08/google-plus-magic-number/ <comment><USER2> > Plus is found on every Google search result page and in every Gmail inbox.

Every single one, except mine.

> Google Chrome sports Plus sharing buttons, available as an extension to the > 160M users of the browser.

So, Plus buttons aren't actually included in all 160M+ installs of Google Chrome. Only the 45,559 of them that have the extension installed.

> You can't avoid the little red number tugging at users' curiosity. Google > Plus is everywhere.

And yet I don't recall seeing that little red number anywhere. It's not on my Google Search results, not in my GMail, not being presented to me in Google Reader, not being scheduled for me in Google Calendar.

Maybe it's because I don't have an Android phone.

Or maybe it's because I've not signed up for Google Plus. In which case his entire superior distribution argument is based on a misconception.</comment>


Joyent Smartmachine Private Beta - <AUTHOR> https://no.de/

<comment><USER2> It would be extremely helpful if you (Joyent) put a description of what 'Smartmachine' actually does for those of us unfamiliar somewhere on your site (preferably on the homepage).</comment>


Why Redux Makes You a Better JavaScript Developer - <AUTHOR> https://www.robinwieruch.de/redux-javascript <comment><USER2> While I agree with a lot of the summary of the article, I personally would not call Redux event driven. Events have a fairly familiar context (that is evoked in peoples minds, who are familiar with them) and that is closer to a pub sub of loose events. where a signature is published and possibly data is published, and then subscribes are added vi a reference to a function.

I would call Redux and Action based function where an Action is passed into a function and then a switch statement decides what to do with said action.

It is a small nuance but there is a difference, I personally prefer event based systems as they tend to produce less boilerplate, but in the grand scheme of things Redux is a great library so it is not that much of an issue to use their Action based semantics as it accomplishes they same end result.

</comment><comment><USER3> Being OOT and throwing in unpopular opinion:

Redux fails in recreating the success of elm architecture. Without the static typing of elm, it ends up being painful to use.

Redux drives inexperienced developers to put everything into the store, making it a god-object. See: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14669980](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14669980)

Redux middlewares allow changing return type, which makes it hard to implement static typing to it.

Redux without middlewares needs additional code to work with static typing. See: [https://github.com/piotrwitek/typesafe- actions](https://github.com/piotrwitek/typesafe-actions)

Redux expose actions and reducers to developer, which is a state management mechanism that usually are written the same over and over again.

I sound harsh on it, but I want devs around the world to not go through the pain of using Redux on large scale project involving a lot of people.

Redux is good for education. It introduce the concept of immutability, higher order function. I learn a lot from it. Nevertheless, it is a pain to use on big projects.

React's setState is friendlier to devs. Unstated [https://github.com/jamiebuilds/unstated](https://github.com/jamiebuilds/unstated) (but not unstated-next), is a detached version of React's setState with additional `.subscribe` method and Promise as return. It is very good in both developing and communicating business flow. UnstatedContainer method can be treated as counterpart of Redux's action.

What is missing now from the client-side web development is an in-app event library. Usually people would put domain-objects to Redux to solve the inter- component communication. This is, against the functional programming (which promotes immutability, higher order functions), introducing the possibility side-effect.

In-app event library should replace this behavior so that messages can be passed through events from one component to another that resides on different component-tree, which may want to act differently. This is some sort of implementing mini kafka/rabbit-mq-like behavior inside the your web app with minimum resource required.

<comment><USER2> First you have to convince those of us that see no little in static typing when weighed against it constraints that it is a valid development philosophy that created a clear advantage over dynamic typed languages.

Me personally I don't see it, I have worked on some pretty big JavaScript and LISP codebases and I cannot recall a single instance where static types would have helped us. But can think of a thousand cases where we could not have produce compact, simple and elegant code for solutions to complex problems.

I am in the camp of static vs dynamic is a developer's aesthetics preference, both are valid ways of getting the job done, but they depend on the developers perceptions and the way they process code. Anything beyond that is a religious war as both can be used to build large applications if people know the tool they are working with. I don't disagree with some of your other points, the way Redux is implemented is not the way I would have done it, that being said it is effective, you can build large apps with it and personally it saves me from having to maintain that concern in custom code. As I said in my other comment I prefer an event driven architecture, it is the way Eich originally designed JavaScript and the browser API and it works.

<comment><USER3> > First you have to convince those of us that see no little in static typing > when weighed against it constraints that it is a valid development > philosophy that created a clear advantage over dynamic typed languages.

I cannot convince with words, only experience can change one's perspective. Thanks for the reminder. I admit my opinion may spark religious skirmish.

I came to love javascript in 2014 when I was making an HTML5 game almost alone. Coming from beginner java and c++, JS' flexibility blew my mind.

4 years later, I came to dislike JS for big projects.

Fast-paced gaming industry drives project managers to rotate new developers in and out, leading to low knowledge retention, thus bad code quality. The project was then handed to my team. Iterating was painful. Regression was everytime. Manpower need rose up fast to add feature and tests.

Long story short, led a total rewrite. Initially most people objected, now most are satisfied.

For me, what's missing from JS is type system. In static-typed languages, types, used correctly, often act as contracts which bind function params and return type. It helped with knowledge retention.

Most frontend devs of the company now agrees that Typescript + network and storage contract hardening saved our asses.

Some argue that unit tests and documenting with comment helps, they don't. Unit tests allows us to warn future bad code change, while comments are not compiled and often not read, so I limit comments usage to the most complex code only.

> I am in the camp of static vs dynamic is a developer's aesthetics > preference, both are valid ways of getting the job done, but they depend on > the developers perceptions and the way they process code.

True, but it's sometimes the circumstances rather than the developers. I still love to write simple build scripts with JS and bash, but not big projects with people coming in and out. Unfortunately, and fortunately, the priority in my work is now both growing product and people, and that's why it's important for new developers to understand the product knowledge by the code, type helps.

<comment><USER2> I see your perspective, I started in small teams doing flight simulator development splitting my time between C and Assembly for 3D and Lisp for AI. I don't disagree that static typing can band-aid over bad process and churn, but it is but good process can eliminate the need for it and empower a good team of knowledgeable developers the ability to outperform a larger team.

I wholeheartedly agree, about unit tests and comments, I have come to find unit test to be a cargo cult, and that they may actually cost more cycles than they save in the way most orgs implement them.

And comments while great are not code, they don't thrown stack traces when they are out of date.

I am very good at team building and maintaining developers in my organizations for a long period of time. This helps in our preference for using dynamic and flexible languages like LISP and Javascript.

<comment><USER3> > I am very good at team building and maintaining developers in my > organizations for a long period of time. This helps in our preference for > using dynamic and flexible languages like LISP and Javascript.

That is very nice. Hope I can learn a lot from people like you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Guess these ideas are sort of in the air this week. I just blogged last night some thoughts about my use of Redux (and redux-observable) in a Discord bot (no React in sight) I worked on a few months back.</comment>


News anchor Anthony Ponce quits to become a Lyft driver - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/27/technology/anthony-ponce-lyft-backseat-driver/index.html <comment><USER2> So basically guy wants to quit and make a modern day version of this?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_Confessions](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_Confessions)</comment>


Two years of Guile 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=7509

<comment><USER2> Fedora 19 which will be released on 2013-06-25 will include Guile 2 [1].

[1] <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Guile2></comment>


The Bones of Marianna - <AUTHOR> https://magazine.atavist.com/the-bones-of-marianna <comment><USER2> Jesus that's not fiction?!? What the actual f*ck Florida! 111 years of this?!

<comment><USER3> Colson Whitehead brought out a novel about this, _The Nickel Boys_. It is short, harrowing, and worth reading.</comment></comment>


Making WiFi fast - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/ <comment><USER2> I have tried several different routers and firmwares.

The #1 thing that made accessing the Internet faster was implementing domain level blocking of the top ad and tracking servers at the router level (e.g. doubleclick.net)

OpenDNS/Cisco let's you set this up domain level blocking in about 10 minutes that also covers iOS devices, if you don't want to tinker with openWRT.

Previously OpenDNS would monetize by "hijacking" mistyped domains, but they switched to a friendlier free consumer/paid enterprise model.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is the best casual router for Wifi?

<comment><USER4> The Wirecutter suggests the TP-Link Archer C7: [http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-wi-fi- router/](http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-wi-fi-router/)

There's an implication along with this that "best casual" also includes "affordable". If not, the best casual router is the same as the best non- casual router - I'm happy with my Google OnHub router but it's more expensive and depending on your use case (and mine, to be honest, but I've already bought the thing) it might not be worth the extra cost. Over the years I've become less enthusiastic to do things like flash DD-WRT to my router and to instead just pay money for something that I will never have to touch again.

<comment><USER5> I used to have C7 for a year, and it was fast when it worked correctly. Unfortunately, once every month or so the wifi would stop working and needed a restart. We also have a weirdly long apartment that didn't get reception at the far end. This was with 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz bands.

I've since switched to OnHub for 6 months and it's been great. I have yet to restart the router and get pretty decent coverage all around the apartment. Well worth the extra money for completely pain free wifi.

Side note: having gone through a bunch of dual band routers so far I've found most did not allow 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz bands to coexist as the same SSID reliably. If I did, my MacBook would constantly get 'locked' to 2.4Ghz with lower bandwidth, since it had better coverage. The OnHub seems to handle this really well and I have not had any issues at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've rebelled against the wifi meme for ages. I always go wired.</comment>


Skype's Homeland Grapples with Dilemma of Robot as Legal Person - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-10/skype-s-homeland-grapples-with-dilemma-of-robot-as-legal-person <comment><USER2> So long as and to the extent it remains the case that corporations can be legal persons, it is likely that robots will have _de facto_ if not _de jure_ status as legal persons. All it takes is wrapping the robot in articles of incorporation.

It's worth noting that there are aspects of corporate personhood where the corporate person enjoys more rights than a biological person particularly at political borders.

</comment><comment><USER3> Probably premature, but if takes years to discuss it will be ready when we might need it.

Maybe it's only a way for the manufacturer/developer to say "not my fault, sue the bot" but I don't expect that and won't welcome it.</comment>


Key takeaways from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - <AUTHOR> http://blas.com/autobiography/ <comment><USER3> You can download his autobiography for your ereader for free at the project I lead, Standard Ebooks: [https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/benjamin- franklin/the-auto...](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/benjamin-franklin/the- autobiography-of-benjamin-franklin)

It's a great read!

<comment><USER4> thanks for the link to standardebooks.org - any other recommendations? This looks great [https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-reed/ten-days-that- sh...](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-reed/ten-days-that-shook-the- world)

<comment><USER5> Standard eBooks takes the works from project Gutenberg and makes them look a bit better. On the Gutenberg site you'll find a lot more files though - <USER2> classics from Darwin to Hobbes to Smith and Marx.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like to think that Mr Franklin aspired to Chastity, but was undismayed by failure.

<comment><USER7> It was item 12 on an ordered list. I know I struggle to get past item 7 on any prioritised list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great read, I also like how it seems totally unfinished. Some memorable moments were (paraphrasing from memory) "I maintained the currency for the town which was very profitable for me" and "that's the best part about being a reasonable person, you can come up with a reason for anything".</comment>


Probabilistic processors possibly pack potent punch - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2010/08/probabilistic-processors-possibly-potent.ars

<comment><USER2> When I saw the pitch deck for these guys I must admit I didn't get it. From what I could see it was "gee you can do divide in analog instantly!" which is to say that they had re-discovered analog computers. Now, don't get me wrong, an HDL for designing analog computers and a way to plug them into a digital stored program computer could be hella cool, but it read too much like someone simply not remembering the past.

That being said, and the fact that most 'analog' stuff is done in a DSP these days anyway, it would be fascinating if someone came up with the analog equivalent to a CLB in an FPGA and an HDL for describing non-linear computation (something the original analog computers could not do).

Its not clear at all however that these are the droids I was thinking of though. There is a lot of unused 130nm fab capacity though, so for a leading edge idea that could be implemented on trailing edge technology there should be a window.

<comment><USER3> > it would be fascinating if someone came up with the analog equivalent to a > CLB in an FPGA and an HDL for describing non-linear computation

What you have described do indeed exist as Field Programmable Analog Arrays (FPAAs).

The Wikipedia article (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FPAA>) gives a good overview of them, but basically they consist of multiple configurable analog blocks (CABs), which can be configured to perform some analog operation on a signal, and multiple CABs can be connected together to form a signal path. All the signal paths and CAB parameters are defined by the digitally loaded configuration. Very interesting!

The one's I have briefly used (many years ago) were the Anadigm FPAAs. Examples of the operations the CABs (or "CAMs") can do are signal filtering, rectification, addition, multiplication, comparison and integration/differentiation over time (<http://www.anadigm.com/_doc/PR021100-0024.pdf>). These devices to me are really targeted at analog signal processing applications (audio, instrumentation etc). If I was an EE (which I am not) I might be able to provide a decent evaluation of them, but they seemed like they would be pretty useful for this kind of thing.

My project using them was to get the FPAAs to perform some simple physics calculations, based on previous work by another student. One example was modelling the height of a moving projectile under gravity. I can't remember the specifics (sorry!) but input voltages were used to specify the equation parameters (mass, initial force), the CABs transformed these voltages according to the given motion equation and the output voltage was the height at time t. And it worked ok! A computer used Digital-to-Analog converters to hold the input voltages steady for the FPAA circuits, and sampled the output using Analog-to-Digital converters.

While this worked for simple examples, the whole system was limited to 8-bit effective values by the Signal-to-Noise resolution of the equation signal path. While for the FPAA device itself has a high signal-to-noise ratio that effectively gives a smallish 20 bit resolution (~= SNR 120db), the extra wiring and components in the rest of my circuit added enough noise to lower this down to 8bit (~= SNR 48db). (Will happily admit I am no great circuitsmith:). Also there were some caveats like hard limits to the parameters of the CABs (restricted internally by the physical limits of the variable capacitors and resistors), which limit quantities used in the analog equations and restricts its general purposefulness.

Some of the things analog computers can do are interesting, like "instant" multiplication and division. However the difficulty of keeping thermally and electromagnetically induced noise low to get a high resolution signal (e.g. pushing past SNR 120db) in analog systems is one of the reasons why we don't really see them being used in computation any more. This is also one of the reasons why digital circuits are much much easier to work with as you no longer (really) have to worry about noise affecting accuracy, from the transistor level up to the PCB or long cable level.

This kind of thing explains the low 8-bit resolution from the device in the article.

> The technology allows a resolution of about 8 bits; that is, they can > discriminate between about 2^8 = 256 different values (different > probabilities) between 0 and VDD

High resolution analog seems to be just hard to do in practice.

(Aside: Also if you take with the width of the known universe, and discretize this distance by Planck length intervals, you only need ~220 bits to represent the position of an object on this line. So only ~3*220 bits for (x,y,z). Binary rules!)

So, I'm more of an digital fan for general purpose computing myself:) However analog computers are hella cool all the same.

EDIT: This post is long. You'll have to excuse the fact that I was finally happy for some information from the old undergrad thesis to see the light of day. TLDR: Analog computers are cool, but it seems they are limited in resolution and general configurability. Use FPGAs or GPUs or even poor old CPUs instead.

EDIT2: Rereading your post, maybe you were thinking about some kind of FPGA+FPAA hybrid? An FPGA, but with some with analog blocks and ADCs, DACs inside?

<comment><USER2> A mix of FPAAs and FPGAs, rather than all FPGAs or all FPAA. The DSP elements in newish FPGAs is a nod in this direction.

 _High resolution analog seems to be just hard to do in practice._

That is exactly the challenging bit. And something I was trying to figure out if Lyric had actually made an improvement on. If you could do computation in an analog matrix and still pull 32 bits reliably out of it, that would be something new.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here are the submissions from seven months ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1619515>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1616800>

I provide this purely for reference, because as so often happens, it sank without trace then, but it's getting noticed and some commentary now.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can see it as potentially useful in mobile devices, since it sounds like it's a trade-off of engineering time (analog circuits are _much_ harder to get right) vs. power consumption, and mobile has such large volume that engineering costs can become a rounding-error.

I'm slightly concerned about per-unit cost since I'm assuming testing yields is going to be much harder. Digital behaves in well-understood ways across temperature and voltage ranges; analog is not as well understood.

[edit] I see they are claiming 30x smaller footprint, which will help, since they can be very aggressive about rejecting chips, but still I wonder if fabs that mainly do digital are setup to test something like this.

</comment><comment><USER6> Analog electronics have been used for simulation for a long time. Mainly for simulation of analog components.

But trying to use an analog processor for discrete computation? While it could work, part of the point of digital electronics is that you can build in error- correction at every single gate to mitigate the effects of not using ideal zero-resistance electrical components. In order to do that with an analog machine you'd either need to sample-then-recreate (essentially making it a digital-logic circuit) or have accurate knowledge of how much voltage is being dropped at each point (which is influenced by environmental factors such as ambient temperature).

<comment><USER7> Analog computers used to come in various forms - including hydraulic. I once worked for an engineering Prof who had spent a lot of time using hydraulic analog computers to "solve" systems of equations modeling various kinds of real world systems.

One thing that I thought was particularly neat is that he had spent time using a hydraulic analog computer to model the flow of fluid through building walls....

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My biggest reason for thinking this won't make inroads into HPC is that they talk about "Up to 1000x improvement over x86 calculations" well that means they need to get it to market and adopted before we have 256 or 512 x86 cores in a single socket, which isn't _that_ far away, and would reduce their advantage to "Up to 4-8x" which is not nearly as impressive.

<comment><USER8> These chips are also very energetically efficient, and I can't see why moore's law wouldn't apply to them too. You could build a 256 core probabilistic processor as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Possibly this may go the same way as the last outing of this idea, which can be seen, no joke, in fuzzy logic rice cookers and toasters and not many other places. Maybe.

<comment><USER10> I wouldn't be so dismissive of this technology. The key is that it uses significantly less power than conventional circuit elements.

For instance, this concept has been demonstrated to be great at decoding lossy video -- perfect for mobile devices. And, it is already demonstrated to work as part of an error correction circuit for flash memory.

According to Lyric, their flash error correction chip requires "30X lower cost to manufacture and 12X lower power consumption" -- pretty significant savings.

<comment><USER11> Do you have a citation for the lossy video thing? Seems like it could be good for rendering graphics too. For a 12x power savings maybe I can live with my pixels coming out #00FE00 instead of #00FF00 (for example).

<comment><USER10> Sure -- <http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/20246/>. Specifically, they have "implemented filter primitives using PCMOS technology, used to realize the H.264 decoding algorithm." (from <http://www.cs.rice.edu/~lc6/visen/2006vlsisoc.pdf>). That paper does not go into much detail about the video implementation, but it seems they discussed it more in a conference presentation.

The relevant part of the technology review article: "That changed in 2006. [Palem] and his students simulated a PCMOS circuit that would be part of a chip for processing video, such as streaming video in a cell phone, and compared it with the performance of existing chips. They presented the work at a technical conference, and in a show of hands, much of the audience couldn't discern any difference in picture quality."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, someone went for alliteration!

<comment><USER13> Always Aim to Alliterate, Says Stan.

<comment><USER14> I always avoid excessive alliteration as it often annoys an otherwise attentive audience.

<comment><USER13> Downvotes denotate demographic homogeneity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If it lives up to the hype, it would be useful for some kinds of cryptanalysis.

</comment><comment><USER16> I really expected to find some mention of quantum computing in this article. Could probability of spin states (or some other state) be used in this paradigm?

</comment><comment><USER13> I wish Jon Stokes had written this article.</comment>


SHA-3 shows secure hash functions are possible. But can we build fast ones? - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/108313527900507320366/posts/4ZPRdvpzBTJ <comment><USER2> Don't you want hash functions to be slow to prolong their lifespan?

<comment><USER3> You've misunderstood the two key requirements of a hashing function.

The first is to be _secure_. It should produce irreversible, unpredictable changes to at least half of the bits in the output string if one bit of input is changed.

The second is to be _fast_. Hash functions are typically used to produce _authentication_ of various pieces of original data. Each such unit of data might be small; hashes should not add an unacceptable overhead to communications, for example.

By contrast, key-derivation functions _should_ be slow, because they have a different threat profile. Using a hash function for key-derivation purposes is a mistake.

<comment><USER4> The problem I have with this simplification is that if I can brute force your hash (which is a feasible attack vector as computers get faster: people even sit around brute forcing MD5 nowadays, thanks to some mathematical attacks that reduce some of its strength), then I can spoof your "authentication". If you have two 128-bit hash algorithms, and one is fundamentally twice as slow as the other, it is effectively a 129-bit hash in comparison.

<comment><USER3> You don't see hashes with, say, thousands of rounds because it's just too slow.

Hash algorithms always exist in tension between security and speed. Because authentication is their purpose, not secrecy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Data would you like to see integrated into a web analytics tool? - <AUTHOR>

I am currently working out what kind of public data could be imported into an analytics tool to make it more informative. For example, I have noticed that the revenue of a site usually drops if it's really hot outside, so I figured offering weatherdata would be helpful as a possible explanation for drops in traffic and revenue. Do you have any other ideas or wishes for data you'd like to see beside your website-data?<p>Thanks for all answers. <comment><USER2> That's a really interesting idea!

In terms of weather data how do you collate all the information: because your users could be from all over the world with all sorts of weather variations.

The only general downside I see is that some of the factors will be _very_ website specific. Stuff like local riots, for example, might be a reason for more international hits on your local news site (that's a poor example I know because you'd imagine the site owner would figure that - but you see what I mean)

<comment><USER3> You just gave me an even more interesting idea! What if you had a service which automatically found data correlations?

Create a sort of Wikipedia of timeline-based data streams. Let people have both public and private timelines. Come up with some sort of clever way to do the N^2 comparisons and find interesting correlations. Maybe even provide people a framework to conduct experiments by influencing an independent variable.

If even a few cool results sprung up out of this, you'd see loads of people pushing their data into it from all sorts of sciences. Who knows what sorts of fantastic things we can learn from the collective intelligence?

<comment><USER4> If you throw in 30 sets of numbers, you are bound to find some interesting and statistically significant correlations.

It is similar to the data mining legend that beer and diapers get bought together. They never told you how many products they analyzed. If it was 5 and they found that correlation, I'd be interested. But it was 500, then the result is pretty useless

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In addition to time of day - holidays based on visitor's location. Also, any big news stories based on the visitor's location as well as worldwide.

</comment><comment><USER6> I want to be able to build my release log and release notes into my analytics tool. If I'm looking at a graph of page views per user and I see a spike, it would be great if I could hover over the day before that spike and see that it's when I pushed out a new feature that apparently increased engagement. It puts everything in context.

</comment><comment><USER7> time of day per visitor

</comment><comment> onreact-com Weather is not the only outside factor: Holidays are, national events like the Superbowl, even popular TV shows end up influencing traffic.</comment>


Announcing the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2011/03/02/announcing-asia-pacific-tokyo-region/`

<comment><USER2> Link is broken, should be [http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2011/03/02/announc...](http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2011/03/02/announcing-asia-pacific-tokyo-region/)</comment>


How Cotap Is Building a HIPAA-Compliant Messaging Service on AWS - <AUTHOR> http://stackshare.io/cotap/how-cotap-is-building-a-hipaa-compliant-messaging-service-on-aws?utm=email

<comment><USER2> Hi! OP here! Just wanted to clear up on a few things!

1\. Yes it's VPC we are talking about, and yes there is an added cost of $2 per region per day. Instances are also slightly more expensive when running in a dedicated VPC. Overall this increased our bill by roughly %20-25. Having a support account also increases the overall cost greatly since it's percentage based of the total bill. However we've been very mindful of the money we spend on AWS and our bill as of Today is still roughly equivalent if not cheaper than the salary of a senior engineer. 2\. Regarding efficiency of messages sent vs instances, you can't really divive num of messages processed by instances and get an accurate picture. Every service that we roll out is deployed across 3 AZs. So that means at a minimum 3 instances. Some services don't need the capacity of 3 servers, but redundancy is important to us, and we build everything with that in mind. We also invest a lot in monitoring, logging and metric tracking. Think Riemann, Sensu, Statsd, Logstash (Indexers + Elasticsearch Cluster). I'd say about 1/5 of the infrastructure is dedicated to monitoring/alerting/tracking. Most days our API backend runs off or 3 instances, our workers out of 3 instances. So if you must calculate it that way, it's closer to 2M / 6\. But even that math feels weird. Then we have various services like click tracking, photo resizing, video encoding etc. Also our frontends are decoupled from the backend so that's another 4 to 5 services on top of my mind ( so another 12-15 instances). And then there is our data pipeline, crons, our distribution service (apt/gems) and a few other things that you need to run in a VPC like bastion hosts, NAT instances etc. Those all add up and contribute to the service but don't process messages.

What's nice about running most of those behind AutoScalingGroups is that it's very easy to adjust and "scale down" on the hardware to keep the costs down when not necessary. We found that c3.larges work well for most Rails related stuff. Frontends can run just fine on m1.smalls and scale horizontally when needed etc.

Hope this was helpful! Let me know if you have more questions I'd be happy to answer them!

<comment><USER3> Nice work and thank you for sharing this. I'm currently working on a migration plan to AWS for an app that needs to be HIPAA compliant and stories like yours are useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They have to use Amazon's VPC service - AWS has a 'secure' vpc service where you don't share the server with other customers which is a requirement for HIPAA compliance. That service gets really pricey.

I run a similar service but for SMS messaging that is 21cfr11 compliant. We rent a 1/4 rack with our own door/lock and throw in pretty much disposable servers as needed. It's much cheaper than doing the equivalent on AWS, and it's not that difficult to set up your own secure servers once you have a few recipes to follow.

We started it about 9 years ago before a secure service with amazon existed. Every year or two I price alternative solutions like AWS's secure service, VPCs, etc and it's always cheaper even taking account my labor to stick with our 1/4 closet. In fact, it seems they base their costs on the going rate for rack space, plus a premium for using the convenience of using their servers.

Oh, and it's funny - we have almost the same number of users and we're processing more messages per month than them, all on a old-fashioned webserver-appserver-dataserver arrangement - three servers (with fallover redunandancy not counted) and it's barely breaking a sweat.

<comment><USER5> You dramatically misunderstand VPC. Everybody on AWS today uses VPC, unless you happened to be grandfathered in to EC2 'classic'. There is NO COST to using VPC (aside from admin over head maybe?). It's a huge security upgrade, as it gives you the ability to isolate things much better.

The specifics of HIPAA/HITECH compliance on AWS are available under their BAA (which is confidential), and do require some things that cost more money. VPC is not one of them.

If you have only a quarter rack of servers and want the minimum s for physical security, yeah, you can probably make that work cheaper than AWS. When you have a whole datacenter worth of gear and now need a more sophisticated security / entry system, etc. the argument becomes much closer.

With that said, you misunderstanding how VPC works and what it is makes me wonder if your pricing is coming out right: it's really complicated to price out a full AWS cost, just as much as to price out your own costs.

<comment><USER3> GP is refeerring to the dedicated instance requirement of having a BAA with AWS. It costs $2 per hour per region on top of your existing server costs.

<comment><USER6> It is $2/hour. So about $1500/mo plus regular AWS charges.

<comment><USER3> In my head I meant $2/hour but $2/day came out instead. Thank you for correcting me!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >>> process about 2 million messages each month... >>> ... We run about 60 instances in production

Seems like a very low efficiency in either the hardware or the software. We run a comparable service with roughly 2 million messages per _day_ in a 6 server dedicated cluster.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, that stuck out to me too

2,000,000 / 30 / 24 / 60 / 60 = 0.7 requests/second/cluster.

However it's probably worth extending them the benefit of the doubt, there may be other factors that they didn't cover.

<comment><USER5> Is your message handling a linear deal over the month? They may process 1.5M of those in the last 8 hours of the day, which would be 3750 requests a second instead...

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure how you arrived at this 3750 per second number.

Processing 1.5 million messages for ⅓ of the time (1500000 messages / 30d / 8h / 60m / 60s) is an average of 1.7361 messages per second during those 8 hours per day. If the remaining 500k messages were spread evenly over the remaining 16 hours a day for a month, that's an average of 0.963 messages per second ((((500000 / 30 / 8 / 60 / 60 )×2)+1.7361)/3) over the entire month.

Even if you were to process 1.5million messages during the _last 8 hours of the month_ , that is only 52.08 ( 1500000 messages / 8h / 60m / 60s ) messages per second during that 8 hour period.

<comment><USER5> I, uh, don't know how I got that either (must have fat fingered in calc). I was talking about all in one 8 hour deal though. Thanks for the clarification.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scientists excited by signs of life on Saturn's moon - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com.au/world/scientists-excited-by-signs-of-life-on-saturns-moon/story-e6frfkyi-1225876207420

<comment><USER2> The phenomenon is better explained here:

<http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174>

</comment><comment><USER3> No, those aren't signs of life. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1405812></comment>


Why do Bitcoin and crypto have no future - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@thinkoutsidetheblox/why-bitcoin-and-crypto-have-no-future-4f95980bb774 <comment><USER2> This almost feels like spam. A badly-written "article" (which is just a collection of facts) with a clickbait title and then a call for donations accepting like 50 different cryptocurrencies.</comment>


Ask HN: Part-time, remote jobs? - <AUTHOR>

Given how favorable the labor market is for software engineers right now, one would think that there would be a wide range of options available to us in terms of how we do our work. After all, as long as the results are there, the time and place of work should be of little consequence, right?<p>However, most advertised positions for seem to be 40+ hours of on-site work, which is quite the opposite of what I'm after. Why is there not a trend to work less instead of taking more money? Is there any demand for part-time remote work? Wouldn't employers significantly expand their hiring pool (read: cut costs) by going after all the talent that is not willing or able to rent $3k/mo studio in SoMa? <comment><USER2> _Why is there not a trend to work less instead of taking more money?_

I've wondered that myself now that I'm a father of a 2.5 year old. I would love to take a 20% paycut to work 4 days instead of 5. I'd take an even bigger paycut to work 100% remote because I could leave Los Angeles, and live somewhere significantly cheaper, like Colorado or Oregon and still keep reasonable hours. If I lived internationally, things get more complicated with timezones and infrastructure, but the cost of living gets much cheaper compared to salary in the US.

<comment><USER3> I think it is better than ever, though. I especially like places like Treehouse trying to put the idea of a four-day work week out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are plenty of sites out there for finding remote work.

Part time, and remote will be harder but not impossible.

There are two big reasons why you don't see more remote and more part time. Training and collaboration.

Lets assume that your talking about programing/engineering and that your a senior developer. You already know how to do your job (write code) but what you don't understand yet is the domain your about to go to work in. There is a fixed cost where your "ramping up", learning about how the business works, the nomenclature used to describe behavior, and functionality. Unless you have been in an industry for a while, this will all be new to you. During your first few weeks/months the company is paying a tax for you to learn, not only their environment but the particulars of what they do.

Once your past that first stage and part of the team, what happens then? If your not present (your day off) and someone needs advice (integration, production support ... ) on something you have built what do they do? Are they going to read through your code (Yes they can, most people don't know how or don't have the patience), are they going to wait or be stuck till you get back? People being "present" at the same time and in the same location makes these sort of issues less likely, it keeps productivity high.

This work does exist. The trick is to be a solid developer AND a domain expert. Your then going to have a set of skills that lets you target specific companies who will need your skill set, and be able to set your terms. At that point however, your not going to be seeking "part time" you going to be charging flat rates per week for much larger sums of money. The pay won't be "steady" but the peeks and valleys will provide you more than your currently asking for.

</comment><comment><USER5> I work 4 days/week writing open source software for the French government ([http://france-universite-numerique-mooc.fr/](http://france-universite- numerique-mooc.fr/) [http://github.com/openfun/](http://github.com/openfun/)). Last week I was in Barcelona; today I'm in Bordeaux. All 4 members of the development team work remotely.

Keep faith! It took me ~5 years to find the right position and a boss willing to accept remote, part-time work. Such positions exist, but you need to search hard.

</comment><comment><USER6> Most positions aren't advertised. Full time or otherwise. If you want to find a specific job you might have better results networking (asking old contacts, going to meetups/conferences, etc).

<comment><USER2> _Most positions aren 't advertised. Full time or otherwise._

That's a good point. The people I know who work remote started onsite and proved themselves first. Then, when they wanted to relocate, they worked out remote working arrangements instead of leaving the company. One of my former coworkers left LA (and expensive rent for a tiny studio near the beach) to move to Colorado (she bought a house with several acres) and she worked out a remote arrangement with the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > After all, as long as the results are there, the time and place of work > should be of little consequence, right?

I am not sure I agree. My experience has been that remote work requires greater discipline. Complex projects have twists and turns, many variables. One has to learn to over communicate to ensure that one is not building the wrong thing. This is harder to do over hangouts mainly because it is tougher to gauge interpersonal dynamics of a room.

Coding is the easiest part of large scale projects. Harder problems are stakeholder management, ensuring we are building the right thing and ensuring that information flows freely. I am on a project that spans Boston, NY and Stockholm. We all know what we want to build. Yet, every two weeks or so, I find myself traveling. Mainly to ensure that we react fast as we learn more about unknowns. Are we all on the same page? This is sustainable for a company that can afford to depute a few people to do this. For a tiny startup that has to be agile enough to pivot immediately, it is harder to do so when all your handful of engineers are remote.

Personally, I would hire someone remote if it was a very well defined chunk of work. At that point, I may as well hire a contractor. IMO, the value of an engineer is not just to write code, it is to solve business problems.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have often wondered why more developers don't pair up and form one virtual full time remote employee. I would actually be willing to hire two people paid for 2 & 1/2 days each as long as they communicated with each other very regularly and worked well together. This would avoid the biggest problem of part time work which is not having someone around when issues come up.

</comment><comment><USER9> I work remote and I can tell you I end up working around 60 hours a week. Or at least making myself available for that long. And this is exactly the reason employers are choosing remote work over on site. They will have a developer available at some time zone at any time of the day and also all of them available at the core hours.

This goes against part time work. By allowing you to work from anywhere (Which is absolutely awesome, writing this from a Fuerteventura beach) you unofficially allow them to get a hold of you for longer hours. This has been the case with my last three remote jobs.

</comment><comment><USER10> Remote work is becoming more and more common - also for SF companies.

Eg half our team (www.producthunt.com) is remote. Engineering and non- engineering.

We dont do part-time (for long term contracts) because we want to give developers full ownership about bigger releases - and this is hard if someone is only available half the week.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not associated with it in any way, but there is a site that lists remote jobs (not necessarily part-time): [https://remoteok.io/](https://remoteok.io/)

</comment><comment><USER12> You answered your own question - the positions exist but are not advertised. As zer00eyz says you will need to have specific skills that are in demand.</comment>


UMass president calls for online college to help face 'existential threat' - <AUTHOR> https://www.boston.com/news/education/2019/03/06/umass-marty-meehan-online-college-existential-threat <comment><USER2> Maybe they should lower prices like every other industry does when customers are sparse.</comment>


Building an Echo Server Using Tornado - <AUTHOR> http://superjared.com/entry/building-echo-server-using-tornado/

<comment><USER2> Echo Server in Twisted Matrix:

      from twisted.internet import protocol, reactor

      class Echo(protocol.Protocol):
          def dataReceived(self, data):
              self.transport.write(data)

      if __name__ == '__main__':
          factory = protocol.ServerFactory()
          factory.protocol = Echo
          reactor.listenTCP(8000,factory)
          reactor.run()

<comment><USER3> Exactly, thanks for posting this (you beat me to it).

It's not that we need to constantly respond to every Tornado post with a Twisted rebuttal - but it is appropriate to respond to articles the contain FUD and demonstrate far less elegant, far more verbose, non cross-platform solutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Echo Server in Eventlet (<http://eventlet.net/>):

        from eventlet import api

        def handle_socket(address):
            sock, ip = address
            while True:
               sock.send(sock.recv(1))

        api.tcp_server(api.tcp_listener(('0.0.0.0', 6000)), handle_socket)

<comment><USER5> You can destructure the address tuple in the arguments:

      def handle_socket((sock, ip)):
          while True:
             sock.send(sock.recv(1))

<comment><USER4> Yeah; I didn't want to confuse people who don't know that Eventlet's API passes a tuple (they might think it sends handle_socket 2 arguments)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Echo server in 10-years old Tcl (more?):

        socket -server acceptConnections 9999
        proc acceptConnections {fd clientaddr clientport} {
            fconfigure $fd -blocking 0
            fileevent $fd readable [list replyToClient $fd]
        }
        proc replyToClient fd {
            set s [read $fd]
            puts -nonewline $fd $s
            flush $fd
        }
        vwait forever

Note that this is a multiplexing non blocking server, exactly like Twisted / Tornado. All features built-in in the language. Tcl failed copying the obvious missing features from other languages. Other languages are failing copying the good things from Tcl.

p.s. note the poetry contained in the "vwait forever" statement ;) Our program is willing to run without stop until the end of the universe.

</comment><comment><USER7> Tornados are dangerous, but I'm glad you're eager to serve their echos.

<comment><USER8> this is a nice joke. wondering why do hackers vote that down</comment></comment>


ShowHn: Nychood, where you should live in NYC based on foursquare checkins - <AUTHOR> http://nychood.com/

<comment><USER2> Awesome concept. I like the simple design.

The algorithm didn't work so great for me. I regularly check in on 4sq, so the data should be there. I work in DUMBO, live in Bed-Stuy (don't really like it, but it's cheap. that's how you bootstrap!)

I mostly go (& check into places) in DUMBO and Downtown Manhattan. But recommendation put me in Hell's Kitchen, which doesn't really work for me. The next three suggestions put me in Queens.

It would be nice if you could factor price into the algorithm.</comment>