The Average Font - <AUTHOR> http://iotic.com/averia/ <comment><USER2> What a wonderful adventure! My favorite of all the recent HN posts.

This is the true spirit of hacking:

> So, this stumped me for a while. I decided I needed to get to know fonts > better, so I built a simple web app to view the lines, curves and control > points present in the fonts I had. On this basis, I started to consider the > ways the features (vertices, curves, stems, serifs etc) might be matched up > between fonts. However, this was a rabbit hole I might never get to the > bottom of - particularly when considering some of the more unusual varieties > of font. Perhaps there was a simpler idea that was evading me.

Of course, now what I'd like to see is the source code to generate the "average" font on a different machine. It would be interesting (for me at least!) to see the average font from a font designer's machine - or someone who collects different monospaced fonts - or my own machine.

I suppose it's not so much "source code" as it is a bunch of manual steps - but would be interesting to know more about those steps, maybe even enough to repeat them.

</comment><comment><USER3> His final solution (500 equidistant points per glyph) is very clever though visually, it results in putting unnecessary emphasis in areas of variability. For example, look at the bottom of uppercase 'Q' or the middle of lowercase 'f' - notice how it appears to be a thick knot instead of being the same width as the rest of the letter. This is most certainly because averaging the perimeter points ends up enlarging the enclosed area. The more darts you throw at a dartboard, the larger the area you will cover. While he mentions that he solved the issue of excess variability (lowercase 'g') by selecting a subset of similarly styled glyphs, I don't think he did anything to shrink the knots.

Off the top of my head, one thing that could help solve the knot problem is treat the serifs and sans-serifs as two different subsets and make two Average typefaces. Additionally, he could calculate 'average distance to X nearest points in reverse direction'. By that I mean, a point on a curve pointing down should look at all the points that point up (meaning they are on the other side of the filled polygon or hole), and find the 5-10 closest points and take the average. This could tell you how thick the line or hole is at that point. Then use this as the weight to come up with a weighted average of all the other parameters for each point.

All-in-all, this is a fantastic project and the weeks and months of independent research is time well spent. Hacking for fun is wonderful.

<comment><USER4> > treat the serifs and sans-serifs as two different subsets and make two > Average typefaces.

Read all the way to the end - that's what he did.

<comment><USER3> Do you mean footnote 2?

<comment><USER5> I think they meant

Avería Serif Family (ZIP, 323kB) OFLB Avería Sans Family (ZIP, 320kB) OFLB

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is really interesting. I think the result is very attractive and readable. Yet it's also difficult to recall. It reminds me of a face built of averages ([http://www.uni- regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychol...](http://www.uni- regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychologie/Psy_II/beautycheck/english/durchschnittsgesichter/w\(01-64\)_gr.jpg)) - attractive, but somehow lacking in character.

Great work in any case.

<comment><USER7> _> attractive, but lacking in character_

Oddly enough (bringing us full-circle back to fonts) that was one of the key design parameters for the ubiquitous Helvetica, the intention being that the font itself has no character so simply carries the message of the content without imparting any extraneous "meaning" (i.e. the font was designed to be as much "function" and as little "form" as possible).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The best part of this post was the dawning realisation about 2/3 of the way through the page that an actual font resulted from the experiment, _and the page was displayed in it_.

It's a really attractive font, actually. Regular enough that it coheres as a font, but just irregular enough to evoke the output of old movable-type printing presses.

</comment><comment><USER9> Aside from some unfortunate smudginess here and there the end result is surprisingly good. It reminds me of 17th century texts I've seen: fairly wide, by modern standards, spaces between individual characters, and rounded serifs.

<comment><USER10> If you want you one, Essays 1743: <http://www.thibault.org/fonts/essays/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's an off-topic legal question:

Are you allowed to copy intellectual property like fonts, perform a function like averaging on the intellectual property, and distribute the result of the function performed on the intellectual property?

<comment><USER12> As I understand it, a font is a bit special, copyright wise. You only need to change it in very minor details to call it a completeley new font. See Arial vs. Helvetica.

<comment><USER13> Arial isn't Helvetica tweaked. It's a fairly similar font squashed so that it's metrically compatible (i.e. you can swap one for the other and if you squint from a distance it'll mostly look the same as the characters have the same dimensions).

<comment><USER14> There's an interesting story behind Arial; it was developed as part of a PostScript clone back in the days of Adobe's tight control over the Type 1 specification. Microsoft then threw gasoline on the Arial fire by bundling it into Windows 3.1, purportedly to save licensing costs.

<http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's interesting to see how lower-case g is the only letter left that is commonly expressed in fonts two ways, single- and double-story; one flipped left and one right.

Looking at the first average rendering, you can see that it isn't clearly defined like all of the other letters. It also has two very different versions in the serif and sans-serif fonts linked at the bottom.

I wonder if one of the gs will eventually be lost, similar how it's so rare to see an "a" represented in a font as a single-story "ɑ".

<comment><USER16> If 'g' is single-story, how is 'a' not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is really incredible.

I would love to see a professional designer "clean these up" -- use the exact same dimensions and curves, but standardize the stroke widths, curves, etc.

Then I wonder -- would this become the most legible, anonymous font of all time? The serif version could be spectacular for body copy that lets the content speak for itself.

Also, I imagine this could be a fantastic font to "design on top of" -- by overlaying your own designs, you can immediately see what is most distinctive about your own design.

</comment><comment><USER18> Bruce Mau uses similar techniques to create hybrid typefaces. See the signage and branding for the Walt Disney Concert Hall ([http://www.brucemaudesign.com/4817/97310/work/walt-disney- co...](http://www.brucemaudesign.com/4817/97310/work/walt-disney-concert- hall)), and work for Zone Books (<http://www.zonebooks.org/titles/CRAR_ZO6.html>, [http://books.google.com/books?id=LCEjVBHQBMkC&pg=PA103&#...</a>).

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd also love to see this process done for collections of typefaces from the same period -- humanist, transitional, modern, grotesque, and so on...

</comment><comment><USER19> So, by copyright law, isn't this a "derived work" of all of those fonts.

(ducking)

<comment><USER20> IANAL but according to Wikipedia[1], typeface (and rasterization of the typeface) is not copyrightable although the font file do:

> Under U.S. law, typefaces and the characters they contain are considered to > be utilitarian objects whose utility outweighs any merit that may exist in > protecting their creative elements. As such, typefaces are exempt from > copyright protection in the United States. However, this finding was limited > in Adobe Systems, Inc. v. Southern Software, Inc., wherein it was held that > scalable computer fonts, i.e., the instructions necessary to render a > typeface, constitute a "computer program" for the purposes of copyright law > and hence are subject to protection. Hence the computer file(s) associated > with a scalable font will generally be protected even though the specific > design of the characters is not. Furthermore, a rasterized representation > (e.g. bitmap) of the characters in a scalable font is not protected by > copyright in the United States.

According to this, the author will have to create his font by directly modifying the original font file to make it a derived work. Since his font is created from rasterized representation, the resulting font file is not considered a derived work. But again, IANAL.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protectio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces)

<comment><USER21> Interesting, but by that reasoning, couldn't I legally copy any font (and have it legally be my own work) simply be rasterizing it at a sufficiently large size and then vectorizing the result?

<comment><USER22> That's more or less how contemporary font clones are made. Rasterize, use auto-tracing software to produce new font curves, done. You can't directly copy any embedded programs from the original, such as hinting or kerning code, though. Kerning often ends up being tweaked manually (though with enough samples you could infer it from the original output), and then for quick-n- dirty clones hinting is just left to your font engine's autohinting algorithms.

There's a bit of angst about this in typography forums, and social pressure among typophiles and some subset of designers to avoid using "ripoff" fonts.

<comment><USER21> It would be an interesting project, if nothing else simply as a statement about copyright, to write a program that automates this process and automatically rips a font file this way. By producing samples with characters placed at different fractional positions, you should even be able to infer the hinting information without directly reading it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the results are really interesting, for my money it puts me in mind of very old style printed text due to the letter shaping. It immediately feels, well, 'familiar' due to the way it appears.

Not sure if I'd use it for a project, but it's interesting none the less.

</comment><comment><USER24> posted previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3174040>

</comment><comment><USER25> Nice.. I had the same idea bored at work using canvas/js a while back (windows XP, so should work with windows versions..). Cool he followed through and made a font with it!

<http://jsfiddle.net/U9mrs/1/embedded/result/>

*edit : copied his idea and used baseline center

</comment><comment><USER26> Isn't the resulting font a derived work of the ones that made it up, and hence not his to freely license?

</comment><comment><USER27> This is why Hackers can do anything. I love this. It's surprisingly readable as body text

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't know a lot about web design. Can someone explain to me how my browser rendered that page with the new Averiá font, even though I don't have this font installed? Can web pages include an external font library or something?

<comment><USER29> Yeah. There's two ways to do it, of which this page uses the latter:

\- CSS3's new font-face extension, supported by newer browsers, allows specifying custom fonts to be loaded for a page

\- Cufon, a JavaScript program which runs in your browser, can download and render the fonts, replacing each word with a generated image (works in some older browsers too)

<comment><USER30> I'm guessing this is why you can't select or copy/paste any of the text.

<comment><USER31> I'm able to select text and copy/paste. I'm using the latest Chrome beta.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Cool that he took it to the extreme and actually created a font based on his results ('Averia': <http://openfontlibrary.org/font/averia/> )

</comment><comment><USER33> The 'o' in 'computer' at the start of the third line of that page seems a little taller than the other letters. Other than that, seems interesting. I'd prefer to see a sans-serif version, though.

</comment><comment><USER34> Why do you think the author is using Cufon?

<comment><USER29> I noticed that too, maybe because he is expecting non-hackers to view it? Or was unaware of font-face?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This looks a lot like print in old books.

</comment><comment><USER36> Inspired by the idea of the "average font", I whipped up a quick scramble suit bookmarklet:

        javascript:/*ScrableSuit*/var __slice=Array.prototype.slice;var __hasProp=Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty;var __bind=function(fn,me){return function(){return fn.apply(me,arguments)}};var __extends=function(child,parent){for(var key in parent){if(__hasProp.call(parent,key))child[key]=parent[key]}function ctor(){this.constructor=child}ctor.prototype=parent.prototype;child.prototype=new ctor;child.__super__=parent.prototype;return child};var __indexOf=Array.prototype.indexOf||function(item){for(var i=0,l=this.length;i<l;i++){if(this[i]===item)return i}return-1};(function(){var Detector=function(){var baseFonts=['monospace','sans-serif','serif'];var testString="mmmmmmmmmmlli";var testSize='72px';var h=document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0];var s=document.createElement("span");s.style.fontSize=testSize;s.innerHTML=testString;var defaultWidth={};var defaultHeight={};for(var index in baseFonts){s.style.fontFamily=baseFonts[index];h.appendChild(s);defaultWidth[baseFonts[index]]=s.offsetWidth;defaultHeight[baseFonts[index]]=s.offsetHeight;h.removeChild(s)}function detect(font){var detected=false;for(var index in baseFonts){s.style.fontFamily=font+','+baseFonts[index];h.appendChild(s);var matched=(s.offsetWidth!=defaultWidth[baseFonts[index]]||s.offsetHeight!=defaultHeight[baseFonts[index]]);if(matched&&s.offsetHeight-defaultHeight[baseFonts[index]]>20)matched=false;h.removeChild(s);detected=detected||matched}return detected}this.detect=detect};var detector,font,fontFamilies,letterTags,randomFont,scramble,traverseElement,_i,_len,_ref;letterTags=[];fontFamilies=[];detector=new Detector;detector.checkFont=function(font){if(this.detect(font)){return fontFamilies.push(font)}};_ref="serif\nAdobe Jenson\nAdobe Text\nAlbertus\nAldus\nAlexandria\nAlgerian\nAmerican Typewriter\nAntiqua\nArno\nAster\nAurora\nNews 706\nBaskerville\nBell\nBembo\nBembo Schoolbook\nBenguiat\nBerkeley Old Style\nBernhard Modern\nBodoni\nBauer Bodoni\nBook Antiqua\nBookman\nBordeaux Roman\nCalifornian FB\nCalisto\nCalvert\nCapitals\nCambria\nCartier\nCaslon\nWyld\nCaslon Antique\nFifteenth Century\nCatull\nCentaur\nCentury Old Style\nCentury Schoolbook\nNew Century Schoolbook\nCentury Schoolbook Infant\nChaparral\nCharis SIL\nCheltenham\nClarendon\nClearface\nCochin\nColonna\nComputer Modern\nConcrete Roman\nConstantia\nCooper Black\nCorona\nNews 705\nDejaVu Serif\nEcotype\nElephant\nEspy Serif\nExcelsior\nNews 702\nFairfield\nFF Scala\nFolkard\nFootlight\nFreeSerif\nFriz Quadrata\nGaramond\nGentium\nGeorgia\nGloucester\nGoudy Old Style\nGoudy\nGoudy Schoolbook\nGoudy Pro Font\nGranjon\nHeather\nHercules\nHigh Tower Text\nHiroshige\nHoefler Text\nHumana Serif\nImprint\nIonic No. 5\nNews 701\nJanson\nJenson\nJoanna\nKorinna\nLegacy Serif\nLexicon\nLiberation Serif\nLinux Libertine\nLiteraturnaya\nLucida Bright\nMelior\nMemphis\nMiller\nMinion\nModern\nMona Lisa\nMrs Eaves\nMS Serif\nNew York\nNimbus Roman\nNPS Rawlinson Roadway\nOCR A Exteneded\nPalatino\nBook Antiqua\nPerpetua\nPlantin\nPlantin Schoolbook\nPlaybill\nPoor Richard\nRawlinson Roadway\nRenault\nRequiem\nRockwell\nRoman\nRotis Serif\nSabon\nScala\nSeagull\nSistina\nSouvenir\nSTIX, see also XITS\nStone Informal\nStone Serif\nSylfaen\nTimes New Roman\nTimes\nTrajan\nTrinité\nTrump Mediaeval\nUtopia\nVale Type\nVera Serif\nVersailles\nWanted\nWeiss\nWide Latin\nWindsor\nXITS\nSlab serif\nApex\nCity\nCholla Slab\nEgyptienne\nGuardian Egyptian\nMuseo Slab\nRockwell\nNilland\nSans serif\nAbadi\nAgency FB\nAkzidenz Grotesk\nAptifer\nArial\nArial Unicode MS\nAvant Garde Gothic\nAvenir\nBank Gothic\nBarmeno\nBauhaus\nBell Centennial\nBell Gothic\nBenguiat Gothic\nBerlin Sans\nBeteckna\nBlue Highway\nCafeteria\nCalibri\nCentury Gothic\nCharcoal\nChicago\nClearface Gothic\nClearview\nCo Headline\nCo Text\nCorbel\nCoolvetica\nDax\nDejaVu Sans\nDotum\nDroid\nEcofont\nEras\nEspy Sans\nNu Sans\nEurocrat\nEurostile\nSquare 721\nFF Meta\nFF Scala Sans\nFlama\nFormata\nFreeSans\nFranklin Gothic\nFrutiger\nFrutiger Next\nFutura\nGeneva\nGill Sans\nGill Sans Schoolbook\nGotham\nHandel Gothic\nDenmark\nHaettenschweiler\nHelvetica\nHelvetica Neue\nSwiss 721\nHighway Gothic\nHiroshige Sans\nHobo\nImpact\nIndustria\nInterstate\nJohnston\nNew Johnston\nKabel\nLegacy Sans\nLiberation Sans\nLucida Sans\nMeiryo\nMicrogramma\nModern\nMotorway\nMS Sans Serif\nMuseo Sans\nMyriad\nNeutraface\nNews Gothic\nNimbus Sans L\nNina\nOptima\nParisine\nPricedown\nPrima Sans\nPT Sans\nRail Alphabet\nRevue\nRotis Sans\nScala Sans\nSegoe UI\nSkia\nSouvenir Gothic\nStone Sans\nSyntax\nTahoma\nTiresias\nTrade Gothic\nTransport\nTrebuchet\nTrump Gothic\nTw Cen\nTwentieth Century\nUbuntu\nUnivers\nZurich\nVera Sans\nVerdana\nVirtue\nSemi-serif\nAmsterdam Old Style\nDivona\nNyala\nPortobello\nRotis Semi Serif\nTema Cantante\nMonospaced\nAndale Mono\nArial Monospaced\nBitstream Vera\nConsolas\nCourier\nCourierHP\nCourier New\nCourierPS\nFontcraft Courier\nDejaVu Sans Mono\nDroid Sans Mono\nEverson Mono \nEverson Mono Unicode\nFedra Mono\nFixed\nFixedsys\nFixedsys Excelsior\nInconsolata\nHyperFont\nLetter Gothic\nLiberation Mono\nLucida Console\nLucida Sans Typewriter\nLucida Typewriter\nMICR\nMenlo\nMiriam Fixed\nMonaco\nMonofur\nMonospace\nMS Gothic\nMS Mincho\nNimbus Mono L\nOCR-A\nOCR-B\nOrator\nOrmaxx\nPragmataPro\nPrestige Elite also known as Prestige\nProFont\nProggy Programming Fonts\nSmall Fonts\nSydnie\nTerminal\nTerminus\nTex Gyre Cursor\nUM Typewriter\nUbuntu Mono\nVera Sans Mono\nWilliam Monospace\nBrush Scripts\nBalloon\nBrush Script\nDragonwick\nChoc\nDom Casual\nMistral\nPapyrus\nSegoe Script\nTempus Sans\nUtopia\nYear Supply of Fairy Cakes\nCalligraphic\nAmazone\nAMS Euler\nApple Chancery\nAquiline\nAristocrat\nBickley Script\nCivitype\nCodex\nEdwardian Script\nForte\nFrench Script\nKuenstler Script\nMonotype Corsiva\nOld English Text MT\nPalace Script\nPark Avenue\nScriptina\nShelley Volante\nVivaldi\nVladimir Script\nZapf Chancery\nZapfino\nHandwriting\nAndy\nAshley Script\nChalkboard\nComic Sans\nCézanne\nDom Casual\nFontoon\nJefferson\nKristen\nLucida Handwriting\nRage Italic\nRufscript\nScribble\nSoupbone\nTekton\nOther script\nCinderella\nCupola\nCurlz\nMagnificat\nScript\nStone Informal\nBlackletter\nAmerican Text\nCloister Black\nFraktur\nGoudy Text\nLucida Blackletter\nDingbat Symbol fonts\nApple Symbols\nBookshelf Symbol 7\nCambria Math\nCommercial Pi\nComputer Modern\nCorel\nHM Phonetic\nLucida Math\nMathematical Pi\nOpenSymbol\nSymbol\nSymbolPS\nWingdings\nWingdings 2\nWingdings 3\nWebdings\nZapf Dingbats\nDisplay Decorative fonts\nAbracadabra\nAd Lib\nAllegro\nAndreas\nArnold Böcklin\nAstur\nBalloon Pop Outlaw Black\nBanco\nBauhaus\nBeat\nBraggadocio\nBroadway\nCaslon Antique\nChiller\nCooper Black\nCurlz\nEllington\nExocet\nFIG Script\nForte\nGigi\nHarlow Solid\nHarrington\nHorizon\nJim Crow\nJokerman\nJuice\nLo-Type\nMagneto\nMegadeth\nNeuland\nPeignot\nSimulation Mimicry fonts\nBagel\nLithos\nPapyrus\nSkia\nMiscellaneous\n3x3\n8514oem\nAshley Inline\nBraggadocio\nContinuum Medium\nFixedsys\nGrasset\nKahana\nLED\nPythagoras\nSystem\nTema Cantante\nTerminal\nWestminster".split('\n');for(_i=0,_len=_ref.length;_i<_len;_i++){font=_ref[_i];detector.checkFont(font)}traverseElement=function(parent){var child,letter,text,_j,_k,_len1,_len2,_ref1,_ref2,_results,_results1;if((_ref1=parent.tagName)==='SCRIPT'){}else if(parent.childElementCount>0){_ref2=parent.children;_results=[];for(_j=0,_len1=_ref2.length;_j<_len1;_j++){child=_ref2[_j];_results.push(traverseElement(child))}return _results}else if(parent.innerText.length>0){text=parent.innerText;parent.innerHTML='';_results1=[];for(_k=0,_len2=text.length;_k<_len2;_k++){letter=text[_k];child=document.createElement('span');child.innerText=letter;child.style.fontSize=parent.style.fontSize;parent.appendChild(child);_results1.push(letterTags.push(child))}return _results1}};traverseElement(document.body);randomFont=function(){return fontFamilies[Math.floor((Math.random()*1000000)%fontFamilies.length)]};scramble=function(){var tag,_j,_len1,_results;_results=[];for(_j=0,_len1=letterTags.length;_j<_len1;_j++){tag=letterTags[_j];_results.push(tag.style.fontFamily=randomFont())}return _results};return setInterval(scramble,100)}).call(this);

This splits the whole page up into 1-character <span>s, and randomizes the font on each one every 100ms. The result is surprisingly readable-- and not at all guaranteed not to crash your browser, I don't recommend trying it on any page more complex than the HN frontpage.

Original CoffeeScript source: <https://gist.github.com/2473373>

</comment><comment><USER37> Beautifully soft and living! Like reading old typesetting! Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER38> Looks better small and large more so than around the 14px-17px range.

</comment><comment><USER39> I really wish people would quit writing "whilst."

<comment><USER29> It's equivalent to "while" and wholly correct, only more popular in the United Kingdom.

<comment><USER40> Equivalent except that 'whilst' can't be used as a noun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Argh!!! This is precisely the problem when you give developers a designers' problems. It is not possible to engineer your way around every problem.

In this specific case, the font is blurry, unattractive, and lacking any character. It looks like someone tried to autotraced a photocopied fax of a carbon copy.

It's an interesting experiment to be sure – but this is not, in anyway, a solution to … anything.

/rant

<comment><USER42> The author doesn't imply that it's attractive or useful, just that it's the average of all the fonts on this system. He even jokes that the name meaning "mechanical breakdown or damage" is somehow appropriate.

This is, in some ways, the solution to... visualizing the average of all the fonts on this system.

(Although, I think the result is attractive. Probably not very readable, or useful other than for some sort of logotype. Almost makes me think of letters made out of the balls in world of goo.)</comment></comment>


Thoughts on my platform? - <AUTHOR> https://www.clyque.com <comment><AUTHOR> We're working on building an area based project recruitment and collaboration tool.

To sum it up, if you have a project or goal that requires other people with specific talent, you could use this to source that talent. It can be used for bands, indie films, games, inventions, or even local area startups. The key thing that I think makes this different is the geocoding. Its like setting up your own HR requisitions for stuff you want to do.

We haven't gotten any traction yet, our marketing sucks. Most comments are "how is this different from Facebook, Meetup, Craigslist, etc." It is different. Its as if you took AngelList recruitment, mixed it with Meetup, Craigslist, and Facebook. Our goal, is to help you produce something with other talented individuals and showcase that product to the world, whether it be a song, film, robot, or what have you. We want to empower the individual to explore their talents instead of going home after a long day of doing accounting and just ripping on the guitar alone, or tinkering alone. I'm sure there's something exactly like this as well, there are 1 billion websites currently on the internet.

Backstory is simple, for a short while I was a USAF Aerial Gunner (HH60) in training. I traveled a bit and at each location, I didn't have anyone to do the things I wanted to do; make indie films, be in a band (vocals if you're curious), or other technical projects. I've always been goal oriented so I like to be a part of something. So I'd check out Craigslist and that always went the route of "this is not specific enough" and "I don't want to get murdered or robbed." Facebook was obviously useless, groups are huge and you quickly get washed away, Meetup is just Facebook groups only focused on events. Long story cut short; I didn't find anyone.

<comment><USER2> Traction for something like this is not going to come from broad marketing to _everyone_. It will come (if it comes) by talking to specific people who will look at it and see that it solves their problem.

Keep in mind that Facebook started as a service for people in a dorm on a small campus. It expanded by adding other Ivy League campuses. Then other universities. It was several years before it became something for people's grandparents...when those former students started having babies. Facebook grew with its members. Now those early users have older kids. Facebook is adding Messenger for kids.

The other people who are most likely to have problems similar to the one you had that led you to build this are unsurprisingly people like you. So target it at members of the military, maybe only on one base. Making it work well for a few people means that other people they trust have to be using it too. Otherwise, Craigslist is better because it is broader.

Good luck.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you're familiar with World of Warcraft, we basically built a real life geo- coded 'Looking For Group' or 'LFG.'

To this caveat of gaming; I also wanted to explore the idea of having people create local groups to recruit for games they play. I hate that I meet cool people online in games and can't just go get a beer with them after because they live across the country.</comment>


Rr 2.0 released (lightweight record+reply debugging) - <AUTHOR> http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/09/rr-20-released.html

<comment><AUTHOR> For those who missed the 1.0 announcement, take a look at the project page: [http://rr-project.org/](http://rr-project.org/)</comment>


A Marvel of a Man: Stan Lee Dead at 95 - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/106322838/a-marvel-of-a-man-stan-lee-dead-at-95 <comment><USER2> He is the real hero behind all heroes. [https://medium.com/boosto/stan-lee- excelsior-the-hero-behind...](https://medium.com/boosto/stan-lee-excelsior- the-hero-behind-heroes-3715adf918de)

</comment><comment><USER3> Dammit. It's.... dammit.</comment>


Ask HN: How to approach your potential buyer? - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,
Just wondering if anyone here has any suggestions on how to reach out to a potential buyer of our startup. If anyone has any email template to kick off the discussion that would be great.
Thanks in adavance! <comment><USER2> If you have some potential buyers in mind, you need to pitch them like any other investor. So just send an email

Hi,

It was great meeting you that one time at <conference, coffee shop, online>. I was wondering if you had a few minutes to let me tell you more about XYZ startup. We've got some great things going on and I'd like to get your thoughts.

Thanks,

throwawaysale</comment>


GleeBox - <AUTHOR> http://thegleebox.com/ <comment><USER2> As a Vim user I've been happy for quite some time now with Vimium. Being able to navigate with speed and select links and elements like forms had made browsing with the keyboard quite enjoyable for me.

Together with ShiftIt for window resizing I generally don't need to use the mouse when I'm coding at all.

<comment><USER3> I'm a vimium user too, and I find gleeBox pretty interesting. The box concept is something I sometimes wish vimium had, the tab manager is also really convenient. However, default vimium's way of managing links seems better for me at the moment - for example when you have a site with lots of links with the same caption (like 'comments' on HN main page), gleeBox seems to be a bad solution (or I didn't figure out how to use it properly?).

<comment><USER4> if you want to go to a link called "14 comments", start with typing "14".

<comment><USER5> How do you up-/downvote?

<comment><USER6> *img[src=<http://ycombinator.com/images/grayarrow.gif>]

You can make this a scraper command.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been using keyboard navigation in Firefox for years and haven't looked back.

Head to options > advanced > general and check "search for text when I start typing". Now enjoy; look for a link you find interesting, type the name and when it starts to get highlighted, press enter (or ctrl+enter for a new tab). If it finds some other text that it's not a link, press F3 until you find it.

<comment><USER8> You don't even have to do that: with Firefox default settings, tapping "/" will start searching for text in the page, while tapping "'" (apostrophe) will start searching for text only in the context of links.

Editing a page is 'edit on the wikis I use most often, for example.

<comment><USER9> The problem with / and ' is that they might start the search in a region of the page not currently visible. The hit-a-hint solutions limit the search to the visible portion of the page, which is much, much more productive. You typically have your eyes already on the link you want to follow, and any scrolling of the page as a result of finding matches will completely ruin the experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> <http://vimperator.org/> \- vim for firefox

<comment><USER11> [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dbepggeogbaibhgnhh...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb) \- Vim for Chrome

<comment><USER12> I like how the juxtaposition of these links makes it look like the Firefox addon is called "Vimperator" while the Chrome addon is called "dbepggeogbaibhgnhh".

<comment><USER13> As an Emacs user, I can only assume that's the command to quit Vim.

<comment><USER12> As a Vim user, I lol'd (and upvoted you).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> With Google Chrome, this is really powerful way how to browse the sites without any mouse/touchpad.

Great for coding and searching for docs but also for web surfing from the couch.

</comment><comment><USER14> As a big fan of Emacs, I also feel the need to mention Conkeror. Its core is based on Mozilla, and it has been my browser of choice since I discovered it a year or so ago. That having been said, I plan on checking this out; it looks nifty!

</comment><comment><USER15> Also see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051967>

</comment><comment><USER16> Pretty cool. Add this as a shortcut (e.g. "hn") so you can type "?hn" to highlight all article links:

        .title a

Or add this as an ESP to link all articles and comment links by default:

        *.title a, a[href^=item]

</comment><comment><USER6> Check out the tips and tricks here: <http://tipjar.thegleebox.com/>.

Includes several useful ESPs and scrapers created by gleeBox users

</comment><comment><USER17> Love this. I always ache for keyboard shortcuts, don't know why I can't get them in more apps.

</comment><comment><USER18> When the docs talk of "jQuery selectors", does it mean that the visited page must use jQuery?

<comment><USER6> No, the visited page doesn't need to use jQuery. It actually means any CSS selector along with any additional selectors supported by jQuery.

See this: <http://api.jquery.com/category/selectors/>

I should probably rename it to CSS Selectors :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> really well done. i'll be using this from now on :)</comment>


Do small startups still have a chance, or do people just pretend to like them? - <AUTHOR> Do small startups still have a chance, or do people just talk positively about them while continuing to use sites like facebook and linkedin and expecting perfect polish?  For example, I started www.nextcept.com a few months ago as a venture network.  I'm focusing on a unique method for co-founder discovery, and users seem pretty pumped, but if I post in various startup communities I get told I'm spamming them even when I'm just asking to for thoughts or wanting to talk about my project. <comment><USER2> > but if I post in various startup communities I get told I'm spamming them > even when I'm just asking to for thoughts or wanting to talk about my > project.

IMHO, startup communities are the worst. Most of the great startups I know avoid those communities, and are usually already a part of 500 Startups or YC.

It's also really common in these communities to post nothing of value. Everyone asks for opinions, takes a month to post a landing page, talks about an upcoming _huge_ launch, repeats this once a month.

As a result, they get very jaded and cynical, the exact opposite of what entrepreneurs should be.

</comment><comment><USER3> If only all that it took to get product market fit was to post in a startup forum / group. It's really hard to figure out who your customer is, how to effectively target them and how to move them through the funnel.

It sounds like you think you know who you want to target and think you know the value you provide them. I'd encourage you to try to make your first few sales manually, before trying to tackle the channel acquisition problem. You can't scale a channel before you know who to target and how to sell to them.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think people pretend to like startups. People like to have their problems solved, and it's hard to gain their attention when everyone is clamoring for attention.

This is anecdotal, but I found it much easier to tweet something to someone 8 years ago, and get some feedback. Now, you're lucky if you get a response back.

</comment><comment><USER5> People don't care about startups OR big companies.

People want their problems solved.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't care about size of a startup and whether it is startup or not.

I care about the quality of the product and support

</comment><comment><USER7> They have a chance; of getting acquired.</comment>


Big companies are stopping Congress from fixing the patent system - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2015/4/30/8521263/patent-reform-trolls-quality <comment><USER2> The US congress was supposed to be made up of ordinary citizens who part of the time lived at home in their districts. ran their businesses and affairs and occasionally went to vote on federal government issues.

What we have is a political class that only does law and politics. Most of them look down on those of us who have to actually work and produce to make a living. Small business individually have almost no revenue or clout compared to these larger entities even though collectively we are the ones who represent most of the economy (or should be representing almost all of the economy if it's healthy).

<comment><USER3> _The US congress was supposed to be made up of ordinary citizens_

And indeed they are, and this is the heart of the problem. They're just regular people like us, subject to the same prejudices, temptations, motivations, etc. We shouldn't be surprised when the motivations that are built into the system actually do something.

More concretely, we've vested incredible power with our politicians. That makes them huge targets for those with vested interests (whether those be corporation, special interests, foreign governments, what-have-you). The potential reward to them for getting influence is so great that they'll invest tremendously in trying to do so.

The idea that "public servants" don't magically become saints, but respond to the same incentives as do the rest of us, is the core of public choice economics [1]. There is, in fact, a fair amount of research and literature on the topic from an academic perspective.

From where I sit, if you recognize the problem as one where we're giving the corporations and special interests, etc., a huge potential payoff by finding ways to co-opt governmental power, then increasing that power to try to combat it doesn't make sense: it's just increasing the size of their potential payoff. It sounds like silly pop-Zen, but the way to get such corruption out of government is to limit the power of government.

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

<comment><USER4> Is there a way to come up with a better system than the exsting one. I am not asking for the ideal system.

<comment><USER5> I read the wiki page on public choice theory and eventually found a wiki page for The Myth of the Rational Voter [1] where they talk about rational irrationality [2].

The idea is that people are more likely to make irrational decisions when the cost of that decision is low, like in voting. An irrational vote only harms you as an individual in a very small way since the cost is distributed across the entire population.

So, it seems to me that we should look for ways to increase the cost of irrational decisions. I'm not sure the best way to accomplish this, but one way would be to reduce the power that government has, thereby reducing the impact of irrational decisions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter#Rational_irrationality)

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

<comment><USER6> Wouldn't that make the decisions people make even less valuable? Wouldn't that promote irrationality on a larger scale, if they're coupled as you say? Are you arguing that there is an inflection point or are you arguing for a useless government?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wouldn't it make sense for small companies to commit their patents to a mutual "patent fund" that would protect them in case they are sued?, are there legal reasons why this has not been done?

An ideal version of this mechanism would work like this: once you commit a patent to the fund you can not use it offensively in the future (to avoid worsening the problem), but you'll be protected by the "patent fund" when someone sues you. The sum of the patents of lots of small companies could quickly be enough to deter most suers that are not patent trolls.

Disclaimer: I'm not american so my knowledge of the patent system is quite superficial, perhaps a similar mechanism already exists?

<comment><USER8> I think when smaller companies have patents, they tend to be closely related to their core business, and they have them precisely in order to use them 'offensively' \- or, in other words, to protect their core business from companies that want to 'copy' them.

In principle, that is sort of what the patent system was intended for. (I still don't agree with it, but that's another story).

<comment><USER9> I don't think smaller companies can be offensive with patents, because they don't have the money to litigate. Maybe your definition of small and mine are different, though. I'm thinking of < $10M/yr. In that case, I don't believe a company of that size would have the resources to go after alleged infringers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh, I see binarybits is at it again! Just a few corrections:

1\. Android makers don't necessarily pay Microsoft for patents on things that were invented in Windows Phone. They pay licenses for patents that relate to either a) computers in general, or b) that you could do on mobile devices in general. Examples include the infamous FAT patent, patents on low-level concurrency primitives, and patents on synchronizing calendar clients. "Good" patents? I don't know. But it's disingenuous to compare Android to Windows Phone because a) it implies Android is licensing stuff that came later, and b) from a product that is inferior, insinuating these patents are low quality. If I were uncharitable, I'd say Google ordered a hit piece after all the love Microsoft has been getting the past couple of days!

2\. The "billions of dollars spent on patents instead of hiring engineers" argument is a red herring. Firstly, these companies _cannot_ find enough "good" engineers to hire, which is why they're lobbying for more H1s. Is their bar too high? Maybe. Or they may justly be concerned about allowing a "bozo explosion". And even if they _did_ hire more engineers, they still have billions of dollars left over. Patents are designed to be a risk to those that would not reward inventions they practice, and reducing risk to the company is a fine way of spending that money,

3\. Using these patents to crush future competition? These companies can more easily crush competition by buying them up rather than suing them. A 2009 study found only a small fraction of lawsuits involve large companies suing smaller ones: [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1396319](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1396319) \- and I would bet none of the large tech companies would risk the PR fallout.

4\. There is no "patent litigation crisis", just increased media coverage of litigation that is more or less in line with historical rates. Less than 2% of active patents are ever asserted and only a fraction of a percent ever make it to trial. See studies by Mark Lemley, for instance. The "smartphone wars" were just a drop in the bucket of all other patent litigation that happens. In fact there were higher rates of litigation in history when major technical developments happened: [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=)

<comment><USER11> Good info. I have a different take on #2.

"2\. The "billions of dollars spent on patents instead of hiring engineers" argument is a red herring. Firstly, _these companies cannot find enough "good" engineers to hire_, which is why they're lobbying for more H1s. "

They can't find enough good engineers _at below market price_. If you could find a good engineer if you paid 1 million dollars, than the "market price" lies somewhere between what you are offering and 1 millions dollars i.e. the price at which you can purchase a commodity on the market.

If I can't find enough gold at $1000 an ounce I wouldn't be correct in saying that "I can't find gold". (The market now is ~$1200 oz.)

<comment><USER12> It is particularly interesting if you compare the average salaries between software engineers and patent attorneys in the US.

[http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-software-engineer- salar...](http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-software-engineer-salary- SRCH_IL.0,2_IN1_KO3,20.htm)

[http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-patent-attorney- salary-...](http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-patent-attorney-salary- SRCH_IL.0,2_IN1_KO3,18.htm)

How many more "good engineers" would suddenly be found if they were offered 58 % higher compensation?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Investors, as well, have been forcing startups to feed the patent beast. Gotta keep your tech "defensible" after all!

</comment><comment><USER14> This is also subject in this piece with John Oliver: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bxcc3SM_KA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bxcc3SM_KA)

<comment><USER10> I think that was more about trolls rather than big company shenanigans. In any case there are some errors in that video that I pointed out in a previous comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9442161](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9442161)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seems like the America Invents Act has created a great opportunity for a non- profit to organize lawyers/law students with engineers for purpose of filing briefs to dismantle the massive pile of software patents out there. I could see it as a grass roots/crowdsourcing effort.

Does anyone know of any such org?

<comment><USER16> The 'patents' section of stack exchange was made to do something sorta like this. See the original blog post announcing it: [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/09/askpatents-com-a- stack...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/09/askpatents-com-a-stack- exchange-to-prevent-bad-patents/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Either get rid of the patent system altogether. All innovations eventually do good to the mankind. Or we need to form a patent review committee primarily composed of people with great track records. Pick professors, company leaders (like Elon Musk, political leaders, graduate students and average consumers. This committee should be tasked to review all of the patents and purge the ones that are too generic in nature. Reduce the patent age from 100 years to a decade. Change this committee every year and their doings should be VERY transparent. A public facing website where they publish their reviews.

<comment><USER18> > Reduce the patent age from 100 years to a decade.

The duration of a patent in the US is 17 years, AFAIK.

<comment><USER19> That duration was measured by a legal clock rather than a natural clock.

Because of that, since 1995, it has been 20 years from filing; prior to that it was 20 years from filing OR 17 years from issue. That enabled "submarine patents", wherein the applicant could intentionally delay consideration of the application to extent the period of market exclusivity.

Design patents have a shorter term, but no one cares how long they last because they are largely worthless, and more like trademarks than actual patents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was under the impression (maybe it's wrong), that good deal of US company _value_ is tied to patents, and IP in general. Reforming the patent system would effectively destroy, or reduce the value of these (in some cases very large and important) patents and therefore harm businesses in the short term. This doesn't seem like something Congress, or US lawmakers would be addressing with gusto.

</comment><comment><USER21> Honestly, if I was running a company that relied on IP, I'd be worried that Congress will probably fuck it up even worse.

<comment><USER22> Well, one might say one of the goals of such a company is to get big enough to be able to pay, er influence, Congress to fuck it up for everybody else and leave you free to move forward.

<comment><USER21> If they are a publicly traded company it could be argued that lobbying Congress for beneficial legislation would be a part of their due diligence toward increasing stockholder value.

<comment><USER22> Yes, that could very well be true. As long as the lobbying is done in a legal manner, which sometimes it is not. But my comment was probably more correctly aimed at Congress than at companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> where is the problem? which startup has been killed by patents? given that the US has the most successful entrepreneurial system - what exactly makes this a huge problem?

<comment><USER24> You ask a good question. I've seen a lot of people express fear. I've seen a lot of claims about startup being killed by patents.... but I've never seen it happen. I've been involved in a bunch of startups over the past 30 years. I have a patent myself and was involved in several others. I'm not aware of any of these patents (Which are now owned by a large company) ever being asserted (I presume that if it were at some point I'd be contacted as the inventor? It's pretty fundamental.)

I have, however, gotten cease and desists based on trade mark. I had a name that was of the type Adjective-Adverb. A company claimed it owned all use of the Adverb word because they'd registered some other two word name that included the same word. I Thought it was hilarious. They weren't even registered in the same business area as I was operating-- yet they sent me several 30-40 page threatening letters and "license agreement/settlement" contracts for me to sign via FedEx. I just tossed them and laughed.

<comment><USER25> Your assumption that people that start start-ups are stupid is wrong. People that start start-ups are in general smart enough to research the patent situation around their start-up idea and will look for greener pastures if they consider the patent situation too borked to try establishing a foot-hold or to navigate the patent minefield.

It's not just the start-ups that you see that might be killed it's all those that you never get to see or hear about in the first place, killed before they ever left the drawing board.

Start-up founders are savvy enough to take patents into consideration when they embark on a new venture, to do otherwise would be extremely foolish.

As for whether or not patents can kill companies, I've been on the receiving side of these suits and were it not for the fact that I had a main office in a country that is a bit more down-to-earth when it comes to legislation it would have certainly killed the start-up I was CEO of.</comment></comment></comment>


The Dangers of "Cancel Culture" are Distant and Abstract - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/cancel-culture <comment><USER2> I know a lot of valuable people who believe a lot of weird and wacky things, including disturbing things. It's a waste to dispose of those people and perspectives as lightly as has become the fashion. They tend to be worth multiples of normal people when it comes to learning about the world.

Worse than someone who thinks independently but to a tragic conclusion is someone who thinks in lock step with their aspirational social group and works to exclude people who don't. But let's not cancel them either.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's easy to see parallels to other cultural revolutions and irrational mob activities, none of which are looked fondly upon by history.

</comment><comment> rr-geil-j I am generally in favor of the _idea_ of cancel culture being that 'cancel culture' is defined as a modern iteration of boycotting which, I believe, is an effective protest tool.

I just hope people executing or practicing 'cancellation' to be more discerning as to who or which really deserves the backlash. A 10-year-old one- off tweet should not be a cause for cancellation.

</comment><comment><USER4> So back to shaming then?

 _Highlighting the supposed wrongdoings of others forces people to respond._

I think there was some dude 2000+ years ago saying something about a speck in someone else's eye.</comment>


Survey of Prescient Actions - <AUTHOR> https://aiimpacts.org/survey-of-prescient-actions/ <comment><USER2> An interesting idea and a good example of the EA/rationality community's unfortunate obsession with putting numbers with little practical basis on everything. The scores may as well be generated from rand(3,8).

The conclusions drawn in the "Discussion" section don't even make use of the scores! It's all qualitative. Embrace that. Sometimes words suit one's purposes better than numbers, but I guess the desire to dress things up with the authority of a number is too tempting.

I'm critical because I believe in EA and think the AI control problem is a worthy cause, but we can do much better.

<comment><USER3> There are steps here:

1\. Collect data.

2\. Apply models to that data.

3\. Change both the models and the data collection methods in response to changing understanding of the problem.

4\. Loop through 1-3 until the data collection methods and models stabilize.

5\. Draw conclusions.

You're looking at a process very much at step 1, and concluding that no models can be drawn from the data, and concluding that we should abandon the process. I think that's a very premature conclusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > For one case, the PQCrypto 2006 conference, we were unable to find > sufficient information after 45 minutes of investigation to provide an > evaluation.

45 minutes!? Stopped reading there.</comment>


Code theft: Asciimo: Where have I seen this before? - <AUTHOR> http://patorjk.com/blog/2010/06/21/asciimo/ <comment><USER2> Wow, what a dick this Marak guys seems to be. He steals someone's code (possibly laboring under a mistaken idea of how copyright law works) makes snarky comments about the original and then when he's called on it instead of just admitting his mistake he is rude and nasty about it (and still doesn't bother to check what the actual law is, which just makes him look like a total idiot).

<comment><USER3> > Wow, what a dick this Marak guys seems to be.

He is a regular on the nodejs mailing list. An example of his, ha-hum, somewhat difficult disposition (break-down starts from the third post down):

[http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/c...](http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/c332756b714d692e/f207a05f505cab2b)

<comment><USER4> Also a regular in the Node irc room (JimBastard). I just connected the dots. He won a ticket to JSConf by winning the pre-conference talk in a bar about JavaScript competition.

He seemed ok in person, and I know he hacks a lot of his own code, but I'm surprised what a dick he seems to be being. He definitely wasn't this much of a jerk face to face. Oh the Internet, this is why we can't have nice things.

<comment><USER5> Also a HN member, though apparently only to promote his projects:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=JimBastard>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marak>

<comment><USER6> Which at least I find perfectly acceptable (as long as the projects are Hacker News worthy).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Taking a step back, I think this is an excellent example of how most people are woefully ignorant about copyright. The vast majority of people think nothing of infringing copyright - they use images from Flickr without bothering to check the license, they forward e-mails, they post & repost videos to Youtube, they download & share music & video & software with their friends without a care in the world.

Why? Because that's the natural way to use the Internet, and (despite the recorded music industry's best efforts) nobody has ever pointed out to them that it's illegal. They copy on the Internet like fish swim in the sea.

What Marak did is wrong, and I feel for the guy who had his code nicked. It's happened to me - Wordpress today contains my code in blatant violation of the license under which I published it. When that happened it annoyed me at first, but ultimately I decided to let it go because any complaint would be met by blank incomprehension. When your stuff is taken by "kids on the Internet", you can't just call them out on it, you have to educate them into a whole new way of thinking. And life's too short for that.

<comment><USER8> Using pictures unlawfully is sadly the trend on internet forums and to a large degree on big blogs. This is particularly prevalent when it comes to videogame magazines which are scanned and uploaded and is either showed on the videogame-related site or referenced by a link. _Everyone_ basically does it. It's ridiculous and appalling.

Add to this sites like reddit who, willy-nilly, deep-link to images on other sites with few if any moral qualms. Hotlink/Deep-link protection is something you ought to make sure you implement. The comic artist The Oatmeal chose to split up his images so they couldn't be exploited effectively.

<comment><USER7> What about e-mail forwarding? That's just as illegal as copying a picture, and everybody BAR NONE does it without a second thought.

<comment><USER9> Can you expound on that? I was under the impression (from some discussion about electronic search-and-seizure laws) that mail, once delivered to the recipient, is no longer considered your property. I guess I've never reflected on exactly what property rights are transfered to me when you mail me something. Certainly if you send me something in a physical envelope, I can forward that to anyone, copyright law has nothing to do with that. So the question is whether electronic mail shares that feature with physical mail, since mail service is something that's explicitly talked about in the law.

<comment><USER10> > I was under the impression (from some discussion about electronic search- > and-seizure laws) that mail, once delivered to the recipient, is no longer > considered your property.

While true, owning a piece of mail does not imply that you own the relevant copyright.

Consider a book that you own. You own that copy. You can destroy it, you can sell/give/lend/show it to someone else, you can keep it. That physical thing is yours do do with as you will.

However, you can't (legally) copy it if its copyright is still active. (Yes, fair use comes in here too.)

Physical and electronic mail is exactly the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If it really is the case that this is copyright infringement, the easiest step may be to send a DMCA complaint to GitHub. The purpose of the DMCA complaint mechanism was to make it cheap and easy to deal with online copyright infringement without resorting to the courts. I know we're used to hearing about silly and illegitimate DMCA complaints, but this would seem like a reasonable use of it.

(This isn't legal advice, of course; I don't know enough of the facts to be sure what applies.)

</comment><comment><USER12> if this code was licensed with an open source license and he adhered to terms, this would be perfectly valid. You _can_ indeed copy such code and write whatever snarky comments you want about it.

But in this case this code is copyrighted and has no open source license clause:

"His response to my comments was that because I didn't explicitly put a copyright notice in my code that he could use it however he wanted (which I'm pretty sure isn't true)."

AFAIK copyright law says its not obligatory whether there is a copyright header or not, the work would be copyrighted either ways. Copyright is there the moment you create the work. So what he did was clearly illegal (and unethical).

<comment><USER13> Just picking some nits, but "But in this case this code is copyrighted" is wrong. In _all_ cases, code is copyrighted, even open source code. It's just that with F/OSS, someone has given you a license to use something they've created.

Other than that, carry on.

<comment><USER9> Actually no, you can put code in the public domain, thereby explicitly waiving your copyright. I believe, for example, that all code written by the US government is in the public domain.

<comment><USER13> I knew someone was going to mention this...

I'm not a lawyer, but in some places, isn't it hard or next to impossible to get your work into the public domain? You're 100% right about government works, but I was under the impression that the WTFPL was the closest thing you could really get to putting something of your own into the public domain...

I could also be totally wrong. Then again, anyone who does this isn't going to face the problem that the OP did, and it doesn't really invalidate my earlier statement either. Only part of it.

<comment><USER14> _I'm not a lawyer, but in some places, isn't it hard or next to impossible to get your work into the public domain?_

I'm also not a lawyer, but I've asked this question of some law professors, and the consensus appears to be that at least in common law states, while there is usually no _de jure_ mechanism for placing work into the public domain, if such a case ever went to trial you can be 99% certain that the judge would wave a magic common law wand to fix that.

That said, wikipedia's "I place this in the public domain, or if that isn't possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions" is probably the safest approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I submitted here yesterday the original asciimo link, now you can read here where the code cames from and the opinion from the real author.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for posting this update.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Personally, I'd be more okay with the fact this dude was posting some code on github had he properly credited the original author and posted a link to the original project. IMO he probably should have also asked for permission to post the author's code in the first place.

I can't say whether or not he made changes to the codebase, but it's just plain wrong that he goes about crediting himself as the author when the truth is he probably contributed a very small amount to an already functional program.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is why I stopped releasing source code. Idiots who want 15 mins of fame and constant attention but cannot create, so they consume what others create.

You own the copyright. The declaration is an option. If you have been financially damaged by this, then you have legal recourse, but you must be able to prove damages with a dollar figure.

</comment><comment><USER18> Great to see Patrick Gillespie is still around, I remember him from the AOL programming community (1999!), nice guy and very sharp.

His API spy is still the best I've ever used: <http://patorjk.com/downloads/patorjkapispy51.zip>

<comment><USER19> Wow I totally did not put 2 and 2 together until now. Now we just need someone to release "gothic nightmarez" for IRC and revive KnK and it'll be like it's 1995 again.

<comment><USER18> Wow, KnK! That takes me back. What a great site.

As corny as AOL programming may have been, I learned so much from it, and it definitely got me hooked on writing software. Good memories.

<comment><USER20> Hahaha this is exactly why I clicked this article..I saw the name patandjk and thought holy crap I haven't heard that since the beautiful days of AOL.. I remember using there API generator while learning to code in vb6...I think everybody had a copy back then..Boy does that bring back memories....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't get it. If every change is tracked by github and he gives links and attribution to TAAG what is the problem? Is there any license issues involed that i can't grasp? What is the original codes license? In what license the new library is distributed?

<comment><USER2> The original code was not open source. It just happened to be JavaScript so it was possible to steal it.

Just for anyone who doesn't know: when no explicit license or copyright information is given this means all rights are with the author. Code is only ever public domain when it is explicitly put there by the author.

<comment><USER22> If you want to take a hardline attitude towards it, then TAAG itself is in iffy territory, because many of the fonts it uses were just thrown on BBSs or the internet with no explicit open licenses. He seems to have just assumed (probably correctly) that if they were put online, or as part of "figlet font packs", then a BSD-style license was intended, but there isn't an explicit one on most of them.

<comment><USER23> Less iffy than you'd think. Fonts are not copyrightable (within the US, at least, and for fonts that do not contain executable code).

<http://nwalsh.com/comp.fonts/FAQ/cf_13.htm>

<comment><USER24> Since they are not copyrightable, why do people pay lots of money to the foundries to use them? Seems like we'd be able to freely distribute things like Gotham, and anything from Veer.

<comment><USER22> Things like TrueType font files are considered computer code and copyrightable, because they have some embedded scaling and kerning logic, which makes it a bit harder to just use them free. The designs themselves (in the U.S.) aren't copyrightable though, so anyone can legally rip off the font by e.g. tracing it. There are quite a few of those floating around, but they have a reputation for being poor quality, esp. with kerning and such, depending on how quick the tracing/repackaging job was. That, and there's a risk that if you used one of the "ripped off" fonts and it was different in a way that was noticeable, your publishing house / design firm / etc. would get a bad reputation in the trade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So is this a good place to be slightly pedantic and point out that "theft" as a concept doesn't apply to non-rivalrous goods?

I suppose plagiarism could be seen as "theft of attention/credit" or such, but copyright infringement is only what it sounds like -- not respecting someone's government-granted monopoly rights.

<comment><USER26> It is always a good time to point that out. Big content owners try to twist the meanings to their benefit, but while both are illegal, they are not the same thing, and it's not to society's benefit to confuse them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> While IANAL, I read copyright law books for fun.

I've thought about writing a series of articles / FAQ on A Hacker's Guide to Copyright Law.

The thing that's been stopping me is:

* The sort of people who really need to know it won't read it

* The sort of people who want to know how copyright works can find out from other sources

<comment><USER28> Write it and we will read it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have a brilliant PR move for the content industries: we will wrap all their stuff with four lines of Javascript and then suddenly the Internets will rediscover copyright.

</comment><comment><USER30> The creator's path should be clear:

(1) Add an explicit copyright/license/reuse statement to the code to avoid similar misunderstandings in the future. While not _required_ , it's wise for people who care about the copying of their work.

(2) If he cares enough to enforce his preference against reuse, he should then send a DMCA notice to github/etc.

From what I can see, both people are a little naive about copyright. The mature resolution isn't fuming back-and-forth, but to just learn and implement what the law already provides.

On the other hand, if the real goal is to instead have an attention- and inlink- and traffic-grabbing web feud, they can each boost their fame/infamy by a few more rounds of mutual criticism in every forum that will have them and their supporters. For this goal, the more emotion/insults/ad-hominem, the better.

</comment><comment><USER31> Since apparently nobody has yet posted here about it, the current state of all this is that Patorjk sent an email to Github, and they've taken the project down.

<http://github.com/marak/asciimo/>

<comment><USER31> OK, they... brought it back?

* shrug __* not interested enough to investigate deeply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> FYI the Node.js IRC channel is logged.

<http://nodejs.debuggable.com/2010-06-21.txt>

</comment><comment><USER33> I _love_ that there are people trying to conflate an blog's image use that falls under a lot of concepts of "fair use" with a particularly obnoxious act of code plagiarism.

<comment><USER7> What on earth makes you think it's fair use? It's not commentary about the image. It's not educational. He reproduced the whole image, not a part of it. I suspect that you need to go and read up about copyright law.

<comment><USER33> I suspect you need to read up on fair use and will leave it at that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If I'm reading this right he took messy javascript someone wrote, and ported it to a php library... If he didn't give original credit to the OP, then yeah thats rude, but don't we all end up porting old code at sometime or another?

<comment><USER2> He took (possibly messy, although that doesn't have much to do with it) JavaScript code which he didn't own and had no rights to without asking and made changes to it. No PHP here.

<comment><USER34> Okay.. but Javascript is free to view through the client machine no matter what. It brings up that question "if its easy to cheat, will people do it?" and the answer is, usually yes. Sure theft really sucks, but was there a way to prevent this other then trusting someone not to steal?

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what your point is.

<comment><USER34> In other words I'm not sure why we should be surprised and caring that someone stole javascript.

<comment><USER2> For the same reason I'd care if someone stole any other piece of work.

<comment><USER34> Well is there a way to hide your javascript, or compile it to hinder the ability to steal it so easily? I'd like to know cause as far as I knew you had to be extra careful on what you do with javascript to protect the security of your site. I always have my controllers verifying my input from javascript/ajax, cause I know my js is easily viewable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Ah yes, Mob justice, bring the pitchforks plz.

I start hearing Smeagol's _my preccccciiooosssss_ when some artists and coders talk about their work.

[Edit] Ownership of goods is a social construction, not a universal truth nor is there some universal morality to consider. We can consider his feelings, but I'll tell you what, the peeps getting snippy here about justice for someone's ASCII generator, while simultaneously accepting the near universal oppression of poor people by their own consumption habits protected by intellectual property laws have somewhat questionable priorities, it would seem.

<comment><USER36> > nor is there some universal morality to consider

It's a social construction most of us agree on, though. In fact, I have no doubt that some on here consider it fundamental to the advancement of the species. You're free to be here and disagree with us about it, but don't expect us to couch all our conversations in hypotheticals because you differ with us on our "undebatable subjects" -- those subjects we have pondered over enough that we need not debate them again and again every time someone raises an objection.

> near universal oppression of poor people by their own consumption habits . . > .

The theory is that if the content isn't protected it won't be generated _at all_ at the margin. You can debate that theory if you like, but if it is true then the mere removal of the laws won't do a lick of good for poor people. Similarly, if wealth accumulation is disallowed, it's not that poor people will magically become wealthier. Instead what will happen is those who had previously worked hard to accumulate wealth will stop working as hard, and less wealth overall will be created.

<comment><USER35> 1\. Agreeing on it doesn't make it moral. [Edit: although it does create a moral majority, aka, the tyranny of the majority]

2\. Trickle down economics at its finest. Where's the evidence?

I'll give you some counter-evidence: music after vs music before MP3 pirating. Seems like this vibrant cultural explosion happened despite all that lack of trickle down, huh.

By your logic the colonialists and imperialists did a favor for all those tragic natives. I mean, where would all those Indians and Indonesians be without all that wealth creation by the East India Company?!?? [Edit: or Apple]

The point is this system of IP is predicated on acceptance of not just winners but losers (at life), and justified with a generous self-serving of trickle- down economics.

[Edit, to insert an LOL at people who think IP wouldn't be created without necessarily oppressing foreigners and people born without silver spoons. Note, I am aware that I have to construct the connection, and I haven't done that here, but there's no point in this forum, abstractions like this remain couched as a conveniently theoretical debate, despite the very real lives that poor people lead]

[Edit, to insert another LOL at people who think that we must support our wealthy people's desire to create more wealth]

<comment><USER36> > 1\. Agreeing on it doesn't make it moral. [Edit: although it does create a > moral majority, aka, the tyranny of the majority]

Yeah, but it does mean that we may unapologetically assume it when we talk about economic issues.

<comment><USER35> You can unapologetically assume that only for as long as you do not accept culpability for the outcome. Or rather, you may accept culpability unapologetically, it just says a lot about you, even if you don't realize it.

[Edit: people can't stand when you only debate on the actual terms of an artificially constructed reality, rather than the make-believe terms that only exist within that reality. It's human, it keeps us from having to think about consequences. But why is that reasonable, it is just convenient.]

<comment><USER36> You can talk about artificially constructed realities all you want, but the idea that other people matter is also artificially constructed. It's not the "source" of the reality that matters. What matters is whether we generally agree on it.

<comment><USER35> >>> _You can talk about artificially constructed realities all you want, but the idea that other people matter is also artificially constructed._

Yes, we can choose to believe that other moral matters relating to people driven in herds to create profit for far wealthier people matters more than say moralizing about IP regimes which have a large net negative affect on those same people. As I said earlier, it's a matter of priorities. Nicely put ;)

There's a handy quotation from random famous person that nails this one nicely, but I can't think of it right now.

[Edit, but we can break it down more in so many directions, and all of them end up very badly for the true believers in advancing civilization with schemes that necessarily require there to be vast numbers of losers for the small numbers of winners. Goddamn that whole conscience thing gets in the way, put a cork in it fast!!!]

>>> _It's not the "source" of the reality that matters. What matters is whether we generally agree on it._

Actually, I think that only matters to the winners under that scheme.

<comment><USER36> > Yes, we can choose to believe that other moral matters relating to people > driven in herds to create profit for far wealthier people matters more than > say moralizing about IP regimes which have a large net negative affect on > those same people.

You've yet to establish the net negative effect, so I think this is putting the cart before the horse just a little. Also: "other moral matters relating to people driven in" -- what?

> Goddamn that whole conscience thing gets in the way

I disagree with you on how best to advance the lot of people in the world. That's not the same as not having a conscience.

> Actually, I think that only matters to the winners under that scheme.

That's typically how it goes, yes.

<comment><USER35> >>> You've yet to establish the net negative effect, so I think this is putting the cart before the horse just a little.

I'm not the one claiming that trickle down economics is a morally justified way to rationalize the goodness of IP regimes. Why do I have to disprove conjecture which is not generally proven as a net benefit? Proponents of this dogma are the ones who want to justify IP regimes, and not only that they (i.e. you) insist this is the way to progress. You've got to prove that the inequalities created are better than the inequalities averted. That basic first step (proof of net positive) has not been done. I am not suggesting action (i.e. IP enforcement), I am suggesting inaction. As in, don't fuck with people unless your theory is proven.

Of course, it's worth pointing out that whole line is thinking is utilitarian. Are you truly utilitarian? I doubt it. So some consistency would be nice too.

<comment><USER36> > I'm not the one claiming that trickle down economics is a morally justified > way to rationalize the goodness of IP regimes.

Yes, but that is the broadly accepted view. It's not incumbent on me to prove it.

<comment><USER35> Trickle down is most certainly not the broadly accepted view, FYI.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics>

<comment><USER36> Oh, well, this is something entirely different than copyright, since copyright is not specifically for businesses at all. It certainly doesn't fall in the broadly understood definition of "trickle-down economics."

What you're doing would be kind of like if I called the policy you're endorsing "socialism" and pointed out that that rarely works and is widely discredited among economists and everybody else. Makes for good reading I guess, but it wouldn't be very honest.

The widely accepted view on copyright is that it's needed to protect creators' ability to profit from their work and encourage the production of more such work. That's why it's written into the legal codes and sometimes constitutions of almost every major political entity in the world. Most economists similarly embrace its efficacy -- with caveats, in many cases, but the overall consensus is for. Misnaming it "trickle-down economics" changes that not a whit.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Real time financial insight - <AUTHOR> https://www.bookvalu.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Bookvalu is web app for small business owners that features real time financial forecasting, analysis and valuation using your existing QuickBooks online account.

Any feedback regarding the website, overall idea and anything else is much appreciated.

Oh, and using the coupon code HACKERNEWS will get you 20% off any plan.</comment>


Programming is terrible—Lessons learned from a life wasted. EMF2012 - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csyL9EC0S0c <comment><USER2> This is without question the best lecture I have ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER3> while I agree with some points, I think his experience is too skewed.

The general vibe I got was "oh we are all clueless, all programming efforts are bad". I think this is unfair over-generalisation. In my experience I have seen both sides of the coin.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great Talk.</comment>


Ask YC: What to do with myself? - <AUTHOR>

Dear YCers,<p>This summer I'm working part time in a media lab on my college campus. The lab is stocked with all sorts of creative media applications and technology. Brand new, top of the line Mac Pros, all of which have the full range of picture editing/movie and music making software, plus all of the cool peripherals to go along with them. Technically I'm supposed to be monitoring the lab and assisting with tech support, but this being the summer semester, I almost never see people in the lab. With all of this awesome technology at my disposal, I feel like I need to put my creative side to good use, but I'm a little overwhelmed by all of it. My question is this: I have the lab to myself for six hours a day, twice a week. What should I put my mind to? What would you do if you were in my place? <comment><USER2> I would

1) Brainstorm: Write a list of the things I want to do that involves the resources in the lab,

2) Prune: Pick the top five I want to do.

3) Summarize: For each one, write out a quick description which identifies basic resources you need and major milestones to meet, and what you expect to get at the end. Keeping it to two or three paragraphs for each idea.

4) Choose: then pick two. First one is the quickest to get done. The second is the most challenging. Then decide which one, but shoot for doing both.

For bonus points, write time estimates for the milestones on the back of an envelope and see how close you get to your schedule estimate. Out of everything I do, estimating projects is the most challenging, especially because I'm usually doing something new.

</comment><comment><USER3> What are the policies of the lab when it comes to the employees using the technology for the greater good of mankind? Do you have a deep knowledge of something? Use the media to create a series of video lectures on that topic. I always love watching lectures about interesting things.</comment>


How Microsoft Has Become the Surprise Innovator in PCs - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/technology/microsoft-pcs-apple.html <comment><USER2> I couldn't agree more with the article.

Working in software development, Windows OS still is facing challenges that OSX or Linux don't have. Although, to be fair, I haven't tried the new integrated VMs that were announced at the last Build or so.

The Surface line of products keeps impressing with clear attempts at innovation and progress. It's almost like a flip of the 90s where MS is now the innovator while Apple plods along one step behind the competition.</comment>


Linus on Linux, 20 Years In - <AUTHOR> http://linuxfr.org/nodes/85904/comments/1230981

<comment><USER2> Interesting read. One of my favorite quotes is "finding the right people is really the killer feature". So true, especially in the open source world.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dupe - front page 1 day ago, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2513123>

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, my bad.</comment></comment>


Your searches on Facebook to show up in activity log - <AUTHOR> http://newsroom.fb.com/News/An-Update-to-Activity-Log-1bc.aspx

<comment><USER2> Before it explodes quoting from the post: "It's important to remember that no one else can see your Activity Log, including your search activity"

<comment><USER3> My hart skipped a beat when I read the title. I hope people will read the whole article or at least your quote before going all termo nuclear.

FWIW I've flagged this, as it's really now HN worthy IMO or at the very least shouldn't have a sensational/link bating title like this.</comment></comment>


Why Was Qasem Soleimani in Iraq? - <AUTHOR> https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/49219/why-was-qasem-soleimani-in-iraq <comment><USER2> He was there at US request to deliver a diplomatic backchannel message on deescalating tensions between Iran and KSA... that is news and disgraceful, if true.</comment>


A Quiet Giant of Investing Weighs in on Trump - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/business/dealbook/sorkin-seth-klarman-trump-investors.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0 <comment><USER2> his book is one of the better ones out there</comment>


WikiLeaks' files reveal major security breach at the CIA - <AUTHOR> http://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2017/03/07/news/wikileaks_files_reveal_major_security_breach_at_the_cia-159969039 <comment><USER2> Link to the actual WikiLeaks release and discussion can be found here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810015)</comment>


Google's CDN hosted jQuery 1.5 is down (Fixed after 40 min) - <AUTHOR> http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5/jquery.min.js <comment><USER2> Hi,

Yes, it's being fixed and the update is being pushed out as we speak. (It should already be back up for some.)

Basically, we broke the alias from 1.5 to the latest version when pushing out 1.5.2. We caught it quickly, but not fast enough.

These URLs should all work now:

[http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5/jquery.min.j...](http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5/jquery.min.js)

[http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.0/jquery.min...](http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.0/jquery.min.js)

[http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.min...](http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.min.js)

And now:

[http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.2/jquery.min...](http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.2/jquery.min.js)

Very sorry about the downtime.

-DeWitt

<comment><USER3> It's nice to know that you guys make mistakes too. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For reference, these exist:

[http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.0/jquery.min...](http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.0/jquery.min.js)

[http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.min...](http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.min.js)

[http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.j...](http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js) (loads 1.4.4)

<http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5/jquery.js> (the non-minified version of the link that's down. version is 1.5.2)

My guess would be something went wrong in rolling out v1.5.2 (since the minified version is 404ing but the regular version isn't). Of course, shouldn't your application be specifying a specific version of jQuery anyway, so that you control when the version changes?

Edit: Apparently 1.5.1 is still the latest release, according to the docs (<http://code.google.com/apis/libraries/devguide.html#jquery>)

Edit 2: The non-minified version still works, and it's returning 1.5.2.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, so perhaps nobody should have been pointing to 1.5 (vs. 1.5.0) to begin with?

Edit: The docs mention only these specific version numbers: 1.2.3, 1.2.6, 1.3.0, 1.3.1, 1.3.2, 1.4.0, 1.4.1, 1.4.2, 1.4.3, 1.4.4, 1.5.0, 1.5.1

<comment><USER4> Well, yes and no. Google does specifically allow that behavior as part of their versioning policy ([http://code.google.com/apis/libraries/devguide.html#versioni...](http://code.google.com/apis/libraries/devguide.html#versioning)). However, in a production environment, you really shouldn't be automatically loading the latest release of jQuery; what happens if there's a regression that affects your application's performance?

Regardless, I don't think that URL should be down.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's very good to know. I had wrongly assumed 1.5 was and always would be 1.5.0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is why I host my own. Cost of doing business.

<comment><USER6> Isn't using Google CDN (quite possibly cached by user) with a fallback to a local copy the best of both worlds?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be really cool to see how many websites failed because of this. Mashing up the amount of caching that actually goes on would be a cool metric to further improve CDN's with, anyone agree?

</comment><comment><USER8> How does it make sense for google to pay for the hosting for this stuff?

Or google charts...I'm building a product that uses this pretty heavily right now, but it seems too good to be true. Generating those graphs for me is really nice, but the bandwidth and CPU cycles that I'm using aren't free (for google), what's their upside?

Cool, google, and thanks, but how does this make financial sense for you?

<comment><USER9> Not everything a company does has to bring in revenue (make financial sense).

<comment><USER8> But how do they justify this to their shareholders?

This is literally the type of stuff I daydream about... "Here, I've got all this computing infrastructure, isn't it cool? Tell you what, use it for free!"

That's _awesome_. I guess I was kindof asking if I was missing the point or something. Are there really people at google who are saying "Listen, boss, I'm going to need $money to build google font library. I'm going to need $foo engineers, and $bar resources, but we should do this because it would be fun!"

And their boss goes "huh, cool! Yeah, here is some money!"

?

<comment><USER10> Note that Microsoft also considers it worthwhile: <http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.5.2.js>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It works now.

<comment><USER4> Hurray!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Wondering how many people applied to YC 3 times or more?   - <AUTHOR>

That is my 3d application for last 3 years ))) <comment><AUTHOR> This time the application is way better! YC is improving in application big time. There are still same questions (that is great), but some hard questions are taken away. I also like the idea of video. We know Paul and Jessica and all crew in face, but now they can see us too (heh). Maybe that would be great to upload picture of funders too and stick it to application. But that is up to YC :-)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> About previous ideas: 1) 3 years ago it was a business networking website. Where people could exchange, hold business cards.

2) Second idea was booking appointment calendar for doctors, layers and personal trainers...kinda electronic appointment secretary...

</comment><comment><USER2> Have you been submitting the same idea with additional twists or new ideas?

</comment><comment><USER3> I've only applied this round so far, but if I don't get in, I plan to keep applying (with better ideas) until I get in. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish you don't reach my record! Best regards

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You've applied 3 times and your account is 17 days old? What's the story with that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Each time i created a new account. My user name was the name of my projects.

Here i found those accounts: ecarder bookzem</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What paid services do you use now for your startup? - <AUTHOR>

I was looking around for server setups, and I ran into an old HN post about what paid services people use.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=545229
Now that it's more than a year later, has consensus changed? Or is it mostly still the same? What paid services do you use? <comment><USER2> This is for my business education course / consulting business:

Slicehost (website hosting) Aweber (autoresponder/broadcast e-mail) Amazon S3/Cloudfront (media server) Google Apps (e-mail) Skype (international calling) Dropbox (backup) Chartbeat (analytics) Powerpay (merchant account) Backpack (reference / reminders) Evernote (database)

I'm seriously considering Ruby Receptionists (callruby.com) for in-bound call handling - I'm on the phone a lot, and it'd be much better than letting incoming calls go to voicemail. (I use Google Voice currently.)

</comment><comment><USER3> At Airbnb we're using Amazon AWS (EC2, EBS, ELB, S3, Cloudfront), Dropbox, Cloudkick, Pingdom, Twilio, Clickatell, ZenDesk, RingCentral, BrainTree, MaxMind, MailChimp ...

and more I can't think of right now :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm looking into twilo (I always forget the name and have to google it). I use phonebooth and google apps. For hosting I'm using host gator til my sites or apps need a dedicated server. When that time comes I have a business partner to front hardware and hosting. For office space when it comes to that time I have made a few connections that I will barter services for.

</comment><comment><USER5> 1\. Voip.ms for phones, IVR, voicemail 2\. Dreamhost for small sites, pgrmr for large sites 3\. SendGrid for email delivery 4\. Bittorrent for everything else

</comment><comment><USER6> For RestBackup.com, I'm using:

\- Amazon EC2, EBS, ELB, S3, SimpleDB, and SQS

\- Sendgrid.com for mail delivery

\- Pingdom.com for monitoring and alarm notification

\- Google Apps Premium for email hosting

\- Linode.com for DNS hosting

\- Namecheap.com for DNS registration and SSL certs (putting off buying from Verisign)

\- JungleDisk.com for backups

\- T-Mobile prepaid mobile phone

</comment><comment><USER7> Hosting: Slicehost, Amazon AWS (EC2), Time Warner Cable (a couple of servers sitting in the spare room in my apartment)

And, er, um, that's about it right now. We're really not far along enough to need much more.

</comment><comment><USER8> Rackspace Cloud for Windows (app hosting)

ASmallOrange (wordpress hosting)

Fotolia

MailChimp

MailboxForwarding

GoDaddy (domains only)

DropBox

Google Apps

Google Voice

</comment><comment><USER9> Intervals for project management, Backpack for quick notes, MailChimp for email, AT&T :( for telephone, Verizon for DSL, and SBWH for VPS.

</comment><comment><USER10>
      Linode (VPS)
      MSNI (merchant)
      Twilio
      Pingdom
      AWS
      MailChimp
      Comcast (build server resides in garage)

</comment><comment><USER11> Google App Engine, Amazon S3, Google Apps Premium, Second Life Premium, Skype, Carbonite, Squarespace

</comment><comment><USER12> Google Apps, Basecamp, Dropbox, Google AppEngine, Nearlyfreespeech for cheap hosting

</comment><comment><USER13> A few we use for a variety of things are.

Mailchimp Google Apps SurveyMonkey

</comment><comment><USER14>
      google apps

      dnspark

      maxcdn

      evernote

</comment><comment><USER15> Dropbox. Currently in trial and considering: Performable, SnapABug, SendGrid

<comment><USER16> Hi this is Justin from Performable. We want to provide the best service possible for startups. Please let us know how we can help in any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Evernote, dropbox, slichost, google apps, basecamp, lessacounting

</comment><comment><USER18> Amazon, Rackspace cloud, encoding.com, google apps..

</comment><comment><USER19> Harvest for time and expense tracking.

</comment><comment><USER20> Curdbee.com

dropbox

Skype

</comment><comment><USER21> Dropbox Github</comment>