An API Journey: From Idea to Deployment the Agile Way - <AUTHOR> https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/04/11/api-journey-idea-deployment-agile-part1/ <comment><USER2> What about this is agile?

>We can set up the assumption that today, each new application supporting API should be a cloud-ready application. By cloud-ready, we expect that it should have the following properties: The ability to adapt dynamically to the load, A flexible and centralized configuration A dependency discovery mechanism, A native load-balancing mechanism for communicating, Strong resiliency, monitoring, and observability, Automatic log and distributed traces collection

This sounds like over-engineering (the exact behaviour that agile is designed to counter). There is too much focus on tools and processes rather than the working software.

A more agile way would to create a working API with basic tools but in a way that allows adding the extra features (logging and load balancing) at a later date.

<comment><USER3> > There is too much focus on tools and processes rather than the working > software

That's because this is a marketing piece for Red Hat tools and processes. All you really need to implement the API they describe is a database, a web server, and a few lines of glue in some scripting language or other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great! But, to be honest, with innovations in "serverless" web technologies you only need one tool end-to-end for API building, deployment, management, documentation, mocking, logging, rate-limiting, you name it.

StdLib [1] does all of these things, with local command line testing included. Think of it like Lambda + APIG + Postman + Doc Generator + Your Favorite Framework, optimized for shipping functions (Node.js) as infinitely scalable web APIs. For example of an Enterprise-ready API + integration, check out MessageBird's (YCS16) one-line SMS API published on the platform [2].

Disclaimer: I'm the founder. We support tens of thousands of developers at hundreds of companies and we're just getting started. :) I toot our own horn quite a bit here, but always happy to get more of the HN community involved: let me know if you have any questions!

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

[2] [https://stdlib.com/@messagebird/](https://stdlib.com/@messagebird/)

<comment><USER5> I'm building the API for my side project on StdLib, and the experience has been great so far, for many of the reasons you mention - so thank you!

For comparison, I'm also building part of the backend on Webtask [1], which provides similar functionality to StdLib (i.e., serverless Node.js functions). Webtask is also very nice to use, but I find StdLib more suited to shipping a public-facing service.

[1]: [https://webtask.io/](https://webtask.io/)

<comment><USER4> Wow, thank you! Very glad we can help.

If you don't mind me asking; are there things you like to do with Webtask that you think we could improve with StdLib? You mention a strength of ours is creating public-facing services, but the majority of customer use cases are actually private (internal) APIs. Is there anything we can do to make this more clear? (Edit: I mean more clear as to the ability to do both.)

<comment><USER5> Sure. For me, the features of StdLib that make it great for building a public- facing service are:

\- I can use my own domain for my service, with the request path mapping neatly onto different functions within my service;

\- I can leverage unauthenticated/authenticated requests to allow a certain number of "trial" calls, with users charged a small fee for additional calls.

Something that I think could be a bit clearer would be how to tell from within a service whether a request was authenticated. From reading the docs, I figured the way to do this is to ask for user fields in package.json, then check for user data in the calling context. If this isn't the best way, please let me know!

The reason I'm also using Webtask at the moment is that it's free to set up scheduled jobs. I think that my use case makes this more of a significant concern than it ought to be, so I've dropped you an email to dig into what I'm doing.

Hope this feeeback is helpful!

<comment><USER4> This is awesome! Thanks for the feedback.

Yep, that's the best way to check if a request is Authenticated. Alternatively, you can disable unauthenticated requests outright by setting the rate limit to 0 requests allowed via your dashboard.

Yeah; scheduled tasks are a paid feature of StdLib. I received your e-mail and will respond shortly, I don't think it's too difficult for us to allow for the intricacies around your use case. :)

<comment><USER5> That would be brilliant. Thank you so much!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Disclaimer - I work at Postman.

IMHO this is a lot of learning overhead.

Postman allows me to design and mock APIs by simply adding my request and saving the example responses I would like my endpoints to return. The request/response format is what is natural to a web developer and does not need learning another DDL like RAML or OpenAPI/Swagger.

The mock url generated can be directly consumed by anyone without needing any local setup and allows decoupling the consumers of the API from the service deployment allowing parallel development tracks i.e being agile. The documentation comes out of the box when you create anything in Postman and can be shared with your API consumers.

I can then use the same Postman Collection to debug and test my APIs and eventually make it a part of my CI/CD process using their Newman CLI tool or just creating a Postman monitor which runs the API specification with tests on a pre defined schedule and notifies you when the tests fail or experience latency issues in production.

[https://www.getpostman.com/products](https://www.getpostman.com/products)

<comment><USER2> You should probably disclose that you work for Postman.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Marketing piece with marketing comments on hn on the marketing piece.

It's marketing all the way down.

</comment><comment><USER8> How is this agile? Where is the requirements analysis? Where is the design? Where is the process? Where is the documentation?

<comment> UK-Al05 I think creating an example API, going back to your customers, asking customers for feedback rinse and repeat is far better than a formal requirements analysis phase.

The best documention from a Devs perspective are interactive sandboxes with examples.

<comment><USER8> Functionally that ticks boxes, but it won't tick non-functional boxes of security, resilience, performance, ..., ..., ... It's very immature to suggest that this is Agile and persists the myths that Agile as a hackathon exercise is okay as a business methodology.

<comment> UK-Al05 Secruirity as formal requirements analysis is often awful anyway. Often just a checkbox exercise.

It won't having good engineers who understand secrurity. Who emdedd it in everything they do.

Yes it is agile. This is what exactly what it means by collaboration in the agile manifesto.

Hackathons have been brilliantly successful for companies exploring new solutions for problems. Why do you think they are so popular?

<comment><USER8> Requirements analysis done properly it involves more than just checking boxes, there are exploratory exercises like [https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/storymap/](https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/storymap/) which allow stakeholders, customers and the development team to work together to voice requirements and concerns.

[http://agilemanifesto.org/history.html](http://agilemanifesto.org/history.html) "The Agile movement is not anti-methodology.." Agile is not about hacking, and the manifesto is not about replacement of one with the other, but about the balance of how you adopt them.

Formal requirements analysis might be too much process, but then on a financial system, it would likely warrant a necessity on accountability requirements put in place by regulators. Looser story mapping alone might be an appropriate balance for a Beer Catalog.

I'm not a fan of a agile, but can we stop recharacterising it as not doing process.

*Not a fan: Having a 3 month support ticket, with multi-level signoff, 100% test coverage, cost codes and invoices per change is a bit much for text change on a website, so Agile does help solve a problem that really does exist in places. But is individual and interactions before process appropriate on medical systems? Agile may fit somewhere in the middle ground (between computer games and nuclear control systems), but it is definitely not a catch all for appropriate ways to work, especially in high risk environments.

<comment> UK-Al05 I wouldn't class user story mapping as formal requirements analysis.

Writing code, getting feedback and then adjusting is a process in itself. It's an ooda loop. Probably the most powerful process.

A lot of process distracts from getting in that loop.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Code-wise, cloud-foolish: avoiding bad technology choices - <AUTHOR> https://forrestbrazeal.com/2020/01/05/code-wise-cloud-foolish-avoiding-bad-technology-choices/ <comment><USER2> While the point can be made that using something complicated is a form of lock-in (K8s in this case), I think it's also a case where the proper use of specialized individuals or roles (a DevOps engineer) frees up developers from needing to do things they aren't good at (like configuring/managing K8s). This isn't to say there won't be devs who can't function in the DevOps role or can't figure it out, but freeing them up to focus on delivering business value while someone else worries about operational details will get you both high throughput and the agility to not rely on a _particular_ cloud provider for their flavor of managed infrastructure.</comment>


MVP job site - <AUTHOR> I put this MVP job site up after reading a post about oldgeekjobs.com.  This site is for accounting and finance professionals looking for jobs that do not require a CPA.
I have over 10 years of accounting and finance experience and do not have my CPA certification.  I've held a senior level (Controller) and CFO position for over 9 years without a CPA.  When looking for jobs I felt disriminated against because I do not have my CPA.  There is no correlation between success in accounting and finance in corporate jobs between employees with a CPA.
Anyway, I just wanted to learn some basic web design as well as, I wanted to solve a problem I had while looking for jobs.  If this site gets any traction I will work on expanding and upgrading it.
My site is http://www.nocparequiredjobs.com <comment><USER2> I suggest you rewrite the headline to be more descriptive, along the lines of:

 _" ShowHN: An MVP of an accounting and finance job site for professionals without a CPA"_

<comment><AUTHOR> Great suggestion, sorry I am a newbie. Do I have to repost?

<comment><USER2> You can edit a submission for a while. If the edit link isn't available, an admin or moderator will have to do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool. Keep at it. (also keep your WordPress install current as WordPress is often attacked by robots and such. )

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip. What do the robots attack?</comment></comment>


Canada denied me a visitors visa because I am too poor - <AUTHOR> http://marcgayle.com/the-life-of-a-bootstrapper-canada-denied-me-a <comment><USER2> How long was the proposed stay? If it is a wedding, a few hundred dollars in the bank for a week or two of travel should be sufficient, but maybe you put 6 months? That would be a red flag as someone looking for work.

As an interesting aside, too much money in the bank is also a red flag. As a DSO (designated school official) for Kaplan, I used to be in charge of I-20 applications for international students coming to the US to study. One doctor from Nigeria (listed by USCIS as a high-risk country) who applied and was rejected provided bank statements showing USD 6.2 million while his mailing address was a farm in Nigeria.

<comment><AUTHOR> I put 20 days and showed them a few thousand dollars over at least 4 - 5 bank accounts, both here in Jamaica and US banks.

So not sure what happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think the main reason is that you applied for a 'Temporary Residents Visa'. If you're just coming for a wedding in July then why apply to be a temporary resident?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is what they call it.

Their 'visitors visa' is a 'Temporary Residents Visa' - as far as I could tell.

<comment><USER3> I guess it depends on what country you are coming from. Most of the US/UK/common wealth countries can just use their host country passport and show up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeh...I am coming from Jamaica. I have to get a visa to go.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Zappos: Security Email - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zappos.com/securityemail

<comment><USER2> For those who cannot access outside of USA - [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fblogs.zappos.com%2Fsecurityemail)</comment>


Importance of NOSCRIPT Availability in Web Apps - <AUTHOR>

How important is it nowadays to provide a non-Javascript experience for people? I believe that most users currently browse with Javascript enabled (with enough permissions for AJAX to work properly), but if you were writing a web application (not Google Docs, but maybe HackerNews), would you make the effort to have everything working without Javascript as well as with it? <comment><USER2> no, too much work for little gain, unless these NOSCRIPT folks were part of my major constituency.

Why don't you track how many people actually have no script before investing time in supporting it?</comment>


Show HN: My evening project: gphangouts.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.gphangouts.com/

<comment><USER2> So basically: Chatroulette for Google+?

<comment><AUTHOR> do a mouseover on the headline of the site...that was my alternative headline first :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Fastest search engine in the world - <AUTHOR> Hi! According to my benchmark tests I've just built the fastest free-text search engine in the world [0]. However, providing proof of that as well as making people care has proven to be a near impossible task. I could use some help from fellow programmers to both work on the formal proof but also to test this code against the Big5's offerings of full-text search.
Would you care to go fetch an amount of common crawl data to test the abilities of ResinDB?
If not, then do you perhaps have another strategy to convince people when you have invented something big? Is writing papers and formally proving things a way into the market place? If so, how do you figure MongoDB overthrew it's previous market place ruler? It had no formal proof of anything. The market loved it though, for it's speed.
I would love for formal proof to be a success indicator. Diverting people from using Lucene/Elasticsearch would then be a breeze.
Why ResinDB? Because why use a cloud-based luxury cruiser when the most precise relevance, the fastest querying and most energy-aware choice is provided by using an on-premise kayaak. ResinDB on-premise, a word2vec search engine implementation, is the fastest (local) information retrieval system known to me. How about men?
[0] https://github.com/kreeben/resin <comment><USER2> Lucene is the standard. Companies have an upfront investment in it, and it would cost them more to change then to not change. If this is a business thing, you need to find the company that has thousands of Lucene instances and try to convince them that they will gain a measurable benefit.

 _How to convince people when you have invented something big?_

You need hand them a peice of paper that says: This [existing setup] costs you $5000/mo. This [resindb] will cost you $200/mo.

If you can directly show a financial benefit to your buyer it becomes a no brainer for them. It's something many (especially SAAS) founders get wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I should probably try to step out of the dev role and see things commercially or through a business utility perspective. My mind however wants me to dive even deeper into the rabbit hole that is search and relevance and the hard problems of concurrent read/write. I do believe I'm aligned well enough already for the database/search market but how to find time for marketing?

Edit: I read your post again and you are saying I need to be orders of magnitude cheeper than my competitors. Does the technical solution (being orders of magnitudes more performant) count in any way?

<comment><USER3> In my anecdotal experience, selling something, especially to businesses, typically comes down to 4 things (in descending order of what's easiest to sell):

Will it make them more money?

Will it save them money?

Will it make their (the decision maker's) life significantly easier?

Will it make their (the decision maker's) life feel dramatically better?

Notice how they get more subjective as the list goes down. Its hard to convince people of, or prove, subjective things. That last one is so hard that I'm not sure I've ever seen someone successfully sell something that way in person. But the first one needs almost no convincing at all.

Now, does your search engine do one or more of those things for people? If the added performance doesn't fulfill one of those desires, sorry but they probably won't be interested enough to go through the pain of switching and taking the risk of failure with a new and largely unproven system.

But if you can show that it will demonstrably fulfill one of those needs, say by cutting down the number of servers required, less down time, or better search results that also result in more sales or engagement, then you've got a product you can sell.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that very good advise.

From what I hear, folks (not only here at HN) aren't really looking for speed, instead they look for features. I'm starting to look at performance less and less as something to strive for and more and more just a confirmation that the architecture is healthy.

Say my benchmarks are correct and I do in fact beat my closest competitor by some measurement. I'm thinking I should start utilizing that performance to achieve higher relevance, donate it if you will to that cause instead of the speed cause.

To me though, Lucene is not so much of a competitor as she is a role model. Well maybe she's both. My real competitor, some day, will hopefully be Elasticsearch. I've used versions 2 and 5. I'm underwhelmed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's a big claim and kudos if you really pulled it off. There is also the aspect of relevancy in addition to speed.

I think the best way you can showcase is to build a few sample proof-of- concept search engines. For e.g., How about a search engine for Wikipedia? Project Gutenberg? StackOverflow? All these datasets are freely available. You can set up a search engine for this and easily let anyone be able to verify your search engine's speed and relevancy.

Lastly, in addition to both speed and relevance is how easy it is to install, customize and extend.

Hope that helps!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes (it helped) and speed, i.e. querying and indexing performance, for sure is only an USP if you also have relevance.

I'm confident the relevance is as good as or better than Lucene. I especially like my phrase queries and how they seem more relevant compared to that of a Lucene phrase query. The scoring is a half-way implementation of word2vec (in a lot of ways similar to the scoring mechanics of Lucene's tf-idf scheme). I'm aiming for full word2vec implementation in vNext.

I have only my own benchmark tests to tell me I'm faster than Lucene. Which is why I'm contemplating writing a formal proof both of ResinDB's performance and of it's relevance.

My test data has been the English verison of Wikipedia plus Project Gutenberg. I suppose I could publish those indices to the world, as a demo search engine. I don't think a soul would care about a proper searchable Project Gutenberg though. Looking into common crawl now.

I'm a part-time father of two, employed doing tedious unmotivating work, focusing completely on my spare time project. I need some advise as to what the next step should be, if I wanted to make this into a business that I could spend all of my time with, not only nights and weekends. Formal proof? Demo?

Side note: one of the most approachable people in the database building community is Oren Eini, creator of RavenDB. He's reviewing ResinDB on his blog. I've read a preview of the entire series of posts, implemented solutions for the best parts of the critique and just released v2. Blog is here: [http://ayende.com/blog](http://ayende.com/blog)

<comment><USER4> Great that you already have those datasets. Yes, putting it on a small public server where people can search and evaluate would be good. Honestly the "speed" part cannot be truly verified if it is on a standard public server but at least the other aspects of it can be. As I see it, you are up against primarily Elasticsearch and Postgres's search engines. [To put out a full index could be costly so you could always try a small subset but still a good enough chunk, say a million docs or so].

Another thing to keep in mind is how easy it is to install and be pluggable. I know you have designed it as a library but I think a small wrapper around it with its own http server so anyone using it can start it as a service and use http to access via JSON would be useful too. [At least everyone these days seem to do everything in containers]. And also to add, Elasticsearch sets a good bar for how easy it is spin up a search engine and get started. Again, not sure how far you must be going to make ResinDB as easy to install, to use and document and all that.

One way to get adoption is to approach a few open-source projects and non- profit orgs (or profit orgs but you might've to start out for free) and see if you can convince them to use your search engine. Once you have a couple or more, it helps in two ways. First, you can get good feedback on what are the steps that someone besides you need to do to get it in production and updates and maintenance and second, you can use them as reference customers.

Feel free to contact me via email [same as hn id but with the popular email service from another search engine out there! :)].

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for this feedback. My eyes have been on Elasticsearch ever since their first funding of 80 million bucks. But I have also noticed how Postgres is the only database engineering team that seem to care about full- text search. Their indexing capabilities are just awsome. They have a library of indexing types you can use. They all seem well constructed and so does Postgres (and the team).

A HTTP wrapper. Sure. It's in the backlog. I can push it up a bit.

What is it that you like about ELK the most? The easy-peacy install where you immediately can start writing data, the HTTP JSON API, or something else?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Diverting people from using Lucene/Elasticsearch would then be a breeze.

Maybe. But most people's problems with Lucene/Elasticsearch aren't really speed. They use Lucene because its feature rich and been worked on for almost two decades. And there's plenty of strategies to mitigate any speed problems (caching, sharding, etc) with lots of knowledge spread throughout hundreds of orgs to the point where "making Elasticsearch fast" is something you can hire someone for. Lots of sunk cost in the Lucene stack.

Not saying what you're doing is without value. Just be conscious that "speed" is only one of many, many factors when evaluating a search engine. In fact, as someone who regularly helps clients evaluate search solutions its very rare that it comes up. "Fast enough" with the right features for the problem is really want people want.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad I posted here because one point is maybe finally clear to me about speed. It's not a good word for performance. It's the wrong word to use.

The great folks at Elasticsearch would _love_ for Lucene to be more performant. It would make life so much easier for them.

The Lucene team spend a good buck on their nightly performance tests. It's astonishing how well-tested Lucene is.

I wonder why I'm faster at writing and reading. Maybe it's because I have been benchmarking against an older version (4.8). But still. I wonder if my tests are all wrong or if I just got lucky in my design. ResinDB has flaws. It puts massive pressure on GC at writing time, if your batches are huge. I'm working hard at optimizing that achilees heel away. Before I have completely done so, writing speed is achieved through lots of memory allocations. It's surprisingly easy though to move away from using GC as a service.

But performance is not a feature anymore?

Edit:typos and tried to clarify things

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Late to the party.

As a search practioner, a formal proof would not convince me so I don't think sales would become a breeze with one. I am interested in performance but I am more interested in relevance. In my experience, sub-second performance is good enough for most use cases, less than 300ms is ideal, and faster is great but I stop caring.

What is really hard with Solr, ES, and Lucene is relevance. Solr has the best out the box experience, but I find ES the easiest to customize though still not easy. What I personally would love is something that has great defaults and easy customization. I would also love to see integration with machine learning algorithms, such as word2vec, as a feature rather than something you have to do yourself.

My advice would be to build on top of Lucene/Solr/ES rather than start from scratch because performance for all three is already good enough. Instead do something that makes using those technologies easier/better. For example, Algolia built autocomplete on steroids which is a big value add if you need that and it is something Lucene doesn't do well. Algolia did write their own search engine from scratch but you can duplicate their functionality in ES (contrary to their marketing claims).

So if I could give Resin any arbitrary dataset and it would automatically compute word vectors and add that as a relevance signal along with BM25 and custom ranking (e.g. popularity), that would get me very excited.

</comment><comment><USER7> Offering a formal proof is really cool, but shouldn't be the whole of your marketing efforts. Instead, focus on what's gained. Even if it is faster, people are still going to rightfully ask: so what? How does that actually improve my life/sales/etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree to what you said whole-heartedly and I have to conlude by now that I am so not even close to being a sales person. I don't care for the psychology of a sale. I've been in many. I've only seen one or two beautiful ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Totally unrelated to this topic, so please ignore if this is a bad place to discuss this.. but: How difficult is this to embed in Go? I've never heard of embedding C#. I suspect if I was to use this it would likely be outside of Go.

Right now I'm in need of an embedded indexer with full text search for schema less queries. I've settled with a (incomplete) custom indexer I wrote that applies FTS via Bleve.

However, I doubt this will scale well - so I was assuming that I'd switch to ElasticSearch or Solr. Resin sounds interesting though. Especially if I can embed it, and not have to run a separate process.

<comment><AUTHOR> "and not have to run a separate process"

Not at all an unrelated issue to me, but unresolvable at the moment me thinks. To use Resin within the same process as a Go app Resin would have to be a Go library.

I'm glad you posted this because I don't think there is a embedded search engine library for Go, which is both a little funny but could also constitute a business optortunity for a Go programmer.

Would you care to talk a little more about your requirements?

<comment><USER8> Sure. I'm using it for a mildly distributed locally focused offline-able content addressable store _(that's a mouthful)_. Think Camlistore, with the things that I wanted. Personal storage is the main use case but with some limited database capabilities.

As such, the records stored in the .. store, need to be indexed with provided fields for later retrieval. The indexer is responsible for this. This ends up being far more like a "database" than anything, honestly, as my queries _can_ be complex, or simple. Eg, tags:foo title:hasWord:bar, etc.

So basically the indexer should be able to run a full suite of database-like queries, I just don't care about the data being retrieved, only the id(s) that matches the queries. To reiterate, the indexer is just responsible for returning the content hashes/ids. The content addressed store actually stores/retrieves the data. Needed operations are all the standard ones: AND, EQ, OR, NOT, PREFIX/SUFFIX is nice too but not required, etc. and of course FullTextSearch.

Anyway, hope this answers your question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thx for the feedback. What I think you should and hope you already do realise is Lucene is nowhere near maximum performance for full-text search nor is it's relevance. And implementing new scoring routines is a drag in Lucene.

Google is also nowhere near maximum relevance. I like word2vec. That model fits into my world view. I'm going to implement it and then take it further. Hopefully while being funded. If not then it shall be my contribution to the open source space and nothing more.

<comment><USER9> If you want to do word vector similarity search, try the "annoy" library from Spotify. It's much much faster than Gensim. [https://github.com/spotify/annoy](https://github.com/spotify/annoy)

<comment><USER6> It appears to do the vector similarity part but not the vector creation part and therefore not a gensim replacement. Am I missing something?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would your technology be adaptable to other problem domains? I can see a few different applications outside of the traditional "search engine" space where speed will be critical and other features would be less important.

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe you can use our index...this is interesting if you join to us and help develop search platform Bubblehunt. Imagine if every user can get own search engine. And if your solution is better, why not? Write me if this is interesting for you :)

<comment><AUTHOR> You wouldn't mind me using your data?

I've seen Bubblehunt and I've played aound a little bit with it. Reach me at github.com/kreeben/resin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> FWIW, various HNers expressed the interest of having something similar to algolia service. Basically, some service than can index a website (including static websites) and provide a search API for it. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Stolen!

<comment><USER12> What do you mean?

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean, great idea, I'm stealing it.

Edit:

A distributed serch engine: [https://github.com/kreeben/dire](https://github.com/kreeben/dire)

Open for feedback.

<comment><USER12> voting my comment would have more like a good HN answer ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What do you call a full-text search index is an inverted index, isn't it? How do you use word embedding exactly? There is no mention of it in the README.

Good luck while trying to climb at lucene and elasticsearch.

</comment><comment><USER13> have some live demos and practical use examples.

<comment><AUTHOR> What would impress _you_?

Me personally I don't think it is impressing of Google to be able to store every web page in existance and to refresh them every other minute. I just don't think that is a good way of spending electricity while we haven't figured out yet how to properly utilize the sun's energy. Google is all- knowing while burning shit-loads of coal. What's impressive about that?

<comment><USER14> Back up you claims. Have benchmarks and demos. Why say these things when there are neighther benchmarks or demos out there?

<comment><AUTHOR> My claims are backed up by the code I've spent blood and sweat to create. Disprove me please because I need to know of scenarios that I need to solve that goes into vNext, scenarios were I'm currently not doing great.

Edit: and also: I'm reaching out to you guys not because I want a pat on the back or free PR. I'm looking for advise as to how to move from having unique tech to having a business. Is this the right forum?

<comment><USER14> > having unique tech

You have claims and they aren't even unique.

> Disprove me please

That's not how it works. Why would I waste my time testing your software when you don't seem to possess common sense or experience? The probability that you can back up what you say is excessively low.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm scrolling up to see where you hit a nerve with me (or is it the other way around?). Anyway, sorry about that.

<comment><USER14> It's not about hitting a nerve, you are making extraordinary claims and for some reason you think other people should compile your source and disprove you instead of you showing any evidence in the first place. Why would you think that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How does it compare to Groonga?

<comment><AUTHOR> "Groonga is an open-source fulltext search engine and column store."

We seem to be at least cousins. Thx for that link. I will have to get back to you.

Edit:

Groonga seems to be cloud software. ResinDB is a in-process library, not a service.

Put ResinDB behind a service end-point and you have "ResinDB as a service", much more like the Groonga architecture.

Orchestration of read/write in a distributed service-like environment is something that is not solved within the ResinDB codebase. ResinDB is intended to be a component of a distributed database, not a distributed database in itself.

Groonga has been around since 2011. I started on ResinDB last year, in March of 2016.

Groonga make monthly releases. I take long pauses because of my lifestyle.

Groonga is a team of devs. I'm an independent solo dev.

Groonga is unmanaged code. ResinDB is managed code.

<comment><USER16> # Creating immediate value

You could use apiblueprint.org and swagger.io to create SDK bindings in various languages for your distributed search engine service. Which you can build using a Paxos library for the consensus algorithm, (lib)torrent for the data-exchange and the s2n or openssl library for SSL/TLS encryption.

# User facing values

None of your points in the last four paragraphs, even if impressive from a developer angle, are of any relevance to a paying customer (end-user). Except your end-user is thrilled and motivated like you are. But even then, you need to keep the motivation up with excellent and enjoyable docs, tutorial a cool website and good integration into developer tools.

# Growth Hacking

After reading the whole discussion like I've the impression that you're looking for growth hacking, but have no idea how to express it other than with differntiating features. Marketing and growth hacking is really different in that it doesn't exploit clean-ness, but messy-ness. That means your whole taks as a growth hacker/marketer is to convince a (healthily) growing mass of people, decision-makers and early-adopters using manipulative tricks. Be it neuro-marketing, selling-techniques, (programmatic) scaling at and taking an advantage or any other form of gaining mass-recognition and presence. You can find a more concise and useful explanation of this on your digital book-shelf.</comment></comment></comment>


BBC dismisses complaint from Android whiners about iOS favo(u)ritism - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2013/06/03/bbc-android <comment><USER2> This post summarises everything you need to know about Marco Arment and his entire blog. End to end trollbait and best avoided.

That said: I can see why BBC subscribers who pay with their tax dollars are unhappy about seeing their tax-dollars invested in closed, proprietary solutions and ecosystems, while the open counter-parts remain ignored.

It doesn't hold water logically and it is against the contract on which BBC is funded.

<comment><USER3> As far as I've understood it, the BBC isn't ignoring Android, the rollout of new features is simply delayed for a platform that's logistically significantly more complex to roll out multi-device supporting apps too.

Also, I'm not too sure about it being against the BBC's 'contract', could you let me know what you're referring to? As far as I'm aware the BBC has no legislative or regulatory duty to favour open platforms.

<comment><USER2> The content the BBC produces should be open and accessible to the British tax- paying public. Plain and simple.

Preferring to provide that content via locked down, proprietary solutions with DRM and god knows what over simple and open solutions would definitely go against that contract.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you, it SHOULD be open, but there's nothing in the BBC's CURRENT public service charter that would MANDATE it to give preference to open-source eco-systems/platforms. As I said, I happen to agree with you: it SHOULD read that. But it currently doesn't, as far as I'm aware.

Going back to the original point, it's not been suggested this is a POLICY decision on the part of the BBC to prefer one platform over the other (be it open or closed) but rather a pragmatic one based on the technical/test complexity of developing for the Android platform (and supporting MANY devices on it). I can personally attest to this last fact, as anyone can who has built cross-platform native mobile apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if there was any preference to the platform. The marketshare of iOS is 25% and Android is 38%[1]. In that 25% almost all iOS users have a consistent screen size, DPI and even OS version. Any changes (think of Retina display in iOS 4), the OS handles transparently. The fragmentation of Android makes it a lot more work to support. Additionally, there's only one store; The App Store. Android has Google Play, Amazon's Store and possibly a dozen more.

iOS in my opinion has much richer tools (Xcode, Instruments, Simulator) to develop with too. I should point out as an iOS developer, I don't exactly have extensive knowledge of Android. If there are rich tools to deal with fragmentation in a seamless way, please let me know. I'd be interested to see how it stacks up to developing for iOS.

I can only speak anecdotally about iOS vs Android but I'm preparing to launch a startup this summer, we're going to have an iOS app but not an Android app until later this year. The primary reason would be we're extremely limited for time and money and the last thing we need is testing the app on 50 different phones just to find the UI doesn't fit on some of them and the performance is sub-par on some. What a pain. Our testing is conducted entirely on our personal iPhones (2x iPhone 5, 1x iPhone 4) along with the simulator and that works out as completely sufficient. The experience we get in the palm of our hands is guaranteed to be almost identical to potentially millions of users.

I can see why there would possibly be a preference. It's a dream to develop for this platform.

[1] [http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww- monthly-201205-20130...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww- monthly-201205-201305)

<comment><USER2> Feel proud about your stance. You are in good company. I'm sure people said the very same thing as they made 1024x768 MSIE-only websites.

<comment><USER5> You can hardly say iOS supports only one resolution now can you? Thing is - Apple dictates certain limitations AND provides the tools and api's to make it more convenient to support those different resolutions and dpi.

On Android you not only have to worry about resolution and dpi, which you could do on simulators, but you also have to take into account which display technology is used. Text on pentile displays can look horrible on the real device, while looking perfect on the "same resolution" in a simulator (real world story here).

That and designing a good UI which's size is dictated by an unpredictable aspect ratio, size (resolution + DPI) is bloody hard. Just look at the total lack of tablet apps for Android.

So yes, if a developer pours the same effort into an Android app as it does in an iOS app, you get poor results. Welcome to the real world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Register is hiring?

As a licence fee payer, I object to the BBC taking my money and favouring proprietary platforms. They bend over forwards to work with and on DRM- encumbered platforms, so they're no strangers to "complexity".

<comment><USER5> So the BBC using DRM-encumbered video-streams is perfectly ok with you? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think there are two things to be considered here

* Marco experimented with Instapaper. Many people (or a few vocal people) were asking for ages for an Android client for Instapaper. When it was released, sales were disappointing (or at least not what expected).

* BBC develops for iOS first, as it seems that it takes less time.

Out of these two pieces, Marco says what he will do as an (indie) iOS developers, not as a BBC employee or consultant. He doesn't say BBC should not develop for Android.

All these issues about open/closed, do not exist if you cannot pay the bills. It seems like he couldn't had he been actively developing for Android besides iOS. I think he has a point.</comment>


Wrong: 5 Reasons Lossless Formats Will Not Destroy MP3 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/07/why-lossless-fo.html

<comment><USER2> Aside from the reasons listed, not all mp3 players even play formats like FLAC in the first place. Also, even as a generic term -- unless they're iPods, they're "MP3 players", so they're probably going to be closely associated with MP3 files until something radically different comes along. It took me a bit to find a player I liked that could play ogg vorbis. (It was an iAudio U2 flash drive, several years ago.) Granted, there are also Apple and Microsoft lossless codecs, but file format fragmentation is part of the problem here.

Also, not all music even benefits from the careful encoding that could benefit, say, Beethoven. One of my favorite bands, The Mountain Goats, has recorded about half of their numerous releases on an old Panasonic boombox. Also, some studio music is produced so poorly that a lossless copy off CD wouldn't help much (<http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dynamics.htm>).

</comment><comment><USER3> Stupid article. Nobody ever claimed lossless will destroy MP3. It will be supported in some MP3 players for those people who want it. Why does everything have to be about one product destroying another? They will coexist.

</comment><comment><USER4> Size Size Size Size Size. People want to be able to put all their music on their iPods. Using lossless formats they're not able to with the low-end players.</comment>


Registration now open for Google I/O 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/register.html <comment><USER2> I was under the impression that registration did not begin until Feb 7 (<http://twitter.com/googleio>)

 _edit_ Just realized that sounded snippy... not my intention at all. Just trying to clear up any confusion.

</comment><comment><USER3> Google I/O 2011 completely sold-out in 55 mins! Tech conferences are like rock concerts now?</comment>


Facebook sorry over face tagging launch - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13693791 <comment><USER2> "Sorry" is pretty fascile when it's clear that their default philosophy is "Ask for forgiveness, not permission".

Of course, the incentives are so high for Facebook that it's hard to imagine this happening any other way. This fully leverages both of their most valuable assets - the most comprehensive social graph and the biggest collection of tagged photographs.

</comment><comment><USER3> "We're sorry, not in the sense that we're going to undo this feature or make it opt in or actually change our behavior in the future, but in the sense that we aren't entirely pleased that people are whining about us in the media for a news cycle or two again."

</comment><comment><USER4> "The social network said that it should have done more to notify members about the global launch."

NOOOOO. They just don't get it. It isn't about notification. It's about violating my privacy without asking permission first.

You can roll out any feature you want silently, so long as it is turned off by default!

<comment><USER5> Of course they get it. They just don't care.

If this was opt-in by default, it wouldn't get nearly the same adoption. Lots of people would click no, then never change the setting.

The general public will eventually get over it, the same way they got over {the news feed, suggest a friend, changing interests to likes, letting people without .edu accounts sign up, ...}. Facebook knows this. PR probably had the apology written before the feature was turned on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Until Facebook adds the possibility to prevent people from tagging me completely, then I don't believe they are sorry.

However, such an option is not available ... you have to untag yourself after the fact and some people just keep re-adding you ... how do you explain to people to fucking stop tagging you without hurting their feelings and without sounding like a weirdo?

I loved Facebook in the beginning, but their intrusion on my privacy is getting too damn annoying. I wish there was an alternative.

<comment><USER7> Tagging is a pretty fundamental feature of Facebook, in my opinion. That being said, there actually already is an option in the privacy settings to prevent anyone from seeing the images you're tagged in. That's slightly different from preventing the tagging in the first place, but the effect is the same.

<comment><USER6> No it's not - I want people to see pictures of myself that I'm tagging myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No they're not.

If you're sorry, you don't do it again.

Facebook do this again and again and again and again.

<comment><USER9> Always better to ask forgiveness than permission, no?

<comment><USER10> The people who trot this line out too much tend to be assholes in my experience.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps I shouldn't have omitted the sarcasm tag?

<comment><USER11> Probably not since I too have encountered people who use this as an excuse for anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why does FB always have to be opt-out.

what I actually feared was being tagged in any photo - even not taken by my friends. Although it would be cool to find photos of myself by other people to try an piece my various evenings out back together ;)

<comment><USER13> Why opt-out? Because the apathetic 95% of the userbase will never opt-in.

What Facebook should do better is intelligently set defaults. Defaulting On for everyone is stupid. Defaulting On for people who already have privacy settings that indicate they would be ok with it is much better.

<comment><USER14> I don't mind opt-out, as long as I _know_ it's opt-out.

The way FB rolls features out is they do it silently in the background, which is sort of grating. I wouldn't mind at all if there was a one-time "Hey, we made this cool new thing, I'm going to turn it on now, but I'm giving you a chance of not using it if you want" message on my next login.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do you know why FB isn't asking for permission? Because it can get away with this patronizing _and_ self serving behavior.

</comment><comment><USER16> How would Facebook be able to innovate if everything they released was opt- out? This isn't some privacy-leaking piece of the site, it is a feature that helps one of their core components be better.

If you are that much of a privacy freak, don't make a Facebook account. It's that simple - either you want your data out there to some degree or not (and don't glorify Facebook into something that it is not).

<comment><USER17> So every Facebook user deserves to have their privacy invaded because they have an account on that site?

Facebook should have been clear about what the feature did, what it didn't do, and how it used their account. They also should have sent emails out warning users of the feature's activation.

Facebook does this all the time, but they'll get off the hook yet again just because they're Facebook. Sigh...

<comment><USER16> How does this invade somebody's privacy? I don't get it - because it makes detecting a friend's face possible?

<comment><USER17> Because it shouldn't be enabled by default?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Am I the only one who doesn't see any big deal over this feature? Normally, I'd be all upset about them forcing an opt-out approach, but I just don't really see this as changing your level of privacy at all.

If it's a friend of yours, and they're uploading a picture of you, well then what do you care if FB removes one step for them? I think most people already tag everything anyway, don't they?

<comment><USER18> I may be wrong, but the impression I'm getting is that people are offended that facebook have used the photos that have people tagged them in as data for training their facial recognition software without them agreeing to it.

It's the fact that they now have the power to determine whether you're in a photo, any photo, or even any video, anywhere in the world, that has people worried. What might facebook end up doing with that?

Of course there was nothing stopping them doing this without it being obvious to anyone.

<comment><USER7> Got it. That does make sense; the article and comments just didn't really seem like that was specifically what people were worried about. Given that I see no other reason to care, though, I assume you're correct.

Personally, I'm not so worried about Facebook being able to recognize me. I'd be more concerned about to whom they might give that data. I can definitely see room for a lot of concern there.

<comment><USER19> As someone who tags a lot of friends on facebook, I love this feature. It was so painful to tag even 5 people over even a 20 photos album. I don't think this is any kind of privacy violation. Moreover, desktop apps like picasa have had brilliant image recognition abilities for a long time. The only thing I want fb to do is to give me an option to stop being tagged by apps without explicit permission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> You ran out of "sorry's" a while back, guys.</comment>


'Under God' Held Constitutional in 9th Circuit Pledge Ruling - <AUTHOR> http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202446113657&src=EMC-Email&et=editorial&bu=Law.com&pt=LAWCOM%20Newswire&cn=NW_20100312&kw=Reinhardt%20Stands%20Alone%20on%209th%20Circuits%20Pledge%20of%20Allegiance%20Under%20God%20Ruling

<comment><AUTHOR> I had posted this article not so much to highlight the faith/atheism issue as to highlight the way judging often works in reality.

This case had caused a huge uproar in 2002 when Judge Reinhardt had led a panel in striking down the Pledge as unconstitutional. While no politician would defend the decision, the case went up on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which punted on it by holding that the plaintiff, a gadfly lawyer named Newton Minnow, lacked "standing" to bring it - this meant the Court invalidated the decision while avoiding the jurisprudential pit into which it might lead under the Establishment Clause line of cases.

The striking thing that happened here is Mr. Minnow found a qualified plaintiff to renew his attack and saw it head to a friendly panel of the Ninth Circuit that seemed highly likely to invalidate the 'under God' language, with Judge Reinhardt and another leading liberal judge - one who had a track record of striking down laws promoting religion in such contexts and who was a 30-year friend of Judge Reinhardt's - constituting two of the three panelists.

Yet the decision did _not_ go as expected, and it appears that this resulted as much as anything from a pragmatic decision by the second liberal judge on the panel not to want to go against the political headwinds that the case inevitably presented.

I had clerked for a federal court and often saw this sort of thing. Judging may appear "objective" or "disinterested" but, in reality, where a case is politically charged, the politics often affects the outcome - and that appears to be what happened here. Actually, this is somewhat surprising from the Ninth Circuit appeals court, which has a long history of following its own path on such issues (and hence has a historically high reversal rate in the Supreme Court).

Hope this isn't too much "inside baseball" stuff. I think it depicts an interesting reality within our courts that many do not appreciate in taking a mere headline view of such decisions. This piece does a fine job of bringing out the human issues that can so affect the judging process.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the explanation. I find constitutional law very interesting, because it seems to be easy for me to comprehend, because the constitution's articles are so short, and the arguments rational rather than technical, like you would find in say, tax law or something like that.

Tell me if my impression is accurate. It seems to me that liberal justices, at least the ones I've heard on the Supreme Court, frequently invoke the ramifications of a particular ruling as an importing deciding factor, on par with the actual interpretation of the law. Whereas conservatives seem more concerned with just reading the law's words, and applying them to the case at hand.

<comment><USER3> Read some Scalia decisions to see how your second paragraph is pretty naive and inaccurate... Hunt up a book by Richard Posner (7th circuit judge and blogger) called How Judges Think for interesting insights as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree, the Founding Fathers believe rights are inherent in being human, and given by God. The had no use for atheists. I am mostly an atheist myself, still I am aware I am born into a country founded on faith and pragmatism both. This is not wholly a bad thing. Those that attack simple expressions of faith stand on uncertain ground. Whose interests are served by denigrating faith?

<comment><USER5> The First Amendment to the Constitution has this in it:

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or > prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, > or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to > petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Requiring the Pledge of Allegiance to the Republic to include affirming a monotheistic God seems a lot like "mak[ing a] law respecting an establishment of religion", which is prohibited.

There are people who are polytheistic and people who are atheists. If taking the Pledge of Allegiance is required for civil service or military service, you're putting them into a rather uncomfortable position.

Edit: I generally dislike the Pledge of Allegiance anyways. If you look at the words - "I pledge allegiance... to the flag... of the United States of America... and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" - it's just not particularly well formed. Pledging Allegiance to the flag first, then it's not clear what "the Republic for which it stands is" - who am I pledging allegiance to? To the federal government? To the States? To the federalist federal/state mix? To the idealized version of American values? If there's a conflict between my state and the federal government, who exactly have I pledged my loyalty to? And what is entailed in allegiance? It's just a murky, hazy, not well thought out thing. And we start doing it at five years old or whatever, which is far too young to understand the implications of the Oath of Loyalty that you're taking.

As an example of a much clearer and better oath, here's the United States Marine Corps Oath: "I, (name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God." Very clear exactly what you're pledging, to whom, and what your duties are, and who you ask if you're not clear on what your duties are. And Marines take it voluntarily, knowing the weight of what it entails.

<comment><USER2> I agree. Pledging allegiance is a sham. The only reason folks are so enamored with the our republic is because it was wrought out of the last frontier, by a bunch of non-conformist misfits, who, guided by Jefferson and other folks, like Lafayette implemented a radical form of government which attempted to really treat folks as free (slaves are another issue). That lasted for about 140 years. Now our content with the government should be commensurate with the degree in which it steps out of the way, and does not simply exist to support the status quo. That was what was so special about America to begin with: there was no status quo!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also:

> "Instead, to the joy or relief, as the case may be, of the two members of > the majority, this court's willingness to abandon its constitutional > responsibilities will be praised as patriotic," Reinhardt wrote, "and may > even burnish the court's reputation among those who believe that it adheres > too strictly to the dictates of the Constitution or that it values > excessively the mandate of the Bill of Rights."

I had to re-read that once to get it, but wow - zing. What a fantastic way of putting it. "may even burnish the court's reputation among those who believe that it adheres too strictly to the dictates of the Constitution or that it values excessively the mandate of the Bill of Rights" - what a subtle, wonderful criticism.

</comment><comment><USER6> You Americans _still_ have your children say this (with or without the god mention) every day? That's insanity.

<comment><USER7> The children who can think actually know that this is insanity, as do the Enforcers of this insanity who can think. Still, the insanity continues.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Go better off with or without generics? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Well, it's 2017 already.</comment>


Are (Gaming) Consoles Dead? - <AUTHOR> http://games.ign.com/articles/122/1220883p1.html

<comment><USER2> Dead? No. Not as mainstream anymore? Quite possibly. Just as PC gaming isn't dead, just less popular, the same will happen to consoles. The issue is whether big companies will be able to continue to justify spending huge sums of money on the platform. I think that for the meantime they definitely can.</comment>


Healthcare: The 6 Trillion Dollar Industry - <AUTHOR> http://blog.carecloud.com/2010/06/21/the-6-trillion-dollar-industry/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd really like to know what the YC community thinks as this our first 'break out' post on our new blog.

Thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: What would it take to rate the web? - <AUTHOR> My need came from browsing services online, and the annoyance of having to go through blogs, other websites, personal references to get a sense of how good, and still "relevant", those services are. Then came the thought, what would it take to have something like Yelp for websites?
Ended up starting a simple project over the week with that in mind [1], but wanted to discuss with others here too.
Spam reviews: With moderation and anti-spamming tools, it seems to have "worked" for rating products (Amazon), offline businesses (Yelp), and others so why not online services (websites)? The 5 star rating system measures "satisfaction" somewhat well, but the "popularity" part (number of stars) is easier to spam. I really liked the format used in [2], so I used a modified version of that in my project. I feel the "never heard of it" option could suppress spams.
Apathy: What would motivate folks to start contributing? It should probably be dead simple so I thought a browser extension could work well, both for the people leaving and consuming reviews. This obviously has its limitations on mobile. The real motivation probably comes from the fact that the review was helpful to somebody. People seem to go nuts on reddit gold, so I guess that's validation if any, so I tried to add something like that.
Privacy: Related, but some people don't like leaving traces behind on the web. I feel the best way is to be transparent as to what is happening and give them as much control as possible. For example, make it easy to view and remove everything they know about the user. Still probably won't satisfy everyone.
There are other smaller issues that I can think of (e.g. not all websites fall into a "rate-able service" category), but probably missing some big ones too. Please feel free to share what you think.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lome/necafokehnnolgnjmapmlmhigjmlelpl
[2] https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/overview/ <comment><USER2> There are two insurmountable problems with rating the Web as a broad concept.

First, you'll never get users to do it at huge scale, which is what you need. Those days ended - to the limited extent they existed at all - with sites like StumbleUpon declining and with the arrival of the smartphone with apps dominating most average usage. Unlike food (Yelp), the average person has zero passion for the Web and zero interest in taking the time to provide feedback in such a manner (they have as much passion for the Web broadly as they do any other utility; they use it, yes, they get upset when it doesn't work, yes, but they have zero passion for it). To get people to dedicate time consistently, you need passion. The young Web had that because of who the early users were (early adopters have passion), and it was a shiny new toy even to the average person (at least for a few years).

Second, the interface point (for initial rating and discovery sorting) has to be tied into an already existing epic scale discovery point. That's because you aren't going to be able to get people to first browse to the rating site for discovery purposes, the audience for that would be relatively small (which is why StumbleUpon is dead). There are only a few sites/services that could even be considered on the short list for that: Google, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter (and other services in places like China or Russia). You're inherently competing with the huge platforms for discovery. The next huge platform will arrive with an inflection point occurance.

I'm not suggesting you can't build a small service that would be popular with a group of passionate users. I think that's possible. You won't be able to "rate the Web" though, at the scale that would be desirable. You need millions and millions of quality active users for that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, my focus was building it for SaaS services. It just so happened to be that the method of least resistance for something to get rolling, in my mind, was to do it via a browser extension.

At that point, it seemed more difficult to filter out websites that wouldn't fit into this category, hence the question: why not everything?

Your points on passion is valid though. Maybe folks just don't care enough about the web. I do think they do care about the services provided on the web though.</comment></comment>


Warren Buffett's Secret Millionaires Club - <AUTHOR> http://www.smckids.com/ <comment><USER2> <http://www.smckids.com/episodes/lemons-to-lemonade> -> This is amazing. To be honest, _all_ kids should learn this stuff. It surprises me how people are so uninformed that they make really stupid business decisions.

<comment><USER3> Oh, lovely. An auto-play video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only one who expected a conspiracy site after clicking that link?

<comment><USER5> No.

Who's running that site anyways?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Every kid should watch these videos before they spend their parents' hard earned money on the business school.

</comment><comment><USER7> "your 2,000 Buffett Bucks (ßß)"

Why would you turn a B into an ss?

<comment><USER8> I imagine because it's easier to identity as a currency symbol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Someone should just build a bot to accumulate Buffett Bucks by 'exploring' the site 24/7. Guaranteed upside! :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Kinda clever idea, don't think my younger sisters would find it fun enough. It seems a bit too overdone ;/ I used to be in a stock market club in school, I think this is a great idea just not the best execution.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is cute. I like the hard driving music, plus it teaches kids useful stuff. The $2,000 "Buffet Bucks" seems like a good hook for users too.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is pretty cool - although it did hurt my brain thinking it was a really funny joke, until I realized ... it ... wasn't.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wish this was around when I was a kid.

<comment><USER15> This looks like the sort of thing I'd have mercilessly mocked when I was a kid.

<comment><USER16> That may say more about you as a kid than about the show.

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure it says more about the show. I'm no expert, but I think the tone is strikes might work for younger children, but likely not very well for the older children I'd think they'd be targeting with investing education.

<comment><USER16> Given the subject matter I'm not sure how much better than this they could make it. But I must say it looks like they're trying a bit _too_ hard to make this "cool" at times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Terrible. I recommend Virtual Stock Exchange as an alternative.

<comment><USER18> I think Buffett was asked about paper trading once... he compared it to 'reading about sex' -- not even close to the real thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Impressively unusable from an iPad.

<comment><USER2> I don't think a significant portion of the target audience use ipads.

<comment><USER20> I read most of my Hacker News from an iPhone. I feel less guilty not "dedicating" too much time to it, and I get in my fix a little more often.</comment></comment></comment>


261 MPG Volkswagen XL1 diesel plug-in hybrid - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/slideshows/cars/261-mpg-volkswagen-xl1-diesel-plug-hybrid-be-produced-limited-quantities/

<comment><USER2> I like my Jetta. I'll probably get another one when I look to replace it. I am leaning toward a TDI. If VW made a Diesel Hybrid it would probably be a "Shut up and take my money" moment.

What I'm saying is I would really like VW to come out with a Diesel Hybrid. Given how they push their diesel cars as 'Clean Diesel' I'm surprised they haven't already released one.

<comment><USER3> I bought a 2012 Golf TDI a few months ago. I really like the diesel engine (that pull you feel when accelerating up a hill is exhilarating). It was the only car I drove (in my price range) that actually made me enjoy the experience.

A few drawbacks, though:

* The DSG transmission has a weird bug that causes some lurching at low speeds, like the transmission suddenly up & down-shifts repeatedly. Many drivers report this same issue but my dealership won't acknowledge the problem. They have been unable to reproduce it. I can reproduce it every morning when leaving the parking garage.

* Diesel is an oily fuel that does not evaporate. Most pumps I use have a nice layer of diesel coating the handle that never goes away. I now have to wash my hands after every fueling.

* The TDI engine adds a bunch to the price of the car. Hopefully the claims that the engine needs less maintenance will be true and will help offset the initial extra cost. I easily get 32 mpg with combined city and brief highway every day. On long trips it's easy to get up to 42-46 mpg, so that should help offset the extra cost too.

* Diesel is currently more expensive than gasoline, but I'm betting on that changing in the future. Diesel powers industry which should have a more constant and predictable demand curve. It shouldn't be subject to the drastic price fluctuations that gasoline sees. We'll see how that works out.

<comment><USER4> Until late last year (when I totalled it), I had a 2009 Golf TDi which I _adored_. As you mentioned, the powerful pull of the diesel inspired many a late night ride. IMHO the TDi is the perfect combination of power, fuel economy and driving fun. My overall average fuel economy was ~5.5 L/100 km.

Sorry to hear about your issues with the DSG. It Just Worked for me. The 1-2 and 2-3 shifts were flawless and I could barely feel the loss in power as it shifted. Until the last few months before my accident, I never used the manual mode. But I discovered that switching to manual mode and leaving it in 4th gear kept the diesel in the perfect power range (3500-4000 rpm) for fun drives through the local mountains of northern Sydney. And even with the harder driving, I would still end up with an average of about 6.5-7 L/100km. Very, very impressive!

Here in Sydney, diesel is a bit more expensive than petrol (0.05-0.10 AUD/L). But I was shocked how much more diesel cost on a trip back to the US over Christmas. Differences of 1 USD were not uncommon. I still think that long- term even with that price difference the diesel would work out better.

The only draw back about the TDi was the lack of immediate power from a stop, while the turbo spinned up. I had forgotten what it was like to move immediately until I rented a petrol car (2012 Audi A1 - and clearly inferior to the VW Golf) for 6 weeks. You can't have everything I guess. :)

<comment><USER5> What's really annoying is driving a Golf TDI in an area where everyone expects you to speed up quickly from a red light. We're talking about a second or two of difference, yet people honk, tailgate, and otherwise behave as though there is something wrong with you around where I live.

Not that I personally care about appeasing such people.

<comment><USER6> As a gas-hybrid owner, I always thought that a diesel-hybrid would be the ultimate combo - a flat-torque-curve of electric motor for snappy starts and the thrumming late-curve power of a diesel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> With hybrid plug-in cars becoming more standard, I think MPG is no longer an accurate or clear measure of efficiency. Are they saying that it gets 261 miles on the same amount of joules contained in 1 gallon of diesel? Or are they saying that with 1 gallon of diesel and a full charge it goes 261 miles? Needs more clarity.

<comment><USER8> They are saying it gets 261 miles for one gallon of gas plus some unstated electricity. They are counting the electricity as free. It's a completely bogus metric. I see a lot of Chevy Volt owners claim they get 400 MPG when they run on electricity 90% of the time.

<comment><USER9> Maybe they need a new measurement like GP100M (gallons used per 100 miles). So for the tesla, that number would be zero, but for the Volt it would be something like 1.7 (first 40 miles is zero, but last 60 would be at 35mpg).

<comment><USER8> The electricity needs to be factored in, it's not free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why aren't more car companies to using a diesel-electic powertrain? They've been used in the locomotive industry for decades!

<comment><USER11> Pressure from gas companies?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Given that hybrids have added complexity and cost, I wonder if the double premium of hybrid + diesel is worth it. The standard VW diesels already deliver amazing performance and economy. I would much rather see engineering talent focusing on improving the diesel even further than moving to a diesel- hybrid.

</comment><comment><USER12> Any more information on this car? Is it in production? Just a prototype?

<comment><USER13> It's the third iteration of a prototype, though IIRC it was always billed as a prototype that _could_ actually be produced or at least be very close: "Seriennahes Konzeptstudie".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_1-litre_car>

<http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ein-Liter-Auto_von_VW>

It says that they're planning a small production run of 100-1000, price expected in the € 30-50K range (not the $600 rumored), components are quite expensive, for example a carbon fibre body. My guess would be that they're limiting the production run because they're losing money even at those prices.

<http://www.zeit.de/auto/2012-03/volkswagen-ein-liter-auto>

On the other hand girlfriend's several year old Polo regularly gets 3L/100km, so around 78mpg. Every time we actually have to fuel up is a bit of a shock :-)

<comment><USER14> I figure a lease with no option to buy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seems a bit disingenuous to call it 261 MPG when you have to plug it in.

<comment><USER8> I agree. They are treating the electricity like it's free (cost and environmental impact). I see a lot of Chevy Volt owners bragging about their "300 MPG" economy. If you have a dual fuel source vehicle (hybrid) and ignore one of the fuels, the numbers will always look good. Using their methodology a Nissan Leaf (pure electric) gets infinity MPG. What we need is a distance per fuels used, where fuels is all the gas and electricity.

<comment><USER16> Different sources of electricity have different environmental impact, but at least you can have a good idea of where your utility gets power from. At the same time, you don't know if your gas came from tar sands or easy to get (but dwindling) shallow Californian oil.

There is an electric equivalent mpg called mpg-e: [http://www.edmunds.com/fuel-economy/decoding-electric-car- mp...](http://www.edmunds.com/fuel-economy/decoding-electric-car-mpg.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I believe they have been talking about this for a while. It's absurd that they are used today. They could be ran on SVO or bio-diesel. However the USA isn't a fan of a diesel engine unless it's in a pickup.

</comment><comment><USER18> Am I the only one who thinks the design of the car is retro-futuristic?

</comment><comment><USER19> Nice, but I can one-up it. I've got 2X Turbo Legs that don't require plugging in and run completely on food energy. Talk about eco-friendly!

Mind you, it runs a little slower, but I choose the planet and my children's future over convenience and luxury.

<comment><USER5> In some places, you cannot survive just by walking everywhere. My girlfriend's job is miles from the nearest house, and she is not going to spend 2 hours walking to her office each morning. Bicycle would be workable _if it didn't involve cutting across a 55MPH highway_.

A lot of US towns and cities are not really designed in a way that promotes non-automobile transportation.</comment></comment>


iOS 14 will let you change your default email and web browser apps - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2020/06/22/ios-14-default-apps/ <comment><USER2> But can you have a 3rd party browser or just an wrapper around Apple's Webkit?

<comment><USER3> An efficient browser engine needs to run with security privileges that I don't imagine Apple ever giving to 3rd party code.

<comment><USER4> You never know. Perhaps Apple is working on public APIs to mitigate those issues?

What if Apple released APIs that let you write an all-new, high performance browser engine and let you publish your own browser on iOS, but the APIs weren't compatible with Firefox or Chromium, so a rewrite would be required?

<comment><USER5> Apple has all of the APIs needed. You can compile and run chromium on iOS today (or at least it used to be possible - I work for an enterprise that did it for internal apps) - it'll just never make it through AppStore review.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Aren't third party browsers still just gimped webkit webviews? I'm not sure the worse performance is worth having a different browser chrome around the web page?

<comment><USER7> Syncing autofill, history, tabs, and passwords with desktop Chrome or Firefox is nice.

<comment><USER8> I just want Ublock Origin.

The existing adblockers for iOS are OK but they aren't comparable, it's mostly OK since I use my iPad's at home and control the network but it's (one) of the reasons I won't be buying an iPhone SE even though it's price (~£400) makes it almost interesting to me.

The only option would be to VPN into my home network and filter that way but yeah that seems silly when I can just install Firefox on Android which I like well enough anyway.

<comment><USER7> I'm curious: what websites have ads that an iOS adblocker can't block? I've had very good luck with Ka-Block! on my iPhone. There are some others with user-editable blocklists.

<comment><USER9> twitter ads

<comment><USER10> True.

Workaround: use Tweetbot

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Dear Google. If I promise to set Gmail as my default email client on iOS, will you then let me keep Safari as my default browser when clicking a link in that app?

<comment><USER12> What are you talking about exactly?

iOS GMail App > Settings > Default Apps

You cannot choose Firefox or Brave but you certainly can choose Safari.

<comment><USER13> I believe the complaint is that I have to renew that decision regularly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Finally! Now if someone will build a browser that will add the missing push notifications feature to PWAs, web apps on iOS might have some semblance of parity with Android.

<comment><USER15> Highly unlikely. Apple will need to figure out how to get it's 30% cut from those PWAs first.

<comment><USER14> I'll give them $ for push notifications alone! Not 30% but it's worth something if their servers suddenly now must process notifications from hundreds or thousands of new Web apps every year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What about that really annoying feature where, if you open a link from say, Amazon, and it forcefully opens the link in an app. I _hate_ this behaviour.

<comment><USER17> You can fix this today.

Hold down on the link and choose to open in a new tab. It will remember the behavior and stop opening the link in the app, until you hold down another future link and choose "open in Amazon" or the equivalent.

Not very discoverable but it does exist.

<comment><USER16> Oh wow! I'll try this out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can I change my default phone app? I'd really like phone numbers to come up in Google Voice. Yes, I know I can long-press and _sometimes_ that lets me choose GV, but it doesn't always work.

What about my default maps app? That would be nice too.

<comment><USER19> Second the default map app. I hate when I click a map link and it opens in Apple's map app, it looks just enough like Google maps that I don't immediately close it, then once I realize it's worse that I remember, I say, "oh, they tricked me again!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Will others browsers be allowed to use their browser engines?

<comment><USER21> Aside from ToS and legal stuff, what API roadblocks are there that make developing a browser impossible?

<comment><USER22> App Store terms and conditions

<comment><USER23> aka ToS and legal stuff

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not trying to start a flame war, but as an Android user I can't help but find it shocking and funny that something this basic is a headline in 2020

<comment><USER25> I do it for the privacy. Google auctions user data to third parties for micro dollars on their ad exchange.

[https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//adexchange/AdExchangeOverview.pdf)

Apple has no such business.

<comment><USER26> Being able to change your default apps has nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with platform control.

<comment><USER25> I stick with Apple for the privacy. There are features on Android I wish to use, but I can't bring myself to use an Android phone or putting the effort of cleaning it from all of Google's trackers.

<comment><USER27> You can just flash your phone with LineageOS. Takes about an hour, and you're done.

<comment><USER28> What about all the apps that need the "Google Play Services" libraries?

<comment><USER29> There's always MicroG and the MicroG-infused version of LineageOS:

[https://microg.org/](https://microg.org/)

[https://lineage.microg.org/](https://lineage.microg.org/)

<comment><USER30> jc! but isn't microg also requires us to enable some level of Google Play Services?

<comment><USER29> Well, MicroG is meant to be a drop-in replacement for closed-source Google libraries on your phone (i.e. Google Play Services / Google Services Framework) but obviously it will still have to connect to Google servers if needed (although you're able to control for what purposes). For instance, push notifications for apps often use Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging platform and MicroG allows the user to still receive those notifications in the absense of Google Play Services / Google Services Framework.

I suggest you have a closer look at the MicroG website where this is explained, too: [https://microg.org/](https://microg.org/)

<comment><USER30> Cool :) I am using openGApps but I think it does not have this flexibility I will switch over to microg :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Welcome to the 2010s, Apple.

<comment><USER32> Welcome to 1998

[] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.#:~:text=In%20October%201998%2C%20the%20U.S.,the%20installation%20of%20Windows%20software).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Glad to see that antitrust and bringing them into court has finally pressured them into building a feature that should of been standard for a long time.

<comment><USER34> Yup, the timing would certainly seem to indicate Apple hedging their position for the upcoming antitrust prosecution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Now only if they allow competing browser engine...

</comment><comment><USER36> What about Maps?

<comment><USER37> Disclaimer: I'm speculating on the reason: There may not be a standardized URL scheme for mapping applications whereas both e-mail and browsers have it already (http(s): and mailto:). It's possible though! Apple could define a standard and say "that's how you can open maps" but currently it's a moving target as mapping applications support varying features like directions with waypoints, POI searches, general searches, area selections, etc. They'd have to settle on some standard that Apple Maps support which almost is guaranteed to not support several Google Maps features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> If you miss how Android shares links between apps, check out the app Opener on iOS, I couldn't live without it

<comment><USER39> Yes let me pay $2 for a feature that should be standard or will likey be built in by Apple eventually after they remove this app from the store.

Same with MacOS. I don't want to pay for a window snapping app so I can quickly send windows to the sides or corners. Windows has done that well for years and upgraded it in 10. Expand that tool, make it built in, and I'll give this old macbook someone gave me another try. Honestly this was a breaking point when I gave OSX a shot last year for a few days. That MacBook is awesome but it just sucks to use coming from Windows navigation, even with Windows search often borked.

<comment><USER38> I agree that the situation with Apple sucks, but they haven't changed their stance since the start of their app platform. So I'd rather pay $2 to fix my own workflows than to withhold my money in protest of Apple's long term platform vision.

I like iOS for the most part and wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Not having real extensions for privacy and adblocking and other layout/js modifications/tweaks on mobile browsers has been a gigantic hassle for a decade. Hopefully this opens up the market for someone to make an actually great browser for iOS.

<comment><USER41> Huh? They have dedicated API.

<comment><USER42> They have an API that lets you block some static rules. It's way better than nothing but it is not a true substitute for the kinds of things and dynamic filtering you can (for now) currently do in web browser extensions. It also appears to have a rather low rule limit.

<comment><USER43> So I want to give a random third party complete access to my browsing history like most ad blockers do?

<comment><USER23> If Apple is literally the only entity on the planet you trust, that might be a problem.

<comment><USER43> You already have to trust your OS vendor.

<comment><USER23> No shit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Would be great to change the default calendar and contacts apps as well. There's a large list of 3rd-party calendar apps, but the user often gets redirected back to the built-in apps, eg when interacting with invitation emails or notification center.

<comment><USER45> I agree! I would love calendar, contacts, maps, notes, & reminders. All things I use super frequently. I'd ask for default messages/vid chat change (to WhatsApp or Google Duo) but that'd be asking for too much haha

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Phone! I want first class support for SIP so I can hook up my VOIP app of choice)f( straight into the OS!

)f(: just kidding, there are no good VOIP apps in iOS :/

</comment><comment><USER47> I know that this is stupid pet peeve but my number one thing to fix is not being able to change the extension of a file with the standard iOS tools. (or is there a way to do this?)

The length to which I needed to go to when I needed to do this recently on a video which was shared with me was mind boggling. I'm not sure if this is because the video was in Files and not in Gallery, but it shouldn't really matter. If anything, that would be exactly where I'd expect to have such a feature.

</comment><comment><USER30> The App library feature looks more like, I will use "on-device" intelligence to show all the apps that I want you to use.

</comment><comment><USER48> I assume the browsers are still stuck using Safari's rendering and JavaScript engine.

</comment><comment><USER49> Finally! Now which email client to use that promotes security and great features?

</comment><comment><USER50> What if you want Hey email!?

<comment><USER51> It's been approved:

[https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275066259801923584](https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275066259801923584)

<comment><USER52> Looks like after they complied with Apple policies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Now that's some innovation!

</comment><comment><USER54> And Maps? And Calendar?

</comment><comment><USER55> Anything but sideloading

</comment><comment><USER56> Hmm someone is concerned about Anti-Trust

</comment><comment><USER57> YES. I think Safari is great but for several reasons I use Firefox. Thank you, Tim Apple!</comment>


Ask HN: List of Revenue Models? - <AUTHOR> Does anyone know of a list of (all/most) possible revenue models?
I was hoping for something similar to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations which purports to list all of the possible dramatic plot primitives.
I've got a great idea for a (web-based) service, and need to figure out how to make it at least minimally self-supporting before I go any further. I was hoping to use a list of revenue models to generate ideas/brainstorm.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I found this to be a pretty good general list:

[http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/05/25/the-9-types- of...](http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/05/25/the-9-types-of-online- business-models-which-one-do-you-use/)

Of course there are sub types under each of these 9 categories and combinations, but its a start

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the most common are probably Ad-supported, Subscription, and Freemium(especially for games).

As we're seeing with all the issues being brought up about Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga, these current models do not always work. And even when they do, there are still issues. There is huge potential right now for new revenue models, so I would recommend getting creative with how your idea could potentially make money. If app.net succeeds, then there will be more of a transition to subscription services versus free, ad-based services. Currently though, the majority of users prefer free. The challenge is figuring out how to make money from them, which is why ad-supported services are so prevalent.

So try something new. And don't be afraid to ask for money.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here are a few useful resources:

Standard Forms of Value from The Personal MBA: <http://book.personalmba.com/12-standard-forms-of-value/>

Outline of 25 forms of profitability from The Art of Profitability by Adrian Slywotzky(as outlined by Derek Sivers):<http://sivers.org/book/ArtOfProfitability>

</comment><comment><USER5> Hmm... The closest thing I can think of is the book "The Personal MBA" by Josh Kaufman.

In the book he talks about the "12 Standard Forms Of Value". These 12 forms of value cover pretty much any business you can possibly think of. In other words, if you're in business and making money, you're using at least one of these twelve methods.

</comment><comment><USER6> Take a look at this: <http://digitalenterprise.org/models/models.html>

There are some examples in there, though a few are a bit dated.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all of the great ideas!

I'll pore over these lists and keep brainstorming how each of them might apply to the idea.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a good question. I look forward to responses.</comment>