What offends me the most, as a web developer - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@BenSassiAladin/what-offends-me-the-most-as-a-web-developer-82f60779c1bd <comment><USER2> I've had a near identical experience over the last 30 years. Every point in the article rang true and I sympathise with every one of them.

Regarding the second point: One of the hardest things to swallow is a programmer with 2 or 3 years experience pointing out code smells in my work simply because he's read Clean Code (I've been a professional, full time programmer for 30 years). Sure, there are code smells in my work - I won't deny it - I'm not a clean coder and I accept that my coding style leaves a lot to be desired. But I work hard and solve difficult problems to a clients satisfaction.

Is it just me or does anyone else think that 'code smells' is a demeaning expression?

</comment><comment><USER3> > Other web developers who think they're holier-than-thou, just because they > write code for a living.

TIL there are still web developers who don't write code.

</comment><comment><USER4> What offends me the most, as HN reader (in EU), is clicking on links to articles only to discover they're behind a paywall or require me to accept cookies or other analytics crap, especially when they come with "Pardon the interruption" and "We value your privacy" modals. Isn't the article on a freely accessible personal blog somewhere?

<comment><USER2> Yep - agreed. The "Pardon the interruption" and "We value your privacy" is pure nonsense. "We value your privacy" must be the biggest piece of misinformation on the web. Tip: Turn off Javascript and all the extraneous crap disappears and the web returns to peaceful normality.</comment></comment>


Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q2 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/ <comment><USER2> I used to run a small hosting service and we standardized on Ultrastar disks. We would regularly have drives fall out of the RAID arrays, but when we ran badblocks on them to verify they were having problems they would always show up as good. After we put them back in production, they would always be happy from that point.

So we started going on the theory that there were some marginal parts of the disk during manufacture, and exercising them would allow them to be remapped to good parts of the disk. Once we started including "badblocks -svw -p 5" in the burnin procedure, our drive failure rates dropped to basically 0.

I wonder if backblaze does anything similar to provision drives.

Recently I replaced some drives in our old Dell R720 servers (5 years old). They were showing media errors over several months but never went degraded. During the replacement, each server had another drive fail. So I ran badblocks on the RAID arrays over the weekend, just to make sure any other marginal drives or sectors had an opportunity to remap. No other drive failures.

Aside: I didn't lose any data, the arrays never went FAIL, but also I had migrated all our services off these machines. Love virtualization!

<comment><USER3> Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> I wonder if Backblaze does anything similar to provision drives.

We do different things for different drives, but ALWAYS have a "burn in" period for new vaults (group of 20 computers that files are Reed-Solomon encoded across) that come online.

When I say "different things", when we deployed a vault full of recent Toshiba (?) drives it came up "too slow" and we figured out the OS block size and drive block size wasn't lined up "by default". It "works" but essentially a single write required reading two blocks and then writing two blocks. (sigh) I always wonder how many mis-configured PCs exist in the world with little problems like this quietly slowing down some user who never figures it out.

<comment><USER4> >I always wonder how many mis-configured PCs exist in the world with little problems like this quietly slowing down some user who never figures it out.

All of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just destroyed my Backblaze buckets recently and realized they didn't have a "delete" button. You have to make a deletion API request for every single item in each bucket before you can delete a bucket.

I found that a bit ridiculous. My internet was so bad that I had to spin up an EC2 nano just to make a few billion requests and have them succeed. Took hours.

If backblaze wants to charge you on the way out (I wonder how much all those requests cost me), okay fine. But please just make a "delete bucket" button that does all this for us. If I was in a worse mood, I would've considered letting the account accrue balance until they did it for me.

<comment><USER6> They did an AMA on Reddit a few months ago[0]. I remember this AMA in particular because they thoroughly explained why they designed some features in certain ways. Overall they said their target customers are the ones with absolutely no IT knowledge.

I guess this part from one of their answers fits your complaint quite well: _But here is the thing - > YOU can work around this problem, the naive customers CANNOT. Honestly, they are too computer-illiterate. But even computer illiterate people deserve to have their files backed up, and they are the target market for Backblaze Personal Backup._ [1]

From this point of view, I guess a "delete" button could be fatal for some of the older folks out there. But I don't use Backblaze, I don't know if my comparison makes sense and we both talk about the same thing. The Reddit quotes refers to their "Backblaze Personal Backup".

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/b6lbew/were_the_backb...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/b6lbew/were_the_backblaze_cloud_team_managing_750/) [1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/b6lbew/were_the_backb...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/b6lbew/were_the_backblaze_cloud_team_managing_750/ejlawg8/)

<comment><USER7> Your casual substitution of "older folks" for "people with no IT knowledge" is ageist ignorance.

<comment><USER8> Very old folks can start to lose decision making capabilites. It has nothing to do with IT knowledge. It's why mostly old people fall victim to email and phone scams and refuse to believe the truth even after you show them mountains of evidence.

Is that ageism?

<comment><USER7> "Very old" != "older" (folks)

<comment><USER8> Pedantry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A word of caution to anyone considering buying one of the 4 TB Hitachi drives listed in the report:

There are a lot of vendors selling "refurbished" HGST drives. Do not buy these. As I understand it, there is no such thing as a refurbished hard drive (not economical). They just zero out the SMART data and sell it as new/refurbished. They even look new, but they're not.

I made the mistake of buying one. It had a ton of vibration and started reporting bad sectors immediately.

If you want one of these drives, you're better off buying an actual used one off eBay or something.

<comment><USER10> "recertified" drives are a thing.

[https://www.blizzarddr.com/recertified-hard-disk-drives- refu...](https://www.blizzarddr.com/recertified-hard-disk-drives-refurbished- hdd/)

<comment><USER11> Cannot say nowadays, but once defective multi-platters disks were "refurbished" (and "recertified") by simply disabling the couple of heads on the defective platter(s) in firmware and "downgrade" the capacity specs.

It simply makes no sense to actually open a US$ 100 (when new) disk drive to repair it (replacing parts that even in the factory cost money for the cataloguing and storage) to re-sell it at US$ 30 or 40.

If you go to the WD page mentioned in the article you linked:

[https://www.wd.com/en-gb/products/wd-recertified.html](https://www.wd.com/en- gb/products/wd-recertified.html)

you will see how they are all "external disks in a case", those might be subject to a number of "returns" for reasons different from the actual disk inside (cosmetic damage, power adapter (if any), connectors, network card or wi-fi, etc.), so those may (while actually being defective as a whole) well have not a defective disk inside.

On the other hand, if they are so good, why would the warranty be limited to 6 months (or less).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Since people from backblaze will be reading this - what happened to the datacenter in europe? Last news I heard was Q2 2019 and we're already way past that

<comment><USER13> not a backblaze employee, just a keen eyed user

Blackblaze uses f00{0..9}.backblazeb2.com which represents different data centers.

Currently f003.backblazeb2.com is live and returns a IP based out of the Netherlands.

<comment><USER14> They're hiring here in the Netherlands too.

[https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1351508643](https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1351508643)

<comment><USER15> That's not us - but easy mistake! I think Backbase is a NL ISP.

<comment><USER14> aye. My mistake. Keep up the awesome service btw :).

<comment><USER15> We shall, we shall! ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been reading these reports since 2012(13?) and have used them multiple times to buy hard drives for my home storage systems, I haven't always had similar results however.

Does anyone else use these posts to pick their own personal disks? If so do you see the data given as a good indicator of lifespan or is the home environment vs DC just too different?

<comment><USER17> I wish they were around when I bought 4x IBM Deskstar 60GBs in a RAID 10 in the early 2000s....

<comment><USER18> HGST has indeed come a long way since their Deathstar days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Seems that Seagate are the worst, even if it's a 2% failure rate.

And reality sucks: right yesterday I lost one hdd from Seagate and the second one is making noises. Ohh boy

<comment><USER20> I don't think personal results and Backblaze results are really comparable. I know plenty of people who have have a bad experience with WD drives, and plenty who have had a fantastic experience with Seagate drives.

Honestly, all hard drives are pretty solid these days, and I honestly don't think one manufacturer really stands out enough that individuals can really expect a given drive to last longer than another. Statistics just don't work on a sample size that small. You may get lucky, or you may get unlucky, it really just depends on which drive you happen to get.

I make my personal HD buying decisions based on:

\- warranty and customer service \- price \- noise \- performance

Both Seagate and WD have about the same warranty, and they both seem to be pretty good with customer service (check recent reviews though, this can change). If you consider them equal in that department, pick based on the other three metrics.

I was about to buy some Seagate drives for a NAS, but ended up with WD because they were on sale. I was a little worried about the noise from Seagate, but the price and performance won me over, but I switched at the last minute because the price changed.

Now, if you're going to build a data center with a large number of consumer drives, absolutely use Backblaze's results. If your just going to but a few, recognise that all drives the test are reasonably reliable, so whether your drive dies early is mostly luck (assuming you treat them nicely).

<comment><USER21> My favorite advice I've heard for home NAS drive buying advice is to mix brands so if you end up buying a lemon model/batch, at least you've lowered the risk of them all failing at once when repairing the RAID

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can someone explain on the situation of "Western Digital". I am confused.

At first I thought Western Digital is retiring their WD brand for HDD, and focus on SSD, but that is not true I find no information on it. There are still Red, Blue, and others. As a matter of fact, it is the HGST brand that is getting killed, but the UltraStar _range_ lives on.

So I am assuming the article is saying, the specific breed of HDD, Western Digital used to provided is no longer available, and it will be replaced by UltraStar, which used to be a HGST brand but are now under Western Digital ?

What happened to 20TB HDD which Seagate promised for 2020. Are we no where close to it? And MAMR Drive? Has Price / GB continued to decline, or given the situation of HDD market, the HDD maker are milking it? ( And I don't blame them )

</comment><comment><USER23> I worked for a startup ten years ago that stored a lot of user data.

A batch of drives from the manufacturer had some sort of firmware issue. It affected a lot of users.

Essentially their data was put into read only mode by our service. Two weeks went by before the manufacturer came out and worked on replacing the drives and migrating the data over for us.

Unfortunately the data center admin at the time didn't have backup servers and drives in place and lost his job over the snafu once the drives were replaced.

Always have backups of your data and make sure the drives are good quality.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have a few drives with video files and I use Backblaze for Windows. But there is no local redundancy. What is a better solution?

<comment><USER25> All my data is on a Synology NAS. Can't think of anything better.

<comment><USER26> I was considering picking up one of these but they seem incredibly overpriced for the specs listed.

<comment><USER27> When you're buying a Synology you're not just buying hardware but also a pretty dang solid software suite. I've used several NAS products along with FreeNAS, Windows File Services, and plain old Samba. Synology has always been just about the easiest to use with excellent mobile and web apps for accessing your files on the go. It all depends on what you're really wanting out of your NAS.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Text-only CNN - <AUTHOR> http://lite.cnn.io/ <comment><USER2> When Google first came out and we tried it there were two things we liked about it.

The first: Good search results. Yeah everyone knows that right. But young people today might have forgotten the second reason we liked Google search back then:

The Second: A clean page with a single logo and search field. It loaded quick. There were no banners everywhere, no bs.

HackerNews has that feel. It is clean, information dense, and does what it needs to do.

<comment><USER3> The Swedish public broadcaster still keeps their Teletext[0] service running. One of the cleanest way to get your news (especially on a TV where load times are zero). You can access it on the web as well [https://www.svt.se/svttext/web/pages/100.html](https://www.svt.se/svttext/web/pages/100.html)

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

<comment><USER4> It makes me pine for the days of Gopher.

<comment><USER5> What do you miss about Gopher?

<comment><USER6> All data, simple navigation, no BS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Someone pointed out below, but in a comment way down in the thread, but CNN is actually who's behind this:

[https://twitter.com/CNN/status/906821174805630976](https://twitter.com/CNN/status/906821174805630976)

I'm not sure if the reason behind this is because of possible weak phone connections or that the hurricane is a good way to promote the text only site, but either way, huge shoutout to CNN for going forward with this themselves.

I've thought for a while about scraping news sites to just show their text, or something like classifying articles based on their subjects from different ones. On this front, they did it first.

<comment><USER8> This is what CNN looked like on 9/11:

[http://i.imgur.com/tqnVwp6.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/tqnVwp6.jpg)

All the major sites switched to something like this when the internet slowed to a halt. I assume they've always had a minimal version ready in case something like it happens again.

<comment><USER9> I'd pay $5/month for a reputable news site to provide this all year long.

<comment><USER10> [http://www.npr.org](http://www.npr.org) ?

It's not text only but it's considerably more minimal than most news websites, loads almost instantly, doesn't have auto play content, and is considered a reputable source.

The BBC used to be similar but their international website is awful now (slow to load, more adverts, and less emphasis on actual news).

<comment><USER11> It's text-only when you use [http://thin.npr.org](http://thin.npr.org)

<comment><USER12> The full npr.org provides transcripts for many or all of their stories. This site leads me to stories that only contain bylines and no other content. Seems like a bug to not include at least a link to the audio or the transcript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Also, NPR has had a text only site for ages

[http://thin.npr.org](http://thin.npr.org)

<comment><USER14> It's so fast, feels like it's hosted locally

<comment><USER15> if you click Topics -> News[0] it takes 2.7 seconds. They should throw that subdomain behind [https://memcached.org/](https://memcached.org/) (and not use php lol).

Unrelated, seems like I can't listen to podcasts. There's an <audio> tag (which doesn't use data unless you click on play if you set preload="none" [1]), so that's an interesting choice.

        $ curl http://thin.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001
        [...]
        Total wall clock time: 2.7s

        $ ping thin.npr.org
        [...]
        round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 76.407/78.359/86.985/2.442 ms

[0] [http://thin.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001](http://thin.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001)

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/au...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/audio)

<comment><USER16> You don't put things behind Memcached. You put Memcached behind things.

<comment><USER17> Varnish is an in-memory cache that sits in front of a site.

<comment><USER16> Correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The absolute worst thing about cnn.com is the auto-playing videos. I've been in quiet places and clicked a CNN news link only to have a video start blasting on the speakers. It's not only annoying but a huge waste of mobile bandwidth.

Now I just need an extension that rewrites all CNN urls to this site.

<comment><USER19> Disable HTML5 Autoplay [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable- html5-auto...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable- html5-autoplay/efdhoaajjjgckpbkoglidkeendpkolai?hl=en)

works for me at the moment. You never know when the blighters will change the format though.

<comment><USER20> In Firefox:

about:config

media.autoplay.enabled False

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> EDIT: As I wrote this, someone deployed a server-side rendered version of the site. Now the site is perfect. :)

This site appears to load ~350 KB of JavaScript, which I think is a bit excessive for a "lite" text-only site. From the sourcemaps, I found a long list of libraries, including:

* react

* redux

* redux-thunk

* react-router

* axios

* base64-js (why not window.atob/btoa?)

* core-js

* fbjs

* react-hot-loader (should not be in a production build)

* ...a bunch of other smaller modules

There's only about 10 KB of non-library application code. Note that I ignore gzip when evaluating this sort of stuff, since that many bytes of code still need to be parsed, no matter how much it compresses.

For the person who made this site, I would replace React with Preact (or Inferno), which should remove most of the bloat. Server side rendering would also be nice for those who don't have JavaScript enabled and would also improve the loading time.

At least it's still better than cnn.com. [http://www.webpagetest.org/result/170910_C8_e78305788a19b0fb...](http://www.webpagetest.org/result/170910_C8_e78305788a19b0fb12e2413251baf9b2/)

<comment><USER22> WTF? why any JS at all for something that's pure content?

<comment><USER23> Because this site is clearly in need of 250 KB surveillance JavaScript.

So even this "plain text" site still transfers ~98 % bloat and just ~2 % content.

<comment><USER24> transfer is different from filesize

its more around 90% JS, 10% content

After the first page load (with scripts cached) its around 87% content (unfortunately they don't seem to be caching CSS)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is what the world needs.

Seriously, I hate this trend to bloat up websites with the rage of a thousand suns. There is absolutely no value, but it increases bandwith usage, load times and CPU/RAM usage. News websites having "fancy, modern" websites actually make me think less of them.

Fuck this web-bloat shit. The web is broken.

<comment><USER26> This format is ideal in this context, but the web is far larger than a digital ticker tape dispenser.

Some publishers are seeking to create a modern version of Life magazine. What do imagine that would look like? How about National Geographic?

I love, for example, what the teams at The New York Times are doing to enhance stories with creative uses of the modern web.

The web is not broken, it's simply revealing that this is a better way to consume breaking news.

<comment><USER27> This is the highest-impact format with which one can consume news, though. Magazines are great, but lots of people are just looking for a quick shot of the current news. This sort of UI is ideal for that need.

This is exactly why the Drudge Report has stayed relevant for 20 years.

<comment><USER28> But behind the curtain, Drudge is a freaking advertising hog.

<comment><USER27> Doesn't detract from the fact that his information design is A+.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> There is a signifiant value prop for this type of clean interface when considering users that use accessibility tools to browse the web. I had the pleasure of working with an engineer whose vision was impaired. Truly inspired with all the self-engineered tools and software that he created to sanitize sites of all the bloat for his consumption with a screen reader. This type of site will make his life a little easier.

</comment><comment><USER30> I just created an awesome-lite-websites list to be filled with lightweight and usable websites alike:

GitHub: [https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite- websites](https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite-websites)

Hacker News thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15212155](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15212155)

</comment><comment><USER31> From the title I thought it would be a Convolutional Neural Network for text, not the Cable News Network in plain text.

An example to show that text CNN's are a thing: [https://github.com/dennybritz/cnn-text-classification- tf](https://github.com/dennybritz/cnn-text-classification-tf)

<comment><USER32> I feel your pain, I thought it was either a Convolution or a Cellular neural network, was very disappointed. But thanks for pointing to some actual good material to read and look over.

To add to your trend, here is an article [1] about "Texture Classification and Segmentation by Cellular Neural Networks Using Genetic Learning" , texture not text though as they are more vision related, though it would be interesting to see by what methods they could be applied to text.

[1] [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tamas_Sziranyi/publicat...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tamas_Sziranyi/publication/222465158_Texture_Classification_and_Segmentation_by_Cellular_Neural_Networks_Using_Genetic_Learning/links/02e7e524ebe4f5d523000000.pdf)

<comment><USER33> The Keras blog also has a good post on using CNNs to label text from newsgroups with their respective newsgroups: [https://blog.keras.io/using-pre- trained-word-embeddings-in-a...](https://blog.keras.io/using-pre-trained-word- embeddings-in-a-keras-model.html)

It achieves 95% accuracy without many tricks, but the newsgroups themselves are quite different so it's not the hardest problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> ...and the World Wide Web goes full circle and mimics the service it replaced. #gopher2017

<comment><USER35> a 16GB RAM machine to run something that ran on 16MB

<comment><USER36> So that you can open 1024 pages before swapping to disk.

People asked for hundreds of open tabs, they got it.

<comment><USER35> Even on a 16MB machine I had open tens of tabs without much problem, browser responsiveness on Firebird(?) was the same as this multi-core machine

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Wow. After all these years of taking steps backwards, finally 100 steps forward.

<comment><USER38> Is there a collaborative community effort for "fixing" websites to make this "100 steps forward"? The relative ease and the large benefit of doing so make it surprising I haven't seen a list of lite websites maintained by volunteers.

<comment><USER39> Firefox's reader mode?

<comment><USER40> In my understanding, Firefox Reader Mode (and similar features in other browsers) reads in the entire page and, based on analyzing the page for cues, then decides to offer the user an option to choose reader view (or not).

So while it helps improve readability, it doesn't cut down the time to load, the amount of data downloaded, and probably helps improve the battery life only marginally (this is debatable, depending on the amount of active JS, auto-play videos and also at what _time offset t_ the user chooses reader mode after the page loads).

<comment><USER41> The impression i have of this reader mode is that it relies, in part, on pages offering markers for printing.

I have in the past noticed that reader mode will not be available of i have killed the JS on a site that enable their print format.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I love this. Pure information without bloat. One of the reaons I love "Teletekst" "teletext"). It also looks very nice, despite the fact that is 30 years old. 101 is news. 818 is domestic football. It's actually still very popular in The Netherlands, and the app is one of the most used apps here.

[https://nos.nl/teletekst#101](https://nos.nl/teletekst#101)

</comment><comment><USER43> The BBC News site used to have a wonderful text-only version which disappeared a long time ago. I still miss it. It even worked really well in lynx.

<comment><USER44> As did the CBC; it is still available but with zero content [0]. It now directs you to a bloated mobile site.

They do have RSS however [1].

[0] [http://www.cbc.ca/m/text/](http://www.cbc.ca/m/text/) [1] [http://www.cbc.ca/rss/](http://www.cbc.ca/rss/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is awesome. Major props to CNN. Reminds me of an article that appeared on HN not too long ago about Conde Nast needing Google AMP because their site is so bloated.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136525)

</comment><comment><USER46> Does this belong to CNN? It's great to read news without clutter, just clear contents. I hope there are many sites like this, it saves you from load the whole page then click the reader mode or similar.

<comment><USER47> Seems to be using the same CDN with the same hostnames as regular CNN, has their logos, their content, looks theirs.

<comment><USER48> Then why is it not on a subdomain of cnn.com? Anyone could copy their logo and their content.

<comment><USER47> Because it's a separate site? I have no idea. It takes 30 seconds to convince yourself it's theirs, though, so I'm not sure what you're asking me.

<comment><USER48> How did you manage to convince yourself it's theirs?

Why couldn't they just put it on lite.cnn.com?

If you try to look up the whois for cnn.io, you only get:

      Registrar: CSC Corporate Domains, Inc.
      Registrar IANA ID: 299
      Registrar Abuse Contact Email:
      Registrar Abuse Contact Phone:
      Name Server: NS-24.AWSDNS-03.COM
      Name Server: NS-630.AWSDNS-14.NET
      Name Server: NS-1845.AWSDNS-38.CO.UK
      Name Server: NS-1268.AWSDNS-30.ORG

There is nothing here that indicates this is legit CNN?

<comment><USER47> I said they use the same CDN hosts with the same forward and reverse names. Which I find quite convincing, on top of everything else.

        dig lite.cnn.io

        lite.cnn.io.		18	IN	CNAME	turner-tls.map.fastly.net.
        turner-tls.map.fastly.net. 20	IN	A	126.96.36.199

        dig www.cnn.com
        www.cnn.com.		39	IN	CNAME	turner-tls.map.fastly.net.
        turner-tls.map.fastly.net. 18	IN	A	184.108.40.206

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Okay, now the server side page is being rendered. The content weighs 6.7kb HTML + 877B CSS + frikkin 52.7kb analytics!!

Very fast, but still analytics on this lite site is bothering to see!

<comment><USER50> Analytics is loaded asynchronously so it doesn't block rendering or interactivity.

Yeah it'd be nice if they used server-side analytics instead, but cost/benefit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is great. I'm sick to death of clicking to links on news articles and having some auto-playing video read it to me...

</comment><comment><USER52> It's amazing what happens to rendering times when only the actual content is being loaded.

</comment><comment><USER53> I realize this kind of defeats the purpose, but I applied just a tiny bit of CSS (and Open Sans) to make it look slightly better. Here's the userstyle in the hope it's useful to some:

[https://gist.github.com/appel/7a475dcbd3f469d73c756385b2c7cf...](https://gist.github.com/appel/7a475dcbd3f469d73c756385b2c7cf06)

</comment><comment><USER54> An important feature is that the article pages don't have an article title. Annoying if you like to open a set of pages from the main page to read as an initial action prior to reading. Current pages at lite.cnn.io don't seem to have extra JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER55> This might be counter-intuitive to types who comment here but the CNN Snapchat thread should also be appeasing to you for the same reasons this text-only site is. You go through their stories until you find the one you want and that's all you get. No ticker tape. No flashing "BREAKING NEWS" decorations and no fluff. It's the same concept only in a visual medium.

</comment><comment><USER56> This has been top of hackernews all day. Funny how as we move further and further into the future, developing all these interfaces as we go, we still can't beat a format that has been here since the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER57> Brilliant. This achieves some key user-centred aims; content is easily navigated, and given prominence above any other feature. I wonder if the addition of aria-roles might add some useful context for screen readers?

In an age when personal assistants are gaining populating, maybe sparse text- centred interfaces are set to gain more popularity?

</comment><comment><USER58> Unless it's real web app like gdocs, this is how sites should be - no need for js, works perfectly on my 64kbps.

</comment><comment> amiga-workbench It would be nice if there was a TLD for text-only, javascript free websites.

<comment><USER59> .txt

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> This is better than CNN.com, but the big problem with CNN is that it simply isn't very good. If you're haven't tried it again, let me again strongly recommend a subscription to the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times. You might be as surprised as I was, once I was free to click around the sites without thinking about paywalls, how much better the reporting is at real newspapers than it is at free news sites.

<comment><USER61> Beware, you cannot cancel your subscription to Wall Street Journal without calling them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I the only one whose mind crossed the idea that maybe this is just a temporary service during the natural disasters in the south of the US?

<comment><USER63> Maybe they'll quietly keep it up forever. A man can dream …

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Bookmarked. Please drop the excessive JS and image tho cnn.

</comment><comment><USER65> There seem to be no ads. How do they plan to make money with this?

<comment><USER63> Honestly, with a few tweaks (RSS support, titles on pages, getting rid of the 'Breaking News, Latest News and Videos' in every title) I'd pay $12/year for something like this. I'm pretty sure that CNN gets less than that from a statistical viewer of its pages.

Wouldn't it be awesome if pure text, static pages became the new normal, and we looked at video-and-image, JavaScript-laden SPAs in much the same way that we look at parachute pants, bowl haircuts and rhinestone-studded jean jackets?

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I was trying to figure out what was different about this convolutionao neural network for about 60 seconds.

</comment><comment> jim-jim-jim Sweet. I'd prefer it if every site looked like this.

</comment><comment><USER67> I really miss RSS.

<comment> jim-jim-jim I still don't understand why it fell out of favor.

<comment><USER68> not enough advertising?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> This + reader mode in Safari is heaven.

If any other news org is tuning in, please do this!

</comment><comment><USER70> I honestly applaud the endeavor. Too bad though they only include the main headlines.

I personally very much like the approach of my preferred newspaper that offers full, mobile, text only editions of its web site.

</comment><comment><USER68> If someone is missing a universal ui language for the web, this is it.

</comment><comment><USER71> They're still loading an analytics javascript file that is 230KB minified. That's literally two orders of magnitude larger than anything else that gets loaded from that URL.

<comment><USER72> You don't know how to block these?

<comment><USER71> Of course I do. That's not the point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Any rss feed for this?

This is awesome. It's quick, to the point, efficient, and allows me to get what I need, then it gets the fuck out of my way.

I'm even willing to put money into this. Is that possible?

</comment><comment><USER74> I love it.

The only improvement I could ask for is about 100 bytes of CSS to limit the column width, change it to a serifed font, and increase the font size.

</comment><comment><USER75> I can recommend [https://cor.ax](https://cor.ax) which is similar to this

<comment><USER76> Except with a political slant:

> We provide an alternative startpage for news, free from left-wing bias.

<comment><USER75> Yep. I find it refreshing with news provides which does not pretent to be unbiased, none are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Glad to see they have the Spanish version alongside English. Now, how about some other languages... Arabic please!

</comment><comment><USER78> I messed around with aggregating a few big news sites' RSS feeds and generating a static site from them after being in areas with choked cell reception. Turns out it's still plodding along!

[http://188.8.131.52](http://184.108.40.206)

</comment><comment><USER79> Nice format, hopefully with some real unbiased content but I am not expected that at CNN though, nowadays the news has to be a mean value of (Reuters + NYT + CNN + Foxs + ....)/N, but I just do not have enough time to read them all, so I read HN instead.

</comment><comment><USER80> It's great that they included an easy toggle to Spanish language. If you're trying to learn Spanish and already know English or vice-versa being able to read topical news every day and switch back and forth easily for both languages is a great tool!

</comment><comment><USER81> The article "This is what South Florida looks like now" kinda loses its purpose here

</comment><comment><USER82> I quickly created a basic userstyle to use a better font and a paper-like which is easier on the eyes.

* { font-family: 'Open Sans', Helvetica; color: #222; font-size: 1rem; line-height: 1.4; }

body{ background: #dac3a8; }

main{ max-width: 920px; margin: 0 auto; }

</comment><comment><USER83> The analytics company I used to work had a private news archive for pretty much every news paper/magazine you could imagine. All text, all searchable. I've long wondered how come no one makes a site like that for everybody.

</comment><comment><USER84> I made this thingie based on Google News and the design of Newsmap: [http://news.bradezone.com/](http://news.bradezone.com/)

It's one of my few side projects I use every day.

</comment><comment><USER22> The link to the full CNN experience at the bottom of each article doesn't deep link to that article's full experience. It just goes to the cnn home page. big fail

</comment><comment><USER85> I'm totally going to hit this with my Amiga. This is great!

<comment><USER86> Big spender. Using my Vic-20

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> How about no google analytics and making it truly text only? :)

</comment><comment><USER88> I'm getting a totally blank page on Android 7.0 chrome 61.

</comment><comment><USER89> i'd love to make a little userscript to redirect articles from cnn.com to here, but i don't think there's any way to extract the .com url from the .io pages.

also -- compare to cnn.com from 1999: [https://web.archive.org/web/20000817204102/http://www2.cnn.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20000817204102/http://www2.cnn.com:80/)

</comment><comment><USER90> I'm curious though. What's the root domain going to be if this one is lite? Being a .io I'd like to think it will be an api site or something?

</comment><comment><USER91> Facebook too has a mostly-text lightweight version:

[https://mbasic.facebook.com/](https://mbasic.facebook.com/)

</comment><comment><USER92> I get "Not found" as the only content served.

</comment><comment><USER93> Nice, but it would be good to know who wrote what. Not for standard wire- service stuff about floods etc., but anything with an element of opinion.

</comment><comment><USER94> Love it, now Yahoo!'s disasterous bloated website needs it but it's mostly clickbait anyway but attests load clickbait faster

</comment><comment><USER95> I like how if you click on a link, that link is _also_ text only.

The regular CNN site sometimes starts auto-playing videos without asking first.

</comment><comment><USER96> If someone could write a wrapper to do this with any major news website, they'd have a hugely popular and profitable product.

<comment><USER97> I can't believe wayback machine has this. I ran a text-only scraper for ~200 websites back in the early 2000s.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20060803053549/http://inr.cjb.ne...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060803053549/http://inr.cjb.net:80/)

Most were RSS feeds, since those used to exist. The rest were hand-written parsers, which were highly temperamental.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Is there somewhere an index of text-only pages?

</comment><comment><USER99> I've been thinking about introducing a similar alternative to my webpage, but in order to support terminal browsers or IE

</comment><comment><USER100> I clicked without thinking. The landing list is a bit too bare, but I love it anyway. Thank god for text (even unicode text)

</comment><comment><USER101> Historical text here

[http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS](http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS)

</comment><comment><USER102> Text-only independent news: [http://levelnews.org](http://levelnews.org)

<comment><USER103> What's your affiliation with this site? All your submissions and comments on HN are about it.

<comment><USER102> I built the site because independent news is being increasingly censored/filtered out by monopoly platforms.

<comment><USER103> Thanks; you should mention that in your comments. There's some irony in the fact you hide your affiliation when promoting a website about independent news.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> This is cool but for some reason (maybe reading too much HN!) I clicked and expected a demo or research paper about a Convolutional Neural Net (CNN) that you can feed lots of text and it would figure out the content and semantic relationships of all the texts on its own and it would get better with every new text that you feed it.

Actually I wouldn't be surprised if someone's already done that...

<comment><USER105> You should see this. "Epic 2014" : [https://youtu.be/Bt3TmUW90B8](https://youtu.be/Bt3TmUW90B8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> If only this kind of view was available for all sites, but via a simpler, more syndicated format.

</comment><comment><USER107> I wish feedly.com (my RSS reader) had a light interface. It feels so bloated and slow.

</comment><comment><USER108> awesome. i was getting very tired of a video every time i looked at an article.

</comment><comment><USER109> This is awesome! Maybe its time to get the fluff out and get back to basics :)

</comment><comment><USER110> It's so fast. More websites should strip down their size to favor speed.

</comment><comment><USER111> This is awesome. I really don't understand why a new page would load so many stuff and then it hangs at some place. Sometimes I was wondering whether it was loading the whole world. Maybe we should take some steps back now to keep our site SIMPLE but COMPLETE. Just like Hacker News itself or Lobsters([https://lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs)) or Pxlet([http://www.pxlet.com/](http://www.pxlet.com/)) so that we would not be distracted too much.

Maybe technically Google's AMP is a good help on boosting the loading speed but it only works on mobile devices and it takes much effort to make the site adaptable to AMP.

Usually a modern website would load lots of third party libraries, ads from different advertising platforms, social media sharing modules and analytic modules etc. All these would make lots of HTTP requests and increase the response time. How would they not be SLOW?

</comment><comment><USER112> My laptop can run computationally-intensive physics simulations and play streaming hi-def video with no problem, but if I click a link to a mainstream news article it just about keels over and dies. How did our grandparents ever manage to load the news on an underpowered machine called "paper"?

<comment><USER113> It works like a gas; the performance-sapping computations on the articles expand until they fill up all available human latency tolerance.

<comment> B-Con That and the abomination of the technology stack that we use for said process. HTML/CSS/JS is absolutely not the answer for "I want to make a UI", never mind the fact that many UI designers have no clue how the stack works and abuse it horribly.

The idea may be "paper", but what's actually being done is far from it. The browser may paint and repaint a pixel a dozen times before it's ever rendered. DOM-traversal is one of the most important parts of a browser's optimization because of the tens of thousands of times it can happen to paint a screen.

<comment> yoz-y React and similar libraries were made to alleviate exactly this problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER114> All this needs is a search field and it's complete.

</comment><comment><USER115> "This is what South Florida looks like now"

 _text only_ :P

</comment><comment><USER116> Why not just use RSS? This is time and effort wasted.

Given RSS is old, text only and has XML its very lightweight, has good support and fast readers.

No heavy javascript needed as readers of RSS are often native apps or browser plugins

<comment><USER117> > as readers of RSS are often native apps or browser plugins

That's probably why.

Most people can barely drive their web browser, and many tech people are reluctant to install new extensions, because of trust issues.

A web page, in a nice pure form like this, is fast, responsive, and easy to use.

<comment><USER118> You can get news feeds as a web page in various places such as Dave Winer's River of News [http://radio3.io/rivers/](http://radio3.io/rivers/)

Light, ad-free and totally trustworthy ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER119> This format is the best for low bandwidth access.

</comment><comment><USER120> This is truly a treat. thank you

</comment><comment><USER121> Imagine how much better it would be with margins. Same for HN. Lobstes gets this right [https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/)

</comment><comment><USER122> doesn't work in emacs eww

0/10

</comment><comment><USER123> Now if only I could get this from a decent news organization.

<comment><USER118> CNN is a decent news organization. It may not be the best, but it's a very long way from being the worst....

</comment></comment><comment><USER124> If you could summarize, what are the key takeaways to create awesome, fast and minimal sites like this lite CNN?

</comment><comment><USER125> If only CNN would go back to being the old but trusted, amazing CNN, with Christiane Amanpour at the landing in Mogadishu during Restore Hope, or Bernie Shaw at the hotel in Baghdad for Desert Storm.

Now, a shell of its old self, CNN is just MSNBC's cousin, with people who say "we, ahem, I mean, the Democrats, are losing Michigan" live on screen.

Oh well. It's been years since I relied on CNN.

But on the technical front, good for them.

<comment><USER126> its been ages I have watched any news from a narrated source. My advice (more so after last election) pay money for news. free is way worse!

</comment></comment><comment><USER127> Let down. I thought this was a convolutional neural network applied to text analytics.

</comment><comment><USER128> Imma crawl the shit out of this

</comment><comment><USER129> You know hacker news people live in a world of their own when a post regarding stripped down Cable News Network website gets more up votes than all the posts on convolutional neural networks combined

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=convolut&sort=byPopularity&pre...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=convolut&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)</comment>


Micro-Services: Scala vs. Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://glennengstrand.info/software/performance/scala/clojure <comment><AUTHOR> A micro-service is written in two different Functional Programming languages for the JVM. Both services are load tested on AWS and the performance results are compared.</comment>


The rise and fall of corporate R&D - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8769863 <comment><USER2> "Corporate R&D; never worked very well in the first place." Huh?!? The first public fax transmission, the transistor, the first synchronous-sound motion picture, UNIX, C and C++, low-cost fiber optic phone systems, the first Wireless LAN, and numerous laser techonologies were all products of Bell Laboratories corporate R&D;.

<comment><USER3> And a lot of other potential big name developments never saw the light of day due to the "corporate" part of corporate R&D.; Yes, it is true that corporate R&D; produced a long lists of greats; however, some of these faced serious barriers to realization because of the hedging of risks that big companies do.

It's not to say they don't develop great things. What they do, they do well because they pour their resources into it. It's the daring, wild, revolutionary ideas that have become uncommon. The smaller company or group of hackers have become the suppliers of those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Corporate R&D; never worked very well in the first place. William Whyte wrote about how relatively unproductive it was way back in 1956 in The Organization Man.</comment>


Anonymous to shut down The Internet on Saturday to protest SOPA  - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/GFkQnf6e

<comment><USER3> I am a DNS and network engineer. DDoSing the DNS root servers is extremely unlikely to succeed, for multiple reasons:

1\. The "root servers" are not 13 physical servers attached to the Internet. Each IP is anycasted from multiple locations around the world. You can validate this by tracerouting to one of the IP's from different points on the Internet. Almost certainly, each of those locations has multiple high-power physical servers handling requests (either with a hardware load balancer or anycast).

2\. The people who run the root servers have thought about this already and taken appropriate countermeasures.

3\. What many folks do not understand is the root servers do a very very small amount of work. They do not contain records for second-level domains (example.com). Their sole purpose is to hold the NS records that delegate the "." zone to the nameservers of the various TLD's -- .com, .us, .uk, etc. Each of those TLD's has its own set of nameservers that _then_ delegate to other name servers. If you were to configure your NS records in Godaddy or Netsol, those records are served from the TLD's nameservers, not the root nameservers. The root nameservers have zero knowledge of, say, example.com itself. What they do "know" is that the .com nameservers (a.gtld-servers.net through l.gtld-servers.net) do "know" how to resolve the name.

4\. As others have said, there is extensive caching in the global DNS system. For example, records for the delegation from "." to "com." have a TTL of 6 days. This means that, theoretically, the root servers can all go totally offline for up to 6 days before the ISPs' caches would start to expire. Even if those caches expire, smarter ISP's will NOT simply drop those records from their cache and starting throwing errors -- they will retain the "stale" cached records until the authoritative nameservers come back online.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ugh. What purpose is this supposed to serve? Are we supposed to get annoyed and coerced into siding with this group? Let's not kid ourselves - <USER2> aren't activists. They're 4chan basement dwellers using the guise of a cause to wreak senseless damage.

Although I don't think they've actually done anything over the last 7 months so this is probably just another empty threat. Wasn't Facebook supposed to go down like a hundred different times?

</comment><comment><USER5> That title feels almost like it's out of an Onion article. Is this actually plausible?

<comment><USER6> Not even a little bit, the whole thing was written by someone who has no idea how the internet works. Even if they somehow managed to get all 13 DNS root servers offline at once, most people would never notice since there are several layers of caching between you and the root DNS servers. The vast majority of DNS queries never hit the root servers.

<comment><USER7> The whole time I was reading this article I was thinking exactly that: with the amount of caching present, no one would even notice.

Considering the fact that they don't understand this basic principle, I doubt they'll come close to taking down 13 DNS servers at once. You can't easily DDoS them (I'm guessing its the only tool they have in their toolbelts).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is anyone else worried about how meticulous this write up is written? I tend to think Anonymous is both good and bad. Good for the citizens, but bad for the government of which citizens rely on. A double edged sword so to speak.

If they do decide to go along with the plan, I support them in their protest. I think Mr. Ben Franklin was right. We should not be bowing to the politicians of the day and should not be giving up our freedom for a little bit more security.

<comment><USER9> "Good for the citizens"

Fighting for what you believe in is good. Doing so by throwing digital temper tantrums isn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If they were able to do this, which I doubt they can, at least it makes this weakness more evident and maybe even force a solution to prevent this from happening.

I still think that they can't pull this off. Additionally I don't understand how this works as a protest. And what message is this sending, really ?

</comment><comment><USER11> Even if they could do this, I find it difficult to take them seriously as a positive force for change.

</comment><comment><USER12> The 31st is a day before aprils fools day... perhaps it is just a prank. Over and above, the writing style does not match that of the usual Anonymous letters. It almost sounds like some kid that has never read a book.

<comment><USER13> It's more likely that the author's first language is not English, than a child wrote it.

Based on the recent Wikileaks and previous reporting on the Anons, it seems a good portion are not Americans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm glad people are finally starting to realize that Anonymous is merely just a group of adult script kiddies. I was using these tactics when I was 15.

</comment><comment><USER14> They could only succeed in delaying the propagation of changes to DNS records; ISPs have their own copies.

</comment><comment><USER15> Well if they can DDOS sites for a few hours, who's to say they couldn't take down the internet?

/sarcasm

</comment><comment><USER16> Yawn.

</comment><comment><USER17> Anonymous to [verb] the [noun] on [insert random date] to protest [nothing].

They are really getting old now. There is a proper way to handle protesting SOPA and it was done already. News outlets covered it and a lot of new people were informed about it. Have another blackout day if you want, but be respectful of those who may not totally agree with you.

Tactics like this get no one on your side. You're disrupting people's lives in a negative way by doing something like this.

</comment><comment><USER18> If they are so mad at bankers and businesses why the hell aren't they doing it on a weekday?

<comment><USER19> _"The greatest enemy of freedom is a happy slave."_

They want to make us unhappy.

<comment><USER20> As a regular Internet user, I can verify that I am not a slave to HN and Wikipedia. I just find them interesting :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "The greatest enemy of freedom is a happy slave."

...you know, it doesn't follow that making slaves unhappy will net more freedom.</comment>


A SuperAngel's Investment Guide - <AUTHOR> http://www.fabricegrinda.com/personal-musings/a-superangel%E2%80%99s-investment-guide/ <comment><USER2> One of the most interesting aspects of this article (which I didn't pick up on until I read the comments section) is that Fabrice has 43 angel investments in 4 countries, but he dedicates just "2 hours per week to angel investing" because he's a full-time CEO. It's a love it or hate it strategy, but it seems to work well for him and his portfolio companies.

<comment><USER3> interesting. i have had difficulty with outside-US investments. i will probably not be doing them in the future.

<comment><USER4> Most non-US investments I make have US educated founders, mostly from Stamford and Harvard business schools.

Also, it's safer to invest in copies of American concepts rather than innovative concepts.

Moreover, the entrepreneurs you back refer you to other entrepreneurs...

I also lived in many countries and speak a few languages which helps...

Fabrice

<comment><USER3> Oh, I know. I'm up to about 50 investments so far. It is just that I have noticed certain patterns...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think "innovation" and "creativity" are mostly empty terms used for marketing purposes and to boost one's image / feed the ego.

Show me a "disruptive" business (google, facebook, etc) and I'll show you 10 that came before it.

This method of international idea arbitrage is about as good as it gets and it should get more attention.

Building something up from the ground is extremely difficult as it is a process of iterating through a massive amount of failure to reach that end goal of success. When you copy someone else's business you get to skip 99% of the work, the sweat, the agony, the sleepless nights, the iterations. Just copy, translate, and maybe change things a bit around. You might not know why this part is the way it is, but you can be sure it probably works out better this way.

It's actually incredibly smart.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the lesson from this guy is that you should invest your time in a clone/copy website in a different country and by copying someone's idea, you'll get funded. Not being snarky, but just look how many times he uses clone in his article.

<comment><USER7> You should listen to his interview on Venture Voice: [http://www.venturevoice.com/2005/12/vv_show_21_fabrice_grind...](http://www.venturevoice.com/2005/12/vv_show_21_fabrice_grinda_of_z.html)

Fabrice Grinda says of himself that he is not very creative, so he copies what work elsewhere and clone it in another market (he built Aucland (eBay clone), OLX (Craiglist clone), ...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish he shared 9 business selection criteria ...

<comment><USER2> [http://www.fabricegrinda.com/entrepreneurship/9-business- sel...](http://www.fabricegrinda.com/entrepreneurship/9-business-selection- criteria/)</comment></comment>


This Worldwide Trend Will Forever Alter the Way We Retire - <AUTHOR> http://www.blackrockblog.com/2015/07/22/worldwide-trend-alter-retire/ <comment><USER2> As for my job the aging makes a great impact in the medical field.</comment>


Sun In The Clouds. I Smell Fail - <AUTHOR> http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2009/03/sun-in-clouds-i-smell-fail.html

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't be so quick to judge. I worked at an online casino a few years back and we were heavily invested in Sun. Simply because of the virtualization. (Probably for some other reasons as well, but I found the virtualization the coolest.)

Here's a PDF presskit about Sun's Virtualization: [http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/2006-1017/virtua...](http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/2006-1017/virtualization_approach_preso.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Please don't put the blog name in the story's title. The domain is visible to the right hand side for those who care.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do a little reading next time, Hank.

<http://kenai.com/projects/suncloudapis/pages/HelloCloud></comment>


Ask HN: Do you really lose control of your company with a PEO? - <AUTHOR> There is a general consensus that you lose control of your company if you use a PEO to handle your HR, benefits, etc. Do you find this to be the case? Do you have issues when onboarding/offboarding employees? Creating your culture, time off policy, etc? Do you feel the PEO has any control over how you decide to operate your business? Would love to hear the negatives or positives you've found when using a PEO for you business. Thanks! <comment><USER2> I don't really understand the question.

I've been at several startups that used PEOs and founded two.

A PEO has nothing to do with your culture, and almost nothing to do with your onboarding. It handles payroll and benefits for you. Some try to provide communication or project management tools, but every company I've been at has completely ignored those.

So on day 1, the employee brings in proof of identity and work eligibility, fills out a couple of government mandated forms, provides direct deposit information, enrolled in your benefits plans, etc. That would have to happen regardless of whether or not you use a PEO. The only difference is that they have to create a login on the PEO's site.

That's the tiniest portion of onboarding, if you're doing onboarding right.

How do you think a PEO would interfere with developing your own culture?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't -- our CEO does. I came from another startup that used a PEO and I didn't notice any interference -- and I worked in ops. He's heard that he can't tailor the company exactly as he wants to with a PEO. After posting this question I did finally see one person note that there were decisions he couldn't make like deciding the timeline people were eligible for benefits or 401K, etc. Maybe this is what he's referencing. Overall though, I haven't been able to find any people complaining about this. What PEO's have you used? Might be helpful to hear your experience for our search.

<comment><USER2> I've used TriNet and Namely. Granted, even at the companies I founded, I was not the one to choose the specific package of benefits we decided to offer, and neither of those companies offered a 401k at all (though I've since had 401ks through both of the above PEOs).

The timing of when 401k benefits kicks in is the least of ones concerns in terms of developing a company culture, IMO.

Edited to add: I do know that some of the companies I was at had benefits begin immediately; others had a one to three month delay.</comment></comment></comment>


Lawsuit Alleges Apple Sells Your iTunes Listening Data Despite Privacy Claims - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/5596033/lawsuit-apple-selling-itunes-listening-data/ <comment><USER2> Not going to go anywhere - unless they can demonstrate where apple is 1st hand selling info then apple is just going to point to one of the many data breaches they've had and say 'hackers did it'.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's 2019 and time.com can't serve it's content over https? Bold move.</comment>


Ugh, it was my birthday... - <AUTHOR> http://www.rahulsood.com/2008/05/ugh-it-was-my-birthday.html <comment><USER2> ahhh what a clever use for technology... it's certainly a sharp piece of equipment...</comment>


CSSDeck - An amazing platform for creating test cases with pro tools - <AUTHOR> http://cssdeck.com/#3

<comment><USER2> Nice examples on the platform. Is it just a gallery or what else can you do there?

<comment><AUTHOR> check this out for more information <http://cssdeck.com/docs/labs/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> hi all, just signup (with twitter or github - takes 10sec) to use the awesome labs, kthx.</comment>


PG's secret to essay writing - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kentf/i-discovered-paul-grahams-secret-ca54b7e23dba?ref=hn

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love to find out if this is something others do or just people like PG.

<comment><USER2> If you look in the "acknowledgements" section of any book, PhD thesis, etc., you'll find lots of authors' colleagues, friends and family members being thanked for reading and commenting on drafts of the manuscript.

Doing this for an essay on the web suggests the author has real dedication to creating a lasting work of high quality. It's probably not worth doing for a daily blog post, since you haven't put enough work into it yourself to justify asking your friends to spend time improving it. (If you keep pestering your friends to review a blog post every day, soon you'll have no friends left.) But if you're going to write the kind of longer (and infrequent) essays that PG writes, it could be feasible. You just need to write stuff that interests your friends enough to make them want to review your work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point! Thanks</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Highest paying software companies in Bay Area? - <AUTHOR> Google, Facebook, Salesforce, etc. Who pays the most? <comment><USER2> <http://www.glassdoor.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm pretty sure we can all agree that this is rapidly becoming out of date.</comment></comment>


btjunkie says goodbye - <AUTHOR> http://btjunkie.com/goodbye.html <comment><USER3> This is the scary part about bills like SOPA. Who cares if they're constitutional, who care if they could stand up in court, who cares if the public supports them? They do their job anyway, even if they don't pass.

Glenn Greenwald was right about this - we didn't win the SOPA battle; we lost it. The very next day after all the hullabaloo and protests, the government went ahead and showed that the powers that SOPA would have been redundant - <USER2> already has those powers anyway.

<comment><USER4>
      >  it already has those powers anyway.

It didn't take Megaupload down without a trial, without due process. They took them down as part of a _2 year long investigation_. While it's possible that they timed the takedown with SOPA, I would err on the side of coincidence. This wasn't an operation entirely within the US. They had the coordination of law enforcement in other counties. This isn't something where they just had a late-night idea that they decided to act on.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't matter how long they run for, how thorough they are, or what they find, investigations are not trials, nor do they constitute due process. Your statement is obviously false on its face.

<comment><USER6> And? Megaupload has only been shut-down _temporarily_ due to a court injunction. If they succeed in court then they could be back online.

<comment><USER7> This is perhaps the most naive statement I have ever read on Hacker News. Domain seizures don't have temporary consequences, and law enforcement knows this. Once they've seized the domain, they've done all the damage they need to do. Everything else is just window dressing. Tomorrow morning, the feds could release Kim DotCom, give him all of his money, apologize, and immediately return their domains, and it wouldn't matter. The site, and the multi-million dollar business behind it, are dead.

As much as prosecutors would love to, we don't put people to death before they are found guilty. We should not allow the equivalent to happen to websites without giving them the opportunity to present counterarguments to a judge. They should be given notice that the domain is going to be seized, and arguments should be scheduled. Domain seizures are far too easy to obtain given that they mean the absolute and total destruction of the target business, without recourse, regardless of the ultimate outcome of any trial. That is hardly fair and certainly not the way the US system of "justice" is supposed to operate.

<comment><USER8> _Tomorrow morning, the feds could release Kim DotCom, give him all of his money, apologize, and immediately return their domains, and it wouldn't matter. The site, and the multi-million dollar business behind it, are dead._

I find that difficult to believe. If tomorrow, the people behind MegaUpload were released, and their assets were released, _and_ they were told they could go back to running MegaUpload as they had done so, I suspect they would, and the users would flock back to it.

Your claim is that websites require unique protection with regards to seizures. I have difficulty granting that, because if you seize all of the assets of _any_ business, that business is, at the least [1], temporarily on hold. So, unless you can provide an argument for why websites are unique, then the process you propose would have to apply to all businesses. I have difficulty with that.

[1] I mean "at the least" literally, as a lower-bound. I don't want to get into a side argument about the likely fate of MegaUpload, since my point is that MegaUpload's fate is no different from that of other businesses.

<comment><USER7> I think an argument can be made that domains do require special protection. Web-based businesses are living, breathing entities that are permanently damaged when offline. Simply look at the before/after traffic statistics of the few sites that have been wrestled back from the claws of the government after seizure. The sites are dead.

The real world equivalent of domain seizure isn't temporarily restraining a business from certain questionable activities. It is to fire missiles at the corporate headquarters the moment they are indicted, destroying the building, and then posting a billboard on the empty land saying how the company that used to be there and all of their customers are criminals even if they haven't yet been found guilty. If they are found not guilty, then, after more legal wrangling, they'll get the empty lot back. They are then "free" to resume their former operation.

<comment><USER9> It's more like shutting down a restaurant for sanitation violations.

If they open up, they might have trouble getting business if everyone thinks there are probably still rat turds in the food. So they need to advertise, maybe "change management", maybe change the name.

Who cares if the old domain is dead, if a new one can be set up that runs the same way and is just as popular?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hacker News double standard:

* A company like Zynga who runs a completely legal business and employ thousands of people with good wages and benefits by copying game concepts is generally considered evil.

* A torrent tracker or file locker that makes a handful of employees rich by ripping off thousands of artists, musicians and filmmakers and serving spammy aggressive popup ads shut down and are considered martyrs.

Somebody care to explain?

<comment><USER4> The flaw in your logic is that you're treating a group of people as if they are a single person with a singular set of ideas, views and motivations.

<comment><USER11> It's not a flaw so much as having too broad a scope. It is certainly the case that a sizeable subset of people here hold such views, which are in turn upheld by upvotes. When called out they should respond, not fail to appear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow. Btjunkie was in the Alexa top 500 too (#390) - it wasn't exactly a small site.

Here's a screenshot of the Alexa ranking, for posterity:

<http://imgur.com/U7dex>

<comment><USER13> You probably shouldn't rely on imgur for posterity… Put it on a server that you control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone remember Suprnova.org?

<comment><USER15> There has never been as site as good as Suprnova, it made thepiratebay look like junk, Mininova was my next favorite...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some background: BT = Bit Torrent (search engine)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTJunkie>

</comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone else suspect that this shut down was not as "voluntary" as stated? Now is the moment in history where people need to speak up for the protection of their rights on the internet, and before the culmination of these struggles has even begun, btjunkie is throwing in the towel? Do they know something we don't?

<comment><USER9> "Now is the moment in history where people need to speak up for the protection of their rights on the internet"

People are. They're just not speaking up for the "rights" you are thinking of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel like I have been working to train and support people, and giving people legs in the form of networks and software just so they can turn around and kick me with them. Did we do this to ourselves?

</comment><comment><USER19> Another one bites the dust... and TPB sails on!

</comment><comment><USER20> Do people think that shutting down the site prevents prosecution? I don't.

My assumption here is that they, and possibly others, have been told to shut down or face Megaupload treatment.

I wonder if we will see few others make the same "decision".

<comment><USER21> There are only finite resources available to pursue prosecution. If the choice is between prosecuting the owners of a site that continues to operate versus one that has ceased operation, I expect the choice would be to go after the one that continues to operate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay is still up despite it being shut down numerous times. It truly is the boy who cried wolf of torrent indexes.

<comment><USER23> It's worth noting that people involved in TPB have been fined millions of dollars, sentenced to jail and fled their country to avoid justice. Not everybody is willing to go those sorts of extremes to run a website.

<comment><USER24> fled their country? AFAIK they're all still living in Sweden.

<comment><USER23> Last I heard non of them where Swedish residents. Fredrik Neij lives in Thailand and last I heard Svartholm Warg lived in Cambodia of all places. I believe the other two defendants live in Switzerland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wikipedia states that the site was commercial, considering the amount of traffic it had does this mean they were making money from it or was it a volunteer organisation using adverts to cover costs? I've never used the site and Wikipedia doesn't explain any of that.

<comment><USER26> commercial venture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Isn't there a way to create a database of torrents without using http protocol, by relying only on peer2peer network? It would be much harder to shutdown each peer individually.

<comment><USER28> That's what Tribler[1] claims it does. I've never used it.

And while it doesn't use bittorrent, eMule has had completely decentralized file searches using the Kad[2] network for years now.

[1]: <http://www.tribler.org/>

[2]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kad_network>

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So incredibly sad.... Anyone know who started the site or how to get in touch with them? I would love a crack at their code base....

</comment><comment><USER30> What next <http://www.usniff.com/> ?

</comment><comment><USER31> Wouldn't it be enough to just move sites like this to for instance Russia?

<comment><USER32> Your assumption there is no law against piracy in Russia is false. Russia is not a great idea, our gov took torrents.ru domain away without any trial as well. They are not so active as in USA, but since Russia is on the way to WTO, btjunkie wouldve been closed rather fast if it would be demanded.

<comment><USER9> And if not the government, organized crime would likely demand a cut.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Another one going down makes you think how exactly did we win with SOPA and what we are going to do with ACTA

</comment><comment><USER34> Sad news. :(

</comment><comment><USER35> End of an era.

<comment><USER4> As was the shutdown of Napster, and the shutdown of other trackers like SuprNova (as someone else mentioned). I'm actually surprised that some sites have made it this long. It's not like the MAFIAA hasn't taken down sites in the past. But the last few years seem to have been somewhat quiet on that front. Seems like they were spending their time getting the FBI and Congress to fight their battles for them; the government just moves at a slower pace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> btjunkie will be missed

</comment><comment><USER37> its been a long ride, bye!

</comment><comment><USER38> The end is nigh.

<comment><USER39> The end of...?

<comment><USER40> Smaller trackers that will be targeted next.</comment></comment></comment>


How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1k users - <AUTHOR> https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/p/how-the-biggest-consumer-apps-got <comment><USER2> I bet the companies using inventive ways to get their first users like the ones listed in the article are in the minority (but certainly make for more interesting stories to read/write about).

I launched a SaaS product recently, and after a pretty successful HN launch, I've been trying different ways of marketing.

What I learned, and this may be obvious to many, is that the boring path of getting users by gamifying SEO actually works. I firmly believe that you can get your first 1K visitors by just using the formula of writing content. You don't even have to be good at writing -- target some keywords, use good SEO hygiene, have a high enough word count, and people will at least come.

I pumped out some mediocre blog posts with clickbaity titles [1] just to test it, and I was surprised to see it work, bringing in consistent weekly traffic. A popular Chinese blogger including a one-liner about my product in his blog in February is the sole source that brings ~1-2 Chinese users (actually signed up) to my app every day 3 months later.

[1] [https://terrastruct.com/blog/10-tips-diagrams-system- design-...](https://terrastruct.com/blog/10-tips-diagrams-system-design- interview/)

<comment><USER3> Can you very quickly summarize the basics here? How do you find which keywords to target, how do you include them in your content, what's good SEO hygiene, what wordcount do you need, etc?

Basically, I'm not really aware of how you do SEO marketing, and would like to learn.

<comment><USER2> I basically just read this to learn: [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup- seo/](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/)

and watch patio11's talks on microconf.

I don't feel like qualified enough to give advice (also these are short term results, they say SEO takes ~6 months to yield results), so you should refer to his stuff.

<comment><USER3> Good enough, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Beware of survival bias. This article tells a tale that if you do similar things, you'll get a billion dollar success too.

Suppose a black founder was out in the mall asking to install an app on your phone, security would drag them away.

Most of the founders went to prestigious colleges with enough connections and saved income to let them work on ideas before it became profitable. As the income divide gets larger, less and less Americans have that luxury.

For every founder that made it, they're prolly 100s that didn't make it even if they did the same things.

For a large chunk of the planet, surviving to day is a struggle, they can't weather out months blowing their only savings on an idea that may or may not work.

This is why most founders tend to be white men from mostly wealthy backgrounds. Most VCs are in a similar demographic and would fund them, so it's somewhat a self fulfilling cycle.

<comment><USER5> This.

IMO, every successful founder has had at least one of these things in plentiful when starting up - money, connections, or deep insight into a painful problem. Luck, of course, cannot be overlooked.

I think learning what worked for someone is good. But more important is learning what did not work (which is only realised in hindsight)

There is a subreddit called r/shutdown. I keep visiting it from time to time to learn what not to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Surprised the Reddit 'solution' to this (fake accounts and activity until real people decide to join) isn't on the list. Fake it til you make it is definitely a strategy that a fair few successful products, services and communities used to kick things off.

<comment><USER7> That's not a strategy to get new users though. It makes a social site more appealing to new users, but it doesn't attract them.

Reddit used the "tell your friends" method first, and then "have PG blog about us", which really accelerated their growth, and falls under "Leverage Influencers".

<comment><USER8> >That's not a strategy to get new users though. It makes a social site more appealing to new users, but it doesn't attract them.

This statement appears thoroughly contradictory, unless you're using an unusual definition of either appeal or attract. IMHO most people are going to see those words having almost the same meaning in the context you used them

In 2012, Steve Huffman, Reddit co-founder, was honest enough to attribute Reddit's initial ability to attract new users to their fake user strategy first of all [1]. Even while they were doing that, he said, they still needed a few months to get the site self-sustaining so they could stop faking user engagement.

In that talk, Steve Huffman never even mentions influencers. Paul Graham didn't write about Reddit until 3 or 4 months in, after they had retired the fake user posting, though I agree with you influencers and friends must have been a help

[1] [https://youtu.be/zmeDzx4SUME?t=28](https://youtu.be/zmeDzx4SUME?t=28)

<comment><USER7> The fake users are orthogonal to _finding_ new users, which is what this post is about. The fake users were about retention, not new users. They kept people using reddit after they found reddit, but it wasn't a way to find new users.

Reddit launched on June 23rd, 2005, and Paul blogged about them in the first week of August. Only five weeks after launch. They were definitely still using the fake users then. In fact when I joined the company in 2007, we still had the ability to create new users on submit, we just didn't do it anymore.

Steve probably just didn't mention the PG blog post because he forgot. If you ask him, he'll gladly tell you about how PG basically forced the wide release of reddit by blogging about them despite Steve's objections.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What about the PayPal way? They took a certain amount of VC money and used it to buy and sell on EBay and demand to pay/sell using only PayPal. It basically acted as a parasite on EBay until they reached critical mass. I call it "gamification of established platform". Diabolical but effective. PayPal's company mascot should be the Sea Lamprey.

<comment><USER10> I believe the primary way they succeeded was giving away money. When you signed up they'd give you $10. Later it was reduced to $5. You could also get that amount by signing up friends

<comment><USER11> This is the same way Square's cash app has grown very fast to 50 million users, buy giving away $5 to each new user referred.

<comment><USER12> would uber count? They subsidize the cost of rides to get users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _Below, you'll find first-hand accounts of how essentially every major > consumer app acquired their earliest users_

Did anyone follow through on the links? Some of these "first-hand accounts" just redirect back to this guy's blog, some of them are just blurbs from other media. I looked at the Etsy one and it's a story by an economist with no first hand accounts by anyone at Etsy.

<comment><USER14> Is the author actually using some of the tricks described in other comments here to gain traction?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A strategy I've been thinking of for my startup (10-20 WAU currently ) is going through old HN discussions that are relevant to my product, finding people who I think would be interested in it based on their comments, and emailing them with a quote from their comment and an explanation of why I think they specifically would be interested. (and then ask them to try it out & give feedback).

I thought of this since I was reading a discussion last night that made me think "this is a perfect use case for what I'm building!", and I've had the same thought with a few other discussions in the past.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has tried something like this.

<comment><USER16> I have utilized this approach, but on Reddit instead of HN. I launched a tool I was working on and got my very first users from Reddit who were passionate about the topic. Now, those users are evangelists and they've helped spread the word to their communities which has lead recent numbers hovering around 2k WAU.

<comment><USER17> Do you have any sample of a thread that you used for this strategy? I have a content generator app and have been using reddit on my own and having fun entering photoshop contests but I want to branch out and get evangelists of people in other ways on Reddit.

<comment><USER16> The posts I made were simply a description of what I had built and a link to my app. There are two things to focus on in your post: 1) do not use marketing speak and 2) talk about the features in the app that would be the most valuable to those users and why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This article fails to include how Airbnb really got their first users - creating several accounts and mass emailing all the landlords on Craigslist

<comment><USER19> That's how they (allegedly) got supply, not demand, which is what I focused on in the post

<comment><USER20> Posting fake homes on Craigslist is the common strategy to get demand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Corey's plan was to infiltrate these communities. He wouldn't announce > himself as a Netflix employee. ... and slowly, over time, alert the most > respected commenters, moderators, and website owners about this great new > site called Netflix.

Strikes me as unethical. Unless their alerts disclosed the relationship.

<comment><USER22> What's unethical about it ?

He talk about something that might be of interest for these people.

It doesn't sound like he was spamming or doing anything annoying.

It sounds to me like a more human way of doing advertisement. The only difference is that he is actually there to have an actual conversation about it.

<comment><USER23> Generally advertising regulations require you to disclose any relationship with the company.

That's why youtuber put #ad on their videos

<comment><USER11> No, under US law you're required to disclose if you have been paid specifically by a third party to promote their product or service. You don't have to disclose a mear 'relationship'.

<comment><USER24> An employee is being paid. Is that a specific exemption?

I don't know what they count as advertising per se but if endorsement via private message counts then the FTC's page[0] calls this out as "position with the company":

"Connections between an endorser and the company that are unclear or unexpected to a customer also must be disclosed, whether they have to do with a financial arrangement for a favorable endorsement, a position with the company, or stock ownership."

[0]: [https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business- center/guidance/adv...](https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business- center/guidance/advertising-marketing-internet-rules-road)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Discord's first cohort of users came from the final fantasy XIV subreddit - after a friend of the cofounder posted there after trying out the app. It's been all uphill from there.

<comment><USER26> Sorry to be that guy, but 'things were uphill from <point>' means something got super difficult (as in running uphill is hard) - not sure if that's what you were shooting for.

<comment><USER27> I believe they reversed the "it all went downhill from there" idiom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > Get Press

Always wondered about this - do I just email an news outlet and tell them "my story" and see if they roll with it?

I'm starting to advertise my business around with the idea of growing a userbase before the official release. Ironically enough mentioning a link to it on my previous HN comment lead to more visitors than either of the Facebook or Reddit ads that I put up.

With that said, if you're into 3D printing, see [https://makely.me](https://makely.me)

<comment><USER29> Yes, absolutely. Do your homework and find a reporter/ blogger that, based on past reporting, you think would be interested in your company.

Email them and keep it short, make it timely (what have you accomplished recently, how is it relevant to a current event or trend) and offer to provide other pieces of the story (e.g. do you have a customer or investor who'd be willing to speak to the reporter? Do you have photos, graphics, data you could send the reporter). Offer to jump on a call and speak on the record.

One mistake I've seen founders make is they treat the reporters as a marketing channel. I.e they want the reporter to help them "get the word out." That is not a reporters job. Their job is to bring their readers timely, interesting and novel stories, so your goal is to help the reporter accomplish that.

<comment><USER28> > One mistake I've seen founders make is they treat the reporters as a > marketing channel

This is what I am afraid of doing and why I've been a bit apprehensive about it. Thanks you for your advice, it actually really helped.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I had zero problems acquiring first 1K customers for my product. Just spammed some relevant forums. Actually I got way more then 1K this way. Problem was that said amount was not making it worth for me. And acquiring more presented a challenge. Basically lacking external investment to increase market share by whatever means I put that particular product on a diet (invest few hours here and there). Since then it brings me small but steady income without investing much. As I have other products and also create those for other companies I am ok and happy with what I got for my efforts. But if I had to live from that single product it would not be a comfy life to say it mildly

<comment><USER31> Are you commenting on every thread and linking to your site? How do you spam a forum? (Genuinely asking)

<comment><USER30> I did not comment on every thread. But I do answer some relevant questions on forums where my answer is likely to be appreciated and my signature is linked. Sometimes write short semi-article in the post (same thing with the signature). Also do product announcement once per forum. Sometimes they have rules against it but they also often let it slide. At some point was noticed by some reviewers and that had some positive outcome as well.

But as already said nothing really stellar in that particular product I mentioned

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> A relatively well known and highly funded managed WordPress company got its first X,000 users by offering free accounts to people with audience in exchange for being able to place links on the site that juiced the SEO. It wasn't "Powered by hosting company X" but rather things like "Best WordPress Hosting" and "How to Update WordPress".

SEO juice + new/immature sector = lots of FOS traffic/users.

</comment><comment><USER33> Shouldn't Netflix be in the "offline" category?

They started as a mail DVD service, didn't they?

<comment><USER34> They did start by mailing DVDs, but you ordered them from a website, not a print catalog or a phone number. Delivery was physical, but ordering was digital. This is similar to DoorDash or Lyft, where you order digitally and then wait for something physical to arrive at your doorstep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I thought for sure this article was going to mention Bird or the other scooter companies that followed. But leaving the vehicles on the street was the way to get first 1,000 users for sure. What is the next thing that can be done this way? I've often thought it should be cheap android phones set with a custom build of android that does something very simple. Like display a bright green background and some text like "take me i'm free!" and some way to encourage the taker to charge the device and place it back in circulation.

</comment><comment><USER36> Shameless plug: A bit old blog post from my company on the same topic. A bit more mobile app-specific. A little old but most of it is still relevant: [https://mobisoftinfotech.com/resources/blog/top-34-technique...](https://mobisoftinfotech.com/resources/blog/top-34-techniques- to-get-first-100000-downloads-for-your-app/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I used to do that Apple store trick with reddit.

<comment><USER19> That's amazing

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Looking forward to the version on B2B and B2D SaaS companies.

</comment><comment><USER38> What's that first app in Create FOMO, the logo with the Bill Murray lookalike's face? Honest question, not trolling.

<comment><USER39> Clubhouse, apparently? Which is some kind of faddish social networking app that will never be heard from again after they run out of their current round of funding, I assume? [https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-clubhouse-why-does- silic...](https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-clubhouse-why-does-silicon- valley-care/)

<comment><USER40> I thought it was weird to feature Clubhouse when the app launched fairly recently. Feels like this article is a way to market them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I've been following these techniques for decades:

1) PG and Viaweb had no traction until they hired a PR firm. Back in the day, those were $5k to $15k/month.

"It took a painfully long time for word of mouth to get going, and we did not start to get a lot of press coverage until we hired a PR firm (admittedly the best in the business) for $16,000 per month."

[https://www.you-books.com/book/P-Graham/Essays](https://www.you- books.com/book/P-Graham/Essays)

YC now has "BookFace", so I suppose you could just promote to other YC'ers if you have an account.

2) Hotmail used a footer on every email for viral mindshare.

3) At Yahoo, new properties were announced on internal employee lists and it was requested that say 500 employees would seed the new service so it didn't look like a ghost town.

4) Most of the social networks spammed your contact list to go viral. Or just changed preferences underneath what you set, like Linkedin and Facebook.

5) Most of the dating sites early on send emails from women, even when you don't have an account on those sites!

<comment><USER42> As for 4), it looks like it was indeed very important for Facebook. Here's a quote from Steven Levy's book "Facebook":

 _For months, the two companies had been feuding over the way Facebook was scraping data from Hotmail and MSN Messenger products. Facebook had its own complaint—as retaliation, Hotmail had begun labeling invitations to join Facebook as spam. According to The Facebook Effect, Moskovitz said that this caused a 70 percent drop in new users._

Later on when Microsoft buys a stake in Facebook, they stop classifying the invites as spam.

<comment><USER41> I hadn't read that spam pass statistic before.

IIRC, FB also got MS Messenger chat access for FB messenger for a period of time after MS' investment, then that abruptly ended (likely the day the initial agreement expired.)</comment></comment></comment>