Instagram raised $50M right before acquisition - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/right-before-acquisition-instagram-closed-50m-at-a-500m-valuation-from-sequoia-thrive-greylock-and-benchmark/

<comment><USER2> I don't understand this at all. Unless FB started and finished this deal in the 24 hours following the round, why in the world would the founders let this round close?

In all seriousness: somebody explain this please.

<comment><USER3> Deals fall apart. Running both deals in parallel is a smart way to hedge risk. Also, it is in fact possible to put together a deal very fast. We sold FriendFeed on a weekend.

<comment><USER4> Curious...when you speak of a "deal" are you saying all of negotiations and paper work?

It's my assumption that many large scale deals get negotiated informally over a longer period of time and rarely is it as simple as an investor comes in on a thursday at a first introduction and a deal is signed by sunday.

<comment><USER3> I negotiated terms Friday evening, we signed docs Sunday night, and announced Monday morning.

<comment><USER5> not that it's apples and oranges either (50mm vs. 1bn) you'd think diligence takes time (i.e. longer than a weekend).

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but that diligence is surely all in FB's court?

If my startup was valued at 500m last week (I wish!), and someone offered me 1b for it today, I'd consider the extent of due diligence required on my part would be checking to see if the cheque cleared...

(Having said that, presumably FB _did_ due diligence - before Thursday's 50m on 500m round - I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when Instagram explained that in the final few days of the sale… "Oh, BTW, we sold 10% to Sequoia et al on Thursday - that doesn't change anything here, right?")

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What did they even raise the $50M for? They have 13 employees and run a couple hundred AWS instances from all accounts...

They had previously raised $7M a little over a year ago. Surely much of that was still around.

Was this primarily to raise their valuation? Is that how it's done?

Genuinely curious, I don't know how these things work.

<comment><USER6> Cynical-me says "To provide 100% returns worth $50mil over a weekend for some friends of theirs"…

Surely there's absolutely no doubt that whoever signed this round last Thursday knew just how close to finalizing a $1bil acquisition they were?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Investors literally doubled their money overnight. Wow.

<comment><USER8> Let's be clear here: _connected people_ doubled their money overnight. There should be a special tax for insider-only capital gains like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually agree with that. They definitely knew the FB deal was in place when they agreed to the funding.

<comment><USER9> Totally agreed. Engineers at instagram worked days and nights for years for probably the same amount of money that the inside traders make overnight, literally.

<comment><USER4> Did you ever stop to think that insider traders may have spent endless nights building their companies, selling them for profit and are now simply taking that money to invest?

Money is simply a medium for exchange in this case.

<comment><USER10> Spending endless nights building and selling companies is laudable, and well rewarded already. "Taking that money to invest" is an entirely unrelated task and needs to be done on the same playing field the rest of the investing public has to play on.

You're saying essentially that the ethics of how you spend money change depending on how you got it. How can that logic possibly work?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I were a facebook shareholder, I would be livid right now. This was definitely an inside deal/giveaway that resulted in facebook having to pay much more for the company than it would have.

<comment><USER2> Facebook's core feature, apart from the graph, is photo-sharing. Instagram is the only company at the moment who has any real chance at building a base to compete with Facebook on photos right now. Looking at this from a $/engineer or $/user seems misleading. I have got to imagine that managing future competition motivates this move. That being said, it seems absurdly expensive.

I'm surprised they didn't try to add photo-filters to their mobile app first. I don't think people are going to spend the next decade taking retro pictures. Just like with location - they could've added the feature to their app, people can "be part of location" without having to join a new network.

Over time, most people get bored of filtering their photos and move on. By putting that feature in mobile app, Facebook likely could've done a bit put the curb on Instagram from ever pivoting away from filters into a full fledged photo-sharing network and saved themselves a billion.

<comment><USER11> I am not arguing whether this was a good acquisition. The acquisition itself seems to make sense. But it is rather bizarre that they would allow this financing to take place which would do nothing but add to the price of acquisition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have a question: is this good or bad for the Series B investors? I'm not sure the answer is as obvious as it seems.

2X return overnight is great for angels, but is it good for VCs? From what I understand (correct me if I'm wrong), once VCs have an exit, they can't reuse the proceedings for a subsequent investment. Thus, since VCs like Sequoia are probably looking for 10X returns, they just ended up with a chunk of their fund that underperformed. True or false?

<comment><USER13> > _From what I understand (correct me if I'm wrong), once VCs have an exit, > they can't reuse the proceedings for a subsequent investment._

Why wouldn't they be able to use the funds for a later investment? Isn't that what VCs do in general? (Genuine question; not being snarky.)

<comment><USER12> I believe that most funds are structured in a way that the VCs have to pass the proceedings (minus their cut of course) to their LPs (investors).

<comment><USER14> Correct. However many funds do not distribute returns that are less than a certain amount (1.5x is typical, I think)

<comment><USER12> So in you opinion, assuming that Sequoia had to distribute the "overnight" 2X to their LPs, was that a good investment for them?

<comment><USER14> I think VCs are looking to provide bigger returns than this.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stack Overflow results now included in MSDN Search - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/stack-overflow-results-featured-in-msdn-search/

<comment><USER2> This is a win-win for both SO community and MSDN. SO has a lot more Q/A on .NET than any other platform/tech. That means there are a lot more .NET folks on it. Good luck to Joel, Jeff and SO community.

</comment><comment><USER3> Stack Overflow (well really, google, but SO usually comes up pretty close to the top) has become my go to resource for looking up problems and usage scenarios for my .NET dev. MSDN is woefully lacking in many respects and it's much easier to find _relevant_ results on SO.

</comment><comment><USER4> In general I find the MSDN information to be lacking. It's about as dry and straight-forward as you can get and rarely does my search for the 'answer' end there.

It would be nice if you could choose to see these results mixed in or not. A check-box next to search field maybe?

<comment><USER5> I find I end up using the two different sites for different things. Stack Overflow for when I need help with a problem, and MSDN as a reference tool for the capabilities of a section of the framework. Integrating the two will be a great help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hope MS doesn't use this as an opportunity to put even less resources into MSDN and Help.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I used to be able to hit F1 to get context (good) sensitive help in Visual Studio - this hasn't worked for ~5 years for me. Luckily, it doesn't matter that much because of all the non- official sources...but I'm just curious why MSDN and help seems to not work, at all.

<comment><USER7> Back when I was trying to use MSDN, I could only assume they had a team of people whose job was ensuring that every document got a new URL with every major release, and that none of the URLs they had already assigned work anymore. Maybe if they had fewer resources they'd waste less time making both bookmarks and their own search results useless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is great because there are many times I find community discussions/forum threads much more understandable than technical documents.

<comment><USER9> They also bring in results from codeproject.com. This definitely makes MSDN search a first stop for tech-related info. No more weeding out experts- exchange or software.informer results from my Google search.

I'm curious about the weighting they give for different sites. Some search terms don't bring in results from StackOverflow like I thought they would.

<comment><USER4> * They also bring in results from codeproject.com.*

Now that (CodeProject) result aggregation, yeah that's extremely cool/useful/helpful... did not know this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's nice to be able to go to one place to look for some .NET API. I no longer need to Google search a topic, and then open multiple tabs, each for MSDN, SO, experts-exchange, and other forums.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is so great. I actually look forward to the next time I need a really obscure winapi function. Apple?

</comment><comment><USER12> Fantastic stuff for certain communities. Using Google to site-search SO.com is a wonderful resource. I'm not a .NET developer, but if I were, then I'd appreciate this data-aggregating shortcut.

</comment><comment><USER13> I rarely care so little about a tech-related article that I flag it, but here you go.</comment>


Neural-redis – Neural networks module for Redis - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/antirez/neural-redis <comment><USER2> Most dev teams probably run Redis in production and having neural networks as a datatype could be incredibly powerful -- it will make neural networks much more accessible.

While this was a 48h personal hackathon (insane!) by Salvatore, I hope it makes it into Redis core.

I will be spending my weekend on playing with this and trying it out with different internal datasets.

Also, the documentation is a treat. It teaches the basics of NNs very well.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. For many prediction / classification tasks you don't need much feature engineering. Or much data for that matter ;)

<comment><USER4> Yep... nor there is locality in the inputs to exploit like it happens in CNNs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I started reading this thinking "Why not just hook into some python scripts that run tensorflow", then I got to this and IMO this makes it:

>The main aim of Neural Redis, which is currently just a 48h personal hackatlon

This was made in 2 days!

Really intrigued to see what happens with this.

<comment><USER6> 48 hours is 6 days in my book.

<comment><USER4> Sorry in the README I meant 48 hours of total time, and about 24-28 hours of total work. However now it's already more, but looking at the commit history says it all.

Also note that _nn.c_ was just modified, it's code I wrote before (years ago). The code I wrote in 2 days is the _neuralredis.c_ file for a total of 1200 lines of code (including comments) plus most of the README.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love this idea, but I'm also worried this is papering over a lot of the truly hard parts of building products on machine learning - the hard part isn't crunching the numbers.

<comment><USER4> I totally agree, and indeed the help that Neural Redis attempts to provide is mainly in the data collection function and the simplicity to experiment. Actually for the number crunching part there are a lot of stellar alternatives (that we can just "connect" to Neural Redis as NN implementation later). The problem is to find a good API for the programmer that allows to easily make experiments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm only on basic understanding of this, so this will be a cool learning tool! Can you, or more precisely did anyone try to create a decoder like this? For example, taking an input stream of mpeg4 or prores or whatever and giving that and the decoded output to the network and, after awhile, see what happens?

<comment><USER2> In the current iteration, this only implements feed forward neural networks -- which are basic and can only resolve basic correlations.

For more advanced stuff (like image or video processing) you have to move to recurrent neural networks.

<comment><USER4> Or CNNs... However I see RNNs more in the future of Neural Redis than CNNs that are more domain-specific, while RNNs are an orthogonal tool for modeling algorithms and not functions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> wow, seems neural networks are going into everything

<comment><USER4> Yep, true... however note that the current Redis incarnation of NNs don't use RNNs nor convolutional NNs that are the big news in the area, it's mostly stuff that was accessible 10 years ago or more. Just computers are now a lot faster even without GPUs, so that small feed forward NNs can be trained in little time and show that they can be pretty useful, especially in a context where the data ingestion and training are encapsulated into an easy to use API.

Nothing prevents us from incorporating more advanced NNs into Redis as a foundation for the API provided by Neural Redis, however with certain problems users face, they may not make much difference, but we'll try to explore new solutions.

<comment><USER8> Does your code use CUDA drivers/GPU or just CPU?

<comment><USER4> Just CPU right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been doing this in my installable app for a bit now. Online training while effectively running blind has been a bit difficult...

Machine learning is definitely going to make devs more productive in this kind of way.</comment>


Why you won't see anything that cool at CES 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://backerkit.tumblr.com/post/39989873263/why-you-wont-see-anything-that-cool-at-ces-13

<comment><USER2> This is not an article, this is just an attempt to push an advertisement and seo spam for backerkit on to hacker news

</comment><comment><USER3> What is he talking about. Already got seriously excited about the new Lego Mindstorms.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's nothing in here about "why" - it's a press release about BackerKit masquerading as a jaded technologist.

It also reads like it was written by an accountant and a marketing intern.

</comment><comment><USER5> ...or why Pebble is the only cool thing this year.</comment>


Ask HN: What open source mailing list software do you use? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to set up a private mailing list. I would like it to support invites, access requests, moderation, simple automation, and archive searching.<p>What do you use/recommend? <comment><USER2> [http://list.org/](http://list.org/)</comment>


Ask HN: Are there actually any good PaaS solutions for Kubernetes? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> IBM Cloud Foundry Enterprise Edition [1] "IBM Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment uniquely unites two powerhouse open-source projects: Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. The enthusiastic adoption of Kubernetes in the cloud market merited a closer look at how customers could leverage both platforms (one focused on applications and the other focused on containers as the primary units of business function) to build coherent cloud solutions."

Eirini [2] "Run Cloud Foundry Applications in Kubernetes"

IBM Cloud Private (self-managed K8s) CFEE [3] "Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment platform brings the same level of application capability that you experience in IBM Cloud and IBM Cloud Dedicated to your data center. It runs directly on IBM® Cloud Private by using Kubernetes containers."

[Disclosure: I'm an IBMer and CF Enthusiast]

[1] . [https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2018/10/ibm-cloud- foundry-...](https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2018/10/ibm-cloud-foundry- enterprise-environment-ga/)

[2] . [https://www.cloudfoundry.org/project- eirini/](https://www.cloudfoundry.org/project-eirini/)

[3] . [https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSBS6K_3.1.2/...](https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSBS6K_3.1.2/cloud_foundry/tech_preview/cfee_overview.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, thank you for the insight!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've started kicking the tires on DigitalOcean's Kubernetes offering. Surprisingly, it's the one I feel most comfortable with. They've made getting the cluster up and running then getting out of your way a thing and I appreciate it. It's Kubernetes without the weird cloud intracacies that make them well clouds. It's in limited preview but, if I'm kicking tires on it it can't be too far from GA. Also, in talking with some of the team members I appreciate their approach and challenges.

[https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/](https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> GKE</comment>


CMS Blue Button 2.0 API - <AUTHOR> https://bluebutton.cms.gov/ <comment><USER2> How do they get the .gov domain?

<comment><USER3> By being part of the Federal Government. This looks like a US Digital Services project.</comment></comment>


ParallelCI: Get faster tests by running your builds in parallel - <AUTHOR> https://codeship.com/features/parallelci

<comment><USER2> Props to the codeship team for another release well done. They're a great team and they're building a great product, can't recommend them highly enough.

</comment><comment><USER3> Codeship really gets points for clarity and usability here. This is the best implementation of parallelism I've seen yet.</comment>


Amazon shares break record... 10 years after coming public - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=ay_0eQaPKWwU

<comment><USER2> Absolutely a great company, they did everything right.

I think junk bonds got them through the dotcom collapse.

When Half.com let people exchange 2nd-hand books, it was USA only. Then Amazon introduced 3rd-party sellers in about 2003 in the UK, and it was great. Though I still buy some from Abebooks (now owned by Amazon).

They even got the Internet Archive going (Alexia was bought out by Amazon).

<comment><USER3> Well, they didn't quite do everything right.

For one, Amazon had a really tough time when the first Internet bubble burst back in 2000. All of a sudden they weren't able to raise capital as quickly as they wanted to.

This would have severely impeded their growth, if not for some brilliant improvements made to their supply chain efficiency.

<comment><USER2> Well, I read they bought high yield bonds (known as junk bonds in the 80s), to get them through a nasty period where the IPO markets had dried up, and VC obviously couldn't fund a late-stage company.

So maybe it's both bonds and improvements?

As for evidence of the bonds: Book The Warren Buffett way:

"In July 2002, only one week after Buffett wrote CEO Jeff Bezos a letter praising him for his decision to account for stock options as an expense, Buffett bought $98.3 million of Amazon's high yield bonds."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> January 2000:

"With only 24 percent of sales coming from international operations, Bezos began working to expand the firm's international base.

He also changed the firm's focus from pursuing growth at all costs, a philosophy Bezos had dubbed "Get Big Fast," to cutting costs wherever possible, building on the corporate overhaul started by Galli."

[http://ecommerce.hostip.info/pages/100/Bezos-Jeff- DEFENDING-...](http://ecommerce.hostip.info/pages/100/Bezos-Jeff-DEFENDING- AMAZON-COM.html)</comment>


Show HN: get music right to your inbox - <AUTHOR> http://www.songsp.in

<comment><AUTHOR> This is almost a weekend project, except it requires daily production of the newsletter (which I love!). Would love to get some feedback from HN users.</comment>


SQLGraph: An Efficient Relational-Based Property Graph Store (2015) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/43287.pdf <comment><USER2> Could someone summarize the results? How did they represent the graph structure and attributes? As normalized SQL or as json blobs?

Also which RDB did they use? I saw mention of Berkeley DB, but can we infer their schema would perform well with stock Postgres or MySQL?

Ideally, there should be code so we can reproduce independently.

<comment><AUTHOR> The paper details its model for the graph structure and attributes, and it shows results for the different approaches they evaluated -- in the end, they propose a novel approach of using rows/columns for adjacency lists and JSON blobs for properties/attributes.

The paper references 3 relational DBs: DB2, Oracle, and PostgreSQL...

      Most modern relational databases such as DB2, Oracle or
      Postgresql have features to support both relational and
      nonrelational storage within the same database engine,
      making it possible to perform an empirical comparison of
      the utility of relational versus non-relational storage
      structures for property graphs.

Presumably they used PostgreSQL since it's the only open-source RDBMS referenced, and it supports CET translations, which they used.

The Berkeley DB reference is regarding the Titan backend datastore they used. Presumably they chose BDB over one of Titan's distributed backeds like Cassandra or HBase since BDB is single server so it's a more apt comparison to the other DBs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is fairly interesting. Postgres has a lot of momentum going on. I guess there's not stopping someone from building a better neo4j on top of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting paper indeed.

On the last page of the paper, Table 8 includes Gremlin->SQL CET translations, i.e. Common Table Expressions: [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/queries- with.h...](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/queries-with.html) , [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_and_recursive_que...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_and_recursive_queries_in_SQL) .

Note the paper uses TinkerPop/Gremlin 2 step names, and since then TinkerPop/Gremlin 3 has been released ([http://tinkerpop.apache.org](http://tinkerpop.apache.org)), which includes many enhancements so the current Gremlin 3 names may differ a little from the ones they reference in column one of the table.

P.S. If you want to see some of the new crazy shit you can do in Gremlin 3, check out Marko's talk and paper from GraphDay a few weeks ago:

Quantum Processes in Graph Computing ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRoAInXxgtc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRoAInXxgtc))

"Quantum Walks with Gremlin" [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06278v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06278v1.pdf)

<comment><USER4>
        Common Table Expressions

Be careful to watch how your chosen DB processes CTEs and what it means for performance in your queries.

In postgres they are "optimisation fences", something which there is significant resistance to changing[1][2], where-as elsewhere (at least in SQL Server) the query planner and engine can optimise across CTE boundaries (pushing search predicates back into them where possible). This can make a massive difference to the performance of some queries, potentially turning a full index scan (or worse, multiple scans) into a small number of seeks.

 _As always: test with realistic data sizes /patterns to make sure things work as you are expecting them to._

[1] see [http://blog.2ndquadrant.com/postgresql-ctes-are- optimization...](http://blog.2ndquadrant.com/postgresql-ctes-are-optimization- fences/)

[2] also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7023907](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7023907) for further discussion

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I always thought that the main advantage of graph databases is the O(1) lookup instead of the O(log n) lookup in a traditional foreign-key relationship. There is no need to search an index, since the pointer already records the location of the adjacent document. On disk, the seeking time would be roughly equivalent if the database is heavily used, since reads/writes would be batched as the disk head moves over the disk, or for other types of drives some similar technique would be used.

<comment><USER6> The problem with a "pointer" like this is that you then can't move stuff around as easily. SQL databases frequently reorganize the physical representation of rows to reclaim space used by deleted data, for example. Surely the same would apply to graph/object databases.

SQL databases _could_ conceivably optimize foreign key constraints behind the scenes by replacing/augmenting the referencing column with the physical location of the foreign row, but what do you do when the target row moves around in the physical store? You'd have to hunt down all the references and replace them. If anything can point to anything, that could have a cascading effect.

You could have conceivably have an indirection here: Instead of pointing to the physical location of another row, you pointed to the physical location of a special intermediate file that itself could contain the physical location. I don't know of any database that uses any tricks like these.

<comment><USER7> > The problem with a "pointer" like this is that you then can't move stuff > around as easily

You can, it just requires one further level of pointer indirection. Rather than pointing to the physical location of the data, you store a pointer to an offset in an array of pointers.

Alternatively you can point directly if you're prepared to update those pointers when you move things around. Luckily a graph database is ideally suited for this kind of operation because it makes discovering those pointers exceptionally simple and efficient.

<comment><USER6> Yes, that was the solution I sketched out in my last paragraph. Do any databases actually do this?

<comment><USER7> The array of pointers thing is standard/common but I'm not aware of any which use the features of the graph itself to avoid pointer indirection. Typically the edges are stored in some kind of tree structure anyway so I'd guess that the savings aren't worth the added complexity when the thing does a _lot_ of pointer lookups besides the initial one. But I'm probably going to experiment with it in my own db project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be nice to compare it with AllegroGraph

<comment><AUTHOR> AllegroGraph is an RDF store, not a property graph. This paper compares property graph implementations.

<comment><USER9> The important bit is that it is a graph database. Property or rdf is a small difference not that important compared to all the other details that go into designing a graph database.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is over a year old, and using ancient versions of software. It would be nice if they showed their testing code not just some horrific and unreadable gremlin queries. Taking 1.6 seconds to create a new node in neo4j and 2.5 to update it? Yeah, I don't think that's anywhere close to legit.

Never met a vendor benchmark that wasn't faulty in some way... [http://maxdemarzi.com/2015/10/16/benchmarks-and- supercharger...](http://maxdemarzi.com/2015/10/16/benchmarks-and- superchargers/)

<comment><AUTHOR> To be fair, the SIGMOD'15 conference was in June 2015 so the paper is only ~6 mos old. While it is based on Gremlin 2 rather than Gremlin 3, most all the code in the paper is SQL CET statements -- there's very little Gremlin. In Table 8 on the last page they show their code for the Gremlin->SQL CET translations, and only a few tweaks are needed to update the step names in column one to Gremlin 3.

<comment><USER11> If the paper is only 6 months old, why would the authors use an ancient version of Neo4j?

<comment><AUTHOR> Titan 0.4 [1] and Neo4j 1.9.4 [2] were the versions released in the Fall of 2013 so maybe that's when they did the work.

[1] [https://github.com/thinkaurelius/titan/releases/tag/0.4.0](https://github.com/thinkaurelius/titan/releases/tag/0.4.0)

[2] [https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/releases/tag/1.9.4](https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/releases/tag/1.9.4)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Instagram's CEO Is Hot For Snapchat - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3013846/why-instagram-ceo-kevin-systrom-is-hot-for-snapchat

<comment><USER2> What a horribly witten, uninsightful article. Basically Kevin is saying 'I think its cool', but heavens knows the business case for it!

"Getting scale in mobile is really hard" \- It really seams like it, there's no cloud computing, distribution platforms, billions of mobile users... oh right. All that exists. You mean getting the share of hype in mobile is really hard, I agree with that statement.

"Snapchat is doing a really awesome job of creating new behaviors that you wouldn't expect" \- Like what exactly? Sexting? Oh that's right, your messages disappear... UNLESS someone takes a screen shot.

"Snap a photo or a video, add a caption, and send it to a friend (or maybe a few). They'll view it, laugh, and then the snap disappears from the screen - unless your friend takes a screenshot!"

So they kinda have this 'idea' that works but really doesn't.

"I definitely think it can happen within an organizations," Systrom said. "Risk-taking, if done well, can be done within organizations in a way that is much safer than having to drop out of school to do a startup."

Pearls of wisdom from a seasoned vetrean of the industry. The guy is clearly smart, and I don't want to take anything away from what he's done but he has exactly 0 experience managing innovation inside a large organization. He has no clue how this works or how this is done. I'd prefer he would give some concrete insight to exactly WHY he thinks snapchat is worth the 800M (beside pure VC speculation or a gut feeling) which he is in a unique position to do, then wax philosophical about innovation in organizations. Maybe if the author did some 'journalism' and pressed him for some real answers instead of half formed opinions we'd have something worth reading.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your assumption here is that the reporter did not press Systrom for "real" answers. Did you consider that perhaps these were the answers he gave when pressed for more?

<comment><USER2> Even if this is the case, my initial point still stands. This article is of poor quality.</comment></comment></comment>


Y Combinator's Value to The US Economy - <AUTHOR> https://blog.siasto.com/ycombinators-value-to-the-us-economy

<comment><USER2> What people don't understand about YCombinator is that they are ultimately in the business of making friends. The few thousand dollars they invest in startups isn't meant to be seed money, or enough money for founders to sustain a business. It's a token of friendship and a reason to continue a relationship.

The fact is that relationships with successful people can be far more valuable than bags with dollar signs on them. Relationships can lead to inside information, help with making deals and most importantly, once in a lifetime investment opportunities. Most rich people spend a lot of their money and effort on _access to information_. At the higher levels, information and relationships rule all and powerful people will go far out of their way to get them.

Evaluating the success of YCombinator based on the total value of their portfolio is missing the point. Most of their value is in the form of soft currency, the massive network of grateful friends that they are building. The incubator model gives them the investment returns of a venture capital firm combined with the social returns of a fraternity. We won't know their true value for decades.

</comment><comment><USER3> _On average, the accelerator has invested between $15,000 to $20,000 in each company participating in their program..._

If this is the case...

 _Based on specific macroeconomic assumptions, we calculate an economic value of around $6.1 bn added since the accelerator was founded in 2005._

...this seems phenomenal, but also highly suspect. How is it that YC is investing so little in so many companies that the average investment is $20k or less? That's almost _nothing_ by Silicon Valley living standards (which, based on HN bias, seems to be a significant share of YC's audience).

$20k, even in very low-income areas, isn't even half the yearly pre-tax salary of anyone who's very good at anything _or_ has an adult's bills to pay. And that's one year for one person. They cite 2-3 founders as average... this absolutely does not compute.

Unless the average YC alum gets enough to operate for about three to six months _without_ employees, advertising expenses, hosting, or any other paid service, and this somehow results in an average of $15,000,000 in "economic value," this article is some inexplicable sort of bullshit.

<comment><USER4> That is indeed the average amount invested _by_ YC. As stated below in recent batches there has been the startfund blanket investment which used to be $150k and is now $80k. Technically speaking this blanket investment has nothing to do with YC and is given as uncapped convertible note (basically the best possible terms).

To address if this is enough, I'd say you'd be surprised how much you can make things stretch if you absolutely have to, but most companies also raise a small amount of money after YC's demo day as well to help them continue. You can think of YC as a startup bootcamp at the end of which you have to prove yourself to get the opportunity (further investment, usually) to continue on. With the startfund though, you get more than those three months to do so.

In short, yes, YC invests $20k and produces $6.1bn in value across the alumni.

<comment><USER5> "In short, yes, YC invests $20k and produces $6.1bn in value across the alumni."

For the sake of clarity, an accurate comparison would be: $20K * # of startups funded : $6.1 billion in valuation for all portfolio companies

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _we calculate an economic value of around $6.1 bn added since the accelerator was founded in 2005_

If you could add up the market cap of all of the companies you've been involved with finding funding all of a sudden the NYSE has "contributed" over 14 trillion dollars to the US economy. Except it hasn't.

</comment><comment><USER7> For comparison: Sequoia Capital estimates that 19% of the NASDAQ's value is made up of firms that they have invested in. If you apply the same ridiculous, super sloppy accounting used here to Sequoia, it has contributed over one trillion dollars to the U.S. economy in market cap alone, to say nothing of second order effects on the economy.

And you can add YC's value to Sequoia's, since Sequoia is an investor in YC itself.

<comment><USER8> s/is/was/

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> not knocking all the great stuff YC does, but the analysis here seems to assume that none of these companies/jobs would have been created otherwise, which sounds incredibly far fetched.

<comment><USER8> It's not far fetched to claim this. I'll admit it's unclear whether Posterous would have launched the way it did, or had any reaction similar to it, if we had not been through the YC program. The homepage wouldn't have looked the same (PG hammered us until it looked good). We may not have quit our jobs. We would not have been as aggressive about customer support. (Thanks Kevin Hale!) That's just n=1, but these stories are not uncommon among YC founders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Isn't there also the flip side - that the disruptive tech businesses represented by YC actually remove jobs from the economy on some level?

For example hotel workers who are displaced because of AirBnb etc. Not that I'm the kind of person who advocates for keeping people employed for employments sake, but I'd be curious how many jobs are actually made obsolete by tech startups...

<comment><USER11> With absolutely no data to back this up, I'll posit the following speculation:

In the short- and medium-run, these business cost more jobs than they create.

In the long run, they rid the economy of relative inefficiency (relative to the 'improved' marketplace), which creates a healthier economy (creating jobs being one symptom of a healthier economy).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This analysis doesn't seem to account for the investments in and opportunity costs of, YC failures. Example: a company that takes $10m over three rounds and then dies.

Also, it seems to assume that without YC investment none of these companies would have been founded, and that no other investors contributed. They seem to be giving YC credit for the entire valuation even though they invested a tiny fraction of funding.

Finally, they seem to be double counting: estimating market valuation and then adding the effects on the economy. Those amounts are not exclusive.

<comment><USER12> YC would not put the $10M in, so from their point of view it doesn't matter. From the economic point of view it is simply statistics, a large majority of start-ups fails, the few that make it to round 'C' and then burn are not very significant. The majority will fail long before that or will survive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was trying to come up with a framework for estimating the incremental impact of YC. Some of these businesses would have been successful without going to YC. And we can't just compare against the general startup population because YC also selects the best.

So what's a good proxy for estimating the value that an incbuator provides to startups? Perhaps _time_. Iterating through product ideas, getting introductions, and getting help with legal work & administrivia probably shaves somewhere from months to years off of getting to a good product-often to the point where the product/business would have been abandoned before getting traction.

Let's pick a completely arbitrary amount of time saved-one year. Most of the value of YC's portfolio comes from AirBnB & Dropbox. It's hard to get good revenue numbers, but based on users, nights booked, and other heuristics their growth rates are estimated at around 100%-500%.

If we take an estimate of 350%, that means that we could attribute roughly 70% of the value of YC's portfolio companies to YC itself. I'm not sure if these assumptions are all accurate (especially the 1 year saved figure), but this can give us a starting point to estimating YC's impact on their portfolio companies.

ETA: the amount of time saved is probably the most important variable. If we assume YC saves each company 6 months instead of 12, then YC's impact drops from 70% to 47%. With 3 months, it's about 27%.

</comment><comment><USER14> Besides the fact that 6.1B is not the value to the US Economy: those engineers and developers would have probably produced value anyway. So, to be specific, we should know the value without YC and with YC and the difference would then be "the value of YC to the US Economy"; I think we should ask ourselves:

1\. How does the YC-factor scale to make a real impact to any economy. Don't ask me data, but 6.1 billion in few years have a 1*10^-n impact to the GDP of most western economies, where probably n>10.

2\. If it's fair to call copycats everybody that tries to replicate the concept, any concept. Innovation involves lots of copying, I thought we agreed on that.

3\. If the YC-factor can make a real impact on industries that are likely to be fundamental for our future welfare: food, pharma, hospitals, insurance (pensions).

And I am interested in point 3 especially. Because 6.1B is nice, but we need to face the reality here. We live in an aging world were people want to retire at 60 with the same shape they had at 18. Implications of this are enormous for our future.

</comment><comment><USER15> interesting. clearly some work has gone into this and, like with any research, the results will always be open to debate. although i think obviouslygreen has got the wrong end of the stick by comparing apples with oranges. i wouldn't be surprised if the valuation number is actually higher. would like to see some more details on those 'assumptions'

</comment><comment><USER16> What does it even mean to add $6.1 bn of value? It's not as if the alternative was to put $6.1 bn in a heap and burn it. They've included staff - would they all have been unemployed otherwise? There's lots of data but no meaning here. What, in this case, _is_ "economic value"?

</comment><comment><USER17> All this says to me is that Silicon Valley success has more to do with who you know that what you do.

</comment><comment><USER18> If people are interested in YC numbers (and individual companies) compared to the 150+ other accelerators around the world, check out Seed-DB. (<http://www.seed-db.com>)

YC startups have raise >$1billion in funding, approximately half of the >$2billion raised by all startups from accelerators. And this is only the reported (or self-reported) funding numbers from Crunchbase, so the total is actually higher than that.

</comment><comment><USER19> Using specific macroeconomic assumptions, I estimate $100 trillion. What's the point of the article if the methodology is excluded?

</comment><comment><USER20> I never applied to YC because of the small amounts. First of all, if I'm going to ask for money, I only want to do it once. Which means I'd prefer to ask for enough to get to profitability, not just enough to get to another round. (Granted, you'll raise that A on better terms with YC social proof.) Second, if we assume a 4-year vesting cycle (which, I think, should apply to founders as well) then my being there already puts the valuation at $1.5-2M (because, while I wouldn't get $375-500k on the normal wage-labor market, I'm working 2+ times as hard and taking lots of risk). Scale that up based on how many other founders there are. So for me, it's not a good deal. If you're 22, I think it's probably a great deal.

<comment><USER8> Having been an alum before, I feel confident in saying, as hooande mentions in another thread, that the program itself is unlike getting invested in by any other investor. If you get funded by other angels or VC's, you have little real relationship built beyond that of you with the partner or angel.

On the other hand, at YC, when we needed help with our Series A, we got to talk to James Lindenbaum of Heroku, who taught us the ins-and-outs. When we needed to launch, we could talk to Alexis Ohanian who created Reddit (and interviewed us) and knows a thing or two about launching consumer sites. YC batchmates help each other and pay it forward when we become alums.

Few people do it these days for the money itself. One trend we see of late is companies who have already raised seed rounds, often from already prominent angel investors, opt to go through YC because it's a multiplier on their ability to execute -- they're more motivated, they focus more on the right things, have access to a hugely powerful network of alums, make deep lasting connections with batchmates, and then get a multiplier on their valuation at Demo Day.

I don't see age as the determining factor. Even for people who already have networks (I was an early engineer at Palantir, Stanford grad) it was useful to greatly increase the number of smart people I knew and trusted. (See Metcalfe's law.)

<comment><USER21> I've joined a YC company as a founder after the actual YC sprint and I would definitely echo much of what garry is saying here even for myself. Our other investors are good people, but none of them offer the accessibility and information even now, versus what we get from the YC partners and especially our fellow YC companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Don't forget the numerous other accelerators which follow the YC 3-month spring, money, and mentors method. If we include those who have been inspired to do YC-alikes, the numbers would become huge.</comment>


RFC 7569 – Public Key Pinning Extension for HTTP - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7469

<comment><USER2> This is very important and can increase security on the internet a lot. As far as I know Google is already doing this in Chrome with it's own servers.

<comment><USER3> There's more to the Internet than HTTP, though. I'd be a lot happier if this effort were being invested in improving DNS so that other services could benefit.

<comment><USER4> It seems like DANE would benefit from extra backing instead of this approach

<comment><USER5> Surely they two approaches are complementary? This could be a good second-best approach for those unable to sign their domain for some reason.

The web browser should treat a pin identically, regardless if it was hardcoded or sourced from HTTP or DNS. Or are there obvious problems with that approach?

<comment><USER6> There is currently very close to zero deployment of DNSSEC on clients and it's unlikely to change any time soon.

I'm somewhat baffled that every time CA problems are discussed someone comes up with DANE. This has been tried for years and the result is that it does almost nothing at all today to protect anyone.

HPKP is not perfect, but it's a vast improvement over the state of the art - and it works today, in real browsers. And I think there is a reason for it: DNSSEC is far too complicated and involves too many parties. For HPKP you need a browser and a webpage to support it, that's relatively simple. For DANE/DNSSEC you need the root zone, the TLD, the registrar, the dns server operator and somehow also the client to do something useful at all.

<comment><USER4> Security is complex. I didn't say "we don't need this, we have DANE".

I said that I wish the effort and weight put behind this solution, was put behind something like DANE, which is protocol agnostic - so it helps you protect connections to your HTTPS login form just the same as it helps me protect connections to my XMPP server or IMAP server or whatever else I have that operates over SSL/TLS.

Yes, DNSSEC has not had the best rollout - even though basic support is _mandatory_ now for registrars, some (I'm looking at you fuckers, Hover/Tucows) use ridiculous subsidiary setups to get around providing support for it.

That to me though, is just further evidence that it (DANE) needs all the support it can get - if we didn't do things that were slightly complicated, we wouldn't encrypt anything at all, or hash passwords or even have the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it just me or is the text size on that RFC a lot larger than on others?</comment>


For what Saas (Software as a Service) are your clients paying for? - <AUTHOR>

There was a question today about Saas that HN readers are paying for. Since people on HN are using Saas that are probably mostly targeted at developers, I'd like to know what Saas average people and companies are paying for.<p>I'll start with a client of mine that pays a webservice company to contact recent customers and asks them for a review and a rating. <comment><USER2> I have a product (<http://tulasoftware.com>) that yoga studio owners use to manage their studios. (Students, class credits, purchases, etc.)

We have a $59/mo plan and a $79/mo plan. The higher one allows them store and charge credit cards.

<comment><USER3> Calendar is spelled wrong several times on that site.</comment></comment>


Show HN: APId – the API end to end testing framework has gone open source - <AUTHOR> https://www.getapid.com/ <comment><USER2> Do you have websockets testing support?

<comment><USER3> Co-founder here - we'll be happy to add this in the future like Ivo already said. If it is something that many people want, we'll add it sooner. It will be really helpful if you could submit a feature request issue on our github - [https://github.com/getapid/apid- cli/issues/new/choose](https://github.com/getapid/apid-cli/issues/new/choose)</comment></comment>


The credit card that may stop, or at least hinder, on- and offline fraud - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/01/the-credit-card-that-may-stop-or-at-least-hinder-on--and-offline-fraud.ars <comment><USER2> Three thoughts:

1\. This will create a new category of credit card fraud by making programmable credit cards acceptable.

2\. I don't see the benefit of having one credit card instead of two in my wallet.

3\. Wasn't NFC meant to solve this problem (more elegantly?)</comment>


Thousands of Low-Income Americans 'Donate' Blood Plasma to For-Profit Centers - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/US/thousands-low-income-americans-donate-blood-plasma-profit/story?id=44710257 <comment><USER2> This reminds me of "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics": [http://web.archive.org/web/20160806191858/https://blog.jaibo...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160806191858/https://blog.jaibot.com/the- copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/)

Our culture has a very strange belief that you shouldn't benefit from the less fortunate. Even if you benefit them too. People that have never donated a dollar to charity in their lives, will come out of the woodwork and complain about "exploitation".

<comment><USER3> "People that have never donated a dollar to charity in their lives" is a particularly American, or let's say anglophone, way to approach social justice.

Charities are based on good will, but "the less fortunate" do not need "good will": they need social rights. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_rights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_rights)

If you don't see "exploitation" when people need and they are willing to sell their blood, I have no idea what you mean by exploitation.

<comment><USER4> What's wrong with selling your blood? To me it seems like selling your time is a far more personal, unrecoverable injustice. And most people just call that 'work'.

If you want to make it out like these people are being 'exploited', then you can make the case just the same that all property is exploitation. Railing against poor people donating blood plasma, or organs for that matter, is profoundly misguided.

<comment><USER5> Not an expert on the subject, but I recall hearing somewhere that selling blood gives people an incentive to lie about their health history.

"Do you shoot up illicit drugs with shared needles?"

"Um... No. No I do not."

<comment><USER4> True, but that is the system being exploited by those individuals, not the other way around.

<comment><USER5> I don't want a tainted blood transfusion, so it does affect me.

<comment><USER4> Right, it effects everyone _except_ the person who donates. The thing i'm arguing against is the idea that the donors are being exploited.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Although somewhat grotesque to many on the face of it, this seems like fundamentally a good thing. Poor people get money they need, and people with severe injuries get their lives saved.

I find it unusual there always seems to be an aversion to companies making money on healthcare (the emphasis on for-profit). This is weird, because no one would suggest companies should only be allowed to make money on irrelevant or trivial things; shouldn't companies that save lives make _more_ money than companies that just make entertainment, or manufacturing equipment?

<comment><USER7> People desperate for money, who may not have blood suitable for donating, are incentivised to lie.

Meanwhile, men can't donate if they've had sexual contact with men in the past 12 months. [http://www.redcrossblood.org/donating-blood/eligibility- requ...](http://www.redcrossblood.org/donating-blood/eligibility- requirements/eligibility-criteria-topic)

<comment><USER8> And if the alternative (not offering any payment) is simply not having enough plasma to manufacture the life saving treatments?

It's almost as if people who are donating this frequently should be properly screened and truly compensated for the value they are providing...

<comment><USER9> Around here they don't pay for blood, they give you things like movie tickets or restaurant gift cards... sure the recipients could sell them for cash but it's not as easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this really news, not known? I did it and so did most people I knew back in college (the ones who didn't were too heavy drug users). It was one of many sources for "minor money". Which when you have NO money, is pretty great.

It's one of a host of shitty things we force poor people to do cause as a society we have this stupid fucking idea that you have to work for everything, that you don't deserve the necessities of existence unless you spend 40+ hours making someone else rich.

<comment><USER11> I sold my plasma for a semester or so in college for gas money, before I got a "real job" on campus. I was making around $60-75/wk, which wasn't bad at all. The people there were all either college students or super sketchy people; it was right next to university campus.

I didn't (and still don't) feel like I was taken advantage of at all; it was better than flipping burgers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Meanwhile, low-income Indians sell their kidneys

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eny6D-7f_rc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eny6D-7f_rc)

The Red Market is an interesting/disturbing book on the organ trade, here's an NPR interview with the author

[http://www.npr.org/2011/06/10/136931615/blood-bones-and- orga...](http://www.npr.org/2011/06/10/136931615/blood-bones-and-organs-the- gruesome-red-market)

</comment><comment><USER13> Pretty basic economics. Quantity supplied generally == quantity demanded, as long as there's a functioning price system. It's why you can go to a gas station and (while the price certainly changes) count on them never being out of gas, despite whatever else is going on in terms of weather, OPEC or whatever.

Paying people for plasma donation means there's plasma available for patients who need it. And it's not like these doners are coerced. Removing their option to do that (by outlawing paid donations) by definition can only make them worse off.

<comment><USER13> It is interesting how the (monetary) price for blood is basically $0, while for plasma it's > $0. Know nothing about blood or plasma, but I'd imagine this is because donating plasma takes longer and is more painful. Wouldn't be surprised if it was trickier to store/transport/use or if you generally got less plasma fluid out of a person vs blood, or people could donate less often or something.

Also note while the monetary price for blood is $0, that's probably not the full price -- just ask anyone who has reluctantly donated blood because they didn't want to be the only person in their school or office not donating during a blood drive. There's often a social cost to NOT donating too.

Also, even with these differences/caveats the lack of a price system for blood does lead to some mismatches between supply and demand. There's currently a big blood shortage as we speak (google it), leading some hospitals to cancel elective surgery.

<comment><USER14> > It is interesting how the (monetary) price for blood is basically $0, while > for plasma it's > $0.

It's not. In the US compensation for donating blood is illegal but not plasma. Most charities that take blood donations sell it.

<comment><USER15> > In the US compensation for donating blood is illegal

Not really: [https://www.statnews.com/2016/01/22/paid-plasma-not- blood/](https://www.statnews.com/2016/01/22/paid-plasma-not-blood/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Two other interesting news stories right next to this one

[http://abcnews.go.com/US/bus-drivers-working-alongside- silic...](http://abcnews.go.com/US/bus-drivers-working-alongside-silicon- valley-millionaires-struggle/story?id=44707434)

[http://abcnews.go.com/US/working-fast-food-jobs-16-hours- day...](http://abcnews.go.com/US/working-fast-food-jobs-16-hours- day/story?id=44707695)

Is this the "american dream" ?

<comment><USER17> Wouldn't be a dream if it as real, now wouldn't it ?

<comment><USER16> touche

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So it seems there is a lot of confusion here in the comments. [Blood] Plasma donation is not the same as blood donation.

[https://www.statnews.com/2016/01/22/paid-plasma-not- blood/](https://www.statnews.com/2016/01/22/paid-plasma-not-blood/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I've donated plasma when I was really broke...only a couple of months ago. I would do it again except the phlebotomist perforated the vein in my left arm 6 or 7 times, digging around for what felt like an eternity. I'm a glutton for punishment but that definitely wasn't worth 40 bucks. I needed money for car parts though.

The really interesting thing about the plasma center is all the oddball characters you get to see. It's worth a visit just to experience the weird vibe.

</comment><comment><USER20> This was something I did twice a week myself, to help get through college. It worked well for being a way to get additional money in a way which worked with the rest of my schedule, though having income directly tied to health wasn't always great. (Have a minor cold? Now be knocked out of a week or two's deposits)

</comment><comment><USER21> The rules against paying donors in many countries can cause problems. Some people with very rare bloodtypes are in high demand. When someone needs that rare blood we could at least cover the traveling expenses needed to bring in the willing donor. But that just isnt allowed.

<comment><USER22> I habe 0+ which isn't rare but still in high dem and.

<comment><USER21> I also have o+ but recentlu found out i will never be allowed to donate in canada because i lived in the middle east off and on as a kid (80s and 90s). The saudis imported beef from the uk. So i have been exposed to mad cow disease. 25 years later and i am symptom free. Lol.

This rule bans so many soldiers, expats and immigrants that i am forced to conclude canada blood services has more than enough blood. The saudis happily took my blood at 15yo. They paid me for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Aussie here. This is an interesting contrast to what the state of blood donation and healthcare here is. I have never seen a for profit blood bank here. It's mainly one non for profit that takes blood donations.

I have often tried to donate blood but been turned away due to my height vs weight ratio ( im skinny and tall ). I think the desire to donate blood for nothing may come from the fact that we receive pretty much free healthcare ( you can pay for health insurance and get access to better doctors and shorter waiting lists ).

I've read many things on HN about healthcare in the pass and it always amazes me how much I take my countries health system for granted.

I have put on 10 kgs (22 lbs) since I last tried so maybe I will try again sometime.

<comment><USER24> > I think the desire to donate blood for nothing may come from the fact that > we receive pretty much free healthcare ( you can pay for health insurance > and get access to better doctors and shorter waiting lists ).

Whole blood donations are (almost always) uncompensated in the US as well. This article is referring to plasma donations, which are different and take longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> And thousands of men 'donate' sperm to for-profit centers. Which, truth be said, seems a convenient way to perpetuate your genes without all the hassle of the traditional mechanism. As long as your genes are 'desirable', of course.

</comment><comment><USER25> Radiolab had a fascinating segment on US blood banks and how cutthroat the blood economy can be. In many cases, your local blood bank might be arbitraging blood from different areas of the country.

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/308780-blood- banks/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/308780-blood-banks/)

</comment><comment><USER26> I donate blood now and then, and am an organ donor. I suppose technically I'm being exploited, but I don't mind.

</comment><comment><USER27> So how come you can't "donate" a kidney and be paid for your time on the operating table?

<comment><USER24> > So how come you can't "donate" a kidney and be paid for your time on the > operating table?

Because one is explicitly illegal and the other is not.

If you're asking for a justification behind that difference, the answer is that the laws are simply not consistent. Donating eggs, for example, can be compensated, and that's a relatively invasive procedure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hah there was a time, long ago, when I used to feed myself with money from blood and plasma donation.

</comment><comment><USER29> I donate every 2 months. I also encourage everyone who can to donate as frequently as they can. It's an easy way for anyone to play it forward.

* American Red Cross || [http://www.redcrossblood.org/give/drive/driveSearch.jsp](http://www.redcrossblood.org/give/drive/driveSearch.jsp)

I had a family member in a near-fatal car accident a little over 12 years ago. It took a lot of blood to keep her alive, and I'm thankful for everyone who donated and made saving her life possible.

That said, donating blood takes time and effort, and some recovery time where you don't feel 100% for a day or so after -- so I have no problem with incentivized / compensated altruism.

<comment><USER30> This is not about donating blood to the Red Cross, this is about the plasma donation industry, which is only for-profit in the US and supplies much of the world. Only a few companies operate in this space, I've studied it closely. Baxalta runs a big chain, BioLife, as does CSL.

If we accept that selling organs is prohibited and unethical then we should also accept the same for selling plasma.

<comment><USER31> Except there's a huge difference between organs and blood plasma. Plasma donation is basically risk free, it regenerates, and has no long term health effects pretty much the exact opposite of any organ donation which are really risky and invasive and also leave the donor vulnerable to long term health risks. Equating them is pretty ridiculous.

<comment><USER29> And there are arguably other benefits to donating blood; at minimum you're getting a little checkup every time you donate. Donating regularly will help you better monitor your resting pulse, blood pressure, cholesterol levels...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Open-Source Selenium IDE Light Extension for Chrome, Kantu for Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kantu-browser-automation/gcbalfbdmfieckjlnblleoemohcganoc <comment><USER2> Tried it and I have a few questions about how to use it:

Am I supposed to visit the url I want to start from, even after entering the base url? I was expecting it to open a tab with the base url.

How do I take the JSON export and run it with selenium?

We have a bunch of selenium tests at work that are extremely fragile and generated by coding instead of something that records actions like this. It takes a long time to write tests and no one does it as a result. I would love to get to a system where the tests are created like this and saved to a folder where CI can run them.

<comment><USER3> In my experience, record & playback tools (like Selenium IDE) generate test code that is a lot more fragile than tests written in code from scratch. I suppose if no one knows how to write anti-fragile tests or it takes way too long, then using a tool like this is a step up. But keep in mind that you may be trading one problem (no one wants to write tests) for another (what the hell are these autogenerated tests even doing? this isn't a regression, it's a feature! etc.)

<comment><USER2> > I suppose if no one knows how to write anti-fragile tests or it takes way > too long, then using a tool like this is a step up.

This is kind of the situation I'm in, but I see how you could get yourself in a position where you have no idea what your longer integration tests do because they're generated by Selenium IDE.

Browser integration testing is hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice work! We work on a cloud-based Selenium grid [1] that can run both WebDriver and Selenium IDE. I just tried your plugin and exported a test as HTML, uploaded it and was immediately able to run the test on all the browsers in our cloud.

[1] [https://testingbot.com](https://testingbot.com)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is it safe to use it? Are my username, passwords and important numbers accessible to chrome extensions?

<comment><AUTHOR> Extension can/could read all data that you enter in websites. So you should only install extensions from trusted sources/developers.

And/or: What I do is to have one Chrome profile for important websites (e. g. online banking) and another one for the casual web surfing. This "casual" profile is where I try out all new extensions. And only the ones I really need are used in the "secure" profile as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> neat, any idea on how long it will take to add asserting/verifying stuff?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not very long... Assert, frame/iframe and EVAL support are next on the list. Plus fixing any bugs that might show up.

For bug reports and feature requests you can email us (team AT a9t9.com) or simply open a github ticket: [https://github.com/A9T9/Kantu-for- Chrome/issues](https://github.com/A9T9/Kantu-for-Chrome/issues)</comment></comment>


Palo Alto Hacker News Meetup - <AUTHOR> http://www.meetup.com/Palo-Alto-Hacker-News-Meetup/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've always wondered why there doesn't seem to be a Palo Alto HN 'meetup', so I created one. It's just an experiment, feel free to suggest other events...</comment>


Ep: Embarrassingly Parallel Utility Written in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dullgiulio/empa/tree/master/cmd/ep

<comment><USER2> This seems like a basic duplication of the xargs program, written in Go. I won't say that this is a bad thing, as it's likely the author just wanted to do something neat. That said, the main usefulness I could see for this would be to get an xargs-like functionality on Windows without having to install cygwin, if you aren't using Powershell. (which I imagine has its own ways of reading data from a pipe and distributing work over multiple processes, but I'm not familiar enough with it to say)</comment>


How script kiddies can hijack your browser to steal your password - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/12/how-script-kiddies-can-hijack-your-browser-to-steal-your-password/ <comment><USER2> This is interesting because it is probably _more_ likely to affect power users. Computer illiterates wouldn't know to search. Novices would use the search menu. It's not until you hit intermediate level and higher that you are likely to see the shortcut keys being used.

<comment><USER3> Which would also be the same class of user more likely to change their password after being notified of a mass password leak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I must not be understanding this correctly. The script is triggered when the user attempts to search for text on the page. When would a user search for their pw's?

<comment><USER5> Look at the example pages.

Because the exploit pages are lists of leaked passwords, or cc#s. So to check if their password has been leaked they would naturally search for their password.

This is just a very slick implementation of the old "enter your credit card number to see if it's been stolen" technique, except the end-users don't realize that they've given anything away.

Here's an analogy: you get a phone call from someone telling you that your bank account has been hijacked and you need to visit your local branch right away to fix it. So you drive to your bank, enter, and you go talk to a bank employee. As he sits at a computer he asks you for your bank account number, home address, and social security number. After typing them in and hitting a few buttons he tells you that your account has actually not been hijacked and you're safe, so you head home and go watch tv. Meanwhile, what actually happened is that you didn't realize that it was a bank holiday and con-men had broken into the bank and dressed up as bank employees to trick you into giving out your personal information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do any major browsers have a setting to disable overriding default keyboard shortcuts? It's one of those anti-features like popup windows or page transitions or custom scroll bar colors that nobody would miss if it was never invented.

There is a special place in hell for people who override PgUp/PgDown or the arrow keys in their webpages.

<comment><USER7> > There is a special place in hell for people who override [...] the arrow > keys in their webpages.

Except for game developers, maps developers, in-browser document editors, presentation viewers, etc. The web isn't just hypertext any more, and part of making the browser a powerful platform is having features that could be misused.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. I'm working on something right now that wouldn't be possible without preventDefault(). Don't blame the tool, blame the people who misuse it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another reason to disable javascript by default.

<comment><USER3> I don't think i'll ever fully understand this approach. Most of the web is simply broken without javascript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very interesting idea and it seems like a reasonably plausible issue. However, If you skin your Firefox browser [1], your skin also shows up in the search bar. It'd definitely be a very subtle sign of something being wrong though.

[1]: <https://www.getpersonas.com/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Why would you ever need to enter your browser into the search mechanism? I just don't get it.

If you're having this problem, I hear Common Sense 2013 is a great browser security package.

<comment><USER5> It's just social engineering, but done in a rather slick fashion. Normally one wouldn't expect that a password or credit card number or social security number would ever be typed into a search box for a web page.

Except, what if you posted a page of compromised passwords or other data? Then someone might go to that page and search for their own secret information, to see if it had been leaked. They wouldn't even think twice about this because normally the information in a search box is secure, and known only to the browser. But if a site creates an html based search box that is hooked into ctrl-F then the user might divulge their secret information without even knowing.

<comment><USER11> That's my problem with the whole situation. The headline paints it as a technical flaw, where in reality it's human error.

<comment><USER5> That's a very wrong way of thinking about the problem. It's not actually a human error except in the strictest sense. Imagine if the mechanism for flying an airplane involved a thousand different levers that all need to be carefully moved in concert in order to avoid crashing. Is crashing such an unflyable plane a "human error"?

The problem here is that browsers allow overiding ctrl-f and almost no users realize this is possible. It's not just a human problem, it's also a browser design problem. Browser makers have trained their users to trust that pressing ctrl-f will pull up a find dialog, it's as much their fault as it is user's fault.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


John Horton Conway: the world's most charismatic mathematician (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/23/john-horton-conway-the-most-charismatic-mathematician-in-the-world <comment><USER2> The most amazing fact about John Conway is that he actually enjoys teaching (even to undergrads). Most profs of his calibre actively shy away from teaching to focus on research. Having his energy and passion made linear algebra fun. He was also always available for office hours and would happily explain anything you didn't get which is also a rarity.

Top notch guy and an evangelist for the mathematics community. Really happy he's getting the recognition he deserves.

<comment><USER3> I watched a class (a single 2 hour lecture I believe) taught by Conway at Mathcamp. It was about, believe it or not, the simple game of dots-and-boxes - except that Conway had attacked it with a lot of math and derived some strategies for winning. He was indeed a great lecturer, even though he was quite old.

The most memorable part was right at the beginning where Conway asked someone to play a 4x4 grid of dots and boxes with him 10 times in a row. As I remember, Conway won 9 times in a row. That got all of our attention! :)

<comment><USER4> I was a Mathcamper this year. One of the most common things people said to me when I mentioned that I was a first-timer was that 2015 was the last year Conway attended, and how sad it was that I'd miss his lectures and general presence around camp. :(

There's this wonderful thing (invented by Conway) they do where, in a noisy crowded assembly, one person raises their hand and stops making any sound. Anyone who notices them raises their hand and stops talking. It works extremeley well (and really quickly!), and I suspect it was Conway's general frailty that led him to come up with this.

<comment><USER5> The Boy Scouts have been doing this for quite a long time - do you have any citations of Conway's having invented this?

<comment><USER4> Maybe he just introduced it to Mathcamp? We teenagers can be a bit quick to make claims sometimes :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The students loved their new lecturer as much for his mind as his high > jinks. He had a homely lecturing style, discussing abstract concepts in > terms of trains and cars, cats and dogs. In lecturing on symmetry and the > Platonic solids, he sometimes brought a large turnip and a carving knife to > class, transforming the vegetable one slice at a time into an icosahedron > with 20 triangular faces, eating the scraps as he went.

We need a MOOC/at least a video with his lectures. Such rare professors are a treasure of humanity.

<comment><USER7> Here's one lecture series from his Free Will Theorem stuff: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftIllWczf5w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftIllWczf5w)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> John Conway has a very interesting theory of "tangles" where he associates a continued fraction to a wide class of kntots

[http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/papers/conway.pdf](http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/papers/conway.pdf)

There is also the Conway Tesselation here he sub-divides a triangle into 5 equal pieces, and creates a non-periodic tiling this way

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

</comment><comment><USER9> There were a few videos on numberphile with him. Here is a playlist:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWIL8XA1npoN...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWIL8XA1npoNAHseS-j1y-7V) (5 videos totalling about 40 minutes)

<comment><USER10> I like that he's wearing an ARML shirt in at least two of those videos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As I got into reading the article, I just knew he would the guy behind Conway's Game of Life. And lo and behold..

</comment><comment><USER12> >terribly introverted adolescent, painfully aware of his own suffering

Self-awareness seems to be a key component of creativity.

</comment><comment><USER13> I really dislike this kind of articles who portray someone as a god. This enstranges people, and this is not what fields like STEM need. At the same time, it glorifies the few people who actually achieved something that is noticed by the general public, while putting down the numereous hard-working mathematicians who have not made contributions. In the end, a mathematician is just a theorist which applies clever algebraic tricks.

<comment><USER14> Estranges?! You must not be talking about John Conway.

This article honors a mathematician who is utterly devoted to teaching, whose research focuses on making interesting mathematical results more accessible, who can have a half-hour conversation with a middle or high schooler that inspires them in STEM for years. This is the opposite of estrangement.

<comment><USER13> No, I am talking about the guy who wrote the article. I appreciate the article and its subject, I just dislike the tone. The 'mathematicians are wizards'-attitude is hurting STEM, that is my point. I'm all for praising mathematicians, but they should be praised for their work and cleverness, not for their godlikeness. It is just pretentious bullshit.</comment></comment></comment>


Hands on preview of Windows 7: Hey, it looks surprisingly good - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2008/10/28/windows7/

<comment><USER2> Remember when Longhorn had a whole new kernel, and WinFS, and was going to breathe new life into Windows?

<comment><USER3> In this case, nearly all of the changes are architecturally minor, and though this looks like a very nice Windows release, it largely looks that way precisely _because_ it is __not __a radical reënvisioning of Windows à la Vista. What we have here is Vista 2.0, with the sucky parts removed, the good parts (yes, there were good parts) kept, and some new, surprisingly well- thought-out, but relatively small enhancements to replace some of the poor features. I am actually pretty confident Microsoft can deliver this one. If they're smart, they'll have a similar incremental improvement scheduled as Windows 8, and get on an OS X/Linux-style rapid release schedule.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This does highlight a few more changes than the Ars Technica article, but it still looks very unimpressive. A slidebar setting for how often you to be notified about changes you made to your OS? Really? Is that a "can't live without" feature? Or even a mildly useful one?

Most of these are rip-offs of toolbar previews from Ubuntu, and Expose, smart folders, and file previews from OS X. These aren't original ideas.

Ooh, I like this part "Gadgets now sit directly on the desktop…which they could do even in Vista if you preferred." Wow, so they changed a setting's default value. I'm sold.

<comment><USER5> Bah, humbug. I read through the changes and thought they were a breath of fresh air for the dinosaur OS. Doesn't all good art borrow from a previous generation and add it's own spin?

We've learned that it isn't sweeping changes that make a gadget great, it's the subtle reconfiguration and simplification that does.

If Windows 7 can help give my parents a better experience on their computers, I'm all for it.

<comment><USER4> Subtle reconfiguration isn't always enough though. I'd love to see the Windows Control Panel cleaned up, for example. That would take a bigger overhaul to do properly.

On the flip side, where I agree with you, are subtle things that could be improved like removing all the nag screens they added to Vista. Unfortunately, many of the subtle changes in Vista were steps in the wrong direction, like moving the buttons around in IE7. What did that help? It just confuses users. At least some things, like adding extra protection against phishing, were a good thing.

<comment><USER6> You know it was redesigned in Vista. The default work image has it set to classic (I assume because some options are difficult/impossible? to find in the "new" view).

I actually prefer it. Some items are 2 clicks instead of 1, but it beats scanning/scrolling.

(Then again, I like the UAC, and it doesn't bother me that much. I keep it on, and I basically only see it when installing programs or configuration changes, which I have to sudo in ubuntu anyway...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand this guy's rage against the tray. Almost every desktop system, be it OS X, KDE, Gnome, or XP has something similar. What would he prefer? A taskbar entry for wireless networks? No information at all?

He also comments that we are "finally" given options to control tray icons... he must not be too observant then, because starting in XP you could choose to always hide or always show icons, or leave them alone. (e.g. to tell your Antivirus to always hide until you expand, but make sure that your instant messaging app stays in view.)

Maybe its just me, but these new OS reviews and previews are always the most ignorant, half baked and opinionated pieces of tech journalism...

<comment><USER8> Unlike KDE, Gnome, OS X, etc, Windows' taskbar never shuts up. It always pops up annoying bubbles, makes clicking sounds, randomly shows and hides icons, and doesn't standardize the way you can add/remove icons.

OS X fails a bit in this area, too, as it's not intuitive to remove items from the menubar.

<comment><USER7> Hmm, maybe more people agree with this guy than I thought. I have used all of the windowing systems I mentioned, and I vastly prefer being able to see open _windows_ , with the few things that need to run in the background being tucked away in the tray. The OS X dock just seems wierd to me, in terms of being able to quickly access open windows and to get a good idea what is running on your system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, how many people run windows today? I would've thought that most of the hacker community would be on OSX, Linux, or another *nix.

</comment><comment><USER10> Meh. It's an operating system... How exciting can an o/s get these days.

<comment><USER5> You fail at hacker, friend. OS wars are just getting warmed up.

<comment><USER10> In what way? What innovation is going on in the O/S world? What has changed radically over the last 5 years?

I used to care about the O/S, when you had little choice, when redhat was this small little sapling with a ton of things to do to get to windows. When macs were this weird other world that wasn't so unixy. When windows 95 came out and suddenly this whole new world opened up.

In those days, the O/S was the platform. Now, it's probably more important what browser you use than what O/S you use for most people.

But we're past all that now, an O/S is an O/S - there are a ton to choose from, they all do pretty much the same thing, and work the same(ish).

Now, the main aim for an O/S is to stay the heck out of the way IMHO.

<comment><USER11> There is A LOT of innovation going on in the O/S. Depressingly, not a lot of that truly revolutionary work is going on in the commercial/productized OS world.

Sun is doing great stuff with ZFS. Microsoft Research's Singularity is absolutely brilliant. Apple and Google are pushing mobile operating systems further than ever. I'm sure others could cite many more examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Let me know when they actually make some usability breakthroughs instead of slapping more translucency on the widgets and throwing more things to read on dialogs.</comment>


{Show HN} A Gif Player Built For Mobile In HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://gifresh.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Any advice would be greatly appreciated right now all we have is the player that lets you control the gifs with your finger and a few other options what do you guys think</comment>