Introducing Cloudflare Registrar - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-registrar/ <comment><USER2> I wouldn't have cared much about Domain Name Register just a week ago, but after what happen at Zoho, and all the horror story in the comments section from namecheap and others, Cloudflare Registar couldn't come at a better time.

I really wish Cloudflare at least made $1 or $2 Gross Profits per domain. Who paids for Domain Register Support? I would much rather be a "customer" than I am not sure where they are making money from my Domain.

P.S - If those were wholesale price, do other companies get heavy discount for signing up in bulks? How do other companies made money when they are selling it for $0.99 or $6.99

<comment><USER3> I though namecheap was one of the better ones around? I'm looking for a domain registrar. Could share the link with namecheap horror stories? Thanks

<comment><USER4> If you are using PrivateInternetAccess, you can't login to your NameCheap account. As in, your valid username and password will be rejected. This happens even if you have 2fa enabled. I reset my password twice (even though I _knew_ the original because I use a password manager) before I opened a support case, and they confirmed that they block legitimate logins if they detect you're using a VPN.

I wanted to move off of them, but everyone else is worse. CF Registrar is interesting, but there is precedent for CF revoking its services from non- abusive customers before (whatever that alt-right site was) so I don't think I will support them either. I heard Gandhi is good so I might check them out.

<comment><USER5> Gandi is good, I think the site upgrade is done now so there won't be much clunkiness for new domains. They're more expensive than most, but I've had no problems. I only use their DNS though, I can't comment on mail, mail forwarding or hosting.

<comment><USER6> Gandi are nice to you until you move your domain somewhere else, at which point they will immediately drop the privacy on your whois record until their version expires, as a nice parting gift. I complained to their support when that happened and they basically lied to my face, pretending to see only the new registrar's whois. Caveat emptor.

<comment><USER5> Ah shit. Thanks for the heads up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do cloudflare want to be registrar for other foreign TLDs in the future?

I would love to see them support TLDs such as .dk, .de, .it etc. That way both me and my clients could begin consolidating domain registration in one place, instead of using expensive and shitty domain registration management services. Harder ones, like Tonga (.to) or Greenland (.gl) would be nice to have as well, but I don't think it's feasible (or possible even) to integrate with all countries.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we do.

<comment><USER8> Any chance of allowing more TLDs for the registration process? My TLD of choice for e-mail (.Industries) is considered illegitimate when attempting to register for Cloudflare.

<comment><USER9> Can you contact our support team? All legitimate TLDs should be able to register on Cloudflare.

<comment><USER8> Is there an e-mail? I tried looking, but the contact form I found required me to register, and thus looping back to my original problem.

Could it be I'm using an alias of email@example.com?

Edit: Attempting "email@example.com" and receiving the same error. Assuming you're accepting .industries registrations, it could very well be my corporate firewall blocking requests to something. I'll attempt again this evening from home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder why nobody has mentioned Njalla [0] yet.

>We want to keep things simple and we're not trying to compete on price but security. We will never be the cheapest domain name registration service but we'll always be the most privacy centered one

You sign up with email or XMPP+OTR, they send mails PGP signed + encrypted (using info from key server or the key you uploaded), they have app based (TOTP) 2FA and they accept various cryptocurrencies.

There's no bullshit and so far the support has been quite good.

Their DNS (currently) supports: A, AAAA, CAA, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, SRV, SSHFP, TXT (also "Dynamic" and "Redirect")

It's run by some of the Pirate Bay founders and they're still making fun of legal threats. ;)

0: [https://njal.la](https://njal.la)

<comment><USER11> I like and use Njalla, but you should be aware of what you're getting into: > When you purchase a domain name through Njalla, we own it for you. However, the agreement between us grants you full usage rights to the domain. It's not at all unlikely that they will eventually be shut down very hard. Please do not use them (or, as long as I'm here, any ccTLD, but that's another story) for any serious/long-term purpose.

<comment><USER10> Who would shut them down? Is this something the ICANN prohibits? Is ICANN even involved here, as Njalla is (to my knowledge) not an ICANN-accredited registrar? They simply buy the domains from an actual registrar and let you use them.

<comment><USER12> I think in the context of that, they were thinking about governments.

<comment><USER10> I don't know why buying something and then leasing it to someone else would be an illegal thing to do. I guess they made sure it's not illegal in Nevis, at least.

<comment><USER13> That's not the problem.

It's more the scenario that the country to which the company, or it's officers, belong/reside in, may take a disliking to their customers (perhaps for unlawful acts), and because the company is seen to own the domain, and either won't or can't hand over the details of the end customer, the company could be liable for those things.

Even if the company obeys every lawful direction on cancelling/handing over domains and whatever customer details they have - they may be seen as facilitating unlawful behavior, and so that in and of itself can be an unlawful act.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have used dozens of different registrars over the past two decades and found Fabulous.com to be by far the best on price and technology. Unfortunately, they now have no plans to support the new CDS and CDNSKEY protocols which would be handy for anyone managing a large number of domains.

What Fabulous do have, however, is an "Executive Lock" feature, which is an optional additional layer of verification that the domain owner must go through before a domain can be transferred away from his account. They also support U2F, which allows the use of hardware tokens such as Yubikeys.

Domain protection features such as these are vital if a registrar does not want to be swamped with jacking attempts and the PR disaster of actually losing domains.

I am surprised that Cloudflare has not already followed the fine example of companies such as Dropbox, Github, and Google by supporting U2F. A quick search shows that Cloudflare customers have been publicly asking for this for at least 3 years. When they introduced TOTP 2.5 years ago, they stated that they would support U2F "shortly".

In the context of being a domain registrar, supporting U2F would be even more useful, dramatically reducing the number of domain jacking attempts. Proper support would encourage customers to associate TWO hardware tokens with their account, each stored in a different location. Supporting only one, as AWS have recently done, leaves them wide open to social engineering, with impersonators claiming to have lost their one key.

<comment><USER15> Wow, it's hard to believe they don't support U2F yet. Even smaller providers such as OVH have U2F for a long time.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, very surprising. Perhaps companies lose the ability to get this stuff done as they grow larger.

An even more shocking example is Transferwise, supposedly a cutting-edge star of the "fintech" scene. They use SMS-based codes, a wildly insecure form of OTP. Over a thousand employees and they cannot even implement some sort of app-based TOTP (such as Google Authenticator) to protect their clients' money.

<comment><USER16> Transferwise is quite low risk in this regard. They don't have a balance or anything like that, it's only moving money between 2 accounts in a transactional manner.

<comment><USER14> No, Transferwise provide balances as part of their "Borderless banking" accounts: [https://transferwise.com/gb/borderless/](https://transferwise.com/gb/borderless/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> While Cloudflare appears to be doing things that are meant to help everyday people, I can't help but be suspicious. This is an organization that sticks with the "we don't host" bullshit line when web sites serve up Trojans which pretend to be Adobe Flash installers. While there's more subjectivity involved with dealing with hosting the content of spammers, there is zero subjectivity involved with clear and obvious phishing sites.

First, anyone with the tiniest modicum of common sense can tell that these pretend Flash sites are absolutely not in the slightest way legitimate content.

Second, providing services in any way, shape or form is, in fact, hosting. Providing DNS? It's hosting. Providing a cached version of the site? Hosting.

So if they want to be in the business of pretending to be not-hosting, then they have to stop providing services that without which web sites would cease to function. Are they now going to claim that they're not providing meaningful services to domains registered through them, and therefore they should not be responsible for people who are doing illegal things?

Probably.

<comment><USER9> I appreciate that these decisions can seem easy, but broadly do you want a private company deciding what can be on the internet, or do you want that decision made by a judge with due process?

<comment><USER18> Matt Prince already decided "what can be on the internet" when he banned Daily Stormer. As far as Cloudflare is concerned, that ship already sailed.

<comment><USER19> I think the issue was that the Daily Stormer communicated that the fact that cloudflare hadn't banned them was a form of support or endorsement.

It seems reasonable to put a lid on that.

I do see the moral dilemma though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is awesome! Charging the exact same price as the registry wholesale price.

NameSilo, as far as I know, comes very close to the registry pricing and offers DNSSEC, nameserver registration and other APIs with the registry.

This could totally throw all registrars out of competition for the price of registry wholesale price. You just have to hope CloudFlare wouldn't overstep their role as a registrar if you only register the domain from them.

<comment><USER21> I currently use NameSilo. Don't forget they also offer free whois privacy for life.

My only complaint with them is their DNS records are only updated once every 15 minutes.

This makes doing automated API based DNS based LE challenges annoying because you need to sleep your script for 15 minutes to ensure the update got pushed.

Also, I'm surprised Cloudflare omit talking about whois privacy in the blog post. Makes me wonder if they plan to sell that for some amount of money.

<comment><USER9> We actually didn't talk about WHOIS Privacy because it's becoming less and less of a relevant feature in the post-GDPR world. We do support it, free of charge.

Cloudflare is also the largest authoritative DNS deployment in the world, and changes propagate in closer to 15 seconds than 15 minutes.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the confirmation. Sounds promising.

Do you happen to also offer free email forwarding with registered domains?

<comment><USER9> I don't have the answer to that yet. On the one hand it's a bit far afield of what we normally do. On the other a lot of people seem to get it from their registrar and rely on it.

The ideal situation would be if we could find a way to do email forwarding which wasn't just as good as what they do, but was exciting and meaningful. We'll keep thinking about it and let you know on our blog.

<comment><USER21> If you want to blow everyone away then I think you should start with giving free real inboxes for everyone (maybe with some sane limit, or a way to pay per month to increase it), and then introduce email forwarding in the future (because I'm sure some people will still want that feature even with real inboxes available).

If you GA'd with:

~$8 .com addresses, N real inboxes, free whois guard and a top notch DNS record API.

That's a compelling offer and I'd very likely switch from namesilo if that were the case.

To be honest, anything less and I'd stay with namesilo because the 15 minute timer can be worked around by using my web host's name servers (digitalocean pushes updates in a few seconds). I couldn't live without either email forwarding or a real inbox.

<comment><USER9> When you say real inboxes, are you thinking webmail of some sort? Don't most people prefer to use Google Apps or the like these days?

<comment><USER21> I mean being able to set up firstname.lastname@example.com as a proper inbox that can send and receive mail without forwarding to another email. Having a web interface for it would be cool but I think a lot of people could also configure existing email clients to access it (at least at the start).

Google Suite is something like $5 / month per domain name so offering that as a free feature would be a pretty big deal.

<comment><USER22> Google Suite starts at $5 per email address per month; I think asking for free email accounts is beyond the product offering of domain registration/renewal.

And they probably want to reserve usage of their domain for email so you know it's a staff member you're dealing with, which is why google gives away gmail.com addresses, not google.com addresses.

Here are three less expensive email options for you:

1\. get a VM and install exim/postfix 2\. OpenSRS [https://opensrs.com/services/hosted- email/](https://opensrs.com/services/hosted-email/) 3\. AWS workmail [https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/](https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/)

<comment><USER21> To be fair he was asking for exciting and meaningful ways to make it better.

> And they probably want to reserve usage of their domain for email so you > know it's a staff member you're dealing with, which is why google gives away > gmail.com addresses, not google.com addresses.

These inboxes would be for your custom domain that you registered, not @cloudflare.com for everyone. I used that for his because it sounds like he works there.

Yours would be firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Still no U2F? C'mon CF, how hard can it be for an org the size of yours.

</comment><comment><USER24> The registration cost for domains is trivial (for most common TLDs): $8/year or $35/year - how much is $27/year worth to you and your company?

The primary cost for domains is potential downtime. How much does a day of downtime cost you and your company? I don't want to think about it either.

The next most significant cost is labor - your time and your business' delays when dealing with the registrar over service and support issues.

Both of these problems are solved with available, responsive, highly effective support. If it goes down, you want to reach someone right away who has the skill to quickly solve the problem and who is empowered to do whatever is necessary to bring it back up. And for lesser issues, quality support means you spend less time solving problems, which not only saves you time and frustration but reduces delays for your work that depends on the problem, and for other people depending on you and people depending on those people. It's the difference between spending days trying to communicate with someone who turns out not to understand the technology anyway, and then you have to figure out a solution yourself and coax them into implementing it, and communicating with someone who answers immediately and says 'I got it', explains the tech to you - and you don't bother to remember it because they already know it.

I don't see support, the most important capability of a registrar (besides basic competence) IMHO, mentioned in Cloudflare's announcement. What is the support story?

EDIT: Added exposition

<comment><USER9> We provide email support to all of our customers. I believe free customers see a response within 8 hours on average (we have teams in SF, Austin, London, and Singapore, to cover every timezone). That 8 hours can become as little as 30 minutes for customers who also subscribe to our Pro or Business plans, or use our Custom Domain Security product.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the update. For comparison, I pay ~$35/year and get skilled, empowered, responsive phone support within maybe five minutes of calling. I've never needed them to pull off a miracle so I don't know how truly empowered they are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I would never use Cloudflare. They hide spammers and refuse to do anything about them. The same mass spammer will register site after site for months, sending snowshoe spam, and cloudflare refuses to do anything. At one point this was taking up about 80% of our incoming spam, and most of it was getting through spam filters due to the snowshoeing. You could see the same registration info for hundreds of domains over months, all sending spam, but cloudflare doesn't give a shit.

The only solution I found was to put a 15 minute delay on all incoming email from a cloudflare domain, then do a second check of the blacklists. This solved the problem, as the sending ips (not cloudflare) tended to get blacklisted within 15 minutes.

In my mind if you're hiding people's websites behind your "cloud", you have a responsibility to kick off the spammers.

<comment><USER17> How do you have your MTA check if a domain is hosted through Cloudflare, and what blacklists do you use? I think I'd like to do this, too.

<comment><USER26> If you've ever ran Postfix on a public-facing MX host, you're probably familiar with so-called "restrictions" like "check_client_access", "check_recipient_access", and "check_sender_access".

There are also several other (seemingly lesser known) restrictions available, such as "check_sender_a_access", "check_client_mx_access", and "check_helo_ns_access" (plus similar variations you can likely think of) that you can use to take action based upon things like the IP address(es) listed in the A RR for the client MTA's hostname, the hostname(s) listed in the MX RRs for the client MTA's IP address, and/or the authoritative DNS servers of the domain name provided by the client MTA during the HELO/EHLO phase.

Imagine a spammer that had hundreds of domain names, all of which used her own DNS servers, jack.ns.example.com and jill.ns.example.com. Using check_sender_ns_access, for example, you can quickly and easily reject all mail where the domain name in the envelope from address uses one of these authoritative DNS servers.

If you get creative, you can come up with some really effective combinations that are actually pretty simple.

[0]: [http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html](http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html)

<comment><USER25> Well, this is the problem with cloudflare...you can't block cloudflare because there are so many legitimate domains hosted there. The 15 minute delay followed by a second blacklist check is the best solution I've come up with (it seems to work almost 100% of the time from what I can tell).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> While I'm sure few of us would have controversial domains, let's remember that Cloudflare have removed the DNS records of sites that they didn't like in the past[0].

[0] - [https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily- stormer/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/)

<comment><USER28> That's misleading. They removed the records of one site. Not "sites". And they did it because that site was claiming that CloudFlare providing them services meant that CloudFlare secretly supported their (hate-based) ideology.

And it's also worth pointing out that CloudFlare wasn't the only company terminating services for Storm Front. GoDaddy dropped them, then Google dropped them (and their YouTube account), then Tucows dropped them after just a few hours, and then finally CloudFlare dropped them.

Or to put it another way, CloudFlare has dropped one single site. Pretty much any other competing service will have dropped numerous sites. CloudFlare's dropping of The Daily Stormer is really only interesting in that it was a violation of CloudFlare's previously-stated policies of only dropping clients that are breaking the law.

<comment><USER29> And, perhaps more importantly, Cloudflare admitted that was a mistake and promised that it wouldn't happen again. (IIRC.)

<comment><USER30> I've been trying to watch these issues and not seen anything that suggests they won't do it again. If you have some evidence of this, please post it.

In fact I think it more important to point out that the incident proved they can and will do such a thing, and will have less of an argument should someone stick a piece of paper to their head and tell them to do it more often.

I like cloudflare and appreciate all these cool things they are doing with with other's (Google's, Micorsoft's and Baidu's ?) money... however the old playbook of get big and entrenched then start to bleed your captive customers is getting rather old.

Wall street pressure has made godaddy much worse in my experience, and I have seen nothing that says cloudflare has done anything to prevent these things from happening again.

Whichever registrar is keeping stormfront as a customer is likely more resilient. (would like to know which (tucows?) reseller is the one.)

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I hope cloudflare is already setting up ways to split their company into cloudflare US, cloudflare CA, cloudflare UK, cloudflare JP, IN, etc etc.. as I think it's the only way to prevent mass takedowns that are likely coming in the future.

<comment><USER30> Days after posting about the need for cloudflare (and others) to decentralize / split up; and there is this article in the Guardian for the UK: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/30/we- can...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/30/we-cant-stop- spread-of-hate-get-tough-with-technology-giants-jo-cox)

Equating cloudflare tech with nazi bouncers, and killing. Needing to be used to shutdown sites.

with things like this: >> Cloudflare has built "edge servers" – data centres that store content locally. There are 30 in Europe, including one in London and one in Manchester. The British government cannot regulate the worldwide web, but it could enforce the law in Britain. The anti-fascists at Hope not Hate begged ministers to make Cloudflare's British operations comply with anti-Nazi legislation.

>> Cloudflare, by contrast, is enabling men who want to kill, not argue.

There was a time when the tech was not easily understood, and the argument of dumb pipes was kind of legit. It seems that time is over, in no small part because tech has not been sticking to their principals (imho).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I really wish I could find a good solution for generic wildcard forwarding of email my registrar provides

I'd move everything to CloudFlare instantly if I could find a way to get *@mydomain.com for all mess of domains without having to run my own email server or pay a bunch of money per domain.

<comment><USER32> You could probably use Mailgun with a routing rule to map *@yourdomain.com to a single email address.

<comment><USER33> Is that free?

Some domain registrars offer wildcard domain forwarding for free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is Cloudflare profitable?

I like their service, but given all the freebies that don't generate revenue, I can't help but wonder if they are going to be around for another 5 years before transferring my domains to them.

<comment><USER35> > Is Cloudflare profitable?

CloudFlare has been profitable since 2014[1]:

> CloudFlare has raised more than $72 million in funding, with a $50 million > round in 2012, valuing the company at $1 billion. That last slug of equity > is still in the bank, says Prince; the company says it just had its first > cash-flow-positive quarter with revenue, estimated to be around $40 million > by year-end, growing 450% year over year.

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/07/30/cloudfla...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/07/30/cloudflare- protection/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is great.

I have used Namecheap as a registrar and Cloudflare as DNS for many years.

I just registered for Early Access and was placed in Wave 1 estimated for Mid- October. I happily donated to Girls Who Code anyway.

<comment><USER37> I am a customer of Namecheap and Cloudflare too, and though I'm a happy Cloudflare customer, Namecheap has given me no reason to leave.

That being said, the company I work for I think I will begin transferring over to Cloudflare as a registrar, simply because we have hundreds of sites already on Cloudflare's NS, and moving them over to Cloudflare is much easier to sell than moving them over to Namecheap, which is something I had pitched but could never justify.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This sounds great. Hopefully the TLD coverage is extensive, I dislike having my domains split across multiple registrars based on their supported extensions.

<comment><USER39> We want to help you consolidate those! Full list here for TLDs supported at launch, but we're busy working to add more before then. [https://www.cloudflare.com/tld-policies/](https://www.cloudflare.com/tld- policies/)

<comment><USER40> Gah, you don't have .je domains. I have a charity one there which I have to use gandi.net for and it's driving me nuts...

<comment><USER41> Likewise, .sh domains are pretty popular but an incredible pain to deal with. I managed to transfer mine to Hover, but it's expensive and buggy (you can't update your registration address, for example; you get an "internal server error").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think this is pretty great. Apparently a .com is going to run you only $8.03 right now.

I already use Cloudflare for some things, and like to keep my web presence diversified, so I probably won't move my main domains to Cloudflare just to maintain "separation of powers", but there's definitely some "own the other TLDs of these"-type domains that I have which I may hand off to Cloudflare to save money.

</comment><comment><USER43> Awesome!

I hope you don't mind me ranting a bit about custom domains

> Custom Domain Protection for Cloudflare Registrar, available on the > Enterprise Plan, protects your organization from domain hijacking with > exclusively out-of-band verification of any changes to your Registrar > account.

This is what keeps me locked into Google and other services. I just can't trust my custom domain, if I'm targeted by any semi competent attacker it WILL be hijacked. That you're offering this service only makes my suspicions stronger. I want to use your services but that's a showstopper. It's not your fault, of course, all registrars face the same issues. You need so many different factors to make the process secure it's not even funny, and you said it yourself: "That, obviously, doesn't scale".

A few years ago one of my customers domain was stolen by contacting the registrar support (one of the big ones, always recommended around here). They even had a scan of his passport. With so many data leaks, even from your own government, how do you even protect against these kind of things? His life for the next few months were living hell.

<comment><USER9> I'm sorry to hear that, it sounds horrible. We had a very similar situation several years ago which led to the development of our original Registrar.

All I can tell you is the 'custom' in Custom Domains refers to the idea that you can set whatever security policy you would like. That includes restricting who can change your domain to a list of people you can count on one hand who each have a personal relationship with you. If you want a policy which requires a photo of you with today's newspaper in it to change a domain, that's probably something which can be arranged.

Just to clarify for readers, this is the Custom Domain plan, which is the Enterprise version of the Registrar we are launching today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Tucows made hover.com to try and solve this exact problem. How does this differ?

<comment><USER14> Price: $8.03 vs $14.99

<comment><USER45> All my domains are with Hover. Good customer support, reasonable UI, 2FA. I'm pretty happy with them.

Sure, it's a little more expensive, but I actually like the no upsell, stable prices, no coupon codes etc..

Most importantly, there's a number to call. I've never had to call it in my 7 years with them, but I'm glad it's there for emergencies.

A domain is so, so important, I don't see "we're a few bucks cheaper" as a selling point.

<comment><USER46> I mean, that's literally the same thing CF is doing here. No upsell, stable prices (at cost) and obviously no coupon codes.

<comment><USER45> Yes. But will they have a number to call? Can they pay support staff if they're selling domains at cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Anyone here know if Cloudflare plans to let non-customers to transfer their domains to Cloudflare? Especially, if it's a personal domain? I purchased a domain from GoDaddy and host a blog. But they have been up selling and charging me needlessly. I imagine it's a headache for Cloudflare to support personal domains like GoDaddy does, but I really hope they do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. As soon as we are through the Early Access period.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> For the last ten years+ I've done all my domain-stuff through Dynadot, and all that time I have been mystified that these guys aren't far better known than they appear to be. Prices are decent, comprehensible, and stable. UX is okay. Not spectacular, but absolute useable. Great flexibility with whois records. I have needed support _once_ in those ten years, and that was my own bloody fault for having forgotten which birthday I signed up with. Even so, help was prompt, polite, and efficient.

Looked in at the competition from time to time - NameCheap, GoDaddy, whoever - just to see what I might be missing out on. The experience was always sobering and ugly to look at, and every time, I ended up dragging my new domain over to Dynadot.

</comment><comment><USER49> I am excited about this announcement, and look forward to a registar who takes security seriously.

> But why should registrars charge any markup over what the TLDs charge? That > seemed as nutty to us as certificate authorities charging to run a bit of > math. When we see a broken market on the Internet we like to do something > about it.

That is not a broken market, it's actually free-market economics and business. Charging a markup for a service litterally is how many companies operate. I don't have a problem with it, and because it's a free market it allows CloudFlare to disrupt it.

</comment><comment><USER50> Interesting. Wonder if they'll support punycode domains - either for internationalisation or for emoji.

I tried to get a .中国 domain, bet fell afoul of the "unique" restrictions that my reseller encountered.

<comment><USER51> .中国 is the country-code top-level domain for China, and has its own set of country-specific rules that they have devised.

Emoji is illegal according to the IETF IDN specification. Some naive clients allow it (i.e. don't follow the standard) but ICANN rules prohibit registries allowing registration of labels that are disallowed by the standard.

<comment><USER52> If you convert unicode to punycode it's fine? So displaying punycode TLD as unicode is fine as well? If all previous has been true then unicode being displayed as unicode can't be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Very interesting.

I sure hope that when they go live that don't force people to use Cloudflare's nameservers.

As I've mentioned before I use Uniregistry and I'm quite happy with them, but at the end of the day, how do you trust your domain register when uncertain things that often have no written policy happen (someone impersonating you to hijack your domains, someone filing bogus abuse/UDRP notices to get your personal information despite using a WHOIS privacy service, etc.)

I'd be curious what other users think of the second part.

</comment><comment><USER54> I've been shy of purchasing a domain name for years ever since I did an availability search on a registrar's site only to discover that the domain had been "reserved" _a few milliseconds before my search_ and would therefore cost more.

It was so obviously shady that I just backed away and have been waiting ever since for some other naming system to become viable.

Meanwhile, this announcement is a ray of sunshine from behind the Cloudflare. (Sorry for the pun! I coudn't resist.)

<comment><USER20> CloudFlare doesn't say they wouldn't do the same (although I believe they won't).

I don't really believe when people claim the registrars registered the domains themselves when they typed it in a search box. For example, it costs the registrars around $8 to register a .com, even for themselves. They make $1-2 profit from a purchase, and I would say spending $8 hoping the same user who searched it will be locked in is a risky gamble.

Sure, one can out a real human to assess the domain searches and try to lock users in, but it's still a gamble.

<comment><USER54> It was years ago and I can't remember the details, but I remember I used some registrar's domain-name-availability widget and somehow the name had been "reserved" (not registered) in a way that meant they would change me more money, and I was somehow able to find some other thing that showed the reservation had happened right around the moment I searched.

I'm sorry I can't give better details, but I remember clearly the sense of "Now that's pretty fishy..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> What about email hosting? Gandi includes 5 email accounts with every registration, while most other registrars charge for each account. Email is a basic need.

<comment><USER20> It is a basic need, but they are pretty distinct features. Registrars today sprinkle features such as email hosting, authoratice DNS hosting, email forwarding, SSL certificates (lol, I know), web site builders, etc for more profit.

I really hope CloudFlare registrar will be a proper stripped down registrar. They offer you domains for the wholesale price, and it's too much to ask for email hosting.

<comment><USER55> Ok, makes sense. I learned about [https://opensrs.com/services/hosted- email/](https://opensrs.com/services/hosted-email/) from another thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Meh.

I am mainly using italian company Tophost to register my domains, and domains usually cost cost 5.99€+ vat. And they're still making profit from that. So I kinda call bs on this "no added fees".

OTOH, I have to say that Tophost is not the prettiest or the coolest, but so far I had no real issue and the price is low.

However, it's nice to see another player joining the game.

Regarding the $0.99 domain... Didn't it sound alarming that you pay a domain so little?

<comment><USER57> From Tophost: "solo 1 euro in più per .com". So it's 6.99€ ~= $8.10; seven cents more than Cloudflare.

In any case, the Verisign fee is not hard to confirm; it would be weird for them to lie about it: [https://investor.verisign.com/news-releases/news- release-det...](https://investor.verisign.com/news-releases/news-release- details/verisign-announces-increase-comnet-domain-name-fees-0)

<comment><USER56> Indeed, only seven cents more: do you really think Tophost and similar (including Coudflare) are living off those seven cents per domain?

<comment><USER57> I think they are living off upsales. I mean, CL already has _free_ plans. Why would an at-cost plan be unbelievable?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Do you support .io, .eu and .fr?

</comment><comment><USER59> > "I love my domain registrar." Has anyone ever said this?

Yes, pretty much every Hover customer?

(Most people don't even care about this, but) they were late with DNSSEC support though, and I transferred to Google Domains because of that, using a VPN because it wasn't officially available in my country. After a couple years, Google Domains told me to GTFO, went back to Hover and now they did have DNSSEC support :)

</comment><comment><USER60> Are you planning on exposing a registration and domain search API that can be used to purchase domains and set them up with zones automatically?

<comment><USER39> Yes, we are planning on releasing those features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> This sounds great but i'm surprised more people aren't recommending AWS as a modern "upsell free" alternative? Their prices are good, can be secured with TFA, solid APIs, etc. That specific part of the management console isn't amazing but it's powerful and if you're using it a lot you should probably automate, right?

</comment><comment><USER62> I have a number of domains with Namecheap and these comments are worrying me. Thinking about moving over but is there an easy way to port all records? Some of domains have multiple txt and mx records associated with them and a bunch of other values that would be a pain to manually rezone.

</comment><comment><USER38> Looks like there's a bug with the wait list, once you sign up don't visit the page again or it registers you again in a later wave!

On further investigation it seems to be throwing 502 errors and then saying Wave 8, so maybe it's just a UI bug.

<comment><USER9> We'll track it down, thanks r1ch!

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I don't care much about the price, but if Cloudflare can operate a domain registrar that doesn't suck, it will be enough for me to move. All domain registrars I tried universally sucked, some less than others, but still.

</comment><comment><USER64> AWS is a Registrar. You create account to use only this and nothing else.

</comment><comment><USER65> Hmm, this might serve as a great alternative to Google Domains.

</comment><comment><USER66> How does CloudFlare cover payment processing fees?

<comment><USER14> As a big company, they pay their processor(s) far less than you or I pay Stripe or Ayden.

For the marketing dynamite of being the only $8.03 "at-cost" registrar, they are going to take a payment processing hit of around ten to fifteen cents per domain. They could shift that cost to the price, but then they would lose those invaluable bragging rights.

The point is not that customers save a few cents, but the absolute transparency of paying exactly the registry cost + the ICANN tax. The simple math of $7.85 + 18 cents implicitly suggests that you are dealing with an utterly fair company: not a penny more, not a penny less. $8.03 will gain the attention of the big companies they want to attract in a way that $8.13, $8.18 or $8.20 never could. In this context, $8.03 is actually a far more powerful price than $8.

There are plenty of other costs associated with running a registrar, not just payment processing fees, but the whole thing is intended as a loss-leader to attract new users and coax their existing, non-paying users into a paying relationship. From there, with a credit card on file, it becomes far easier to sell them higher-margin services.

It will also deepen their relationship with their existing paying users, making it a lot harder for competitors (present or future) to lure them away.

When you consider the cost of customer acquisition through normal marketing channels, positioning themselves as the only "at-cost" registrar is a stroke of genius. Reminiscent of Apple disrupting the phone business, Cloudflare have chosen to disrupt a particularly messy, flaky industry that no customer loves. If they manage to pull this off at the $8.03 price, it will catapult Cloudflare to a whole new level.

<comment><USER66> This is actually incredible from a standpoint that most people and businesses have a very limited number of domains, making margins of say $2 a year on 5 domains moot.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, it is not about the $10 that the 5-domain company might save, it is about trust, about Cloudflare positioning itself as a fair dealer that is not out to nickel and dime you.

Of course, once that relationship has been established, Cloudflare is in prime position to eventually make hundreds or thousands of dollars per year from that company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What are the supported TLDs going to be? I.e. codes, app, ca? WHOIS protection?

<comment><USER39> We'll support 224 TLDs at launch! Full list here: [https://www.cloudflare.com/tld-policies/](https://www.cloudflare.com/tld- policies/) And you'll be able to redact your personal information from Whois with us, too.

<comment><USER20> This is a pretty extensive TLD List, specially considering CloudFlare has to directly deal with the registries than being a reseller of some commercial registrar (like enom).

<comment><USER67> Most of them are from Donuts, who have a huge number of TLDs. In fact, looks like the only non-Donuts domains are com, net, org, and info, so only four registries.

It's not surprising, dealing with all the various registries (especially for ccTLDs) is probably one of the harder things to scale when spinning up a new registrar. Even Amazon Route53 uses resellers for some TLDs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Security wise, are you on par with MarkMonitor?

<comment><USER9> Our Custom Domain Protection is even more secure than MarkMonitor, but the overhead of doing that also makes it almost as expensive. Our at-cost standard domain service includes as much security as we can build into it without a large human component being required (2fa, etc.).

<comment><USER38> I've been trying to find a registrar with more-than-normal security without much luck. I want a registrar that will stand up to a sophisticated social engineering attack using leaked documents and personal information etc. The big names like MarkMonitor start at like $50k, mid-range ones like CSC leave me with an uneasy feeling given they do so many things with a clunky web UI and over email. I don't really even know any other options in this space.

One option that could scale well with the standard service is allowing customers to upload photo ID / business registration etc and locking down the account so that customer support can never touch anything. Should the customer lose their password / 2FA etc, then they would need to physically go to an office location for ID verification (and a $xxx inconvenience fee). I've had some limited success implementing this system with conventional registrars but I would be more comfortable if it were an actual product offering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Will there be an API for the registrar service?

<comment><USER70> I've used OPEN SRS with a good experience in the past. [https://opensrs.com/integration/api/](https://opensrs.com/integration/api/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Generate All Permutations of a Passphrase? - <AUTHOR> I cannot remember the exact typing of my old laptop's passphrase. It is encrypted, after an hour of random typing I got the passphrase once and am now stuck on my Linux Mint 17 or 18 login screen, faced with the same passphrase.
It's something like this:
SimplePhraseOfMine  with the possibility of upper/lowercase and s=5 o=0 e=3
I've tried writing all variations by hand, but that is tedious and I've not gotten it. I tried messing around with Crunch wordlist generator, but that doesn't seem to do exactly what I need (keep that phrase intact).
Is there a program to do this? <comment><USER2> One option:

[https://github.com/ryepdx/pyethrecover](https://github.com/ryepdx/pyethrecover) does something very similar to what you're asking for, in the context of remembering an ethereum wallet password. In your case, the password-spec file would probably contain something like:

``` [ ('S','s','5'), ('I','i'), ('M','m'), ('P','p'), ...etc ] ``` See the comments [https://github.com/ryepdx/pyethrecover/blob/master/password_...](https://github.com/ryepdx/pyethrecover/blob/master/password_spec.txt) for details.

The overall code is not complex: it should be straightforward to strip out the word generation from the wallet testing and re-purpose it for your needs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you I'll get looking at this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's probably not difficult to generate the possible permutations but there may be a very large number. For example if there are 20 characters in the phrase upper/lower case alone gives about 1 million possibilities.

Also I'm not sure how you could try them automatically unless you have sshd running on the laptop.

I didn't understand the meaning of "s=5 o=0 e=3".

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I figured I can look through and narrow it down by hand too. s=5 o=0 e=3 meant it looks more like SimPl3pHrase0fMine So, a few letters have the option of upper/lower/number replacement

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess you don't want to reorder the letters.

Are the uppercase possible only at the beginning of each word, or it can be in LaTeXcase?

<comment><AUTHOR> It will look more like LaTeXcase

I want to find all variables of upper/lower case & if certain letters are swapped out for numbers something like 5imPl3PaSs0fMin3

<comment><USER4> You must count how many special letters (like e, o, s) you have, and how many normal letters (all the other) you have.

In the example there are 6 special letters (two s's, one o and three e's). And there are 12 normal letters.

The total number of combinations is 2^12 * 3^6 = 2,985,984

It's in the brute force range, so you can get the list if you want using the programs linked in other comments. But password verifications have usually some protection to prevent brute force, like using a slow algorithm and adding some delays between tries.</comment></comment></comment>


CPUShare: allows anyone to sell their spare CPU cycles - <AUTHOR> http://www.cpushare.com/ <comment><USER2> The deeper problem here is that loosely-coupled CPUs have a value approximating 0. Your unused CPU cycles have absolutely no value to you, so what you are going to see if a fast race to the bottom in terms of price. This sounds great, particularly if you need some sort of embarrassingly parallel task performed, but most of the people providing the CPU cycles will have an artificially inflated sense of their value (e.g. "I paid X for this system and if I participate in this scheme for some period of time I should expect to get X/time back") and are not going to stick around when they learn that in return for the overhead of the cpushare system and bandwidth costs they will incur the CPU provider will end up with diddly-squat in return.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if a virtual machine is being started? How do I make sure no harmful code is executed on my machine?

<comment><USER4> When you think about it, what does your web browser do? It is downloading someone else's code (Javascript, Flash...) and executing it on your machine. Somehow your trust the browser. Why not trust the virtual machine? Maybe if the company only allows Javascript to be executed on the virtual machine, people might feel more comfortable about the idea.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I mean, just look how well that worked out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From reading their blog and a little googling, they currently are using SECCOMP - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seccomp> \- which is a process restriction mechanism that nobody really seems to trust.

They are working towards using KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) which would be a Virtual Box running on your local workstation.

</comment><comment><USER7> The copy on the front page makes it sound like a scam, even if it's not (and I have no idea either way). It looks like they're trying hard to tell you that the money is real, which of course makes you wonder if it's really unlikely that you can earn real money.

</comment><comment><USER8> This site does look suspicious. When you go to the orders page FireFox says: Secure Connection Failed www.cpushare.com uses an invalid security certificate.

<comment><USER9> It's a free cert from cacert.org hence it's not trusted...

The "About" page claims it's a research project which is precisely what it looks like to me. What's suspicious about that?

<comment><USER10> From the webpage: "Feel free to join CPUShare to immediately start earning your first CPUCoins and to potentially earn real money by selling your CPU resources."

Anytime real money is involved or potentially involved, folks should be using the defacto certification companies that browser all agree on.

<comment><USER11> CACert isn't really unrecognized, it's just that they haven't worked out a deal with Firefox. There's a 5 year old bug about this, and they're just waiting for the company to do something before they add them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is anyone here interested in buying CPU cycles?

I wonder if there's a market of buyers. The idea is cool though.</comment>


Obama and Romney tackle 14 top science questions - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/obama-and-romney-tackle-14-top-science-questions-1.11355

<comment><USER2> I was really enjoying the lack of political posts on Hacker News. Everywhere else on the Internet is inundated with blood pressure-raising political opinions. Now the sewage seems to have seeped in here to...

<comment><USER3> I don't have a problem with it being on Hacker News. It's not an inspiring speech by a Texan mayor, it's not about marijuana, and it's not an indictment of something racist from 20 years ago. The article consists of real answers by the real candidates to real questions: a good hacker might find it interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I thought they asked them stuff like 'What's Faraday's law of induction?' or 'What's the 30th element on the periodic table'?

</comment><comment><USER5> I understand why they put the responses on the left and right, but that really made the article hard to read, especially since the candidates often had different text lengths for each of the questions.

</comment><comment> B-Con Inane length stats for their answers:

Romney:

* Words: 5,031

* Paragraphs: 70

Obama:

* Words: 3,242

* Paragraphs: 35</comment>


What to write down when you're reading to learn - <AUTHOR> https://acesounderglass.com/2020/06/10/what-to-write-down-when-youre-reading-to-learn/ <comment><USER2> >The single most helpful thing in figuring out what to write down was noticing when my reading was slowing down (...)

> If I have one piece of advice, it's "learn to recognize the subtle drag of > something requiring your attention."

This really resonated with me, but perhaps not in the exact same way as the author. I've recently become more consciously aware of how I react when reading more complex text or parsing more complex points.

I read along at a fairly constant speed, not having much trouble following the author's mental model. But at some point the complexity seems to grow beyond what I can comfortably hold in my head without stopping and really trying to parse what's on the page in front of me.

I can react to this difficulty in two ways:

1\. I let the inertia carry me past the sentence, not really grokking it, instead it becomes a sort of buzz in my mental model (or a 'drag' in the author's words), something like step 2 in south park's famous step 1: do something - step 2: ??? - step 3: profit. I continue on with the text, but now my understanding of it is compromised.

2\. I recognize what I'm doing, stop reading, and start re-reading the sentence much more slowly. Look at the surrounding text for illuminating context (sometimes this snag isn't because it's an overly complex point, it's just a poorly structured sentence and the next line clears it up). I may need to start taking notes to parse it.

My problem is I'm quite lazy (and I'm usually reading in bed to relax) and tend to default to strategy 1. But I'm trying to change that bad habit and react with strategy 2.

<comment><USER3> Maybe we're using different words for the same thing. But I've found that when I get "stuck" like that, it's because I'm trying to fit too much into my working memory, and I start losing track of it and am unable to recall parts of it, leading to confusion.

So I do what you say, except it's much more deliberate than just "slow down" and "re-read". I try to break the concepts down into chunks, and focus on being able to recall specific things about each chunk. First I convince myself that each chunk makes sense in isolation, and then what its "contract" is (how it interacts with related concepts and fits into the bigger picture). When I can easily recall both of those in a coherent way, I'm ready to move on. I use a variety of ways to practice recall, depending on whatever's most ergonomic (Anki, study sheet, deliberate practice, etc.). Sometimes I find that I lack enough understanding of other concepts to really understand a chunk, so I have to go recursively do the same thing for other concepts.

So I see it as more of a memory problem and not "understanding". I don't really know what "understanding" means, to me it's all just memory--memorizing _why_ something is true/makes sense (by relating it to stuff I already know/memorized), and then memorizing _how_ that thing fits into other contexts. If I can't load that stuff quickly into my working memory, then I don't "understand" it.

<comment><USER2> It's a different phenomena.

I experience the running out of RAM problem that you describe as well and take basically the same approach to you. That's much closer to how I read code.

My issue really is just a tendency to keep reading even if I didn't actually parse the sentence properly. It seems to be a complexity threshold rather than a volume one.

I think it's just what happens when I try to read a text at the top of, or beyond, my reading level. I imagine that anyone who struggled in school with reading comprehension may have a similar experience, or perhaps its like that feeling when you read a garden path sentence[1].

I struggled to even recognize that I was facing this issue because I found reading very easy during school. Facing a text that was too difficult to instantly parse and understand was rare enough that I never had to develop the mental tools to deal with it.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden- path_sentence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The best information on this topic I've come across is contained in Mortimer Adler's "How to read a book".

Highly recommended if you're doing any non-fiction reading.

<comment><USER5> Here [0] you can find a decent summary of the book. For me the single most important point that the book taught me was that it's ok to write in books, they don't have to be in pristine condition without any text in them. The white pages in books are meant specifically to write on. They explain this point of the book in a separate blog post [1] for some reason. Anyway... I never used to write in books, now this has become a central part of my learning process. The physical act of scribbling a question mark next to unclear parts, rephrasing what is meant and so on has helped me understand complex material faster as well as made it easier to refer to at a later point (as there is no need to worry about any notes getting lost).

[0] [https://fs.blog/how-to-read-a-book/](https://fs.blog/how-to-read-a-book/) [1] [https://fs.blog/2015/01/marginalia/](https://fs.blog/2015/01/marginalia/)

<comment><USER6> Do you know of any android app that I can take notes of what is on the screen?

<comment><USER7> Email

Take a screenshot/copy text. Paste in any email client. Hit send.

I have a preconfigured default bcc address so never have to (mis)type email address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I always used to tell myself "You can never be sure you've really understood something until you try to recreate it". It started from my university days when I noticed that stuff I read and thought "yeah I got this" later turned out to be anything but, when I had to do it without the textbook at hand. Since then, I've always kept the habit. There's literally a pen and notepad two inches to the right of my keyboard. There is also a terminal open always, where I can do this:

      $ learned
        > about Walder's law: the bulk of discussion on programming language
        > design centers on syntax (which, for purposes of the argument, is
        > considered a solved problem), as opposed to semantics.

That's an actual example from two days ago. "learned" is just a shell script:

      #!/bin/bash
      read text
      echo -e "\n$text" >> ~/Dropbox/writing/notes/learned.txt

As you can see it auto syncs to dropbox.

<comment><USER9> That's a really simple but great idea. Thank you for that. I can't tell you how many times I've learned something while working but have been too lazy to find my notes and figure out which note to put it in. And so I never end up making a note of it in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The answer depends on what you're trying to learn and for what purpose, as it will dictate what learning strategies you utilize.

For example, if you're studying to retain information for educational purposes (and reproduce in an exam environment) then research has indicated that reading and rereading have the lowest utility (return on time invested) in the 10 common strategies used by students. The strategy offering the highest utility was practice testing under exam conditions.

If you are reading to learn about a topic that requires you to retain information in a sequential manner, then using learning techniques such as a memory palace can be helpful. This is a technique that allows you to picture a room you know very well and associate blocks of information with objects in that room while you are learning. It's a very common way to deal with performance anxiety which manifests as blank memory.

I'm happy to share some thoughts on potential approaches if you offer some clarity on what your desired outcome is.

<comment><USER11> Is there a list of those 10 common strategies? Just out of curiosity.

<comment><USER10> Yes, there is. This is an informal article discussing the strategies: [https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/dunlosky...](https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/dunlosky.pdf)

And this is the more formal research: [https://pcl.sitehost.iu.edu/rgoldsto/courses/dunloskyimprovi...](https://pcl.sitehost.iu.edu/rgoldsto/courses/dunloskyimprovinglearning.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> First round of reading about a topic I don't write down anything because of flow-problems the author mentioned. It also helps with getting a view beyond the horizon. Then I try to write a good summary. Writing something really helps with memorizing. Curiously, I think the effect is much weaker when typing something on a machine.

Rereading my summary gives me an impression of how well I understood a topic. If it is just incoherent rumblings, I probably should revisit the topics in question. So it can also be a good self test.

Such an iterative approach takes time though...

<comment><USER13> I'm wondering how people find the time for that during college courses. Mine always moved at a pace where read throughs were in direct competition with the homework.

</comment></comment><comment> awinter-py > I mentioned "losing flow" as a cost of note taking in my opening, but I'm > not actually convinced that's a cost. Breaking flow also means breaking the > author's hold on you and thinking for yourself

this is the best writing about reading I've read recently

</comment><comment><USER14> "Write down anything taking up mental RAM" is the sagest advice

<comment><USER15> And this seems like a place where (at least at some point) getting the notes into a place like org-mode where they could be assigned appropriate labels could be useful: something taking up mental RAM might not be fully tied to the thing you're reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My principle: "Instead of taking notes from ideas contained in a book, take notes of the ideas _you_ get when reading a book"

</comment><comment><USER17> > Writing down a thing you've read (/heard/etc) improves your memory and > understanding, at the cost of disrupting the flow of reading.

Flow disruption, in the case of self-paced learning, is likely a good thing, even though it feels like it's slowing you down. Even though it _is_ slowing you down. The act of getting back into the flow requires some level of retrieval from long term memory, and retrieval is practice at remembering. So anything that helps you practice remembering what you just read is useful, and anything that helps you read more pages per hour but does nothing to change how much you remember per hour is wasteful.

</comment><comment><USER18> References.

Seriously. I read a lot and I would completely drown if I was taking notes of anything that I am interested with. The only thing I really want to note is my own index system where I have a document with keywords and list of links, books, documents, other resources where I have seen this thing. Rarely a small note -- once I find the reference I am usually able to recall what the reference was about.

I have two types of reference stores.

1\. My global index. This is one bag of huge amount of keywords and links. The storage works like this: I enter the reference (which is basically any free text, usually a link). I enter a number of words, terms I might be trying to look it up in the future, name of context I am researching this reference for (for example name of project I am working on atm). Later when I don't remember the reference I may be able to recall I have worked on some particular project and use the name of the project to help me find the reference.

2\. My project index. This is typically a document listing design/decision details I made for a particular project with references to materials. For example, I might have decided to use a particular board component and then have a reference to digikey/mouser part, reference to specs, reference to any number of designs I found on the internet that include the part, etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> Write down anything that seemed surprising or otherwise non-obvious on first reading. Even better: rewrite the surprising parts in your own words, once you have understood them, in a way that clearly explains to you that which you originally found puzzling, with enough context that you will get the point when you re-read your notes (note that this helps even if you never re-read these notes, because the act of paraphrasing is helpful on its own.)

</comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone use LCD drawing tablets for taking notes? I don't like using paper that much, and for anything important I prefer to have it digitized so that information can be sorted, copied, and recalled. I wonder how important it is to be able to come back to those notes, or if simply writing them down and never coming back to them would be enough.

In that case, a "dumb" LCD writing pad such as the Boogie Board would be enough. I'm not sure if I want to hassle with a more expensive and complex system such as a drawing tablet, which would be an alternative.

<comment><USER21> Check out the amazing [https://remarkable.com](https://remarkable.com) It is a bit on the expensive side of things, but seems great. (I don't have one yet)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Notes on reading are like writing: embrace brevity. There is a difference between intesting and essential. Too much noise will only dilute the important bits.

</comment><comment><USER23> To be totally honest, I have two separate note taking forms. One when I'm reading the first time through, which I could almost certainly not refer to in any form, as they are scribbled down and unintelligible. The second (and often on my second reading), I have much less comprehension from the reading, I'm taking notes to refer to.

<comment><USER24> So you immerse and get the idea while skipping on the details and then you address the details. I will try this. I find that I usually go full force, get the idea then rarely come back to notes if I take any. It's a bad habit that makes me a very poor communicator because I missing the labels. If I undwrstand something thoroughly that can form a metaphor, I can play with it in my head which kindof helps cement the idea.

Similarly, for programming I understand comcepts better by playing with some code rather than dryly following line by line on the text. I think it depends on the book, I found myself reading form SICP without much interruption. It's a certain pace that I enjoy

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Write down anything that's taking up mental RAM, whether it seems related or > interesting or not. If you find you're doing this a lot, consider you might > have a secret goal you don't know about.

Basically I do the same using Kindle, with the plus of getting everything on my email after, for reviewing.

</comment><comment><USER7> > it's much better if my sense of "this is important, record it" corresponds > with what is actually important. The real question here is "Important to > what?"

This is my Aha! moment.

</comment><comment><USER26> There was mention of an online book/site which was about writing every thing that is going on in your head. Does anyone has reference to it?

</comment><comment><USER27> I think its the best way to learn</comment>


NRF52 Debug Resurrection (Approtect Bypass) Part 2 - <AUTHOR> https://limitedresults.com/2020/06/nrf52-debug-resurrection-approtect-bypass-part-2/ <comment><AUTHOR> Part1... [https://limitedresults.com/2020/06/nrf52-debug- resurrection-...](https://limitedresults.com/2020/06/nrf52-debug-resurrection- approtect-bypass/)

...and the related discussion on HN [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485711](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485711)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Nordic Semi seems to been handling it somewhat decently now, by acknowledging the flaw officially.

[https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/pdf/in_133_v1.0.pdf](https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/pdf/in_133_v1.0.pdf)</comment>


FTC Officials Back Tesla's Right to Sell Cars Direct to Consumers - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/11/ftc-officials-back-teslas-right-to-sell-cars-direct-to-consumers/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER3> Having bought a new car recently, and having to drive 100 miles, past 4 dealerships, just to get to a dealership that was willing to give me a reasonable price (still high, but reasonable) for a car that is in low demand, I support every company's right to go around the dealerships. They are disgusting.

While sitting around waiting for 20 minutes "cooking" in a dealership waiting for the man to come back with a price for a used car, I heard 4 other salesman standing around, pretending to be customers, laughing and making fun of people who had come in to buy a car. Some pretended to be gangsters who had to "go geyt sum monnah frum muh baby mommah's couch". Another pretended to be school teachers who had to pay the down payment with 3 different checks. It was disgusting. I left after it was obvious that the man was making me wait for no reason, and when I left, he sent me a text message with a price for a base model, used car, for ABOVE the new price not 100 feet away from his desk, at the dealership next door.

It was a very abusive process. I've never been in another situation where you ask how much something costs, and they say "make an offer!"

That's like going into Walmart and asking how much a TV is, and they say "What's it worth to you?"

Gross. I felt like I was dealing with conmen from the start. I will never buy another car from a dealer.

Tesla has the power to lead the way into eliminating these middlemen monsters and I hope they see more support in that regard.

Note: I needed a pretty specific car because I'm extremely tall and I'm having back problems from having to slouch in normal sized cars. Because of this, I had limited options in the way of dealers.

<comment><USER4> Unless you're being forced to buy a car because of a wreck or something similar, you have to remember that you have 100% of the power. I've had salesman and "sales managers" laugh at my price and then chase me out as I walked out, only to call me a week later offering my price to which I told them was no longer good so it needed to be lower. I've had the finance guy literally not shaking my hand at the end of the deal and telling me never to buy a car there again (I had to correct his _mistakes_ over and over). Buying a car is war, and if you approach it that way it can be quite amusing.

Some other stories, I had a friend when buying one of his cars it was a month long negotiation. I would be in his office, the phone would ring he would pick up say "No" and just hang up on the sales guy. Pretty hilarious actually.

Another friend walked into the dealership, money in hand and told the guy a price and that he had 45 minutes before he had to go back to work. He said it was awesome watching the salesman run all over the lot in the heat, but the deal got done.

If someone does not want to negotiate, CarMax is okay. The prices are not the best, but they are clearly shown online and the buying process is dead simple.

<comment><USER5> This is true. The buyer has all the power in a car purchase, especially for a sports car or motorcycle which are nonessential to daily life. I'll tell you two stories of acquaintances. One wanted a Lamborghini, so he researched what he wanted, drew up a letter to the dealer and included a cashier check for the price he was willing to pay, and a return envelope. Initially the dealer responded in the negative, but without returning the check. Six months later his car arrived.

I accompanied another friend to a motorcycle dealer. He had previously negotiated the price of the bike and brought cash in that amount. He puts the cash on the counter, and the salesman starts running this game about how the owner really likes that bike and doesn't want to sell it, except at a higher price, and all this. The buyer reaches into the giant stack of cash -- thousands of dollars in $20 bills always seems like a lot of money -- counts out a thousand dollars, and puts it in his pocket. He says the remaining amount of money is the most he's willing to pay after hearing the salesman's story. The salesman disappears, comes back and desperately tries to close the deal at the original price, but eventually has to settle for the money that's literally on the table.

There is almost nobody more desperate than a car salesman, so dealing with them is actually pretty easy.

<comment><USER6> As much as I would like to do this to a shady used car salesman, I'm hoping I will never need purchase a car again. I'm going to use public transport, biking, walking and carsharing until self-driving cars arrive. I'm sure many millennials are in the same boat.

<comment><USER7> Not sure if you've ever heard of Carmax, but it's designed to be the opposite of what you experienced.

I used them to basically order the car I wanted over the internet. I browsed their site, found the cheapest one in their inventory, and paid to have it shipped to my local Carmax. They called me to let me know the car was there and I went and test drove it. The price was set, so no haggling, and just friendly service. It was the best experience and probably the only way i'll buy a car again.

Check it out next time... it really was surprisingly good service...

ps. I've had the car for 6 years and ended up being an overall terrific buy...

<comment><USER8> If you buy slightly nicer luxury-ish vehicles (M-series BMW, E/S class Mercedes, Audi, Porsche) the extended warranties are unbeatable. It's nice getting a Porsche Cayman rebuilt for $150 deductible because you purchased a $4500 100,000 mile warranty. Jalopnik had a write-up on a guy who bought the much maligned Range Rover and basically recouped his purchase cost in 1 or 2 warranty-covered repairs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not a single mention of "service."

The FTC, TechCrunch, and the mainstream media are ignoring another aspect of the protectionist legislation that is put in front of Tesla customers: not only can't you BUY a car in a number of states, you can't get SERVICE on one either.

For example: New Mexico. The NMADA (New Mexico Automobile Dealers Assocation) has made sure there are laws on the books that make it impossible for Tesla to not only open a store in the state, but also they can't open a service center. Even though on Tesla's own website it shows a map with a "Coming Soon" icon for a service center in Albuquerque, it really isn't coming any time soon because the law forbids Tesla from opening a service center. So owners in New Mexico are kinda screwed. Some of them don't even realize it. If you are a Tesla owner in NM, and you need service some day, you have to call Tesla and have a service person come from either Phoenix, AZ or Denver, CO -- 7+ hours away by interstate. And if your car has to be taken back to one of those service centers, you're looking at significant expense because of the flatbed transportation. Not to mention hassle.

All this to protect a bunch of sleazy old boy network car dealers who don't want Tesla educating the New Mexico public about how bad they have it with dealerships and service centers.

I wish the FTC would talk about the service angle as well.

<comment><USER10> > you're looking at significant expense because of the flatbed transportation. > Not to mention hassle.

Is it stated anywhere that this is what will happen, and the customer will be liable for the cost?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Our experience at the Tesla store was quite pleasant.

The ordering experience was literally walking to an mac in the back part of the store and bringing up teslamotors.com.

No paperwork, or shenanigans. We were actually talked down from a few options we were thinking of based on the sales person saying that they weren't quite worth the cost if it wasn't something you were interested in(leather seats, winter package).

Closest experience I've had was when I bought a Saturn ages ago. No hassle, just here's the price and features we offer.

Detroit better look out because if Elon has his way Tesla is going to eat their lunch.

<comment><USER12> Yes, you are absolutely right. But in case it isn't obvious to everyone already:

1\. Detroit as a city, and the industry that built it, is dead and gone. Nothing will bring it back. The auto dealership network across the US has tried to adapt to changing technology too many times to count, and apparently is still waaay behind.

2\. Tesla _might_ not successfully disrupt the auto industry, all by themselves. But like sharks, once there's blood in the water, it's only a matter of time. Many businesses want a piece of the US auto market -- and I mean "want" like a shark wants its next meal. I personally think Tesla is here for the long haul and has a huge first-mover advantage.

3\. The only question is what this means for the infrastructure. Refueling stations. Brick and mortar parts stores. Parts websites. Tooling industries. Inspection and emissions and repair businesses, both brick and mortar and online. Imports. Dealerships. Financing. Fleet management. Warranties. Lawsuits. US Department of Transportation regulations and the political power structure that surrounds it.

Tesla will almost certainly make some mistakes. But so far the trend has been extremely positive.

<comment><USER13> Detroit, as a city, is neither dead nor gone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What possible reason, from anyone's perspective, is there to say it's not OK for Tesla to sell their own products to people?

Is this literally 100% because the US is so corrupt that car dealers are just making laws that make them money? Or is there a sliver of an argument here that has merit?

I neither live in the US nor own a car, so the idea that Toyota can't tell you a Toyota or whatever is bewildering.

<comment><USER15> It's part of an old set of laws that were put in place to protect dealers. It kept a manufacturer from selling a market to a dealership, allowing that dealership to expand the market in the area for them and then moving into that market on their own.

Meaning, Ford sells a dealership the Los Angeles region. The dealer spends money advertising how great Fords are in the local market. Sales go up. Ford decides to open its own dealership in Los Angeles and compete directly with that dealership.

The law was useful a long time ago. However, it shouldn't apply to manufacturers who don't have dealerships that need protection. Entrenched businesses are using that law to keep out competition.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the explanation, that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "A fundamental principle of competition is that consumers – not regulation – should determine what they buy and how they buy it."

Hey how about that three-tier system for alcohol distribution? Perhaps that should go away too, yeah?

<comment><USER17> Before prohibition breweries owned the bars to the point sometimes you could only buy a single brand of beer for blocks to no end. That squeezed small breweries out of the market. When lifting prohibition, Congress created the tier system to prevent something like it from happening again.

Ken Burns' documentary about prohibition explains it really well.

<comment><USER18> That doesn't currently happen? I'm in Aus - so things are different - <USER2> certainly here there's an awful lot of pubs with only the one mega brewers beers on tap (aka - either SABMiller or Lion Nathan). In the same ways that most smaller stores have either coke or pepsi but not both. They are not _forced_ they are just _incentivised_.

<comment><USER19> I've never seen anything like that in the U.S.

<comment><USER18> Do coke and pepsi do it with smaller stores?

It's not that it's only one brand of beer. It's just that of the 10 options - they're all owned by the same mega corp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The automobile industry should be a: "sell car -> build car" business model. Eliminating the vast majority of inventory, and limiting damage from failed products.

It's absurd in premise that you can go to a dealership and look at a hundred vehicles; six of each make, of varying colors - all sitting there, with the dealership and the automaker praying they get sold.

Keep one of each model for viewing and test driving. Take orders and customizations. Pick your vehicle up in a week, save 15% (thanks to vast reduction in waste, and the elimination of the middle-man sales commission).

I had a conversation with the publisher of Forbes almost 20 years ago about this concept. It's sad so little progress has been made in that time.

<comment><USER21> It's possible to get a custom order car right now, and if you tried buying one, you'd know why it sucks. It takes __much __longer than a week to get the car, try __several __months, and that won 't magically change, it just can't. Considering that it takes over 45 hours of non-stop driving to go from Orlando to Seattle (chose a southeast point and northwest point to show how long it takes at its worst), you can see how a week might be a stretch. It would take two of those days non-stop in best conditions, leaving you with 5 days to build the car.

Hell, even buying a Tesla means you have to wait a month or two for your new car to arrive.

<comment><USER22> Teslas take a month or two just because they're backlogged. The actual production time is not that great. The total time between my car entering production in the factory and being available for me to pick up on the east coast was 12 days, of which 6 was the actual building and 6 was transporting it across the country. A week might be a stretch, but two is conceivable, and three should be quite practical. "Several months" certainly could be reduced substantially for cars that don't need to be shipped over an ocean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> US state and local politics make much more sense when you realize that in any given area, the two most powerful political interests are likely to be car dealerships and real estate developers.

<comment><USER24> An interesting thing to me, is that car dealerships start off in what's usually the edge of town (where lot space is cheapest), but are usually the last thing to go when a city expands and the area around the car lot gentrifies. It's an odd effect, that I assume has to do with the dealership managing to keep its rent down by hook or by crook.

<comment><USER25> Cities are hesitant to get rid of car dealerships because they bring in _lots_ of tax revenue.

<comment><USER26> Car dealers also tend to be the among biggest financial contributors to local politics, too.

<comment><USER24> This makes me wonder if there's clear statistical trends in municipal politics that pop out if you graph cities by number of car dealerships.

The information would be especially interesting near zero. I imagine, though, that it'd be hard to find a city in North America without any car dealerships, so it'd probably be easier to do an analysis on European countries with some cities that don't have cars at all.

<comment><USER27> > European countries with some cities that don't have cars at all.

I am not sure what cities that would be.

<comment><USER28> Venice is the only one I can think of right now. But it's definitely an outlier.

<comment><USER22> I wonder if Venice has similar stuff going on with boat dealers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If you are purchasing a new car and don't love the negotiation game, check out Costco's auto program. I got a much lower price on a new car versus what truecar.com was offering. The downside was that not many dealers participate and you didn't get to see the price until you arrived at the dealer. You didn't have to commit to the purchase. Also, make sure to sell your old car as a separate transaction (preferably a private sale if you can) to minimize dealer hijinks.

</comment><comment><USER30> Couldn't Tesla sell solely from a different state and just have a showroom in other cities? I thought that inter-state trade can't be hindered by states.

<comment><USER31> Tesla only has showrooms. Their stores are pretty much the same everywhere. There are no cars you can buy and drive off in.

In states where Tesla can sell direct to consumers, the showroom has sales people who can talk to you about buying a car, and sit next to you to answer questions as you do so at teslamotors.com.

In other states, the showroom does not have sales people. The staff can answer questions about the car, but not about purchasing (pricing, financing, etc). If you want to buy one, they direct you to visit teslamotors.com.

In no case are people in a state prevented from buying a Tesla car. The buying experience is the same everywhere: go to teslamotors.com, configure and order a car, and either pick it up or have it delivered to you after it's been manufactured.

As for the legal aspect, the federal government does have the ability to regulate interstate commerce, and federal law preempts state law. When there is no federal law, however, the states are free to regulate in that area. If Congress were to enact a law guaranteeing the right of manufacturers to sell direct to consumers, this would preempt the state laws prohibiting it, and Tesla could have sales people in all its showrooms. IANAL.

<comment><USER22> You're largely correct, but there are some pretty substantial differences in the experience.

First, Tesla does actually have some cars you can just buy and go. They're (currently?) the minority, but they're there. They're starting to sell used Teslas, and they also have "inventory cars" which are showroom, test drive, and loaner cars which have finished their corporate service and are ready to be sold.

Second, test drives are pretty key to the whole process (even if you can't test drive the specific car you buy, most people want to test the model) and even that gets caught up in this whole nonsense. Until recently, you couldn't even get a test drive in Virginia. I had to go into Maryland to try one out. Tesla had a showroom in Virginia but they couldn't even let you drive one, let alone sell you one.

Third, in states where they are allowed to sell, you can configure and purchase on site rather than online. The effect is the same, and they're basically just punching the order into the computer for you, but for people who prefer buying from a real person it can matter.

Fourth, taxes and registration are different depending on how you bought it. When I bought mine in Virginia, I had to take delivery in Maryland, and the sale was actually processed in DC. I had DC temporary tags, and I had to handle Virginia registration and pay Virginia sales tax on my own at the DMV. Now that they can sell directly in Virginia, they can handle registration and sales tax themselves, which saves a decent amount of hassle.

Finally, it can affect the post-sales experience in extreme cases. For example, New Mexico is so strict about this stuff that they won't even let Tesla open a service center. You can buy one there, but you'll have to go extremely out of your way to get it serviced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> As Clark Howard says, it can take a lot of stress out of the equation by negotiating via email. Then they can't make you wait 30 minutes or an hour as they pretend to be talking to their boss, and you can communicate at your convenience.

</comment><comment> white-flame "Tesla has long borne the brunt of these kinds of state laws, which were ostensibly first put in place to protect consumers..."

Does anybody know the backstory of this customer protection?

</comment><comment><USER33> Good. We very seriously need this.

My very first time in a dealer was in '88, and I bought a Sprint, the little 3 cylinder car, for something like $5K and change. The total finance amount was 12K! And I was young too.

Oh well, that actually was a great little commuter car, and I got much more than that 12K out of it, but knowing how shitty the dealer was just chapped my ass big. Never did forget it. Won't either.

While the kids were growing up and I was paying the house off, I really didn't see any need for new cars. Just bought reasonable used ones, mostly for cash, and that really saved me a ton. But we eventually ended up wanting an SUV for the dogs, camping, kids, friends.

During the years I was away from the dealers, I moved from a pure tech role to one with a heavy sales / consulting component. Turns out I was ready, and went to battle. The people here saying it's war really aren't kidding. I think the no bullshit fixed price dealers are OK, but that price really isn't all that good of a deal. It's just not painful. Good for them to offer a reasonable offering to the market.

Sadly, I wanted a Ford, which meant going to an older school type dealer. Slimy as hell. For what it's worth, I've put the overall strategy here on Quora: [http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-bargaining- techniques...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-bargaining-techniques- when-buying-a-car-from-a-dealer/answer/Doug-Dingus?srid=uUDp&share=1) Lots of good tips on that question overall too. Online, etc... I think the share means you can read all the question answers for that shared question.

It's an ugly process, and it took me about 8 hours to buy that car. I had to do things like when they left me, I would leave too, going to the other end of the lot after getting my free coffee, and just staying there waiting for them to trudge out there, only to walk all the way back, and do it again. It's actually funny in hindsight, but maddening at the time.

Or, I would end up in ego contests: "Are you man enough to buy this car?", to which I actually said, "Only if you aren't such a bitch I would be embarrassed to admit buying from..." good god. But that worked. Got the manager with the brass rings and went to town on the deal proper. Nothing reasonable was going to happen as long as I was dealing with the front end bruiser. Sad.

The Expedition I wanted was MSRP at something like $42K? Maybe $40. I got it for $31,500 and that's one hell of a lot of margin. My guess on the invoice on it was in the high 20's, btw and I got them to show it to me after about 4 hours. But the pain was not over!

The owner of this dealership had a very hot daughter doing contracts. She wrote one up, leaned into me hard and said, "since I know you so well already, how does this one look?" Also funny looking back, but maddening at the time! I had to cross out lots of ugly numbers, and that was because they had packed all that money back into the contract! Worse, had I not been dealing on the front end, some people probably get the ugly treatment on both, paying way too much for the car too.

Since then, I've helped a few people get cars. I ask for a percentage of what I get out of the price of car. I've gotten $1K pretty easy, with people actually wanting to pay me more, which seems to me a great indicator of just how painful dealer purchases really are.

Tesla isn't interested in any of this. They want to make a great car, ask an appropriate amount for it, and sell it to people who see the value. Nothing at all wrong with that, and if these dealer clowns had any soul at all, they would be working double overtime to build trust rather than abuse it at every turn.

There isn't anything in this process I find redeeming. Go TESLA! Edit: Actually, that's not true. If one is into the brutal sport of it, doing battle with a dealer to score a sweet price on a car they worked way too hard to sell can be gratifying, but this really isn't high value for the vast majority of people.

I'm not really a vindictive sort of person, but man! Many dealers have something ugly coming their way, and I hope they get it big. To the few out there doing a fine job of it, I'm sorry. The company they keep must be absolutely terrible.

</comment><comment><USER34> Interesting take away: " a unique new category of vehicle dubbed "autocycles." "

And this $6800 tron like gas powered tricycle with 84mpg - [https://www.eliomotors.com/](https://www.eliomotors.com/)

<comment><USER35> Neat. I notice 2 of 4 pictures show inclement weather, which is probably to show their advantage over motorcycles. Since in general a 2-wheeled motorcycle is more enjoyable than a trike.

Can this thing provide the crash protection of a normal car? If not, why not get a normal MC?

<comment><USER34> "Each Elio comes equipped with a Safety Management System that includes three airbags – a reinforced roll-cage frame, Anti-Lock Braking System, and 50% larger crush zones than similar vehicles. "

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This 1000 times. Dealers are unnecessary middlemen and provide no value added service. They are a protected cartel and serve to disenfranchise regular, every-day car buyers. My last vehicle was purchased using TrueCar (truecar.com) and I highly recommend using this service to make sure you are getting a fair price if you unfortunately have to work with dealers. Hopefully more and more Teslas will be available soon!! I'd buy one on principle alone.

</comment><comment><USER36> Dealerships are middlemen who CAN but not always have a place. If for instance you had trouble getting financed a middleman could facilitate the process of buying a car.

If you didnt know exactly what you wanted in a vehicle again, a middleman would be helpful.

If you know what you want and just want to buy the damn thing, you dont need a middle man.

</comment><comment><USER37> Has anyone done the math on if Tesla will be able to meet future demand without sending supply to 'dealerships' (or other lots?)? I'd imagine a large portion of a dealership's cost is in inventory/inventory management. (could be wrong though...)

<comment><USER11> They're built on-demand is there's very little inventory sitting around. Typically the service center here in Portland only has 10-15 on site for delivery.

At the pace they make changes to the car it really doesn't make sense for them to manufacture large batches and those not interested in waiting can pick up an inventory/CPO.

<comment><USER37> Not sure it's possible to maintain at production targets. 2014 if I recall, Tesla did ~35k units. That's ~12 cars/ hr if we assume 12 hour work days.

Their 2016 target is 100,000 cars or 33 cars per hour by 2016. So for example they'd have to both double their plant capacity then get 50% better at making cars. Seems like a tall order but perhaps doable for a guy like Musk :)

<comment><USER38> 'Up to May 2010, NUMMI [now the Tesla plant] built an average of 6000 vehicles a week' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Could this be perhaps as big of a contribution to the auto market for consumers as actually having an electric car? What if Tesla makes the dealership model obsolete. That would be an incredible side effect.

</comment><comment><USER40> I back the right of any manufacturer to sell direct to consumers. Go Tesla!</comment>


Ask HN: Great Android / Kotlin Blogs/Podcasts? - <AUTHOR> While we are discussing popular blogs for iOS, what are great blogs for Android?<p>I personally love Fragmented podcast. <comment><USER2> I've always wondered about this as well. Seems like the iOS blogs / podcasts are more well known or are somehow surfaced more prominently. Same w iOS conferences - there just seems to be more of them. For example there was a Kotlin conference in Amsterdam a few weeks ago and I had no clue about it.

I occasionally check the Android developer blog and yt channel - [https://www.youtube.com/androiddevelopers](https://www.youtube.com/androiddevelopers) [https://android-developers.googleblog.com/](https://android- developers.googleblog.com/). Have not checked out Fragmented but will do so.</comment>


Ask HN:How many LOC is/was your simplest useful application? - <AUTHOR>

Ask HN:How many LOC is/was your simplest application? <comment><USER2> According to sloccount, bsdiff + bspatch is 425 lines of code. I've written smaller applications, but that's probably my smallest _useful_ application -- at least if you consider being used (albeit unknowingly) by millions of people and being responsible for saving hundreds of man-years of waiting for downloads to complete to qualify as "useful".

</comment><comment><USER3> 1 - back in 1964 I wrote a utility for the operations staff at the stock brokerage I was interning at that copied a deck of punched cards which fit on a single card, and I wrote it at the keypunch machine.

</comment><comment><USER4> g, an interactive shell for grep and ack that lets you search files and open them to specific lines. 120 lines of Python.

        $ g --js FooBar

         1) static/web/www/foobar.js
              4:   var FooBar = function( options
              9:   FooBar.superclass.constructor.call( t, $.extend( {
             28:   Foo.inherit( FooBAr, somthing.ui.Baz, {

         2) static/web/www/js/ui.js
            196:   FooBar.show( new something.ui.FooBar( {

        ack> open 1 28
        ack> open 2 196

</comment><comment><USER4> iSVN is an interactive shell for SVN. Think CPAN or RPM shell. Normal use is to list all files that are modified, and to pick various ones by number and operate on them (commit, revert, diff, etc). It's 60 lines of Python. Reminds me, have to release it...

        $ cd ~/svn
        $ isvn
        svn> status
        1)  ?      devtools/bin/isvn
        svn> add 1
        A         devtools/bin/isvn
        svn> update
        Updated to revision 1234.
        svn> commit 1 -m "new interactive svn tool"

</comment><comment><USER5> First ask if LOC is a good measure for programs. :)

LOC can be very misleading. A better estimate, to me, would be: _how long did it take_ to write your simplest, useful application?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not a programmer. I just started to learn 16 hours ago, but I built 2 simple simple apps (ok not really app) with a few lines(30 and 140), but they are nonetheless useful to me (as a beginner).</comment></comment>