Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf

<comment><USER2> This paper is a HUGE DEAL in the bitcoin community. Sidechains in theory could address lots of the scalability issues of Bitcoin and could accelerate the roll out of new features.

However, there are many strong opinions on both sides as to whether sidechains are desirable and/or technically possible.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm one of the co-authors. AMA.

EDIT: There will also be a reddit AMA on Thursday at 12pm eastern time.

<comment><USER4> Why so soon? It doesn't give people much time to read, think, ponder.

<comment><USER3> We're always open to questions! But some people have some immediate concerns and we'd like to address those right out of the gate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some interesting criticisms here: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2k070h/enabling_blo...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2k070h/enabling_blockchain_innovations_with_pegged/clgqdeu)

<comment><USER6> I find the proposal that Bitcoin may want to setup central authorities (that can be federated) to support 2-way sidechains more. A lot of the Bitcoin luminaries now seem to be coming around to the idea that regulation is OK and that trusting authorities (instead of just math) isn't the end of the world.

But that raises again the question of why one would use a value-transfer system designed to be wasteful of electrical power (with the amount of waste going up as Bitcoin price goes up) instead of a distributed network that handle secure value storage/transfer as efficiently as possible. E.g. patio11 has described such a system (Stellar, [https://www.stellar.org/](https://www.stellar.org/)) and while I don't know enough about Stellar to speak intelligently about it, even without Stellar there's good ol' fiat-based networked systems. Visa alone can handle 47,000+ tranx/sec vs. Bitcoin's 7.

It seems to me that Bitcoin's unique strengths have been reduced to international remittance use case, and even that appears subsumed by Stellar (and if Stellar doesn't pan out, by existing money remittance services who can easily drop their cost below the equivalent cost to transact in Bitcoin, unless Bitcoin suffers an extreme price drop).

The only other area I see is that Bitcoin will become simply a digital commodity (a virtual gold or silver), but if this happens the price speculation would destroy the usefulness of Bitcoin as a unit of account and as a means of efficiently exchanging value.

<comment><USER3> > A lot of the Bitcoin luminaries now seem to be coming around to the idea > that regulation is OK and that trusting authorities (instead of just math) > isn't the end of the world.

That definitely deserves a citation needed. Accepting regulation? Yes, sure. "Trusting authorities (instead of just math)"? Absolutely not. If you are ok with that, then why use bitcoin at all? A simple ledger on a central server works just fine and saves a lot of trouble.

The federated two-way peg is at best a temporary measure. The first most obvious improvement is to conjunctively add the SPV security trustless peg as well, such that using a peg requires signatures of the functionaries AND a valid proof. Then the worst they could do is freeze your coins, which we're still not happy with.

Another improvement not in the paper is to spread the functionaries out into multiple jurisdictions and selected from multiple distrustful groups. E.g. it would be nice if there were functionaries in Iran and China as well as the U.S. and Europe.

> E.g. patio11 has described such a system (Stellar)

Stellar's consensus algorithm (the same as Ripple's) is broken by design. It will not work as advertised, and provides little better security than the existing fiat system.

<comment><USER7> Can you say a bit more about what's wrong with Ripple's consensus algorithm? Or link to a critique?

<comment><USER8> My opinion is the Ripple consensus algorithm doesn't yet meet the security claims its stated to in their whitepaper. There's an ongoing discussion here: [https://forum.ripple.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7801#p56432](https://forum.ripple.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7801#p56432)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Excellent explanation of how Bitcoin works and its shortcomings. Bit of a Bitcoin newb, but how are decisions currently made in regards to implementing new features? Are Alt-Coins similarly hard to change (mostly thinking about Litecoin) ?

<comment><USER10> Ultimately it comes down to every node defining what they consider a bitcoin or Xcoin. Suppose we're the only two nodes on the network and we disagree about what a bitcoin is (we're running different validation code, either intentionally or not). You'll mine some ebel-coins and I'll mine some bdcs- coins. We won't agree that they are bitcoins and so we'll have a blockchain fork.

So yes, changing anything (hard-fork) is very difficult because it requires 100% consensus to be done well. Two-way pegging is technology that allows almost endless permissionless innovation on top of bitcoin WITHOUT requiring consensus. This is killer. I cannot wait to see what comes of this.

There is now a huge space to be filled for dev APIs and useful abstractions for creating, running, and updating side-chains.

<comment><USER11> > So yes, changing anything (hard-fork) is very difficult because it requires > 100% consensus to be done well.

I'm fairly certain this isn't the case. It needs 51% to be done (nevermind done "well"), and then in theory more and more miners will cut their losses and start operating under the winning chain's rules.

Unless by "done well", you mean that transacting users and merchants aren't inconvenienced. Because a hard fork battle would be inconvenient for commerce if it wasn't a large majority. But miners don't necessarily need to care about that :)

<comment><USER3> There's a distinction here between soft-forks, which require majority mining hashpower and a definite super-majority to avoid possible transition risks, and hard-forks which absolutely require every node on the network to upgrade.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


An alchemist who failed to make gold but still made history in porcelain - <AUTHOR> https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/real-life-rumpelstiltskin <comment><USER2> There's some sort of good analogy in here about how the modern-day search for "AI" is akin to the search for an alchemist recipe for gold. In the search, many interesting substitutes are created and many other useful discoveries made.

Those proclaiming to have general AI that solves everything are charlatans like the man in the article professing to have a way to create gold, but they create investment into research which leads to other useful knowledge, processes, and artifacts.

<comment><USER3> The irony here is that we can transmute other metals into gold nowadays, it's just absurdly uneconomical:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#G...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#Gold)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a book about alchemy and other delusions which is actually still really interesting. I'd recommend it. It was originally published in 1841. It includes chapters on financial bubbles as well as alchemy.

[1] Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extraordinary-Popular-Delusions- Mad...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extraordinary-Popular-Delusions-Madness- Crowds/dp/149036188X)

<comment><USER3> Sometimes I wonder how much of the weirdness in alchemy was due to people getting mercury poisoning and similar problems while experimenting with unsafe techniques. There's a long history of chemists poisoning themselves when discovering things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> it's also speculated that his supervisor [Walther von Tschirnaus]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrenfried_Walther_von_Tschirn...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrenfried_Walther_von_Tschirnhaus)) was the original inventor of European porcelain; and that Bottger had stolen Tchirnaus's notes from the family's tutor after von Tchirnaus's death and claimed the invention as his own

> In 1719 the arcanist Samuel Stölzel escaped from Meissen to Vienna and > betrayed the secret of porcelain production. He claimed that Tschirnhaus and > not Böttger had discovered porcelain. Also in 1719 the secretary general of > the manufacture in Meißen, Caspar Bussius reported: "that the invention of > porcelain is not due to Böttger but von Tschirnhaus and that Böttger > received the written 'science' from Steinbrück

from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Friedrich_B%C3%B6ttger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Friedrich_B%C3%B6ttger)

> Three days after Von Tschirnhaus's death, there was a burglary at his house > and, according to a report by Böttger, a small piece of porcelain was > stolen. This report suggests that Böttger himself recognized that Von > Tschirnhaus already knew how to make porcelain, a key piece of evidence that > Von Tschirnhaus and not Böttger was the inventor. Work resumed on 20 March > 1709, by which time Melchior Steinbrück had arrived to assess the dead man's > estate, which included the notes about making porcelain, and had met with > Böttger. On 28 March 1709, Böttger went to August II and announced the > invention of porcelain. Böttger now was nominated to head the first European > manufactory for porcelain. Steinbrück became an inspector and married > Böttger's sister.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrenfried_Walther_von_Tschirn...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrenfried_Walther_von_Tschirnhaus)</comment>


Fun with convex polygons - <AUTHOR> http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2012/03/29/fun-with-convex-polygons/?v=0

<comment><USER3> That works for just fine for concave non self intersecting polys as well - <USER2> the signed areas (albeit overlapping) cancel appropriately.

(scribble scribble) ... Edit: and for self intersecting, it gives the area of the poly where winding is odd.

</comment><comment><USER4> Without looking at it very closely, it seems as though the wedge-product approach (to finding the area of convex polygons) is just asking for numerical errors. It's a classic case of finding small differences between large numbers. Most of the positive and negative contributions are supposed to cancel, but with finite-precision arithmetic, surely there'll be problems eventually-- for example, for small polygons far from the origin.

I suppose for application domains like games, you just want ballpark estimates quickly, and numerical errors aren't very important.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if this is actually done, but you can shift the vertices to be centered at the origin (e.g by subtracting the mean of coordinates from each coordinate for a polygon). The numbers are now close to 0 and will have better precision

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I thought something similar-- translating to put one vertex at the origin. But at that point, aren't you pretty close to just using the triangles, anyway (since it's a convex polygon)?

<comment><USER5> Yes, I think you are right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "I've seen a lot of people go through and calculate the area of a polygon by breaking it up into separate triangles, carefully calculating the area of each, then sum and halve."

I doubt anyone do that. What was described seems a lot more work compared to searching the web for the right formula/algorithm/source-code -- at least in the modern days. A very minimal amount of research will reveal this algorithm mentioned by the author.

That said, it certainly is a very nice algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have to say, if I'd known this years ago when I was in school trying to become a game programmer... Well, I would have gotten more sleep! But yeah, nice stuff sir.

<comment><USER8> > Well, I would have gotten more sleep!

Do you really think so? You'd probably just put the same amount of time in, but would have gotten farther!

<comment><USER7> hah, very true; I may have graduated and still have been programming today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> By the way, if you like convex polyhedra, but don't feel like being bound to 2 or 3 dimensions, you should have a look into mathematical optimization. Most of it centres around finding, in effect, the southern-most point of high dimensional convex polyhedra.</comment>


Is "Stealth" the Best Way to Build Your Business?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2011/03/is-stealth-the-best-way-to-bui.php

<comment><USER2> there's a great soundbite in that video from Reid Hoffman: "launch so early you're embarrassed by your product." the context is important (i.e. get customer feedback before you spend too much time building stuff that nobody will use).</comment>


When WordStar Was King (2009) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/482/482readings/06%20when%20wordstar%20was%20king.pdf <comment><USER2> I kept reading this title as 'When _World_ Star' Was King...

<comment><USER3> Same here. I was surprised to find HN talking about WSHH....

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's an editor with a WordStar-style interface: [https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm](https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm)

<comment><USER5> Huh! I use joe, and wasn't aware someone had forked/worked on it. Nifty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I got imprinted with WordStar back in the early 80s. So much so, that when I program today I use those same text-editing command-codes. So I can jump seamlessly from programming on CP/M, Linux or even MSDOS. Frightening, isn't it? <grin>

<comment><AUTHOR> A bunch of us got those commands imprinted on our brain by using Turbo Pascal, even though we didn't use WordStar.

<comment><USER7> Ctrl-KB Ctrl-KK Ctrl-KC

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Second WordStar article posted today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272952).</comment>


Tapping Generation Z - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/tapping-generation-z <comment><USER2> > "I call them 'tech genius.'"

I disagree: You can impress most "Generation Z" kids by introducing them to Ctrl + F in the browser. Using technology without knowing how it functions seems pretty prelevant.</comment>


New OSS License: the CDL - <AUTHOR> http://supertunaman.com/cdl/cdl_v0-1.txt <comment><USER2> The interesting part is the response from the OSI, who appear to be taking it at least semi-seriously. According to The Register ( [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/26/chicken_dance_open_s...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/26/chicken_dance_open_source_license/)):

 _"Clause 4 appears to conflict with OSD clause 5 because people with disabilities or cultural obligations preventing them from either singing or dancing (or religious issues portraying chickens) would not have equal freedoms under the license,"_

and

 _"It also violates OSD clause 6 as it would prevent use in the plinth industry"_

<comment><USER3> The OSI spokesman appears to be have not really understood the license. It is really two licenses. The first 3 clauses are the open source license. The 4th clause gives an alternative non-open license that the software is available under for those who do not wish to use an open source license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've never actually laughed when reading a license before. This is so funny that I might have to make a new project JUST to license it with the CDL.

</comment><comment><USER5> I prefer the original CDL, the commercial drivers license, with that you can certainly go far.

<comment><USER6> zing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The section 4. makes this a proprietary license.

<comment><USER2> You need to read a little more closely. Section 4 is just stuff you have to do if you _don't_ want to redistribute with source code.

 _4\. An entity wishing to redistribute in binary form or include this software in their product without redistribution of this software's source code with the product must also submit to these conditions where applicable: ..._

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> But plinth is a perfectly cromulent word.

<comment><USER9> Indeed, it embiggens the validicity of the license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Instead of making up joke licences someone should sit down and write a licence tailored for software that is roughly equivalent to a CC-BY-SA-NC.

<comment><USER11> NC would conflict with the Free Redistribution criteria of the Open Source Definition[1], and BY would be the equivalent of the "obnoxious BSD advertising clause"[2].

And besides all that, I really don't think the world needs yet another GPL- incompatible licence. You effectively wall off your code from being used in the vast majority of the ecosystem and vice-versa, and you end up with a scenario like Sun's CDDL where developers have a disincentive to work on your code due to its incompatible licensing, and they have to jump through hoops to integrate it with anything else. Unless those effects are desirable to you, you're better off just picking a compatible licence[3].

[1] <http://opensource.org/docs/osd>

[2] <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html>

[3] <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html>

<comment><USER10> Yes, I know it's not "proper" open source if you can't sell it, but I think there is clearly a demand for that kind of licence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh please, this is a bad joke, not even funny.</comment>


Banking malware in Brazil may be responsible for billions in losses - <AUTHOR> http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/07/brazilian-boleto-bandits-bilk-billions/

<comment><USER2> So many comments asking why people don't use credit cards. The easy answer, already told, is that many Brazilian people don't have bank accounts or credit card.

This is only half truth and probably not relevant to the case here, as the malware in question will only affect people accessing their bank accounts through the internet.

The "boleto" system is actually a very nice way to handle payments. The boleto mostly substitutes mailing checks: the company I owe send me the bill with a numeric code (and a corresponding bar code for convenience), and I can use this code to pay the bill at a bank, supermarket, lottery houses or, of course, directly from my bank account through the internet or ATM.

A boleto is different from a account deposit because each boleto is unique: the code identifies who that specific boleto was sent to, so payment processing is done automatically. No out-of-band bank codes or check handling involved.

Boletos are used in several contexts where a credit card is not appropriate, such as paying the credit card bill. However, it may substitute credit cards sometimes: an online commerce outlet will happily generate a boleto for you to pay instead of paying with credit card. You can then pay for you purchase without revealing personal information, having a credit card or sending checks by mail.

Actually, paper checks are very, very rare in Brazil nowadays, even in business contexts. Most retail business won't accept them anymore.

Also, when you pay a boleto, you get an timestamped authentication code proving you paid it. The company can't allege the check was incorrect, for example. The code may also carry the amount to be paid and/or expiration date, preventing payment of the wrong value of after the due date.

This is actually a very functional system that credit cards cannot completely substitute, even if everyone had a bank account or credit card.

EDIT: clarity and a bit of extra info

<comment><USER3> The closest equivalent to boletos in the UK are payment agents:

[https://www.paypoint.com/en-gb](https://www.paypoint.com/en-gb)

[http://www.payzone.co.uk/](http://www.payzone.co.uk/)

I don't believe the numbering is unique to specific bill, but to a specific account, e.g. I'd use the same identifier each time I paid by gas bill.

<comment><USER2> Having a numbering for a specific account is also possible with Brazilian boleto system, but it is common only for credit cards, which can be paid at any time and at a wide range of values.

Gas and phone codes are always bill-specific. However, if you pay a boleto like this twice, the provider will be informed and generally will give you the chargeback in the next bill. I have already used this as a trick to pay a bill when I was travelling and wouldn't get the most recent bill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This has been happening in Brazil for years. They use several methods: boletos for inexistent taxes, internet domain renewals, "social contributions" and others.

They make them look very legit: one we received even mentioned real legislation that said that a certain type of contribution(very similar name to what was on the boleto) was obligatory. We had to take it to our accountant, and he instantly found the fraud.

They also have access to Brazilian whois data somehow. The official whois is protected by captcha, but they're able to obtain the whois database via some other method and then snail-mail boletos to millions of domain owners using their real personal data. It looks very convincing.

The sheer amount of such fake boletos that arrive in the mail every month indicates that this may be a successful scam after all.

<comment><USER5> That happens _a lot_ after you incorporate a company here. The day after you fill the forms to create a company you start to receive these bills pretending to be something you have to pay. From associations, unions and similars.

The point is that in this particular case it is a "legal scam". There is nothing illegal to pay to your company be part of an association or union. So they send you a "boleto" that looks like something official, and if you don't consult your accountant, you will think you should pay. Even your company's address is open to the public when you incorporate. You pay because at least one of these _boletos_ you actually must pay, it is a municipal fee (an inspection fee, even though the municipality will never actually inspect your office, unles there is some complaint). Also there is some mandatory payment to unions, but only when you hire an employee.

Of course these "associations and unions" don't actually do anything for you. They just exist to get money from entrepreneurs based on all the misinformation and bureaucracy that exists to open a company in Brazil.

<comment><USER4> I recall that the association / union boleto we received was meant exactly for joining a union of some sort.

And you are absolutely correct: the minute you go formal in Brazil, you become a target for all kinds of scams. I believe all data should be public in a democracy, but they should be public in a way that the person who queries it should identify somehow. That way they would know who downloaded the entire database and would have control of suspicious activity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tangentially, in the documentary The Fog of War, Robert McNamara describes how accounting at Ford was so messed up that they had to weigh the invoices to estimate expenses. So this got me wondering if crooks don't just mail false invoices to large firms in case some pay without checking.

<comment><USER7> > So this got me wondering if crooks don't just mail false invoices to large > firms in case some pay without checking.

They do

Example: a company I knew (in Canada) displayed some fake invoices for "IP/Trademark registering" in Europe, of course the payment was optional, but if you don't pay attention it gets payed

<comment><USER8> In my previous companies in Italy we received multiple times requests to renew the registration on some kind of internet company registry in Germany. Fortunately the accounting dept asked us in IT "what's this / should we pay it?" and we directly sent those letters to the trash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Shameless plug: I recently created a boleto management iOS app called Zebra ([http://zebrapp.co/](http://zebrapp.co/)) If you're brazilian and are looking for a better way to handle and pay your boletos, I think it can help you.

<comment><USER10> How can it help defend against this type of scam?

It seems what is needed seems out of band confirmations?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems that the criminals are actually from the USA: [http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2014/07/1479569-gangue-...](http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2014/07/1479569-gangue- do-boleto-infectou-192-mil-computadores-detectam-fbi-e-pf.shtml) (Portuguese only, I'm afraid).

</comment><comment><USER11> After getting a trademark in the US I got bombarded with fake Invoices from companies claiming I have to pay or I will loose the right to defend or even keep my trademark.

</comment><comment><USER12> They say it doesn't happen to mobile, but I'm not sure what happens if you root your phone and/or install allow apk install from "untrusted" sources in the Dev Opts.

This kind of scam is old, but there are many, like local DNS redirect, keylogging / input-logging, maybe even a piracy web-browser.

</comment><comment><USER13> The first comment in the article (from someone who has clearly never left his hometown or is a five year old in disguise):

"Brian, do you know why Brazilians would choose to use Boletos if they aren't subject to chargebacks? It seems like a silly thing to do, especially when credit cards are acceptable forms of payment practically anywhere."

 _sigh_

<comment><USER7> This is the payment version of "Let them eat cake" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake) for those who don't know)

And of course in Europe Credit Cards are not widespread as well and there are other popular payment options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone know what those bank plugins are supposed to do anyway? I never managed to get a good answer for that.

<comment><USER15> I know some of them can be pretty aggressive, going as far as installing a "root kit" on the machine. At some point one of these plugins conflicted with a Windows 7 update, and caused the affected machines to crash at boot: [http://gizmodo.uol.com.br/bug-windows-7-solucao-e- causa/](http://gizmodo.uol.com.br/bug-windows-7-solucao-e-causa/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I only went to read this article because every title letter begins with B.

</comment><comment><USER17> Awesomely alliterated amigo

</comment><comment><USER18> I admit I initially upvoted because of the alliteration. Then I read the article, which was quite interesting (even more so because I'm Brazilian). Then I wanted to upvote it because of its content, but I no longer could. Which made me sad :/</comment>


Keybase.io - <AUTHOR>

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/tealc; my proof: https://keybase.io/tealc/sigs/UFwg_G7nQFt8h4x3mZxBxi-fXCQ6HVhlXSXHbb3qZTw ] <comment><USER2> You don't have to submit a thread for verification. Instead edit your profile and add it in about section: [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tealcavalon](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tealcavalon)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hmm.. seems interesting. Could this potentially be a more easily understood and adoptable method of encryption? Although, I am not sure how secure it would be to use accounts from twitter or facebook, as they contain personally identifiable information.</comment>


Carnival scam science – and how to win [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk_ZlWJ3qJI <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DW - dividing carnival games into games of luck, games of skill (usually with some sneaky tricks to make people overestimate their chances of success), and games that are more or less impossible to win. Most useful tip - don't ever expect to win at a stall which offers giant, expensive prizes.</comment>


Show HN: Ask recurring questions and get aggregated answers in your email - <AUTHOR> https://keyory.com <comment><AUTHOR> I've worked in a cross functional organization as a product manager for about 8 years now and I finally feel as though I can articulate a need that has existed for quite some time. There are a few problems.

      * Someone isn't asking a question to team members that should be asked on a regular basis
      * Someone is manually asking a question to team members on a regular basis
      * Someone is asking a question during a meeting that should be asked before or after the meeting

Here are some examples of these types of questions

      * As a team leader - Is there anything you'd like me to specifically address to the team during our weekly status meeting?
      * As a sales manager - What feedback did you hear from customers this week about our product?
      * As a product owner - What do you think should be our top 5 priorities for the next 3 sprints?
      * As a scrum master - Is there anything that is blocking your current objectives?

There's an interesting side effect of not asking these questions regularly and asynchronously. Instead of getting the best answers from the group, you get the perspective of the loudest, fastest talking person in the meeting and it becomes the focus of discussion.

We built Keyory to solve this problem. You can ask recurring questions to a group of people and have the aggregated responses delivered right to your inbox. You can configure your questions to be sent out daily on specific days, weekly, biweekly, or even monthly on the first day of a month. Then you forget about it and read the answers all in one place, in your email.

<comment><USER2> Amazing concept. As an engineering manager, the main cause of my drinking is juniors NOT asking questions either for an immediate blocking issue or for a very clear learning opportunity.

I imagine for many questions are not asked in order to reduce or delay doing actual work. It'll be interesting to see what excuses remain after implementing a solution like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! And they can't say you never asked if they needed help either. Keyory won't solve your people problem though, unfortunately

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Whoever signed up email@example.com, I confirmed your email, enjoy lol

</comment><comment><USER3> Reminds of an internal Amazon system that would pop-up a question every morning when you open your computer asking some bullshit HR or "culture" question. Man, I hated that thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope nobody uses it like that! One thing we've done is made it so the recipients of questions have to explicitly subscribe to them, otherwise they'll never actually receive the question in their email. They can do that by just clicking a "subscribe to question" link that goes out when the question is created or users are added

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish I can upvote this more than once. Very useful service and congrats on launching this.

Your challenge is, I am afraid, is in finding a manager who forces the teams to use it _constantly_ as opposed to just a few iterations and the usage fades away. Not because your product is not good, but humans often do not stick to routines. My intention is not to come across negative, but to implore you to design-solve a implicit loop inside the product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, that's definitely something we need to consider

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Basecamp (the project management software) has this as a built-in feature. My company is small enough that I always disable it. As we add more people and lean more into remote work I'll probably give it a try.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I think that makes sense for Basecamp users. We're differentiated by the fact that you don't need to be a paid user in a closed ecosystem to be able to check in. Everyone is already an email user and only the asker is a paid user if they're asking enough questions to enough people. We have smaller teams in product development using Basecamp but aren't paying for other teams (operations, sales) to access our projects since they're just design/development focused

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is really useful! Nice work on keeping the service simple and thanks for the really clear data usage detail. I really like this feature in Basecamp, but not every situation warrants a project management tool.

Edit: any plans to allow sending the email to everyone? It can just be forwarded in the meantime, of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> We released this feature.

<comment><USER6> Nice! Looking at it now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_\(search_engine\))

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Based on some of the great feedback we added a "How it Works" page to describe the problem we're solving in detail and how to test out its value without even trying Keyory. I will say the more I write about this and by the questions I see some people asking their teams on Keyory, people definitely get it. [https://keyory.com/home/how](https://keyory.com/home/how)

</comment><comment><USER8> Or, you could just use slack. It has a recurring message thing as well, which you can set on a channel.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not everyone uses slack. In most mid/large size companies people are still using email. Keyory helps bridge that gap between functional teams using slack and leadership teams using email. Everyone gets to stay in the loop.

<comment><USER9> >in most mid/large size companies people are still using email.

Is slack usually associated with start ups and small companies?

<comment><USER10> For me, yes that's my experience. Older/bigger companies built communication habits on email and maybe an IM solution. I even see IM fairly underutilized except for "wanna grab lunch?" type conversation or in big offices "got a minute to talk?" for impromptus

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Clever. Could be useful for people who do a lot of email.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just read that as "aggravated".

So, I get aggravated answers in my email. Yay?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great now I have to choose a new word. And make sure it doesn't say aggravated anywhere hah

<comment><USER12> Collated.</comment></comment></comment>


Firefox is slow - troubleshooting - <AUTHOR> https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox%20is%20slow

<comment><USER2> "Firefox may hang if left open for long periods of time. To fix the issue, restart Firefox." Oh my God...

<comment><USER3> I can't find that text on the page at the moment, but it's the truth.

Firefox (3.6) seems to have a really nasty problem in its garbage collection system. If I leave it open for more than a couple of days, under normal use, it starts hanging for a couple of seconds every minute to half-minute -- and it hangs for longer, more often, the longer I leave it open.

Closing and restarting Firefox seems to clear the issue up. At least, for a while.

The only reason I still use Firefox is because of AdBlock Plus. The moment someone comes up with a replacement that's as good, I'm done with it and never looking back.

edit: oh, and by the way: this bug, combined with Google "Instant"? _Very not the best thing ever._

<comment><USER4> I regularly ran Firefox 3.6 (I'm on v4 now) for weeks at a time, and never had such issues. I'd guess it's an extension or plugin you had installed.

My biggest problem with Firefox (v4 only) is shutting it down takes ages as it iterates through every file in the cache, which is encrypted on my machine. I limited my cache size to 50MB, which seems to have limited the pause times to something reasonable.

I cannot stand Chrome though; I hate the way it selects text on the page with the mouse (I'm a compulsive selection-reader), and the cobbled-together extension replacements for the Bookmarks menu don't work nearly as well as a proper menu.

<comment><USER3> I do have a few extensions installed & enabled -- AdBlock Plus, Firebug, Greasemonkey (rarely used, I should just uninstall it), Flashblock, and YSlow.

But, I've seen similar behavior on at least one other system, and the only extension we had in common there was AdBlock Plus. The behavior also predates Greasemonkey.

The other system is newer, and the slowdown there is less pronounced (though still noticeable), which leads me to suspect that there's some task that runs regularly that performs well enough on fast enough systems to be less problematic, but becomes a miserable dog on older systems -- a pretty typical case of programmer "fast enough for me".

Apropos of nothing: I don't get you compulsive selection readers. I'm always a little bemused when one of you speaks up. Why do you do that? It's so weird. :-)

<comment><USER5> I have no idea, all I know is that when I can't do it it feels like something is deeply wrong :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tip: If Firefox is slow / consuming too much memory, start a private browsing session then close the browser. When you restart it, all the tabs will re-open to the previous pages, and the memory footprint is usually smaller.

</comment><comment><USER7> I just wish Firefox doesn't crash as much. I got a crash at least once a day. Already using 4.0.1.</comment>


Building a home NAS on a shoestring budget with the Rock64 SBC (2018) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theramblinman.ca/2018/04/04/building-a-high-performing-home-nas-on-a-shoestring-budget-with-the-rock64-sbc/ <comment><USER2> I've been eyeing a NanoPi M4 [1] with a "SATA HAT" [2] for replacing my ageing QNAP NAS. It should have similar specs as the OP, with the added advantage of a 4-port SATA controller sitting directly on a PCIe bus.

[1] [https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...](https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=234)

[2] [https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...](https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=254)

<comment><USER3> I tried searching the blog post or this thread for use cases, but didn't find even a mention; it seems that people use these NATs with something like 4 to 16 TB capacities at home; but I can't imagine a non-professional reason to store so much data.

Personally, if I wanted to store valuable stuff locally, like photos, I'm guessing 250gb of space would be enough for a lifetime.

So what do people use these huge personal storage systems for?

<comment><USER4> Video and photos keep getting larger and larger.

<comment><USER5> Especially with the cost of cameras that shoot 4K video coming down. You can get a good camera that shoots 4K video for under $1000, (e.g. BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera), and there are cheap cameras (under $100) that can shoot 4K.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I shudder at the idea of using USB connectors for important data. I have recently purchased a Kobol NAS [https://kobol.io/](https://kobol.io/). It is amazing because it has the following features in a good price point:

1\. Open source

2\. 2GB ECC ram

3\. 4 x SATA

4\. Hackable GPIOs

<comment><USER7> It only says "preorder now" or do I miss something? And given the price point of 300USD (with taxes and shipping) you are well in the terrain of x86-Atoms, heck you might even get a good deal on a Xeon-D...

<comment><USER8> It's the same as the Helios in OP's article, seems to be a Kickstarter doing limited runs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I built a very similar home NAS with the newer RockPro64 and a pair of 4TB HDDs in RIAD1, all on top of Debian[0]. I found OpenMediaVault to be overkill and kept me from really understanding what was going on. Plus there are a million guides to setting up SMB, rsync, Borg, etc.

The RockPro64 hardware is great. Very performant, especially when using the PCIe to SATA card instead of USB like the OP did.

[0] [https://ameridroid.com/blogs/ameriblogs/how-to-build-your- ow...](https://ameridroid.com/blogs/ameriblogs/how-to-build-your-own-nas- server-with-the-rockpro64)

<comment><AUTHOR> I asked this on another thread, but I don't understand why you would see real world difference between PCIe vs USB3.

When using this setup as a NAS, isn't your bottleneck the gigabit network from machine to machine? You'll saturate the 1 Gigabit link ( or even 2 Gigabit duplex ) before you can reach 5 Gigabits ( USB3 ) or 6 Gigabits ( PCIe )

<comment><USER4> RAID seems very popular for 2 disk setups, but I don't like the cost benefit. With RAID under about 5 disks, you aren't getting much speedup, under 4 disks you can't do a proper fail-out and rebuild of a larger multi-disk volume.

I use 2 x 4TB disks in my homeserver, but I keep one online and have a script that brings up the other one periodically and rsyncs everything. This gives me a local backup, something RAID lacks, so I'm protected from fat fingering or accidentally deleting stuff. I also have very minimal downtime, because I can mount that drive in the place of the primary drive in just afew seconds.

I run xfs on the primary drive, and btrfs on the mirror, so I can take snapshots after I rsync and maintain differentials easily.

My point is, you should consider getting rid of RAID and just use the bare drive or LVS Volume.

<comment><USER10> Agreed, RAID makes little sense if you want a quiet home storage that is used only occasionaly. Additional disk is better used for regular backups. If you need to minimize downtime and have the storage accessible 24/7, then RAID makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been running a 8TB homeserver for the cost of an optiplex on eBay (80) and 2 8tb external drives on Amazon (300). I cronjob an rsync every night and that's that. Cheap, works great, and (surprisingly) I understand how it works. I also have cloud storage for the subset of things I don't want to lose. A thing I'm working on right now is for the rsync disk to be on a switch I control with an Arduino/pi so it's only powered during the backup -- I reckon the drive will last longer that way. Homeservers are fun :)

If you're ok losing 24hours of data and not a performance junky, the backup plan becomes trivial and the raiding isn't really necessary.

<comment><USER12> Daily rsync alone isn't enough. Any data which gets corrupted on the main drive will, within 24 hours, also be corrupted on the 'backup'.

If you're confident enough that your computer won't get stolen, burn, or zapped by a power surge, then you can keep the same hardware setup you have, but:

1\. Use borg backup (or restic) instead of rsync (so that you can restore to any day in the past, not only to yesterday)

2\. Disconnect the 'backup' drive when it's not being used (so that it's protected from malware or fat fingers).

Even better would be:

3\. Have a separate computer host the borg backups, and have it run 'borg serve' in append-only mode (so that, no matter what you do the main computer, you cannot destroy or corrupt past backups).

Even better:

4\. Have this separate computer in a different physical location (so that you're protected from fire, theft and the like).

<comment><USER13> I didn't think corrupted data would change the size of the file or the mtime? If it doesn't then rsync wouldn't overwrite the second drive as it would see it as an existing, good copy. Unless you had rsync using checksum comparisons of course.

<comment><USER12> You're probably right for corruption caused by hardware failure or filesystem bugs. I was thinking about corruption in the wider sense, e.g. caused by application bugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Building a high performing home NAS"

"I was averaging 60-113mbps depending on the size of files being moved. This was a successful build in my mind! After selling my QNAP NAS, I came out ahead on my expenses for the build."

113Mbps is considered "high performing"?

"on a shoestring budget with the Rock64 SBC"

"TOTAL: $172.39 CAD before tax"

This is without the cost of the hard drives, doesn't seem ot include the cost of an enclosure, and results in:

* 1 Quad-core A53

* 2GB ram (the 4GB version is $45 USD without shipping, so it couldn't have been this one), which you can't ever change

* 0 SATA ports

* 1 USB 3 port

* 2 USB 2 ports

* 1x GbE

I would probably rather consider an HP Micro Server (e.g. [https://www.amazon.com//dp/B079MFYDSL](https://www.amazon.com//dp/B079MFYDSL) ), which for $282 provides:

* 1.6GHz dual-core Opteron

* 2 DIMM slots, 8GB DDR4 provided

* 5x SATA ports (4x in the disk bays, 1 in the optical bay)

* 4 USB3 ports, 2 USB2 ports, internal USB port

* 2x GbE

* 2x PCIe slots

* Hardware RAID support (I wouldn't use it, but it's available).

It would meet all of these requirements the poster had:

* Shoestring budget, under $300 preferred

* Scalable, not locked into a certain number of drive bays

* Gigabit ethernet

* USB 3.0 (for fast backups to my backup drives)

 _Preferred: compatibility with open source NAS offerings (OpenMediaVault, FreeNAS, etc.)

_ Low power usage (I don't have high computing requirements for this system, so it doesn't need to be driving up my electricity bill to run every month)

(I guess the Rock64 may have lower power consumption, but I don't think vastly lower).

I have a much older Microserver G7 (or NL54), which was much cheaper (I paid about $100), and it's great.

Edit: formatting

<comment><USER15> Yup, I've been running an N40L microserver for almost 10 years now. Put 16 gb in it & some hard drives and never looked back. It just works.

I first ran FreeNAS, but eventually moved it to Ubuntu 18.04 so that I could run some containerized services on it (file sharing, Plex, and a remote virtual desktop).

16gb RAM is about right for running ZFS. 8gb worked OK, but I'd notice slowdowns from time to time.

If this machine ever decides to pack it in, I'll get a gen10.

<comment><USER16> If you ever get the urge to play around with FreeNAS again, they really improved linux emulation and virtualization; I've been pleasantly surprised with how much I can get done with bhyve.

That's only if you feel like tinkering, though; Ubuntu's a great choice as well.

<comment><USER4> I run opensuse on my home "NAS".I get so much more with a full Linux install and it's still headless and let power.

I just use an old desktop with a pretty efficient CPU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When I built an ARM based NAS, I chose to use the Banana Pi BPI-R2 because it was one of the very few boards with 2x SATA ports using PCI-E. It worked fine and got good speeds. It's difficult to run a current kernel on the BPI-R2 though (it is slowly creeping towards mainline). If I built another NAS again I'd just use an x86_64 or aarch64 SBC with a PCI-E port and connect a good SATA controller.

Full build log: [https://bburky.com/NAS/](https://bburky.com/NAS/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm surprised I don't see more people with my NAS setup. I run a HP Gen8 MicroServer which cost about £120 for the base machine a few years back. The default specs were a bit feeble but perfectly serviceable for running a NAS, though mine has now been modified a bit since then to sport a quad core E3 and 16GB of ECC RAM. If you pick up an adapter lead you can fit an SSD in the optical drive bay (which I have done). One nice thing about the microserver is it has two built-in ethernet ports, so mine run in a link-aggregation group, which is well utilised (I run a lot off this little server, like Plex, ZoneMinder etc).

I run ZFS on Ubuntu (ZFS is superb and one of the best things I've learnt in years) with a RAID 10 setup (2x2TB mirrored pair, 2x4TB mirrored pair). I'm actually just resilvering one of the 4TB drives right now as I finish migrating to them from a couple of old 1TB drives. RAM usage was high when I used dedup but now I've ditched that it's running much lower. I think the hardware will start to struggle once I get up over 10TB of usable space, but considering the cost of the actual machine I really don't feel like I've wasted any money at all.

I picked RAID 10 for this because I feel like with only 4 drives available it makes the most sense, weighing up resilver speed vs slightly better failure recovery if it was RAIDZ. On bigger servers I tend to go for RAIDZ3 instead.

For backups I use syncthing on various machines to copy data to the server, and then rsync the stuff I care about every hour (with a lockfile to stop overlap) to rsync.net, which then performs all the snapshots. I used to run borg but I swapped back to plain rsync because I felt more confident in being able to restore from it. rsync.net is fantastic. I'm currently storing about 1TB with them, and although it looks more expensive than other options for home backup, I feel like the lack of hassle is really worth it for me.

I'm not usually a fan of HP btw, but these little microservers are really well built and I actually ended up using a ton of them at work as well; we only ever had one failure (which I believe was due to PoE somehow being delivered to it, which was really fun to debug :|). When this one eventually can't keep up I suspect I'll just go for a newer model of it. The form factor is very convenient for the home, especially if you don't have the convenience of a spare room in which to put a rack.

<comment><USER19> A second vote for HP's Gen8 MicroServer!

I couldn't get the low voltage Xeons for a sane price in Germany, so I settled for a second-hand i3, which turned out to be more than enough for what I'm throwing at it.

I'm running ESXi as a hypervisor managing two Ubuntu VMs at the moment: a router and a fileserver managing two volume groups (6 TB dump storage for movies, music, etc. that's not too important and thus unmirrored, 2x2TB mirrored storage for photos and other important data that should not get lost). Thanks to the two network ports I can completely isolate the fileserver from the open internet as only the router VM has access to hat port. If I want to access my stuff from outside, I can VPN into the router and thus have access to the fileserver.

The next points on the list is Plex or something similar so I don't have to manually re-encode movies when my TV doesn't like the audio codec. Here, the i3 might struggle a bit, but we'll see.

As for the cost: I spent 200€ on the server itself, 88€ on 16GB RAM, ~20€ for the SSD case and power adapter cable and ~65€ on the SSD. The i3 was ~25€, so I'm up to roughly 400€ for the entire server (plus storage costs, but you'll have those anyways). Compared to what you'll get for that price it's an absolute steal, especially when you compare it with several "low budget"/homemade NAS builds floating around the net/youtube.

Bonus points: you can stack them on top of each other.

<comment><USER20> Heh. I've still got a gen7 happily chugging away - it is happier streaming 1080p x264 rather than x265, but aside from that we never notice it's so feeble. That's easy enough - we only rip x264 now. It's heavily used, ZFS performs flawlessly - running on FreeNAS, and runs a surprising amount of plugins and jails without issue.

I haven't looked at gen 8 or 10 - where was 9? - since the arbitrary HP switch in policy to say _you need an active support contract to download a BIOS update._ For most people buying a MicroServer that's BIOS updates in first year only, which is far too hostile.

I'm more likely to self-build using a U-NAS 8 bay or something else with more bays next time around, or pick up a rack off ebay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You could also get a Dell Optiplex with a 2nd gen i5 from EBay for about $60 + the cost of hard drives.

<comment><USER22> Mine is built around an even cheaper used Atom fanless Mini-itx board plus Nas4Free (1) which is more than enough for serving multiple full HD videos (2) around the house, so speed isn't that important; the network would be the limit anyway.

(1) I know it's old, but attempting a live upgrade to XigmaNas would be risky, so I'll reinstall it at the next maintenance stop.

(2) as files through NFS and SMB shares, not transcoded and streamed; ie, the player does the dirty work, not the NAS.

<comment> W-Stool I ran NAS4Free for years but found that I could not configure it to email me an alert when the chassis fan failed or the RAID array degraded. You can guess what happened - fan failed and a drive cooked. Was this ever addressed/fixed? Otherwise I thought it was pretty great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> USB for a nas?! nope nope nope

~2012 mini-itx AMD C60 does 60Mb/sec, at the time was ~60€

<comment><USER24> Can you explain why?

<comment><USER8> Most external USB enclosures I've used run hot, die early and are dog slow...

<comment><USER24> I used an aluminium enclosure for a long time and no problems with heat. And perhaps that's why there were also no lifetime issues either. "Dog slow"? Yeh I agree but mine was USB 2.0. It's much less of an argument with USB 3.0 and even less again if you don't need high performance for your use-case (e.g. backups only).

So I don't think we have answer yet as to why you wouldn't use USB.

<comment><USER25>
      So I don't think we have answer yet
      as to why you wouldn't use USB.

The short answer is "USB has a widely known bad reputation"

How did that bad reputation arise? A combination of factors:

* USB 2.0

* Platforms like Raspberry Pi, where both disk and ethernet are on the same USB link.

* Sellers marketing products with the USB link bitrate (5 Gbit/s) rather than the rate of data transfer from the ideal disk.

* Embedded platforms that don't have the performance needed to saturate a gigabit ethernet link (or 5 gigabit USB 3 link)

* Articles like this, reporting "60-113mbps" without going into enough detail to determine which components are the limiting factors on performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "32GB MicroSDXC – $17.98 CAD"

You don't want to do this. Buy a Swissbit Card of you don't want data corruption on your system.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, even the name brand SD cards blow up for me after about 6 months. I've switched over to the Samsung "FIT" USB sticks that fit flush with the port, and boot off that. And leave the SDXC slot free for importing images from the camera.

So far, my experience has been SD cards faceplant by going read-only. They will mount rw, but a single write will cause a long hang, followed by a bunch of sd driver errors, and then it goes read only. It is still readable but will accept no writes, including blkdiscard (which gets translated into whatever the sd card equivalent for TRIM is).

<comment><USER28> Sounds like the SD card internals for boosting voltage to do the erase go bad.

I still wonder why EEPROMs don't have another pin for a high-voltage supply.

Especially for SSDs with multiple chips, would make sense to have 1 efficient voltage boost, instead of in-silico charge pumps on each chip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've done something like this with a SolidRun CuBox and a cheap external 2-disk RAID1 enclosure connected via eSATA... 8 years ago. It's still running - I've only had to replace disks as they failed, which is expected, with zero data loss. It appears as a Time Machine on the network, backing up a couple of laptops, and as a shared SMB drive for bits and bobs.

To be on the safe side, I mounted /var on the enclosure, so the SD card in the CuBox is not stressed, and that has not failed once in 8 years. It wasn't the cheapest thing (and it's absolutely wasted on this task - it has good media capabilities and wifi that I don't ever touch), but it sits in a small recess out of the way, and has been rock-solid. Every few months I dump all its contents to Glacier because I fear the enclosure will fail before the little box does.

I expect I'll eventually replace the CuBox with a Raspberry Pi when it dies, but the overall model is sound, for something as simple as a fileserver. Just don't open it to the internet - a lot of these small boards stop getting OS updates from manufacturers after a year or two, and their custom chipsets make it difficult to work with vanilla Linux - particularly if you need wifi or bluetooth.

</comment><comment><USER30> > my old QNAP NAS would average around 17-22mbps transfer speeds

This seems a bit too low in my opinion, I would expect an average consumer- grade NAS to perform a little bit better than that. Perhaps there was a bottleneck somewhere (e.g. network issues)?

I didn't test transfer speeds on my cheap Thecus NAS (with 2X WD Red 3TB in RAID 1) but now I'm curious so I think I will check when I get home.

What's your experience with NAS transfer speeds, HN people?

<comment><USER31> 22 MBps sounds like what my former DNS-320 achieved. IIRC, encrypted data transfer (WebDAVs instead of NFS) usually reduced the transfer speed a lot, due to a weak CPU. The value above is the one I recall for encrypted transfers (note Bytes, not bits).

<comment><USER32> IIRC I had about 60 MB/sec in 2008 with some old Phenom of mine with dedicated Areca raid controller plus 4x 1 TB _and_ encrypted storage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does either the Rock64 or RockPro64 run mainline Debian with the Debian generic arm64 kernel yet? Or do you have to use a board-specific kernel like the ones that Armbian provides?

<comment><USER34> Yep, the community has done quite a bit of work to mainline support, Mali (old and new) drivers were just recently mainlined.

[https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/17540-early-mainline- image...](https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/17540-early-mainline-images-for- rk3288-rk3328-and-rk3399/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've been thinking of setting up a NAS like this for a while. Am I missing something, though, or does a setup like this need 5 or 6 power adapters to work (one for the Rock64, one each for the USB enclosure, and possibly one for the USB hub)?

Not a deal killer, for sure, but it becomes a mess of cables quickly.

<comment><USER36> Check the allowable voltage input ranges for each and if they have overlap just buy a big power brick (like a laptop charger), cut the ends off of each of the supplied wall warts and solder+shrinkwrap them all together into a nice neat harness. This has the added benefit of saving a tiny bit of power assuming you get a decent main supply.

Tip: thread the shrinkwrap _first_ before soldering. This will save you much swearing.

<comment><USER28> You can also find barrel splitters. I use one so that my 12V router and 12V modem both run off 1 wall-wart.

Look to be common for security cameras.

Like so: [https://www.ebay.ca/itm/113713154440](https://www.ebay.ca/itm/113713154440)

<comment><USER37> Did you do any testing to figure out how many amps you're drawing from the single wall wart? Although, modem/routers in normal usage are pretty low draw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Probably just my paranoia, but I'd be a bit nervous about corruption running many large drives from a single usb3 port.

<comment><USER39> ZFS has a nifty, sort of low-rent safety that can be used for this sort of thing - the 'copies' param. Just be sure to understand what it does and doesn't give you.

[https://linux.die.net/man/8/zfs](https://linux.die.net/man/8/zfs)

I personally value the data I store long-term more than this, but most likely would have played around with it when I was more cash strapped and daring/stupid about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Is there any NAS that has design and simplicity as a primary focus?

I have hated all NAS that I've tried due to each one wanting to have more features than the next and all resulting in slow complicated messes.

<comment><USER41> Which features would you keep/prioritize?

<comment><USER40> Storing files in a resilient way (usually just RAID 1). Allowing those files to be accessed from all my devices. Only doing what would be guessed by the words Network Attached Storage. Don't give me stuff for security cameras, transcoding, things for my thermostat, vertialization, email, etc etc. Basically just a personal Dropbox.

<comment><USER40> And maybe make it look nice and also small. Maybe use laptop drives. Make it wireless too. Focus on nice UI instead of looking like Windows 95

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> By the way, when using a backup software like Borg or Restic that are supposed to have replication built-in, do you still need things like RAID (if you intend to use the drive only for backup) ?

EDIT: I guess no : [https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/faq.html#can- pro...](https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/faq.html#can-project-name- add-redundancy-to-the-backup-data-to-deal-with-hardware-malfunction)

<comment><USER43> I think the answer is actually yes, you need RAID as borg is not taking care of replication for you.

<comment><USER42> Yes sorry, I meant yes, you still need RAID.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Why don't these people just buy one of those power efficient i3's and throw it in an old PC case ? Seems like a lot more power and flexibility compared to using Rock64's. My 'nas' is just a headless linux computer with a bunch of drives in there. My only complaint is that 6 HDD ports aren't enough. It can stream HD video to multiple devices at the same time no problem which I feel like would choke if you tried it on the Rock64.

</comment><comment><USER45> I use a gnubee nas. Its an open source hardware nas that can run debian. Its not a shoestring budget device but its a lot cheaper than the commercial ones.

<comment><USER46> Lol the GnuBee is adorable!

But "recommended RAID levels are 0 and 1 under LVM and MD, and Linux MD RAID 10"[0]?

What you _likely_ want is a 1, and if so it seems easier to keep two drives in your PC and rsync from one to the other[1]. (Also, such is the awesomeness of rsync that the syncs from one _10 TB_ drive to another literally takes seconds...)

I thought NASs' niche was more complex RAID levels which mitigate the data corruption our last-gen filesystems are still prone to. :D

0: [https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal- cloud-2](https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-2)

1: Cron "rsync -aPq --delete {$source} {$destination} >/dev/null 2>&1". (The scary delete flag deletes files on the destination that are no longer on source, handling renames and unwanted data as RAID would.)

<comment><USER45> You can set it up any way you like really. You have access to a root debian shell and can do anything at all that can be done on debian.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> It's a little more than a shoestring budget, but I built my NAS from an old Supermicro server I bought on ebay. I found a 4U 24-bay machine for $1200 with dual xeons, 256GB (!) of RAM, 2x PSUs. All I had to add was a RAID controller ($100~) and a flash drive for the OS (because I was being greedy and wanted all 24 bays for storage).

It works great -- although it is as loud as a jet engine.

</comment><comment><USER48> (2018)

The ROCKPro64 with the PCIe slot has been out for a while.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does PCIe vs USB3 matter when building a NAS in this case? Your bottleneck is going to be the gigabit network anyway.

<comment><USER49> PCIe might be good so you can use an used enterprise raid card in JBOD mode. Probably can attach way more drives that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Just go with a full tower, you will be able to fit more cheap HDD's. And use ZFS mirrors.

</comment><comment><USER51> I have Raspberry Pi 3 B+ hooked with two LaCie Porsche Design P'9220 1T drives set up in RAID 1. I had to increase the USB current by configuring max_usb_current=1 in /boot/config.txt and also use good USB charger and cable (really, some of the cables I had were not good enough) to get it to work reliably.

It's been working perfectly. Sure, it's not the fastest thing ever, but mostly the limiting factor is our home WiFi, not the the RasPi.

EDIT: The USB drivers I use do not need external power supply, so the whole thing needs only two cables; power supply and Ethernet. Ethernet cable is not necessary if you are ok with WiFi speeds.

<comment><USER52> I have a usb harddrive connected to an odroid c2, it used to be connected to an rpi3, but if I'm not mistaken I got 2-3x the write performance when using the odroid. I have an odroid n2 now, but I haven't bench marked it.

<comment><USER51> rpi3b+ got pretty good upgrades for networking and usb speeds compared to rpi3b. But sure, it is not the fastest thing in town.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is pretty cool! Back in 2012, as a hackathon project, we compiled our then product (MagFS) to run on raspberry pi - and it worked beautifully (minimal work needed, as the client was in C++, mostly compiler ifdef's).

For context: MagFS (sold to EMC, as part of the acquisition of Maginatics) was a full-fledged cloud NAS (mostly following SMB2/3 semantics, although it was also mostly POSIX-compatible) and used cloud objects (e.g. S3 or OpenStack) for raw data storage instead of HDD blocks.

</comment><comment><USER54> I got tired of ARM-board NAS boxes a few years ago, the performance has always been pretty bad, usually because of the USB attached storage. Although I had an orion5x-based WD ShareSpace a few years ago with 4 sata connectors, and that was terrible too!

These days I'm running a SFF PC with 7TB of SSDs wedged in it, seems to be doing the job nicely.

</comment><comment><USER55> I've got a Qotom PC for this purpose. Mine, unfortunately, is an older model with only USB 2 and SATA, but my Orico RAID box has got both USB and eSATA, but even then since I run borg backups in the background, I don't miss much performance over USB (I've been too lazy to reconnect it to SATA).

</comment><comment><USER56> I just bought a used Synology NAS for about $30 and added HDD. Synology OS is awesome, with everything I need wrapped in a nice GUI.

</comment><comment><USER57> What do you thing on using an Odroid XU4 for that? (with a big USB3 HDD with multimedia basically)?

</comment><comment><USER58> Also for about $300 you can buy a used workstation with relatively beefy specs and two 40Gbps fiber cards.

</comment><comment><USER59> If you consider peace of mind, backup in the event of fire, not having to maintain hard drives after failure, energy cost (and Apple running iCloud on renewables)... the $10/month iCloud account (2 TB) account is quite cost competitive with doing it myself...

<comment><USER60> Depends on your requirements. I have 2x12TB drives in a NAS that I rsync. I backup some of it to the cloud (software repos, processed photos, misc documents, etc - maybe 200-300GB) and a lot of it just stays locally (raw video, linux iso, all my original, unprocessed photos, etc).

I also have an old 10TB disk in a USB enclosure encrypted with LUKS that sits in my cabinet at work which serves as my off-site backup. Every ~6 months or so I bring it back and rsync it with a script and take it back to work.

Unfortunately, Apple doesn't even offer anything larger than 2TB, which is terribly small for anyone who's serious about photos or video. I have hours and hours of 4k60 (~400MB/min) video from events and vacations that I want to store. And this was taking using the smartphone in my pocket, I'm not a professional.

<comment><USER59> What's your estimate for the ~cost of the setup, and how many years do you think it will last? Curious if the cost/month is similar to what I calculated.

<comment><USER60> Good question, I never considered it. The motherboard, CPU (i7 4770) and RAM are a very, very old desktop setup.

I checked Amazon and the hard drives were purchased on 10/8/2017 and they were $479/ea. The U-NAS case was $150 and the SSD was a random 120GB SSD I had after upgrading my desktop (it was the smallest of the "spare" SSDs I had in a drawer in my desk).

The 8TB HDD were Seagate Archive Drives that used to be the primary storage until I upgraded, so they became offsite backups. Those were purchased 5/8/2016 for $248. The external enclosures I use were $19.99 ("ORICO Toolfree blah blah" I can get you the exact model if you're interested but I assume you can find something newer and better).

So direct cost, I'm not really sure. A lot of it was "free" for me in the sense that it was spare hardware. But should be enough for you to guestimate what a setup would cost.

How long it will last is really hard to say. I monitor the disk health via smart and by keeping two copies I feel pretty safe. Luckily I'm also a Google Fiber customer (which means 1TB free Google Drive) and I sync a lot of critical stuff (software repos, personal photos, documentation like taxes, etc) to Google Drive for a third backup (following 3-2-1 rule). Right now I still have >1TB free on my primary 12TB drive, and the growth rate isn't very high. The most intensive thing I store is video from my iPhone, so that's really what dictates my rate of growth.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Here's Woz, Waiting in Line for His New iPad - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5893839/heres-woz-waiting-in-line-for-his-new-ipad <comment><USER2> People are still waiting in lines to buy Apple products? After all those years? I could understand it (if I really, really tried) when the first iPhone came out. But for the iPad III. People have way too much time on their hands.</comment>


Chesslin a 256 bytes chess program - <AUTHOR> http://olivier.poudade.free.fr/src/Chesslin.asm http://olivier.poudade.free.fr/arc/Chesslin.zip Published in 2600: The Hacker Quarterly Spring 2016 <comment><AUTHOR> Chess in 256 bytes. That's less than two tweets. This makes the 1k ZX81 version look like bloatware. @robmanuel</comment>


Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing - what now? - <AUTHOR> Just over a year ago my co-founder and I started working on our startup full-time. As we developed the product and talked to other people, everyone said our startup is an amazing idea. I even had a situation where a total stranger that I was pitching to, took out her iphone and ordered our product right in front of me - it was amazing.
Our customers also love our product and the feedback has been extremely positive. We didn't just ask friends and family - we actually validated our product before we committed to it full-time.
Our startup is in the travel industry, we put a new spin on the traditional travel guide. After many months work, we have finally managed to cover most of the popular tourist destinations in the world. We are making sales, but it's a trickle - nowhere near enough to support us.
Here is an example of our product: http://bit.ly/szvH36
We bootstrapped and have reach the end of our funds. Attempts to get incubated via Chile, YC and Techstars have so far been unsuccessful. We haven't gained enough momentum to approach angels.
I had to go back to contract work to start paying bills, but I am still moonlighting on our startup. My cofounder is going to be in a similar situation very soon.
This is what puzzles me... how is it possible that everyone thinks our idea is good, but we haven't managed to gain momentum?
Any thoughts, ideas or feedback on how to keep the company afloat would be great. <comment><USER3> Keep contracting to pay the bills. As you guys save up some cash, hire a designer to make the pages prettier.

So many people will disregard the praise for your site if it's ugly or they can't figure it out.

Edit: A little more food for thought - I opened the page you linked, then went to the homepage, then closed the page. It just didn't appeal to me visually. It wasn't until I saw the comment about charging too much that I even realized you sold something.

So on the cost thing - split test! Run a test between $5 and $10. Seriously. Combine a pretty product with a price that seems just barely over the limit and you will likely find that people are finding your product "re-assuringly expensive". It costs $10 and it's pretty. It must be a high quality itinerary.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! I think you're right and a great idea. We've discussed a redesign for a while now. We couldn't justify the cost when we were bootstrapping. Now that some cash will begin to roll in again I think it would be worth it.

<comment><USER5> Email me at firstname.lastname@example.com. I might be able to help you out with the site redesign.

I am a freelance web designer and i love helping out startups with tight budgets. My portfolio is at madebyargon.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My immediate feedback is that you are charging too much. I can buy a travel book which details hundreds of things about SF for ~$20, used $10. I can get a Google itinerary for many places for free.

Second, this seems like an impulse buy sort of item. ( i.e. I'm stuck visiting somewhere new but haven't had time to research it.) A mobile app that allowed quick access to new itineraries via gps look-up might make for a better sales rate. But I don't see anything changing until your price-point accounts for the competition's prices.

<comment><USER7> good point, but being on the webpage looking at a focused itinerary of a place I am going to is much more compelling than buying a one size fits all guide book. And for the cost of parking ($7.50), it seems well priced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Take heart: Without AdWords, Google itself was an idea that was amazing but a failing startup. You need a better revenue model than competing with cheap guidebooks.

Here's one idea: Give it away but include coupons for each stop on the itinerary. It's Groupon for travelers. Consider offering an app so people can easily carry it with them and it will always be up-to-date with the latest destinations and deals.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! I mentioned this below, but we're running a small test with essentially this approach. We're giving away the itinerary for free and then trying to upsell/cross-sell other related services -- such as a San Francisco CityPass, tours and p2p experiences. If you'd like to take a look you can check it out here (you'll have to enter your email address to get the free itinerary) -- <http://bit.ly/enWxWz>

My concern with partnering with restaurants and retailers is that I feel like it's a slippery slope to disingenuous recommendations. Plus, why would a restaurant offer a coupon to a traveler (at least a coupon of value)? There's no chance of repeat business. Just some thoughts, would love to get more feedback, if you have any.

<comment><USER8> > Plus, why would a restaurant offer a coupon to a traveler (at least a coupon > of value)?

Because it brings in business. I see restaurants advertising for tourists all the time. Look in any in-flight magazine or any of the free guidebooks that are given away in tourist areas. They're full of ads and coupons for tours, restaurants, museums and attractions. That's a business model worth investigating.

The downside is it's a real boots-on-the-ground business that requires a heavy investment in sales effort to make it work. The upside is that once you sign up a customer (assuming they have a positive experience) it is highly likely they will repeat. You could start with just one city and if it works grow it from there.

Good luck to you!

<comment><USER4> Fair enough -- I was thinking more along the lines of a Groupon type coupon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem is that you need to connect with the person who is traveling at exactly the right time. too soon and you lose mind-share, too late and it's no longer necessary. you need to figure out the delivery mechanism that works well. Maybe see if you can partner up with groupon travel destinations as an adder and offer them a split of it. so if groupon sells a hotel package in Chicago you should be offering your Chicago package. I think living social offers vacation packages too.

You can offer a few different levels of service too: default is web/you print at home. You can offer a full color printed version with the order if you want as well. logistically this is harder but it seems like more of a deal.

There is also the fandango way of doing it too. offer the ability to prepay for the tickets and take a small commission off the top for that. that's tougher to sell to the consumer because you don't have the trust relationship and might leave them stranded at the venue with no valid tickets. It would be slick to have this so that they didn't have to wait in line at all. make it opt in though and let them select what they want to actually go to see/do.

An iPhone app that has everything integrated would be great but it could also be as easy as just an interface for the pdf. If you got it into the appstore you would increase your visibility a bit especially if you target the "what should I do in x" queries with adwords that linked to a specific version of your app. you could also have inapp purchases that would download a new guide. cross selling in your apps is a good thing in this case.

pretty interesting idea. I'd probably buy the sf one if I go there ever but you have to reach me at the right time....

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great ideas - some of our thinking has been along the same lines. One of our biggest barriers is funds, which means we have to push as hard and fast as we can before we are totally depleted.

Design is something on our list, but neither of us are designers, and getting a good design will cost a fair amount.

We have tried to provide them in physical format, but the price significantly exceeds that of a travel guide - I'm not sure if it makes sense.

We haven't considered the fandango route - I guess it is a revenue stream that we should investigate.

The iphone app is coming... but its not feature packed, because we had to outsource it, and as always, funds are limited.

<comment><USER9> I'd say go for the print version with the expectation that not too many people are going to buy it. There is a well known psyhcological device called price fixing that shows that people are more likely to buy/pay more for the mid range option when presented with a high priced option. Look at the basecamp signup page for this. People are predictably irrational. (check out that book for more good stuff like this; chapter 1 in particular for this example)

Do you get to own the code for the iPhone app or are you beholden to one company for updates?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had a similar idea sometime ago. I think you can try a ton of things before deciding that it's failing.

Let users create their own guides, which they can share with others for free. User generated content can be a huge driver of traffic. Then your business model becomes freemium. Normal users' guides are free, but you pay a little for "expert" guides.

Get professional tour guides on board. For example, in the UK we have blue badge guides who are certified. Getting them on your site will add some credibility.

Make some deals with existing tour companies, either to offer discounts through your site or just a cut of ticket sales.

Have you considered selling your existing guides as ebooks on Amazon or other platforms? Even if you have some awesome guides, I don't know about them because I've never heard of your site. I do go to Amazon to buy travel guides when I'm travelling. If I see your guides show up in the search, I will at least look at a sample on my Kindle. You could do both - have some free guides for promotion and have some cheap ones to make some revenue.

Have you considered selling hard copies of your guides? Most people don't have a way to read a PDF when they are travelling.

Use the Foursquare API to show a "hot destinations" chart on the homepage. Show where people are checking in and link to your guides for those places.

Use buysellads or call businesses directly to place very targeted ads on the site. Affiliate links for tickets and hotel bookings may also work. AirBNB has an affiliate program - ride their success wave.

There are lots more things you could try. The important things I feel are generating lots more content and being creative about distribution channels.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think your business model might be wrong. As Iaks points out below, the $5 price point is not far from that of a used travel book.

Perhaps offer the content free, then work with top restaurants and retailers on the 'tours' you recommend and get them to offer coupons / deals or advertising, of which you can get a cut. People touring a city will get hungry, and if you can point them to a great place, they'll thank you.

<comment><USER4> We're running a small test with essentially this approach. We're giving away the itinerary for free and then trying to upsell/cross-sell other related services -- such as a San Francisco CityPass, tours and p2p experiences. If you'd like to take a look you can check it out here (you'll have to enter your email address to get the free itinerary) -- <http://bit.ly/enWxWz>

My concern with partnering with restaurants and retailers is that I feel like it's a slippery slope to disingenuous recommendations. Plus, why would a restaurant offer a coupon to a traveler (at least a coupon of value)? There's no chance of repeat business. Just some thoughts, would love to get more feedback, if you have any.

<comment><USER11> Priority #1 is to remain genuine. That's what you stand for.

Restaurants might actually be more open to offering coupons to travellers - <USER2> a sense, those customers are not repeat business, so they shouldn't be worried about impacting their long term pricing with the local market.

Ultimately, I think you need to focus first on building enough value here with consumers - I don't like to suggest making things free, but in this case I think it's something you have to give away and monetize in other ways. There's nothing bad about that approach (Google does it), but it does require a higher volume of users for it to make sense.

Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The problem is that even though you have a great idea, that's only one part of the equation. To have a successful product you have to have four aspects: the market, marketing, design, features - in that order (got that from "Start Small, Stay Small".

Everyone could say that the features in your product are amazing. But if you're in a market where customers don't pay, or if you're unable to reach them with the right marketing, then a perfect product is useless.

You have to determine the most profitable segment of your market. And find the cheapest way to market to them. What's the expected lifetime value of a user? Is it less than the cost to acquire that user through Adwords/Facebook? Then run through some ads. And invest some time in learning to optmize the ads.

What are some keywords that people are searching for that would lead users to your product? Are there many people competing for those terms? It might be worthwhile to invest time/money doing SEO. It seems you have a lot of content that might be worthwhile.

You've solved the hard part of having a good product. Now you have to figure out how to market it well.

<comment><USER13> Personally, I think they solved the easy part.. and the hard part is left. Creating a product is easy these days, but getting traction is like black magic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think people love "the idea" of your idea. People love to imagine they're off on a vacation to Paris, and they'll have so much to think of, they'll probably want a locally-authored tour guide. So they're excited about traveling, going to Paris and finding lots of cool things to do there. But not necessarily from your guide books. When the time comes to _actually_ go to Paris, the problem for you guys is that there's a TON of free information. You're competing with the simplest of all Google searches: "What should I do in Paris?", not to mention dozens of in-flight magazines, tourist info packets, maps, concierges, coupon books etc etc. When you're competing with so much free information, a $4.99 price point is too high, imho.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is definitely some resistance to paying for travel information when so much of it is available for free - I totally agree with you on that. However, our product is more aimed at short trips, where investing in lots of time to research the destination just doesn't make sense.

I feel like $4.99 is a reasonable price considering the amount of time it saves you.

What would you consider a reasonable price? Or specifically... what would be your own personal "too expensive" threshold?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't think offering more information, or charging less, would solve your problem. If I had wanted more information, I'd buy a guidebook. As SHOwnsYou mentioned, it's about having (good) itinerary decisions made for me. The value isn't in the amount of information, but the judgment that went into filtering and digesting the over-info out there in other travel sites/books.

To complement that value, your design needs to give a sense of 'here's the distilled gem about this city' - it should just 'hit me'. Instead, I am presented instead with a rather drab plain page, which feels like it'd take forever to get through to gratification.

I'd echo suggestions to look into redesigning the page to make the visual impact, fast.

</comment><comment><USER16> A question for you: Why did you decide to offer these travel guides worldwide instead of concentrating on one city first?

It seems like you should test out your ideas on one city (which is much easier to market), then once you find a successful model, start branching out into other cities.

You could spend some money on PPC ads on keywords such as "San Francisco tours", "San Francisco golden gate bridge", etc, and test out different landing pages and different types of guides.

I also think something like this would work better if the information was all free, and people get to rate the quality of each tour. The ones with higher ratings will be shown higher up - maybe offer prizes to authors who have highly rated tours.

</comment><comment><USER17> Court the traffic gatekeepers who reach your target audience by pitching them via email. In my experience asking a single direct/focused question elicits a response at least 50% of the time.

Inbound link juice from being featured on a site that's old, trusted and authoritative is 90% of the SEO game. Getting traffic is all about courting and pitching traffic gatekeepers at progressive levels of difficulty/reach, so you might as well start refining your approach.

For an inspiring read on growing your traffic check out "Crush It" by Gary Vaynerchuk, and start getting your content and community hustle on!

</comment><comment><USER18> I looked at the 2 itineraries available for my city and it was the typical tourist attractions. Like others have commented they're already widely recommended online and in print guidebooks. If I made an itinerary for a friend i'd recommend specific niche places the locals go relevant to their interests.

What if you bump the price up to $20+ per itinerary then offered more value by having each itinerary custom made to match each customer's personal interests. Maybe also have the 'local experts' who made the guide ranked like a restaurant on yelp to build up trust.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well the idea was to build a marketplace in the hope that we would get lots of different itineraries for each location, with each one tackling the city from a different angle. It would be up to the individuals to write itineraries how they deemed fit, and the review/rating process would make sure the best ones were highlighted.

Unfortunately, so far we have had to seed the marketplace with itineraries which are costing us $100+ each, so we dont have the luxury of making many itineraries for each city.

Also, each itinerary takes many weeks to write - $20 just wouldn't cover the expenses of bespoke itineraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's little chance you'll make enough to survive selling $ itineraries... I suggest just pivoting and becoming a consumer travel website ala TripAdvisor, or GogoBot.. if you're not going into the ticket space, you need content, and lots of free content.

You also need to learn more about the amount of traction it will realistically take to make a good amount of profit. Even 1000 daily visitors won't do you any good with your current business model. How are you gonna get visitors? You can't just sit tight and wait.

</comment><comment><USER19> > how is it possible that everyone thinks our idea is good, > but we haven't > managed to gain momentum?

Because you haven't achieved product/market fit.

For example, you're trying to charge individuals who are traveling - have you explored charging travel-related companies? I could see your app being very compelling for travel agencies, travel book publishers, neighborhood merchant associations, Chambers of Commerce, and businesses that want to advertise to travelers.

</comment><comment><USER20> Maybe you're using the wrong channels. How about reaching out to biz devs at all the various Expedia-type sites to see if they are interested in doing a little up-selling during check out as an affiliate or something? This would give you targeted users who already have their wallets opened which is perfect for an impulse purchase. I think partnerships will go along way if executed properly.

<comment><USER4> I completely agree and we would love to partner with someone like this. Talking with others who have tried going down this road, I've heard it's difficult to impossible to land a partnership like that, so we've been hesitant to put a lot of effort into trying. Perhaps it's time to give partnerships a shot.

<comment><USER20> Test your biz dev skills on the smaller sites first and it will help you understand how it all works. They also won't want to dedicate massive amounts of time to implement so make it dead simple for potential partners to serve your data. All you need is one small break to boost your confidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> i'll have to agree with SHOwnsYou.

My first impression is not "Wow!". Your website design doesn't have that wow factor with it's design. i would highly recommend either getting a design to do some work for you or download a nice design from themeforest.

also there is no way i would pay any money to find an "itenary" because as mentioned below i can just go on google and search for "what to do in xyz?" and pick and choose the ones i like. so personally i would make it free, redo the design and try and make money from the advertisement. maybe down the road you can make deals with certain locations to add them in your itenary for a fee? sell tickets on your site for those locations and keep a commission? either way, charging for an itenary when anyone can just do a google search for it doesn't make sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER22> $5 isn't much if you are able to demonstrate more value - example: personal safety - what are the areas to avoid? where can you find free water fountains? where are the best spots for a cheap meal along the route? You might be able to raise your revenue mix if you had sponsored content.

</comment><comment><USER23> Have you tried promoting on Adwords, go for long tail keywords, optimize, optimize, optimize? Have you done A/B testing on your landing pages? Have you thought about installing an affiliate program?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have done many tests with Adwords - our margins are tiny, and adwords doesn't seem to work for us. We are still testing this, but we are not even close - we are many, many miles away. I'm sure we are missing something with adwords, but we have tried a lot, but still not succeeded.

We have a very basic discount/promo system, but building an affiliate system takes time, and we haven't had any requests for it, so it is not at the top of our roadmap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I travel a lot and wouldn't use this. Shanghai costs $5 and I don't have any idea what might be in there. My travel book was $15 and already has itineraries for most popular cities in China.

</comment><comment><USER7> persistence. a better UI. and community feeling - invite users to signup for itinerary authors - and have a subsection of such 'community written' itineraries at a reduced rate. authors get a %. that would ^ word of mouth among travel and expat forums, blogs, social.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions. We are currently giving our itinerary authors 75% of the sales - and that has got the word out a bit (just not enough I guess).

Trying to build a social community is something we should possibly try, but it will take a lot of time - and we weren't convinced it would catch on.</comment></comment>


Flawed Security Exposes Vital Software to Hackers - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/flawed-security-exposes-vital-software-to-hackers/

<comment><AUTHOR> "The McAfee paper focused on issues in the popular system made by Perforce Software, whose customers include Google and many other technology companies.

"McAfee said it intends to review other SCM systems, which include the free program Concurrent Versions System, Microsoft's Visual Source Safe and IBM's Rational."</comment>


Image processing 1,000 times faster is goal of new $5M contract - <AUTHOR> http://www.eecs.umich.edu/eecs/about/articles/2013/Lu-image-processing-1000-times-faster.html

<comment><USER2> >>1,000 times faster with 10,000 times less power

Do you even need to read their research to call bullshit?

How many projects have achieved this ever?

<comment><USER3> This is DARPA money.

How many DARPA project mission statements have you read? They all sound like that.

<comment><USER4> Also, the more dollars and the more professors on the grant, the more hyperbole. Thus, a $5M DARPA contract has to promise more than 10x what a $500K DARPA contract promises.</comment></comment></comment>


Understanding SARS-CoV-2 and the drugs that might lessen its power - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/03/12/understanding-sars-cov-2-and-the-drugs-that-might-lessen-its-power <comment><USER2> Animal food markets in China (and nearby in SE Asia) are unlikely to be shut down. They are regional phenomena. I guess they accept that risk. What will keep them from fathering pandemics?

The ships plying global sea trade started spreading plague epidemics no later than the 1500s. (Not to mention colonization, or Columbus.) War made the so- called Spanish flu widespread. We're not sure yet whether that one started in Kansas.

Both moved a lot slower than today's airplanes. They've become the disease's vector of choice ... and hugely bear the responsibility for accelerating regional epidemics into global ones.

How long did it take to shut down air travel once Wuhan happened? Why is that? Taiwan was expected to be badly hit. Take a close look at Taiwan's route to success. [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689)

<comment><USER3> How much did China lose due to this outbreak?

$1 trillion at least.

You think they can't do something to reduce the risk of this calamity from happening again?

Cultures can change. Ancient practices that had limited risks when everybody lived in remote villages must change to adopt to the modern society. There is a lot of people in China that want to ban these markets. I'm not sure about Southeast Asia.

<comment><USER4> Only 1 trillions? That's what usa pumped into the market in one day...

<comment><USER5> And it promptly disappeared as markets kept plunging

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you are interested in the details of how SARS-CoV-2 works, the history of discovery of the ACE2 receptor it binds to, and a potential treatment based on human recombinant ACE2 that has been through phase I and II human trials previously and is now starting trials in China for covid19 - I highly recommend this video lecture from Dr Josef Penninger from earlier this week.

You might need to register (it's free) to watch but it's worth it.

[https://connect.myesr.org/course/novel-coronavirus- outbreak-...](https://connect.myesr.org/course/novel-coronavirus-outbreak- experience-and-challenges-in-imaging-and-beyond/)

The idea is that by adding soluble rhACE2 to the serum, the virus will bind to that rather than real ACE2 in the cells, reducing viral load.

This is not the flu - it can attack multiple organs where ACE2 is expressed - deep in the lungs, heart, stomach lining, kidneys. I've seen other studies which indicated it can affect the central nervous system too. It's not as deadly as SARS but much more contagious. And we still don't have a clear picture what permanent lung/organ damage is inflicted to some recovered patients.

<comment><USER6> Now on YouTube:

[https://youtu.be/jAW6VBWTiAA](https://youtu.be/jAW6VBWTiAA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> No mention of Camostat plus E-64d that is already known to blockade TMPRSS2 and ACE2. E-64d needs full clinical trials while Camostat needs enhanced Phase IV trials since it's already Rx in Japan.

[https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30229-4](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674\(20\)30229-4)

<comment><USER8> Camostat is mentioned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there a non-paywall version?

<comment><USER10> [https://outline.com/Ma9nV7](https://outline.com/Ma9nV7)

Or just stop the page loading when it shows the full text, before it gets hidden by the JS popup.

<comment><USER11> Or you can just turn off JS for economist.com

<comment><USER9> Herp derp on my part. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>