Don't Charge $9 a Month for Your SaaS - <AUTHOR> https://www.mojosaas.com/articles/don-t-charge-a-month-for-your-product/ <comment><USER2> > Whereas previously it was tempting to look at my roadmap and think "what > would people like me pay $9 for", now I am thinking more about what actual > businesses would pay $50 to $100 a month for.

Two things have changed here. The $ amount, and the TARGET AUDIENCE. While the title suggests the article is about pricing, the text is about finding the right audience.

This is the first time I've heard of "Votemojo". My first reaction was, that's cool! I'd like to use that for some side projects I'm working on, but a single tool isn't worth $50. As a consumer, I'd expect it to deliver more than services I'm paying for such as Google Mail ($10/m), Adobe Photoshop ($20/m) or Dropbox ($12/m). It's fine to price out the consumer in favor of enterprise sales, but I'd be curious what the user demo breakdown is for a single tool.

</comment><comment><USER3> Indie hackers may not be a sustainable market, but on the other hand, employees using your tool for hobby projects is a great way to backdoor yourself into the company. If you're going to start at a $49/mo plan, you may want to spend the effort to figure out what kind of basic cheap plan you can offer individual users such that only companies pay for the more expensive plan.

</comment><comment><USER4> On the other hand, "your margin is my opportunity". Cost-plus pricing probably dissuades others from replicating the service and becoming competitors

</comment><comment><USER5> Read this book to learn about "willingness to pay" [https://www.amazon.com/Monetizing-Innovation-Companies- Desig...](https://www.amazon.com/Monetizing-Innovation-Companies-Design- Product/dp/1119240867/ref=sr_1_1?crid=AHTVQP3QZRV&keywords=monetizing+innovation&qid=1573608425&sprefix=monetizi%2Caps%2C144&sr=8-1)

Sadly, I haven't seen anything literature on real value based pricing

</comment><comment><USER6> I wish him good luck. Who's going to pay 50 USD a month to get website previews or a forums with votes though ? It looks like doable by (non SaaS) plugins for CMS

<comment><USER7> Let's price one of your engineers at $200k/year (ball park). 250 working days a year. So if your engineer spends 1 day cobbling something together, you could've paid for 16 months using this product.

That's not something your average person is going to pay $50/month for, but that price is just nothing to a decent sized company whose core competency isn't this exact product and it shouldn't be for a professional trying to run a business with actual revenue.

<comment><USER6> But those services would still be better integrated and cheaper with a plugin for a CMS

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As Patio11 mantracises, "charge more".</comment>


The GDPR blog post - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/tsengineering/the-gdpr-blog-post-9a571b13079d <comment><USER2> I got a few dozen gdpr emails today, some from companies I didn't know existed. This law is a fantastic development for end users/consumers.

<comment><USER3> Yup. Today I opened my fridge wondering if I'll see a note about an updated privacy policy inside.

It's ironic seeing that the law was in power for the last 2 years, but companies woke up only last week. A lot of those mails are only information, with no (clearly marked) link to a consent panel, so I assume that me ignoring them means they won't be allowed to spam me anymore.

<comment><USER4> You're joking, but _my_ fridge did hand me a GDPR notice in the morning:

[https://twitter.com/varjag/status/998496423019778048](https://twitter.com/varjag/status/998496423019778048)

<comment><USER3> Wow. That's the funniest thing I've seen this week.

Beats the schadenfreude I'm having with some of the IoT lightbulbs no longer working for EU customers - a problem which actually impacted a friend of mine. See: [https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/999619364541394944](https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/999619364541394944).

EDIT: 2 friends now. I wonder how many more bought those lightbulbs...

<comment><USER5> Anyone who bought these lightbulbs should return them to the retailer for a full refund.

<comment><USER6> The yeelights are typically bought on eg Aliexpress. I have mine with the local network developer functionality enabled, here's to hoping they will still work with that at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, I'm _really_ not trying to start a fight, please read this with curious intent.

I personally don't really feel like keeping my email is a violation of my privacy. If they're not "processing" it (that feels like code for "data mining") is this really required? I mean my email address is literally a public means of contacting me. It's kind of fun that they decided to use a one-way hash, but this story doesn't make me feel like the internet has really been improved.

<comment><USER3> The problem is identification of physical persons. Your e-mail is public, but it also identifies you as a person. This is important, because it allows for correlating different data sets.

Touch Surgery sounds like a honest company, so for them this was just some extra burden. But the same law prevents ShadyAdtechCo from getting datasets from _several_ companies and joining them on e-mail column to build a profile of you, without your explicit, informed consent in several places.

<comment><USER8> Wouldn't then a hash of your email also identify you as a person? The companies can still build a profile of you if they just agree to use the same hashing function :/

<comment><USER9> Or even if ShadyAdtechCo just knows what the hashing function is, and has a list of plaintext email addresses to test against – perhaps obtained from one of the datasets they're joining against, or even from crawling the web.

<comment><USER3> Hashing should be done with salt for precisely that reason.

<comment><USER9> If you mean a static salt, that could help mitigate against hacks (if the attacker has access to the database but not the code), but where adtech is concerned it's probably more realistic to assume that the datasets they're using were disclosed willingly. If you mean using a different salt for each address, that could work for some use cases, but it wouldn't work for the use case described in the blog post, since Touch Surgery needs to be able to lookup whether a given address is in the database (to see whether they've previously declined an invitation).

<comment><AUTHOR> It's really no problem to do this. We're using a variation on this: [https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/158400/etc- shadow-h...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/158400/etc-shadow-how- to-generate-6-s-encrypted-password). The output of crypt (where the input is an email address) is pretty useless if we did suffer a data breach. They'd have to hash every known email address with that salt in order to figure out who had declined an invite from us.

<comment><USER9> What is the salt based on?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had a recruiter call me up with what I suspect was a made up role. At the end of the call he casually dropped in the line "ok, well, is it ok if I get back in touch when something more suitable comes in?"

It was conspicuous. I asked is he'd asked me that because of GDPR. He said yes. I said no.

</comment><comment><USER11> > I would be very wary of a company who claims this legislation is onerous.

... and elsewhere ...

> On the other hand it also was not very hard for us. We are not a creepy > company.

> This is not to say that preparing for GDPR didn't take us 100s of hours. It > did.

A company who it didn't affect much, spent 100s of our hours? I think it would reasonable to call that onerous.

The different & fair question would be if time was justified.

<comment><USER12> > A company who it didn't affect much, spent 100s of our hours? I think it > would reasonable to call that onerous.

100 hours is 12.5 days. That is not much to protect your users data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even in Europe (at least in Spain), mainstream journalists and pundits are generally misstating the effects and contents of GDPR.

I wish not-so-hot takes like this are more widely read, and along with sane enforcing, contribute to the sorely needed education on these topics of the general population.

</comment><comment><USER14> A colleague sent me this, lots of funny variants [https://gdprhallofshame.com/](https://gdprhallofshame.com/)

<comment><USER15> Warning though: that site is not gdpr-compliant

<comment><USER16> Why? Is there a company behind this webpage?

<comment><USER15> doesnt have to be a company. it processes data and it's not a strictly personal site, it's all over the internet in fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there not any issue with having a hashed version of the email, given the entropy of an email address is quite small?

<comment><USER18> Maybe, but they have a good reason to keep that data, and they even go out of their way to "hide it" the best they can using a one-way function.

To save the information that a certain email address has explicitly withdrawn consent, they need to store it. The alternative is to send out a new email the next time someone adds then. I think the interpretation of GDPR this particular instance of information storing is still open, but they have done everything possible to keep it safe. Should the list of hashes be leaked, the best an adversary can realistically do is check known emails against the list of hashes.

<comment><USER19> You're right, but there are safer constructions to do this. Maybe this kind of knowledge will get more popular now that GDPR is mandating it :)

Active concern for me: GDPR will promote a bunch more homegrown looks-fine- but-actually-busted crypto schemes. I don't think GDPR will be used to enforce that even in the case of breach, and I'm not sure it should -- I think we should make better schemes available instead.

<comment><USER20> What is the 'safer construction' to do this? I'm looking for ideas and trying to solve a problem. My understanding of the GDPR, which is very basic, supports the view that hashing email addresses is at least questionable. On the other hand, if an email list is a core function, de-spamming seems valid.

<comment><USER21> An appropriately tuned bloom filter would probably suffice.

<comment><USER19> A Bloom filter is an interesting approach, but the problem is that the attacker and you need the same property: to know if an email is in the set. If you could tell set membership with (effectively) perfect accuracy the Bloom filter may improve performance but not privacy.

I posted an alternative construction elsewhere in the thread.

<comment><USER22> The difference is that you may be willing to accept a much higher false- positive rate than your attacker can. This is the same idea behind the old "flip a coin, and then raise your hand if either the coin came up heads or you have [embarrassing problem]" method to statistically count everyone with the embarrassing problem, without disclosing anyone's status with certainty. That's the same property your truncated hash achieves.

A Bloom filter could also be designed accordingly. I'm guessing this post's grandparent was thinking of the filter's natural false-positive rate, or you could add deliberate noise.

<comment><USER18> If had a service where I wanted people to use it and only remember explicitly opt-out, I wouldn't want any false positives to the "have already opted out" question.

<comment><USER22> Let's say my list has 10^4 members, and there are 10^9 people worldwide. If I design for a 10^-4 false positive rate, then a list constructed by reverse- engineering my algorithm (whether it's a Bloom filter or a truncated hash or anything else) will be 91% false positives, 9% true positives. That's not a huge improvement, but I could imagine applications where someone judged it worth the ~one customer I inconvenience.

This raises fun questions of what it means to disclose a fact, when you're disclosing it probabilistically. Let's say that you tell me the yes/no answer to a question you consider private. I then generate a uniform random number X on [0, 1], and disclose (("you told me yes") || (X >= a)) for some agreed constant a.

If a = 1, then I've almost surely just disclosed your secret. If a = 0, then I've almost surely disclosed nothing. At what value of a do you start to care? That's a really messy question, depending on the social consequences of the information being disclosed (what fraction of innocent candidates would you reject to make sure your child's tutor isn't on the list of clients of a psychologist known for treating pedophiles?), and the other public information about you and about my population that an attacker can fuse to make a stronger estimate.

I don't think privacy-through-false-positives is a terribly effective tool. It's just the only possible tool for creating privacy when your rule is public (whether deliberately or after a breach)--so it's interesting to think about places where it could have some benefit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So far I have received over 300 GDPR emails. When I am supposed to read all this? How do I track it? How can I track what each company stores about me? Do I feel this in any way improved safety of my data? I don't think so.

<comment><USER2> In theory, if you don't reply, all these companies should stop using your data and quite likely delete it. Sounds like improving safety for me.

<comment><USER24> It sounds pretty tedious to sift through 300+ emails to find everyone you want to keep using your data and go through whatever process they have for replying.

<comment><USER25> Why do you want them to keep using your data?

<comment><USER24> Why wouldn't I? With the exception of one or two emails, they've all been from companies/services I signed up to originally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have reported as SPAM all the GDPR emails i got from unknown companies, i never asked to receive all this shit (250 GDPR messages just this week)

</comment><comment><USER27> American entrepreneurs who are proponents of GDPR are experiencing some serious Stockholm Syndrome. Or possibly they're just faking their love for GDPR to virtue signal.

</comment><comment><USER28> Love how I got a popup asking me to sign up with a fb/ggle account, stating "To make Medium work, we log user data and share it with service providers."

</comment><comment><USER29> We're still not GDPR compliant and don't plan to be. So far so good.

<comment><USER30> Same here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "To make Medium work, we log user data and share it with processors. To use Medium, you must agree to our Privacy Policy, including cookie policy."

No Medium, I must NOT agree to your privacy policy and your cookie policy, because to use and share my data you need my FREE consent. AND you can NOT deny me reading an article without giving consent, because then the consent is not FREE, and it is NOT strictly necessary for the service.

Medium: either you allow me to read blog posts on your webserver without FORCING me to allow you to collect my data, or you don't. Choose. But stop fucking annoying me with lying banners.

<comment><USER31> I think it's more likely that "to make Medium make money," they engage in tracking for advertising purposes.

Medium works perfectly well for my purposes without that banner being displayed. I can open up developer tools and delete that node.

If I don't click agree, does that mean that this information isn't collected? Because tracking cookies are still placed.

Now what is interesting is that I don't remember being asked for consent for them to place a cookie to log the number of articles I read in a month as part of their sign-up funnel.

<comment><USER3> > _Now what is interesting is that I don 't remember being asked for consent > for them to place a cookie to log the number of articles I read in a month > as part of their sign-up funnel._

They could probably make this compliant by storing the counter in your local storage and never sending it anywhere - just having a piece of JS that essentially does: if(Storage.getItem("visits") > 6) { displaySignnupPopup(); }

<comment><USER32> Ah, when I used to bother with Proxomitron ([https://www.proxomitron.info/](https://www.proxomitron.info/)), I could rewrite anything that went "over the wire" because it acts as a HTTP-proxy listening at localhost. I remember modifying Javascript lines so adding my own code was possible...

One could add an SSL library and basically MITM HTTPS connections, but I never tried that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A popup (probably what used to be cookie warning) on Medium says:

> _Medium uses browser cookies to give you the best possible experience. To > make Medium work, we log user data and share it with processors. To use > Medium, you must agree to our Privacy Policy._

I _must_ agree to logging user data and sharing it with processors?

EDIT: come to think of it, it might be a new, GDPR-specific, dark pattern. I can use the site without clicking "I agree", and the existence of that button sort of implies the consent is not assumed. The wording of the message ("you must agree") is just trying to bait consent.

EDIT2: I just read[0] that biggest sites in my country are treating closing the GDPR popup as giving consent to everything. This definitely does not sound as explicit, informed consent. I sincerely hope it'll land them in a world of hurt.

\--

[0] - (PL link) [https://zaufanatrzeciastrona.pl/post/klikasz-x-w- komunikacie...](https://zaufanatrzeciastrona.pl/post/klikasz-x-w-komunikacie- o-rodo-wyrazasz-zgode-na-przetwarzanie-danych/)

<comment><USER33> Isn't that the quid pro quo, though? I don't feel obliged to accept their shitty privacy policy, and in return they are not obliged to serve me their often equally shitty content.

<comment><USER34> > I don't feel obliged to accept their shitty privacy policy, and in return > they are not obliged to serve me their often equally shitty content.

Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that you can argue that. No, in the sense that the GDPR just says "no, you cannot ask people to pay with personal information". So either they must show me the article even if I opt-out of giving my information. Or they must make reading their article conditional upon something else (say, paying them). They CANNOT make it conditional upon my consent to use my personal data, because that's just coercing me into clicking "yes", which is exactly what GDPR is supposed to curb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > this is going to be another ridiculous Cookie Law

Given the number of ugly popups I had to click within the last few days, it already is.

<comment><USER30> I never added this cookie law notice to any of our websites and apps and never had a single problem. We operate in the EU. Pretty small scale. We did nothing for gdpr.</comment></comment>


Crystal Meth (variation!) Could Stave Off the Flu - <AUTHOR> http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/11/crystal-meth-could-stave-off-the-flu/

<comment><AUTHOR> For those of you who just saw the topic and thought of Walter in Breaking Bad please read the last sentence:

"But more interestingly, it could be that compounds similar to meth could be used as effective anti-influenza treatments. Just don't self-prescribe yet, please."</comment>


Job offer - <AUTHOR> http://www.getacoder.com/projects/programming_c_87390.html

<comment><USER2> $100 is a reasonable price to install Debian. But selling it later may prove tricky.

<comment><USER3> Actually not. As far as I know you can sell e.g. burned CDs. That should be legaly ok. (As far as the Software is GPL licensed)

</comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen How can anyone say we're in a recession with job offers like this?

</comment><comment><USER4> HarrixOS!

[http://web.archive.org/web/20010608013821/www.harrixos.co.uk...](http://web.archive.org/web/20010608013821/www.harrixos.co.uk/history3_8.htm)

(the navigation images do not seem to have been archived...)

[http://web.archive.org/web/20010124021000/http://www.harrixo...](http://web.archive.org/web/20010124021000/http://www.harrixos.co.uk/history4.htm) [http://web.archive.org/web/20010512014726/www.harrixos.co.uk...](http://web.archive.org/web/20010512014726/www.harrixos.co.uk/history5.htm)

Oooh, and screenshots: [http://web.archive.org/web/20010607222820/www.harrixos.co.uk...](http://web.archive.org/web/20010607222820/www.harrixos.co.uk/image.htm)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's an old troll: [http://www.getacoder.com/projects/need_operating_system_4287...](http://www.getacoder.com/projects/need_operating_system_42879.html)

<comment><USER6> Wasn't the one submitted to HN requiring a mere $100? Imagine that!? :) How nice of them to lower the prices they were going to _pay_ the developer...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The best part is the ad for a book called "Successful Outsourcing" that I see on the page.

</comment><comment><USER8> Old joke is old.

<comment><USER9> Agreed - just as a sample, here is another one posted a while ago (Jan. 2007) - [http://www.getacoder.com/projects/need_operating_system_4287...](http://www.getacoder.com/projects/need_operating_system_42879.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> His way of finding a business oppurtunity seems to be simple: Just find what everyone's using and build (or get built) another one like that to try and make a quick buck. These guys often dream of becoming billionaires with this idea. I confess that I too had such ideas when I was 14 (4 yrs ago).

He never seems to think why people need another OS or as he says an 'Operasting System'.

</comment><comment><USER11> Some dude in India took the project and now is trying to get someone to get the job done.

</comment><comment><USER12> Priceless! ...well, actually, $100...

</comment><comment><USER13> holy smokes!!! $20-$100 for a new OS, with clear edges? does he mean shell themes?

</comment><comment><USER14> I will take it!

</comment><comment><USER15> send him ubuntu hardy 8.04LTS for free

<comment><USER16> I think you mean Lindows. Erm, Linspire. Meh, whatever, just get his $100. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> roflol</comment>


A Mind Is Born - <AUTHOR> https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just realising two things - firstly I could never write something like this in 256 bytes (I mean using two bytes miles apart from each other as the global clock while the melody is encoded in bytes around them - it's ... beautiful.

Secondly HN submissions are becoming my real bookmarks.</comment>


Is there a non-obvious answer to why Amazon acquired whole foods now? - <AUTHOR> Are there any non obvious reasons why Amazon acquired whole foods other than declaring war on the grocery industry or the Pe being at a low ? <comment><USER2> I'm late to the discussion, but my thoughts...

From Amazon's perspective, Whole Foods is a fairly low risk acquisition. WF is a going concern, not growing like crazy, but operating on a profitable basis. They don't need cash or a bail out and prima facia don't need management attention. Given the delta in revenue and profit between the two companies, they won't materially contribute to Amazon's top or bottom lines. Hence, this is not a deal for its own sake. It's strategic to Amazon. Until Amazon makes a formal and compelling statement (not a smoke screen), we'll have to infer what we can and speculate.

Amazon has shown a clear intention to pursue the grocery business. Local fresh delivery and operating retail stores that don't have cashiers or cash registers of any sort implies that they want to change the way people acquire groceries, in terms of both delivery and in-store. From a delivery and distribution standpoint, I really don't think Amazon has much to learn from WF. Amazon is likely the technology leader in that space.

What all of this means to me is that Amazon wants to roll out their cash register-free shopping experience beyond the proof of concept and into a larger scale. And they want to do that in a way that the results can be considered experimentally valid.

By buying a going concern, at the right size and scale, and then only changing one variable, they have a pretty good, experimentally valid method of seeing whether and to what extent the cash register-free shopping approach can work. Some example questions that may be answered:

\- How is foot traffic affected? Do they get more people into the stores because there is guaranteed to be no line at the cash register?

\- How is customer service affected? Can they redeploy cashiers to the aisles to answer customer questions? Perhaps up-sell customers to a higher average sale?

\- How is profitability affected?

\- What is the cost of maintaining the check out system itself?

There are many more things they can learn from this. It's a small investment that should hold it's value and provide a petri dish that yields experimentally valid results. Once they have those results, they'll be confident in their decision whether to invest in a global roll out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Real Estate - Whole Foods store locations are usually very targeted and nicely picked throughout the US, unlike Safeway's or Walmart's (in ghetto areas). The obvious reason is the expansion of amazon fresh. The least obvious reason is a long term investment in real estate. They want to become the McDonald's of the internet by investing $13 billion in Real Estate. Very good move from Amazon.

<comment><USER4> Whole Foods rents their real estate.

<comment><USER3> The $13 billon deal includes Whole Foods + Real estate (400 stores)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why don't modern Chrome and Firefox pass the Acid3 test anymore? - <AUTHOR> A few years ago there was a large hype of browsers being the first to pass the Acid3 test.
Now I tested the Acid3 test (http://acid3.acidtests.org/; also cf. http://www.acidtests.org/) with the most recent browsers available to me:
Google Chrome 61.0.3163.91 (64 bit), Firefox 55.0.3 (64 bit) and Microsoft Edge.
Ironically (with respect to Microsoft/IE haters) only Microsoft Edge still passes the Acid3 test with 100/100, while Chrome and Firefox only get 97/100 (the second and third box from the left stays gray).
But this would not be Hacker News if it were not for some technology discussion: So what is the reason why these two browsers do not pass the Acid3 test anymore? <comment><USER2> Two changes lead to three failures in Chrome.

The first change is described in the 'note' at [https://drafts.csswg.org/selectors-4/#child- index](https://drafts.csswg.org/selectors-4/#child-index)

Chrome is failing a test because the root node claims to be a 'first-child'.

The root node _is_ the first sibling, but since it doesn't have a parent, the selectors 3 spec didn't include it.

The selectors 4 draft does away with the requirement that a 'first-child' have a parent, and chrome's behaviour matches.

The second is discussed here [https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/319](https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/319)

Roughly, when interpreting qualified names, Chrome is throwing InvalidCharacterErrors when the acid test wants it to throw NamespaceErrors, in situations where you really have both. This leads to two tests failing.

</comment><comment><USER3> According to www.acidtests.org:

> Acid3, in particular, contains some controversial tests and no longer > reflects the consensus of the Web standards it purports to test, especially > when it comes to issues affecting mobile browsers.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Acid3, in particular, contains some controversial tests and no longer > reflects the consensus of the Web standards it purports to test, especially > when it comes to issues affecting mobile browsers.

Does this imply that the standards have changed on how some features are to be implemented? Or has the correct behavior simply never been specified precisely enough? Or does this simply mean that some of the features that Acid3 tests simply don't make much sense on mobile browsers?

<comment><USER4> Standards have changed. For example, CSS :first-child without a parent is now legal:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:first- chil...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:first-child)

You can shift click the "A" in Acid3 to see what's failing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The game these days driven by Chrome is not about standards, it's about the number of chump devs they can find to adopt whatever "cool" garbage they come up with over the weekend hackathon. Then they point at those numbers and say fuck you to whoever opposes it. Six months down the line they will be furiously patching it. It's like a bunch of 10 years old drive the process.

<comment><AUTHOR> While this might be able to explain the result for Chrome, it does in my opinion not explain why Firefox fails the Acid3 test, too.

<comment><USER6> Firefox drop in market share means they now must do whatever the winner does, they are an "also-ran", so they are following these 10 year olds...</comment></comment></comment>


Competition is overrated - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2010/06/26/competition-is-overrated/

<comment><USER2> In startup land the only competition you should worry about is a guy named Maslow. He has a pyramid that will fight against you pretty strongly when you work 16 hour days under your desk in social isolation without result.

You compete, but not in the pure sense of against another company. You compete more strongly against forces that may not face others, like sociological needs, acceptance of short-term poverty, and etc.

<comment><USER3> Competition against yourself, against society, and against nature.

Seem to me that startups have only two of the plot elements!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A friend of mine supplies all of the sand for making cement in his area, thanks to perfect storm of regulation shutting down his competitors. With a grin he is fond of saying "A monopoly is a terrible thing...not to have". I think every business person harbors this fantasy sometimes.

But for innovative products, competition is validation. For you, your customers and your investors. The reason is that innovation brings some risk to the customer associated with adoption or integration. To the investor and innovator this looks like risk of acceptance. Competition eliminates this particular hurdle.

<comment><USER5> That sounds like a really interesting story. What kind of regulation shuts down sand producers? Is sand environmentally hazardous? Does warning workers about silicosis with sand MSDSes cost a lot?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great quote:

"Startups are primarly competing against indifference, lack of awareness, and lack of understanding — not other startups."

Couldn't agree more.

<comment><USER7> Agreed on the quote. It's so easy to get wrapped up in your competitors. But if competitors have bad products, that leads to focusing on doing a bad thing just a little bit better, which doesn't lead to a great product.

That's why talking to your customers and focusing on indifference, awareness and understanding are so critical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's interesting to note in light of the Garry Tan quote at the top that Posterous recently started a campaign targeted directly at its competition[1]. I think it's a great quote, just trying to emphasize that it's applicable to the early stages but not necessarily the later ones.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/posterous-thinks-your- startup...](http://www.businessinsider.com/posterous-thinks-your-startup- sucks-and-it-isnt-afraid-to-say-so-2010-6)

<comment><USER9> That Garry Tan quote is really a PG quote. I lost count of the number of times Paul said that during YC.

<comment><USER10> Amen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Aren't there some areas where this is more true than others? There are dozens of good ideas in online selling/auctions/etc. that have failed mostly because they weren't able to overcome the entrenched incumbent, eBay, but may quite possibly have done well if eBay didn't exist. A similar hurdle faces anyone trying to take on PayPal, or at this point, Twitter (e.g. StatusNet's #1 barrier to acceptance is Twitter's dominance). I would imagine the Gmail juggernaut totally changes the playing field for anyone who was once contemplating a freemium webmail startup as well.

It seems that's a big part of the indifference equation also. If you say "I'm doing X", and everyone replies with "well doesn't [Big Player] already do X?", you have an extra hurdle to get over there: not just convince them it's a cool idea, but convince them you do it better or differently enough than the competition.

Though if he means only the more narrow: don't worry about competitors who _haven't actually succeeded_ (yet), then I agree.

</comment><comment><USER12> What about the winner-take-all markets?

</comment><comment><USER13> I was at a rock show and before the singer started she said make sure to go out back and get a burger. The placement of the back button in the title allowed me to skip this post. It would have made a heavier impact at the end of the story, "Now hit the back button."</comment>


Wolverine-like frog breaks bones to produce claws - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13991-horror-frog-breaks-own-bones-to-produce-claws.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting evolutionary pathway. Biomimicry was a big fad in mechanical and industrial design when I was in school. I wonder if this kind of "nature" story could lead to innovations (or at least thought tangents) in coding or user interface.</comment>


Ask HN: When is it okay to email the users? - <AUTHOR>

So a problem I'm having is that I had a big wave of users who signed up for my website (http://thingist.com), used it for a while, then disappeared...
A few people have told me "Well, send out an email to people who haevn't posted for a while.  Or send out an email to people who registered but never posted at all."
This seems like a decent idea, but I'm concerned about being "spammy".  Is that concern valid?
Are there any best practices guides for this?  Or advice you can give? <comment><USER2> I suggest making each email more personal then "Dear User, why you no post?" by using their user name.

Also I'd say do it in small batches where you perfect your approach depending on how the users react to the title and content of your e-mails.

Finally, don't send them more than one or two "Where you been?" emails every few months, that would definitely bother people.</comment>


Small - <AUTHOR> http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/small

<comment><USER2> Two nights ago while I slept, for the first time I had a dream about going into space on the shuttle. I have wanted to go into space since I was a child, so in my dream I was extremely excited about going into space.

I dreamt of the launch, the G-Forces, the adrenaline rush, and finally the sky turning from blue to black as we escaped the atmosphere.

Then the shuttle turned over so we could see the Earth. As the cockpit window rotated and Earth came into view, the feeling of _sheer terror_ washed over me as I saw how small the planet looked. I had a panic attack in my dream from looking back down at Earth. I woke up a few minutes later as if from a nightmare. It was the strangest experience, and the imagery and feelings are extremely vivid in my memory. I wonder if humans have an innate emotional response to this size perspective, but this seems somewhat related to the Overview Effect described in the article.

<comment><USER3> You might enjoy this recent podcast on radiolab. [http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab- blog/2012/oct/08/dark...](http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab- blog/2012/oct/08/dark-side-earth/) amazing how humble and calm the guy comes across as

<comment><USER4> Seconded. I listened to that a few days ago and it's an incredible story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I breathed a sigh of relief when there wasn't some tie-in to startup culture or programming or social media at the end of the article. Excellent post.

<comment><USER6> Top ten signs you may need to stop spending so much time on HN and thinking about startups, number 9:

<comment><USER5> Yep, big sign I spend too much time on a startup-centric news aggregation site when I understand that most of the articles are about startups. Nailed it, bud.

<comment><USER7> The point as I understood it is that if you were so glad to see that this article wasn't about a startup, maybe you'd do better getting your articles from a different source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I suspect that the thoughts people have in space will be of the same order as those they have on the ground. Thus space tourism is unlikely to have much mind-expanding effect. We have profound quotes from astronauts because we don't send idiots into space. Yet.

<comment><USER9> Do you think that travelling to other countries -- "seeing the world" -- changes people? Gives them a new perspective? If that can, I think going into space can as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Regarding the pale blue dot.

Has the photo been enhanced so we can see the earth, or is that actually how it looks?

What are those color bands I'm seeing? Does the earth stay in it's orange color band, indicating they are orbital lines around the sun?

<comment><USER11> The Earth takes up much less than a pixel in the image, a combination of other factors cause it to be much more visible than it "should" be, see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When you live in one town all your life you get a better/different perspective when you travel to another city. The same goes for then visting other parts of your country and then inbetween countries and then continents. Each time the effect is more pronounced than before. You realize the insignificance of many of your "problems" when you met other people from very different socioeconomic backgrounds. I wonder if space is just the most absolute point of this effect.

Elegant blog post. If only because it didn't overcrowd us with thoughts but rather set the stage for pondering.

</comment><comment><USER13> Good discussion about 'overview effect' [http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/05/space- euphoria....](http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/05/space- euphoria.html)

Also <http://www.overviewinstitute.org/>

</comment><comment><USER14> "With more people viewing the Earth from afar, perhaps the world will gain a little more perspective, and a better sense of proportion."

Interestingly enough the reason we have the pictures of the earth from space is that Stewart Brand started a petition to get them declassified because he thought seeing the pictures would induce the same sort of experience (and pro- social behavioral shift) as LSD. Apparently he actually had the idea while on acid, while sitting on his roof in San Francisco.

<comment><USER4> ...also the reason he named his projects "whole earth X"

Like the Whole Earth Catalog, mentioned at the end of Steve Jobs' graduation speech (the source of the "stay hungry, stay foolish" line).

Or the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, better known as The WELL, one of the first "online" communities.

<comment><USER4> oops, I just connected the op back to startup culture and to social media :-/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Relevant: A fascinatingly disturbing thought by Dr. Neil deGrasse - <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDRXn96HrtY>

<comment><USER16> Many thanks for the share. Awesome watch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would have thought that you'd have to be a lot higher up than Felix to experience the overview effect. Its one thing being able to see the curvature of the earth... its another matter altogether to be be in orbit and see the whole planet in 90 minutes (or being able to blot out the entire planet with your thumb held at arm's distance, as was the case for the guys that made it to the moon).

<comment><USER18> > _or being able to blot out the entire planet with your thumb held at arm's > distance, as was the case for the guys that made it to the moon_

At first I didn't believe you, but some quick math confirms this. The angular size of the Earth from the moon is 1.9 degrees, and the angular width of your thumb at arm's distance is about 2 degrees.

<comment><USER19> Maybe a bit more with the spacesuit glove on!

<comment><USER18> Ha. Good point. But even without, the math checks out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd like to believe that we all experience a weak Overview Effect from time to time. It's often a friend of existential nihilism.

But to have your entire life add up to a powerful case of that realization must be an extremely emotional experience.

</comment><comment><USER21> hoepfully the rest of us can rediscover a less costly way to get that same perspective ... the fact that this author concludes with excitement at space tourism suggests to me they totally miss the message roaring from the blue dot.

</comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me of the Total Perspective Vortex, a torture machine from Douglas Adams' sci-fi book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

 __For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says "You are here." __

This, according to the book, completely annihilates your brain.

</comment><comment><USER4> I grew up with enough of an interest in space that I heard and internalized a lot of this as a kid. I think some IMAX movies attempted to recreate this kind of experience.

I wonder now much more impactful the real thing would be in terms of altering a person's perspective.

</comment><comment><USER23> To contrast, I absolutely love this video where Neil deGrasse Tyson provides an explanation as to why he _doesn't_ feel small in the Universe: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D05ej8u-gU>

</comment><comment><USER24> although the first to do space tourism will be the rich.

They will hover over us and instead of thinking how small they are, will feel at peace having escaped the rest of us... who are now too small to see.

<comment><USER25> Does a man drifting at sea feel like he has escaped humanity? Even a wealthy man?

<comment><USER26> Depends on if it's a cruise or not

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here's Carl Sagan talking about the "Pale Blue Dot", it's definitely worth a watch: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g>

</comment><comment><USER28> [http://www.unturf.com/post/24536592330/i-dont-care-if-you- ar...](http://www.unturf.com/post/24536592330/i-dont-care-if-you-are-a- millionaire-a-ceo-a)

</comment><comment><USER29> Makes me want to start a small side project that routinely sends oppressors and other individuals with ambition of world domination on a free ride into the space.

</comment><comment><USER30> Perspective is a powerful thing. How things looks depends a lot on where you sit.

Makes me wonder how this concept can be applied to more Earthly affairs.

</comment><comment><USER31> Am I the only one who assumed the Baumgartner's remarks were rehearsed or otherwise prearranged?

</comment><comment><USER32> This is the kind of article that I come to Hacker News for. :)

</comment><comment><USER33> I was disappointed, a pretty inconsequential blog post reaching far for anything worth writing.

"So while the first astronauts to the moon went as technicians, they came back as humanitarians."

meh.

<comment><USER12> I wonder why you felt the need to leave this comment.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Resources about writing reliable software - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for books / articles about how to write reliable software.
There is a lot of focus in the web / startup world on writing code as fast as possible with the general assumption that you can always fix your bugs once they're in production (ie 'Move fast and break things').
I don't see many articles on general strategies / ways of thinking / processes to put in place when you can't afford to have bugs in your software. I'm not writing airplane-level, formally-verified code either (the level I'm aiming for is that the user can't do his job if the app fails but no one is going to die either)
More specifically, we're writing mobile apps where some of the users don't have network connectivity for a part of the day, so syncing is a big issue.
Thanks for all your ideas! <comment><USER2> _Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World_ , Joe Armstrong. The tldr; is "Let it crash." From an engineering perspective, this seems like the sensible approach. Let it crash has been field tested in life and death uses:

[https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.1201-pa.html](https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.1201-pa.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think books are very helpful, you basically just write lots of functions with immutable data structures. It's hard to understand unless you're forced into functional programming. I recommend clojure. Programming in a functional paradigm is closer to writing mathematical proofs. It's not fun at first but it will totally change the way you think about programming.</comment>


The Spectrum Auction: How Economists Saved the Day - <AUTHOR> https://priceonomics.com/the-spectrum-auction-how-economists-saved-the-day/ <comment><USER2> The design of the UK spectrum auction of 2000 should be mentioned here. As well as being pretty interesting from a game-theoretic standpoint, at $34bn raised, it was the largest auction since AD 195, at least by the reckoning of the designers:

[http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/klemperer/biggestpaper.pdf](http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/klemperer/biggestpaper.pdf)

A colleague who worked on the auction design for the ELSE Centre at UCL ran some test auctions on student subjects with the premise that buyers were bidding for the rights to operate a diamond mine, with a guaranteed (and astronomically large) return. In experiments, bidders were explicitly warned to save some of their budget over for picks and shovels so they could actually extract the diamonds, should they win.

When it came time to bid, the students did not heed this advice... and nor did the telcos.

<comment><USER3> All the auction does is create a "hidden tax" for cell phone users since all the company does is pass the costs on to the rate payers. Since cell phones and smart phones are not a luxury but are now essential, it is a regressive tax on the poor.

I wouldn't be proud of this. I would rather have seen the spectrum given to the cell phone providers the way that spectrum was originally given to radio and TV broadcasters in the US.

<comment><USER4> From an economics perspective, taxing the airwaves is just as efficient as a land-value tax. The market response to something being taxed is to not make as much of it. As long as the tax is set such that the land or spectrum is still worth using, it's the closest thing to a free lunch.

And it's not as if taxing the spectrum changes how much more money cell phone companies would get at different prices.

<comment><USER3> It is in the best interest of the government to make the key resource of cellular Wi-Fi as cheap as possible to encourage use just as it is with wire- line internet providers.

When Google Fiber comes to a city, the prices of competitors drop and the data speeds increase. The spectrum auction which is passed on as an invisible tax creates the opposite effect of that desire.

It is an essential resource in today's world, so this tax is not only implicit and invisible, it is also regressive, adversely affecting the poorest the most.

> And it's not as if taxing the spectrum changes how much more money cell > phone companies would get at different prices.

Actually, cell phone providers could make more revenues through increased use of spectrum at lower prices. Consumer, cell phone provider both win when there is no auction and the spectrum is given out as it originally was in the US with radio and TV spectrum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Selling spectrum to cell phone providers such as Verizon simply results as a "hidden" tax as that cost is passed along to the pubic who uses cell phones (just about everyone).

This implicit tax makes for an inefficient market as it makes cell phone use more expensive than it should be and thus limits the use for productive purposes while making it much more expensive for those with low incomes to be able to use this now essential technology.

<comment><USER5> Do you have a good alternative to propose? The beauty-contest model didn't seem to work out too well, because regulators have a relatively poor ability to determine in advance who will best use the spectrum, and the process disproportionately rewarded those who were well represented at the FCC. The lottery system eliminates the latter problem, but greatly exacerbates the former. In either case, one could rely on secondary market transactions to reallocate spectrum to more optimal uses, but this would impose a 'hidden tax' at least as high as simply auctioning the spectrum in the first place.

<comment><USER3> I propose using the model which had been in place for allocating spectrum to television and radio (over the air) broadcasting.

I'm not certain why this was down voted. "no taxation without representation." Implicit taxes should be made explicit.

There are many resources such as mining leases for minerals, metals, oil & gas, coal, etc. that are leased out to firms at below market values. There are no auctions for the mining of public lands.

Why make the distinction with spectrum, a new one at that, since as I have pointed out, TV stations and radio stations were given spectrum for free with caveats to report the news.

Meanwhile this tax makes use of the spectrum far more expensive that it otherwise would be creating a politically induced scarcity and artificially raising prices -- a market inefficiency -- that makes it harder for the poor and elderly who might are generally on a fixed income to use data on smartphones and to use smartphones altogether.

<comment><USER6> Your proposal leads to great inefficiencies in the market though. What exactly are those TV stations using that VHF spectrum for right now? Nothing. They switched to digital broadcasts years ago.

And it doesn't make using the spectrum (cell phone service) far more expensive than it would otherwise would be. It makes it the correct market rate by making the telecoms figure out how to properly spend the right price on spectrum and infrastructure to be profitable given the market price of cell phone service. You need no better example of that than the current cell phone wars in the US - Sprint and T-Mobile provide cut-rate prices to get customers, prices that AT&T and Verizon need to match.

<comment><USER3> I am using market inefficiency in the microeconomics term. The auctioning of the scarce resource be it land or spectrum results in a politically induced scarcity (the power of scarcity) resulting in higher prices than in a competitive market. This politically induced scarcity, or "economic rent" means people are paying more money for the resource than they otherwise would. Money that would go towards other goods and services are spent on cell data instead. Others that at the lower rate without the auction who would marginally be able to afford the use of the cell phones and data would are no longer able to do so. This increases inequality.

<comment><USER5> > The auctioning of the scarce resource be it land or spectrum results in a > politically induced scarcity (the power of scarcity)...

Spectrum is naturally scarce. Many uses are mutually exclusive due to the potential for harmful interference. And today there is far more demand for commercially useful spectrum bands than there is supply. (That, after all, is a primary reason that this spectrum fetches such astronomical prices at auction.) Therefore, it is reasonable for the government to erect a legal regime for allocating this resource efficiently.

> ...resulting in higher prices than in a competitive market.

How so? The whole point of an auction is to approximate the 'free-market' value of a resource from the outset, thus minimizing the relatively inefficient secondary market transactions that would otherwise be needed in order for the asset to find its true price. An auction, after all, _is_ a competitive market.

<comment><USER3> > How so?

I was trying to communicate that the companies don't pay for the cost of the spectrum, the customers do.

Basically, politics have made the cost of cellular communications _to customers_ higher than it should be in a competitive market.

Economist (and wealthy businessman) David Ricardo brought up the use of politics to artificially create higher prices using the "Corn Laws" in Britain. This was the case of putting restrictions and tariffs on imported grain which resulted in increased prices for land because of the politically increased scarcity of the grain by limiting imports made domestically grown grain have a higher price which basically means that more (marginal) land was brought into production raising the overall value of all land.

Raising the cost of spectrum to consumers creates a regressive tax and increases inequality.

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

"The Corn Laws enhanced the profits and political power associated with land ownership. Their abolition saw a significant increase of free trade."

<comment><USER5> I understand your view is that spectrum auctions increase costs for telecom providers, and that these costs are passed along to consumers.

What I am challenging is your assertion that these prices are somehow higher than they would be in a competitive market. I've articulated three primary objections to this position, none of which you seem to have addressed:

1\. Spectrum auctions can only be said to 'increase' costs relative to some other, preferable regime. But, as I and others have argued here, there is no preferable regime, for the reasons that I set forth above.

2\. Spectrum auctions are a form of artificially/politically imposed scarcity. There is nothing "political" about the scarcity of spectrum. It would be scarce even if there were no FCC (in fact, it would arguably be scarcer due to increased interference). So the government must come up with _some_ way to allocate it efficiently. Auctions are the most efficient choice yet identified because they do the best job of transferring the resources to those who value them the most, without requiring a lot of intermediate, inefficient secondary market transactions.

3\. An auction results in higher prices than would a competitive market. The whole point of a spectrum auction is that it _is_ a "competitive market" so I don't understand what you could mean when you say that it results in higher prices than would a competitive market. Is it your point that auctions result in higher initial prices than the market would otherwise find through secondary market transactions if the Commission were to give spectrum away like candy? If so, this is highly counterintuitive. Why should we believe this? The point of the auction, after all, is that is reduces the transaction costs required to find the market price, improving market efficiency, thus lowering prices.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps better than using the word competitive, is to use the word efficient market. Efficient markets increase wealth creation which leads to a better economy for all of us. Today, cellular data is an essential, not a luxury as it may have been in the past. Just as the low cost of money is important for wealth creation to encourage capital investment, cellular data is another input where taxing it makes for a market inefficiency thus impinging on wealth creation.

Cell firms that pay billions of dollars for spectrum space (and repeatedly for new spectrum as technology advances) pass those billions of dollars they paid on to customers, just as they would the cost of any other input (eg, higher electric prices, more explicit taxes, higher health care costs for employees).

From the point of view of wealth creation one should strive for efficient markets, especially in such essentials as cell phone data.

A better solution is to simply give the spectrum away to firms such as Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-mobile and other existing firms in their markets just as spectrum was given away to CBS, NBC, etc. for radio and later TV spectrum. Part of the agreement would be to tax cell firms for overly expensive customer charges and possibly to give the poor say, some free data.

<comment><USER5> I'm at a loss. Either I'm hopelessly confused (and I don't think I am), or you still have not even tried to address a single one of the points I have raised. That's too bad, because I think this could have been an interesting conversation.

I'll try one more time, this time coming from a slightly different angle: you say that the government should just give spectrum away to existing firms, but...

1\. Which ones? You seem to take for granted that there are only a small number of firms interested in spectrum and that it will be easy to decide who gets what. But, in reality, there would be countless firms that would very much like access to the same spectrum, especially in the biggest markets. Our experience with spectrum auctions amply proves this. How does the government choose between these competing firms? How does a new competitor enter the market if the government always gives spectrum to the big four carriers?

2\. Assuming that the government will not reliably select the firm that would use the spectrum best (history makes pretty clear that this is the case), wouldn't this gifted spectrum immediately come up for sale on the secondary market to be sold to an even more productive user? If so, wouldn't the secondary market price approximate the would-be auction price (plus the significant transaction costs that these secondary-market transactions entail)? If so, the cost of spectrum to the ultimate user would be the same (and maybe a little higher) than if the spectrum had been auctioned in the first place, plus a large windfall to the original licensee/seller.

3\. More fundamentally, given that many other firms would also like to have received the gifted spectrum--and would have paid good money for it (as spectrum auctions prove)--shouldn't we regard this gift as a massive _subsidy_ to the original licensee and not merely the absence of a tax?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It should be noted that while the US forward auction is extremely complicated, with dozens of bidders and hundreds of regions, most national spectrum auctions are much easier. They typically have 3 or 4 bidders and 4-8 bands for sale, run the ascending auction described in the article, and last a few days at most. The only countries where you'll see package bids (aka a combinatorial auction) is in the richer Western nations.

<comment><USER7> Partly this is because the TV broadcast stations are sitting on a lot of valuable cell phone spectrum. Not all spectrum is equivalently good quality for cell phone usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems quite generous to say they "saved the day" when in actuality they granted a handful of monopolists complete control over what was previously a public resource.

<comment><USER6> No, they created a competitive open market for spectrum. Any company can bid in the auction, it doesn't have to be a telecom "monopoly". Private equity will be bidding, Google will be bidding.

The unspoken truth about when spectrum auctions was handed out by the government is that crony-ism played a huge part, and led to inefficient allocation of spectrum.

Another debate can be had about the just finished reverse auction - should the government pay these tv stations (think your local ABC station) money to buy back the spectrum they were given for free?

<comment><USER9> The notion of granting permanent exclusive right of way to anyone is decidedly non-optimal. What was once the most efficient use for that spectrum may no longer be the case, but now you have to fight monopoly forces in order to achieve efficient use. If spectrum were an infinite resource, sure grant permanent ownership, but it's not infinite. One spectrum grant precludes someone else from having access to wireless spectrum.

A much more efficient means would have been automated auctions for 12 month _leases_ , combined with broadcasters having the capability to automatically switch to different channels as their spectrum portfolio changes.

<comment><USER10> Please don't create batches of new accounts to use only for a comment or two. This breaks the fundamentals of the community here: HN threads are for individuals engaging in conversation. Anonymity is fine, of course, but there needs to be some sort of identity for people to relate to. Otherwise we might as well have no usernames at all, which would be an entirely different site.

It's particularly bad to do this within a single conversation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A better way to buy code. Use tests to buy code - <AUTHOR> https://codeswap.io/

<comment><USER2> This is a lovely idea, but I'd like to share with readers an experience I had a while ago.

I was looking to outsource some coding, so I advertised and chose someone that seemed reasonable. I asked for some sample code doing similar things to what I wanted, they responded with some snippets that looked right, so we entered an agreement. I would provide some sample input and output, they would provide code that produced the right results. Once I verified that it did what was required, I would pay.

It was a problem domain that wasn't overly complex, and I thought it would be an ideal task to outsource. It was a lot more complex that the example I'll give here, but I want to give you a flavour of how it all went wrong. This is _not_ the task, just something to explain _how_ it went wrong.

I asked for code that would return "True" if the 2nd and 4th characters in a supplied string were the same, but otherwise all characters were different. So here are some examples of input and output:

        severity    True
        vagabonds   True
        unknowable  True
        unsnarled   True
        telegraphs  True
        robot       True

        faunas      False
        flimsily    False
        freighting  False
        rummaging   False
        mosaic      False
        shushes     False
        conflicting False

Remember, the actual task was described in full, was much more complex than this, and we were simply providing some example test cases.

What we got back was the equivalent of this:

        def test_string(x):

            if x == 'severity'    return True
            if x == 'vagabonds'   return True
            if x == 'unknowable'  return True
            if x == 'unsnarled'   return True
            if x == 'telegraphs'  return True
            if x == 'robot'       return True

            if x == 'faunas'      return False
            if x == 'flimsily'    return False
            if x == 'freighting'  return False
            if x == 'rummaging'   return False
            if x == 'mosaic'      return False
            if x == 'shushes'     return False
            if x == 'conflicting' return False

So to anyone who tries to specify their coding tasks by using tests - beware. There are coders who will strive to meet the exact letter of the requirements, and then demand payment.

For what it's worth, we never resolved this and eventually paid an agreed amount to make them go away. We took this as a reasonably expensive lesson about some of the potential pitfalls of out-sourcing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for the example. This is definitely something we want to avoid with this platform and have thought of ways to mitigate it.

One way is we will allow the buyer to further test submissions as black boxes to see if the output matches their expectations.

The second way is with a rating system as extra information for the buyer and an incentive for the coders to write good code.

<comment><USER2> How do you avoid this scenario:

      * Customer creates job spec
      * Customer creates white examples
      * Customer creates black examples
      * Coder bids
      * Customer accepts
      * Customer sends spec
      * Customer sends white examples
      * Coder delivers code
      * Code fails black examples
      * Customer refuses to pay
      * Coder claims code meets spec

??

<comment><USER3> The platform is weighted in favour of the buyers. What I mean by that is the coders compete to win the payout. The buyer doesn't see or own the source code until they pay. Many coders can submit solutions and the buyer can pick the best one to purchase. It's up to the buyer to query the submission fully as a black box and to trust the rating system.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fortress Project At Oracle Wrapping Up - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.oracle.com/projectfortress/entry/fortress_wrapping_up

<comment><USER2> Sad to see it fold. I hope it will spread its genes.

</comment><comment><USER3> _"Dimensions and units: We designed a way to write such expressions as "2 meters per second" and "15.7 kg" and have them fit smoothly into the rest of the type system and mathematical syntax—still a good idea that has yet to reach fruition."_</comment>


House arrest for doctor who molested, photographed patients at free Calif.clinic - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/28/house-arrest-for-doctor-who-molested-photographed-patients-at-free-calif-clinic/ <comment><USER2> Not defending this guy... but RCC is a death sentence. He got his.</comment>


US-NK Tensions ratchet up over Wannacrypt attack - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/365634-us-north-korea-tensions-ratchet-up-over-wanna-cry-attack <comment><AUTHOR> hi posted this because i thought it was initially understood that the wannacrypt was a piece of weaponized NSA malware that was leaked from vault 7 (edit: or shadowbrokers), then in the news about 3 days ago I heard the U.S. now blames NK for the attack..,

Was this not true?</comment>


A Deep Dive into Monte Carlo Tree Search - <AUTHOR> http://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/deep_dive_mcts/ <comment><USER2> Nice write-up & demo. MCTS—UCT particularly—is a hidden gem of symbolic AI that hasn't found it's deserved notoriety; I suspect because it's not as flashy as the successes of deep learning. I think we'll be seeing a lot more of it in the future though, as it has proven to be a remarkably flexible general search algorithm with simple, tunable mechanics to balance exploration/exploitation. It also works well in both classical search and adversarial search with minor modifications. A lesser-known example of its use in classical search is that at the time DeepMind made waves with performance on Atari games with Deep Q-Learning, the state of the art results (better than deep-q results on most games) were actually MCTS-UCB for planning/policy learning.

<comment><USER3> it's wonderful in situations where the breadth of search is impractically enormous, but the depth limited. like complex games :)

<comment><USER4> Is this some sort of "accepted wisdom" ??

(i.e. Does MTCS handles breadth better than depth)

I understand the MCTS rollout becomes difficult with 1000s of moves ahead. But we can "learn" a leaf evaluator, or "learn" to limit the branch out at deeper levels, etc etc.

Are there key papers or conclusions on this issue?

<comment><USER3> the reasoning for that thinking is simply because MCTS is comparable to DFS while something like minimax is comparable to BFS.

Of course, because MCTS searches in a depth-first manner, the deeper the depth the less effective it is, because you have less time for your rollouts (as your rollouts are more expensive).

But not many board games (if we are limiting ourselves to this example) will have thousands of moves until end of game -- they may, however, have an exponentially large breadth of moves.

For a game like Go, MCTS could simulate thousands of rollouts in the amount of time it would take minimax to evaluate two plies ahead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I dunno if we can call this a "deep dive". Its a good introductory blog post on the subject, but without a discussion on multi-armed bandits, its kind of impossible to fully understand UCT, and the Monte Carlo Tree Search built on top of it.

The Multi-Armed Bandit is a very simple / idealistic model. You have many slot machines, all of which have different probabilities of winning. Your ONLY ability to estimate your future earnings is through experimentation: trying the slot machines one at a time.

The Multi-Armed Bandit problem then asks: what is the ideal strategy for searching through all of these slot machines?

UCT, despite being a very very simple algorithm (its just a sqrt and a few adds), is asymptotically ideal. There are better multi-armed bandit solvers out there, but UCT is incredibly fast to compute and ideal for the "inner-most loop" of AI problems. That's why its used.

\</comment><comment>---

Go (or really, any turn-based zero-sum game) can be seen as a multi-armed bandit problem.

Which moves will most likely result in a win for me? Well, you try a move by simulating it out, then record the win/loss statistic as a "win" or "loss" as a slot-machine in the multi-armed bandit model. Then, you try again, and again, and again.

The two factors of the UCT algorithm are exploration (trying new slot machines), and exploitation (repeatedly trying the best slot machine).

UCT proves that "exploring" at a rate of approximately sqrt(total visits) is asymptotically perfect. After 10,000 "slot-machine pulls", you want to make sure that you have ~100-visits in all of your choices. (Exploration factor).

Otherwise, you want to favor the slot-machine that has won the most. (Exploitation factor)

The sqrt(explortation) + exploitation factor is UCT in a nut-shell.

At the end of the say, UCT is an asymptotically perfect "multi-armed bandit" solver composed of just a sqrt(), a few multiplies, and a few "adds" here and there. Its outrageously cheap to calculate but (when configured properly) explores the tree "asymptotically perfectly". (Like Heapsort. Its not the best sorting algorithm, but it's asymptotically perfect, and thus useful)

\</comment><comment>---

Anyway, this blog post is fine and all. But without explaining the 'Q' or 'U' formula, or even saying what they mean (exploration factor vs exploitation factor), its certainly not a "deep dive".

And there's no discussion for why you'd expect UCT to do well. Just a simple statement for why UCT is asymptotically ideal for the multi-armed bandit problem would go a long way for the reader's understanding IMO.</comment>


Intel Goldmont CPU Causing Chrome Crashes? - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=968683 <comment><AUTHOR> [https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB/status/113419208392371814...](https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB/status/1134192083923718144)

Excerpt:

"Bruce Dawson @BruceDawson0xB 8h8 hours ago

Software at scale means that sometimes you hit CPU bugs.

It looks like there is a bug in Intel's Goldmont CPU that is causing Chrome crashes.

I filed [http://crbug.com/968683](http://crbug.com/968683) \- anybody got experience or references for this?"</comment>


YouTube Music App now preinstalled on Android 10 devices - <AUTHOR> https://youtube.googleblog.com/2019/09/YouTube-Music-App-Android10.html <comment><AUTHOR> It's funny to see how Big Tech don't want to learn when it's about piling more money...

Google already has been caught (and fined) by the EU because it used Android to "promote" ("force" would be more appropriate) its search engine, like MS was fined 20 years for the same thing with Windows and IE. But Google is doing the same once again !

I guess that they have a bunch of competent lawyers, that already told them that they WILL be fined. And they surely decided that the benefits from abusing their position would be greater than the fines that they'll have to pay in 3 or 5 years

</comment><comment><USER2> That's one of the reasons I'm not buying a device with Android 10. I find it intolerable that I can't uninstall most pre-installed apps. PlayMusic, PlayBooks, News, Drive. Hangouts, Assistant, GMail etc. are all apps I don't use. Nevertheless, they are still on my smartphone and take away important space. I understand that Google/Alphabet also wants to earn money but it's really annoying. I'm using the Firefox browser but still can't uninstall Google Chrome.

<comment><USER3> The worst thing is that at least on my tablet, I get continual popups saying unfortunately Google Hangouts has stopped. No kidding Google - it's because I bloody well deleted it. Why force me to keep seeing it even if I never have and never will use it, and don't want it on my systems?

For some reason, my Android phone doesn't harass me like the tablet does. But I best end it here, lest I jinx myself.

Android _used to be_ better than Apple's OS.</comment></comment>


OWASP Mobile Security Testing Guide - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/OWASP/owasp-mstg <comment><USER2> I interacted a bit with the OWASP community a few years ago, and it seemed to me the O on OWASP is not really there. It feels like the community is made of a few guys, the typical stereotype pentester: a bit arrogant, and difficult to communicate with when you have different views.

Sorry for the negative post, but there are no comments on this story and I felt like I needed to say this.

<comment><USER3> The linked manual is available for free in multiple formats, and the README specified multiple ways for potential contributors to become involved. How would you suggest it be made more open?

<comment><USER4> I think he was referring to the process used to create the material.</comment></comment></comment>


Monthly Learning Digest for Software Dev Managers/Product Managers/Product Owner - <AUTHOR> http://trrove.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone. I'm working on a new project - Not sure whether this idea has any real business potential. I just want to take the plunge and find out. Open to all kinds of feedback… roast me if you like!

Reading/listening/viewing freely available content on the web is useful. However, it can be time consuming. The pain I'm trying to solve is to eliminate unnecessary time wasted in searching the web for learning resources.

For a small subscription fee I plan to provide a monthly digest of custom- tailored curated learning resources that help you focus, learn, and broaden your knowledge within specific sub-areas of product development/management.

Every 3 months paying users will be asked to choose 3-5 focus areas within the software development/product management context. We'll then send them 100+ personalized curated learning resources (best content with actionable steps from blog-posts, discussions, podcasts & videos) each month on the chosen topics. At the end of every 3 months the user would be able to choose different sub-topics or continue with the same.

The monthly digest would include articles, discussions, podcasts and videos related to:

.. Broad topics: Product Development, Product Management, People Management, Stakeholder Management, Leadership, Recruitment, etc. .. Specific topics: Managing Remote Teams, Code Review, Delegation, Legacy Code Management, Project Reporting, Decision Making, etc.

What do you think? Thank you very much, I hope to find some useful feedback.</comment>


Git commit hook disallows committing keys - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/safe-commit-hook-rb/safe-commit-hook-rb <comment><USER2> Is it common to use a new org for each repository now?

I can't understand the usecase for a new org called "safe-rb-commit-hook" that only has 1 contributor and 1 repo of the same name.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough. I took it out of my own primary account so that it would be less totally owned by me if&when some potential contributors get started on it.</comment></comment>


Interference: Open-source distributed SQL database with complex event processing - <AUTHOR> http://interference.su <comment><USER2> Is it a norm for library written in Java? I don't see any code example in the readme. And it would be more readable/portable if the document is presented in website / markdown (currently it's presented as pdf)</comment>


GDP per capita visualization of Mainland China, Taiwan, S Korea and Japan - <AUTHOR> http://twitpic.com/hainz/

<comment><USER2> GDP per capita has little meaning when the area is divided into specific areas. I.e, if you put a guy in a desert with an oil field, the GDP per capita is huge. If you have a very productive place that is productive because of the high population, you have a low GDP per capita.

People go where the money is. The more people arrive, the lower the GDP per capita sinks. In the end, the only places with high GDP per capita are mines and oil fields, etc.

<comment><USER3> The map is meant to show relative GDP per capita. Tokyo is very dense, and has an extreme GDP per capita compared to most other comparatively dense cities in China. Your man in an oil field is not part of this exercise, except where of course, he is. But if you know your intra-China geography, the "oil fields" are pretty obvious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is in USD. Curious what the anomalous little island of wealth is in extreme NW Xinjiang, as well as north central China.

It would be instructive to superimpose this with a population density map.

<comment><USER5> Both of those are resource-extraction economies: Karamay (oil) and Ordos (coal+natural gas).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some of the anomalies of the map suggest overreliance on official figures that don't capture all the genuine economic differences among those various regions. The map is interesting in showing huge regional disparities among regions of China ruled by the P.R.C. regime. That issue of regional economic disparity is worrisome to social scientists in the P.R.C., as economic disparity among regions of the country is believed to be one reason for the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting, but "visualization" seems a bit overwrought. I believe most people would refer to it as a "map."

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm surprised that several provinces near Mongolia scored the best. Why?

<comment><USER4> See quant18's comment. Combination of very sparsely populated steppe and an oil gusher or two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Communism FAIL.

<comment><USER8> You're a stupid troll. That's much worse than being just a troll.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why programmers should use Vim? - <AUTHOR>

In a lot of articles, video tutorials and books I see that programmers use VIM instead of a better editor like Sublime Text or something.<p>I'm a programmer. I build apps with NodeJs, JavaScript, CSS and Python and I feel really better when I use Sublime Text because it's visual, I can use the mouse cursor for moving between tabs or copy or paste codes, then WHY should I use VIM? I mean is there any secret behind VIM that I (and maybe many other programmers) don't know? <comment><USER2> Tools are tools.

So long as you're using a screw-driver, and not a hammer, for screws what tool you choose is up to you.

But some screwdrivers are better than others. They are made from better materials, and have nicer grips, and better heads. The warranty is for the life of the user. They have little features that advanced users know appreciate[1].

Please don't call one tool "better". Please use phrases like "I prefer this tool". So called 'religious wars' have consumed many megabytes of Internet bandwidth, and usually don't achieve much.

It's a great question though - what are the benefits of tool X that I don't know about? It's a shame that this kind of question is banned from Stack Exchange which has a huge userbase of people who'd be able to give you great responses.

[1] Some people don't seem to know that you place your index finger on the spinning end and use your middle finger and thumb to turn the driver. Also, form a loose fist, extend your index finger, insert the driver into the fist so the head of the driver rests by the tip of your finger. You can hold a screw as you move the driver to the hole the screw needs to be in.

</comment><comment><USER3> First, Sublime Text is not a "better" editor than Vim. You may _find_ it "easier on the eyes", "easier to learn", "more comfortable", "more modern", "more intuitive" but as far as _text editing_ goes, it doesn't hold a candle to Vim. And its _text editing_ is a large part of the Vim's appeal for the programmers who use it.

Second, programmers _should_ n't learn Vim. Programmers _should_ learn whatever makes them better programmers. If you think nothing beats your current tools/languages/practices there's no point even looking elsewhere. Just keep trucking.

Third, Vim is just as "visual" as ST: you "can use the mouse cursor for moving between tabs or copy or paste codes" just as you would do in ST. The catch is that, for many programmers and most people who work with text, the mouse isn't a very good manipulation tool for words, lines or the arguments of a function. For those people, the keyboard is the best tool for the job and the mouse usually stays there, unused for hours. You can use your mouse in Vim to select text, paste, resize or focus windows, click on quickfix errors or click on a file name in netrw to edit it… but Vim offers much more than what can be done with the mouse or even with your usual Ctrl+Alt+Shift+x combos. Whether that's something valuable is entirely up to you.

If you don't mind pressing thousands of Ctrl+arrows a day then Vim's wWbBeE$0^(){} won't appeal to you. And it doesn't matter. If you are comfortable with your setup, stick with it. No one will judge you negatively for that.

I started to learn Vim because I was in the process of switching from Mac OS X to Linux and the last and most important part was the editor. I was _very_ efficient with TextMate and, well… I just wanted a cross-platform alternative. I wasn't looking for something better than what I was used to but I wanted something that did just as much.

It's only after a while that the evidence jumped at me that TextMate was in fact very limited and that Vim's design (its famed "language", text-objects, modes and so on) was an order of magnitude more empowering than TextMate's lush but too conventional features.

</comment><comment><USER4> > I mean is there any secret behind VIM that I (and maybe many other > programmers) don't know?

Yes. This article is probably a good overview of those secrets: [http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2012/03/21/why- vim...](http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2012/03/21/why-vim/)

<comment><AUTHOR> +1 for link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, programmers should use whatever they feel comfortable using. Sure Vim and Emacs have a much steeper learning curve and they are also much more productive and powerful once you master them, but it dosn't work for everyone.

For starters, if you have your hands on your keyboard, moving them to reach the mouse takes time, so if you can do everyting without moving your hands, this is something that improves your workflow.

Secondly, even moving your hands on the keyboard to reach for the arrow keys makes you loose time, so if you can do the same without moving them from the main row...

On third place, with Vim, once you master navigation you moove pretty fast. You can move to the end/beginning of the next previous word, etc, and specify the number of times you want to do that just by prepending a number before the action. You can use regular expressions to search and replace (yes, I know, you can do that with other editors as well).

And many more advanced, powerful features and shortcuts that you learn over time.

You can just ssh to any linux/unix and edit a file really quickly. On some boxes it's the only editor available. This one alone is a really good reason to learn at least the basics of Vim.

Then, it's a personal choice. I force me to use it and learn and improve, but because I want to master it, you might not have the same goals as me. And of course you can leverage what you already know about Vim without giving up the benefits of other tools. For instance, you can prefer to use an IDE instead of just a text editor for some programming languages, so you can just use Eclipse, IDEA... along with their Vim plugins.

Of course you can configure Sublime Text to use Vim keybindings as well, so you can have best of both worlds.

Overall, I guess it depends if you like commandline. I love commandline, so the ability to have something like tmux over ssh + vim is really powerful once you know how to use it.

In the end, it's a matter of personal preference.

<comment><USER5> That said... [http://xkcd.com/378/](http://xkcd.com/378/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well I suppose I could start with the fact that you called SublimeText a better editor - but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that when you said "or something" you meant emacs :)

The thing is, people like to avoid using the mouse.

It may feel more comfortable to use a mouse but avoiding it can increase your productivity. It may be perception but I don't think it is, from my personal experience.

What VIM offers over SublimeText is superior text editing capabilities. SublimeText just looks great, so use a VIM mode for SublimeText if you think you are missing out on VIM.

Another benefit to VIM is it is ubiquitous because some form of it is installed on every modern machine (that isn't windows). Also, as mentioned above most editors have a plugin that emulates vim/vi.

Lastly, being able to effectively edit code over SSH like it is your native code editing environment is a pretty big bonus.

Learning VIM pays off in many ways.

-An emacs user

<comment><AUTHOR> > It may feel more comfortable to use a mouse but avoiding it can increase > your productivity

Agree.

<comment><USER7> As someone slowly picking up Emacs, reaching for the mouse is easier. It just takes longer and tends to inerupt flow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use vim because I like it better than anything else. I'm not going to tell you that you need to use it. An editor's purpose is to make the process of turning thought into code as pleasurable as possible. There's not much more to it than that. If you like Sublime, then use it.

</comment><comment><USER9> "...instead of a better editor like Sublime Text"

Made me cringe.

<comment><USER10> s/Sublime\ Text/emacs/

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "There are two editors that continue to reward learning. Your hands are going to fail. One of the editors is easier on your hands. QED: Vim."

\- @garybernhardt

</comment><comment><USER12> I use Sublime Text 3. I code faster in ST than in vim.

</comment><comment> antonio-R They like that comand line look and feel.

</comment><comment><USER13> emacs</comment>


Google Page Speed Online - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/

<comment><USER2> Page Speed Online graduated out of Labs. There don't appear to be significant differences from the previous version aside from a restyling. Previous commentary:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2816166>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2393424>

</comment><comment><USER3> When I ran the speed check on one of my sites, almost all the low priority problems listed referred to google ad urls.

That's proper irony.

<comment><USER4> More like accurate reporting? It makes sense that when you load an external Javascript file on the top or middle of the page would reduce your website's speed.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I'm glad they reported it, but I still find it amusing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I keep typing the urls into the "Search Google Developers". Seems like a bit of poor design there.

<comment><USER6> Seeing as it's labeled Search Google Developers, I would expect it to Search Google Developers and not to Analyze my Website. Seems fairly obvious...

<comment><USER5> True, but that requires reading. And reading is haaaaard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Let the snake eat its own tail: [https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/#url=https_3A_2F_2Fd...](https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/#url=https_3A_2F_2Fdevelopers.google.com_2Fpagespeed&mobile=false)

</comment><comment><USER8> After making a few optimizations, how do you get it to check again without having cached results? The refresh button still brings up the same issues that I've already fixed (mage size reduction, still shows old sizes, and expiry settings still reporting no expiry on files that a HEAD request confirms have expiry times).

<comment><USER9> Perhaps they are caching their results?

You could try modifying the URL a bit to try and trick in into thinking it's new (add a '?' or '/', pass some useless variables)

<comment><USER8> Seems to be caching individual file info for JS, CSS, and images, regardless of the page URL...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My JS is minified with Closure Compiler, but it still reports that "Minifying the following JavaScript resources could reduce their size by 7.2KiB (6% reduction)." What can be done?

</comment><comment><USER11> Gtmetrix.com is better as the explanations are better and it can actually minify CSS, optimize images for you. Very helpful.

</comment><comment><USER12> One of the ironic suggestions I got

        The following cacheable resources have a short freshness lifetime.
        Specify an expiration at least one week in the future for the
        following resources:

        http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false (30 minutes)</comment>


Inside Apple's Thunderbolt to Ethernet Adapter - <AUTHOR> http://www.hardmac.com/news/2012/06/21/inside-apple-s-thunderbolt-to-ethernet-adapter <comment><USER2> Unfortunately I think it'll take until MacBooks and iPads are literally as thin as paper (edit: hyperbole) before Japan becomes truly wifi friendly... 'til then, I'll appreciate my current MacBook and not having to carry around that dongle everywhere.

<comment><USER3> There is plenty of semi-public Wifi in Japan. You're ostensibly meant to pay into a seperate contract, but anyone who buys an iPad gets a password to use Softbank hotspots, good for two years[1].

[http://store.apple.com/jp/buy/home/shop_ipad/family/ipad/new...](http://store.apple.com/jp/buy/home/shop_ipad/family/ipad/new_ipad?product=MC705J/A&step=accessories)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if it's possible to use this as a PCIe-to-Thunderbolt adapter – as far as I can tell, all existing packaged products are at least $500.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is it the angle of the photo - or did he just melt the pcb in Photo#4 in order to wipe out the A and figure out what chip it was?

</comment><comment><USER6> So how does this work? Shouldn't it have a Thunderbolt controller on there somewhere too?

<comment><USER7> Maybe the thunderbolt cable is short and well-shielded enough that they can just run plain pci express over it.

<comment><USER8> thunderbolt IS the PCI express bus (plus Displayport)

<comment><USER7> It carries the pcie protocol but pretty obiously it's not electrically identical to pci express (external cables and connectors don't generally provide as good signal integrity as required by pcie that is happening on your motherboard).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, there's no space in a mac for a ethernet port?

what's the advantage or serializing a pci-e bus into some 4 or so pins? They must be certain that ethernet port is a thing of the past.

<comment><USER10> Don't you think it is? I can't remember the lasttime i used an eth cable (apart of testing the network/router)

<comment> X-Istence Those of us who work in classified locations or on classified projects are not allowed to use wireless. Also, since when have we been able to push 1000 Mbps over Wireless?

<comment><USER11> I'd say that particular use case is rather uncommon.

It's not that wired ethernet is _never_ required, just that wireless is perfectly acceptable for the vast majority of users.

<comment><USER12> And in the cases that it's not, having to use a $30 dongle on a $2200 machine is just not a big deal.

As an aside, if an office is paranoid enough to lock down well encrypted Wifi, I wouldn't be surprised if Thunderbolt got the boot as well.

It's built like Firewire; devices that are plugged in have direct access to the host machine's memory. Though at least it now has the ability to mask off sections of memory.

An attack via a malicious network adapter doesn't sound out of the question. Seems like it would be on the same level of plausibility as sniffing WPA2 traffic and decrypting meaningful information from it.

<comment> X-Istence Thunderbolt requires physical access to the machine. Wireless can leak and potentially be available outside of the building. That it is the biggest concern with Wifi.

Is there a likely hood of WPA2 AES being cracked? Yes, it is very small but it is still possible. Also if a secure device is captured by an attacker and they steal the credentials to access the wireless network they can now come and go as they please. At least with physical they would have to enter the building and plug in.

Are other attacks feasible, absolutely and I will grant that, but having wifi enabled just doesn't work for certain situations and where paranoia runs high due to the work that is being done.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>