Y Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1: Meet Wevorce, FlightCar, Thalmic - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/26/y-combinator-winter-2013-demo-day-batch-1/ <comment><USER2> Wow, this definitely is the strongest looking batch in recent memory. Interesting to see a few companies in the group that are or will be competing head-on with previous YC alums.

Airware is particularly exciting. There are a lot of parallels between today's hobby UAV market and the hobby PC market of decades past.

I love Circuitlab, but "the founders estimate their market to be $500 million, because of _CircuitLabs' influence over which components the developers using the platform choose_ " (emphasis mine) is annoying.

Fivetran seems pretty ambitious, but it will be very cool if they can make it work.

<comment><USER3> Fivetran looks very cool, although I'm only worried that it's web based tool.

Advanced Excel / SPPS/ Matlab is used by professionals, who want very fast and responsive, something that is hard to replicate in web based app.

I wish them good luck though!

<comment><USER4> 1010data provides a web product for performing transformation on large sets of data and it's quite nice. We used it when we used to do analysis of mortgage pools etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm worried about Airware. Checking out their site, they list (prominently) among other advertised features "Free of ITAR restrictions". First of all, I'm not sure such a thing can be claimed (due to the nature of the decisions as to whether specific technology or scientific arts count as arms).

It also looks like none of their products are particularly innovative in this space. 3D robotics, Ardupilot, Micropilot, Openpilot, ZeroUAV, VeiYu Tech have dozens of different products in this space. <http://diydrones.com> does a pretty good job tracking all of those.

Compared to the big commercial players: CloudCap's Piccolo and Kestrel APs, I don't see the value add. Major consumers of APs (>100 units) tend to choose these because they're consistent and trusted. Building up clients trust in an AP is a very hard thing to gain (why should I risk my $250,000 experimental aircraft on your dinky little AP) and a _very_ easy thing to lose.

I'm also curious how will AirWares OS and "Apps" will fit in the current airworthyness certification model, which has whether DO-178B compliance is on their roadmap. Maybe the answer is "that doesn't apply to us" just like ITAR? :)

Good luck to them, and good luck getting a CoA for anything with one of their products in it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been using Bitnami VMs for years. Surprised to see them in a 'new startup' batch.

</comment><comment><USER7> So I went down through the list, curious about what this batch looked like, figuring most of it would be social networking junk or suchlike but hopefully there should be a few gems in the list.

... and as far as I can see, it's actually pretty much all gems! Most of these are solving real problems, and even the print on demand T-shirts is something for which there seems to be an actual market.

So, congratulations to everyone involved and hopefully in a few years we'll be going "oh yeah, it was back in 2013 I first heard about..."

</comment><comment><USER8> I think buildzoom is going to be big. I'm remodeling a condo in Florida, and it has been a nightmare to find contractors.

In fact on the flight on the way home I penciled out some ideas to improve this that aren't too different from what buildzoom is offering.

Edit: After reviewing my notes, one thing I considered was that for better or worse, a lot of the industry is under the table and transient. Maybe buildzoom will force the industry more into the open.

<comment><USER9> What about Redbeacon (squarely aimed at the same place), or Thumbtack or Yerbid?

This isn't a particularly new space, although I'm sure BuildZoom can do well in it.

<comment><USER8> I've never heard of these, which is part of the benefit of YC I guess. What that said, none of them seem to offer what BuildZoom does which is a list of all the contractors in my area sorted by reputation. Even if their reputation metrics are questionable at this point, at least they are making an attempt at it.

I just contacted a painter through buildzoom. Let's see how it works out. Contractors in my area (Tahoe) are notoriously hard to track down.

<comment><USER10> Tahoe has been a little tricky. You need a contractor who is regulated in CA however a lot of the contractors near Tahoe are licensed in Nevada (although a number are licensed in both states).

One of our advisors has a house up there and we've been working with him to create a better experience in that region. If you want to let us know a bit more about your project, I'll make sure we get a great contractor out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I see 4 very strong, smartly chosen brand names in this list: wevorce, fivetran, simplyinsured, errplane. But, wevorce wins this round.

<comment><USER12> Why do you say that these are strong brand names? I think all of the names are difficult to remember and spell. I know that finding a name is difficult, but the names of these startups are probably the least impressive aspect.

Wevorce - I doubt that people would remember this name

Startups can use a systematic method of determining if a name is memorable. I think the ability to remember the name and write it down and spell it correctly is the best indicator of a strong name.

I've done this previously by getting a short list of 15 names, then stating them several times in a video (in different orders), then using a crowdsourcing site such as amazon turk, get the person to watch the video and then write down which names they remember. This tests both their ability to remember the name amongst a crowd of other names AND their ability to spell the name. Certain names come way out on top.

Startups need to think very carefully about their name, because I believe the memorability of the name will have a huge impact on their success.

<comment><USER11> I think they are strong names based on either the language devices they employ or based on the existing brands they are carefully aligning themselves with, which I believe makes them memorable.

Here is a simple formula for one kind language device used in naming: 1) Find a key term: house 2) Find a word that rhymes with the key term: mouse 3) Find an idiom or common phrase that includes the rhymed term: mouse trap 4) Substitute the original keyword in place of the rhyming word ... result: house trap

Due to all kinds of fuzzy reasons that will never be arguably as good as testing names with real people (kudos for testing your names!), I prefer this method.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Oh, I didn't realize Bitnami was taking part in YC. Enhorabuena, Daniel!

<comment><USER14> Thanks David! It has been three very intense months :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems a little strange that the TC article references DOS in two company descriptions (Airware, the "DOS of drones", and CircuitLab replacing "DOS-era tools").

</comment><comment><USER16> I like this batch.

Getting lots of Apache errors in the listings on Zaranga - <http://www.zaranga.com/>

</comment><comment><USER17> As an ecom professional, fivetran is the most exciting to me.

<comment><USER18> Thanks! We've got a lot of features still to build and things to optimize but we're really excited about what's coming up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am of course preparing for the downvotes but the first two companies to me proffer the future of tech start ups.

Wevorce I really had to double check to be sure I was not reading an extended parody of the HN front page. Try saying "tech-powered standard for civilised divorce" without hearing Jon Stewart.

Then airware, already trying to turn UAVs into a app platform - UAVs are a big open frontier - but a hardware led one.

One company that is browser only - and is filling in the gaps left over from Web 1.0 and 2.0. And one that is driven by hardware. And while I cannot comment on the company- boy are they in a growth industry

I suppose I am saying that way back when, connecting the virtual to the physical was simple - music, text, video. We have taken the already connected and transformed it

Now we need to provide the connection to the physical as well as the application to drive the next generation - which means the next big waves need to come with dongles. Pycon beware.

<comment><USER20> What company would want to waste time and money customizing low-level UAV software?

<comment><USER19> Uav is still immature - customising implies a standard, whereas most customising of low level stuff is still "getting it working right"

Big new field very open

I would put more money on dirigibles than planes myself</comment></comment></comment>


The Target Value for Bitcoin is $100K to $1M - <AUTHOR> http://falkvinge.net/2013/03/06/the-target-value-for-bitcoin-is-not-some-50-or-100-it-is-100000-to-1000000/ <comment><USER2> The biggest problem is that getting bitcoins is a major, major pain in the ass. You need to setup bank transfers, confirm your DNA and get a rectal exam to buy them from any exchange. You are looking at about a week to buy your first bitcoin from when you decide to do that. (3 days to confirm bank, 3 days to do a deposit) - This will never change for online purchases, because the way bitcoin works- there is no takey backeys (so credit card purchasing is out to buy bitcoins). So, either there will be massive fraud, or massive barrier to entry. The only way around it is retail, in person bitcoin exchanges/stores. Sort of like you see in international airports with currency exchanges.

Also, Even though Bitcoin cant be destroyed in a physical sense, it can still be completely devalued by litigation. The US has shown they are serious about anti-gambling and if this starts taking off, they simply need to go after the exchanges. Making it hard to buy bitcoins = BTC value goes down. Making it hard to sell (remember when pokerstars was shutdown? Everyone withdrew everything from ALL sites) and the value goes down catastrophically fast.

Basically, all it takes to completely devalue bitcoins is to have one event that makes most bitcoin owners think the amount of time they have to cash out is minimal.

How do you think the market would react if mtgox had a 'megaupload' style moment? It doesn't even have to be realistic- The US gov could just say terrorists might be using it to funnel funds or something.

But anyways, If mtgox was raided or taken down (and please don't say its not possible- Its totally possible) the effects on the market would be massive and instantaneous. When megaupload was taken down, all its competitors shut down out of fear as well. Its likely that would happen in this situation in a similar fashion.

There is no intrinsic value in bitcoins unless it is possible to easily trade them with a outcome of receiving capital. Yes you can trade bitcoins for services, but the person giving you services is not going to do that unless HE can get cash from this. People are not going to trade services/items to each other in a giant circle if the value of the currency is not hinged on a dollar amount.

I think the pro-bitcoin line to counter what I am saying is that someday people wont care if it converts into USD, because bitcoins will be more valuable. Its not totally bullshit- The USD is no more 'real' than a bitcoin, with the exception of it being established and backed by our gov. However, I doubt BTC would ever get gov backing, so it will eternally be at risk.

<comment><USER3> But what I actually don't get it is: what is stopping me ( or anybody else ) to start creating similar, let me quote "experimental new digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world" ?

Isn't a second, or third such p2p currency due to come? Won't this distroy the current bitcoin uniqness, thus devaluation, etc, ?

What is protecting the bitcoin from this?

<comment><USER2> Just that the masses currently agree that bitcoin is 'the' current p2p currency. Nothing would stop the US Gov (or walmart!) from making/publicizing its own bitcoin competitor which would instantly, immediately, crush bitcoin. (Why use bitcoin when you can use usgovcoin, all other things being equal)

<comment><USER3> So my bitcoin-based new business will depend on a popularity contest??

I believe more in a energy-bound trading value for the future, much like the petro-dollar. Why not solar-coins, based on the value of solar energy ( GWh based ) traded on the markets? We all consume energy, right?

<comment><USER4> All your web business depends on popularity of HTTP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ok, here goes, and I confess I don't know anything much about bitcoins, so you may help me here:

Bitcoins are fractionable to 8 decimal places

Maximum existance of 21Mi bitcoin. (If we disregard the decimal places)

So, let's see, if, as he says, the value of BtC should be 100k dollars, that would represent 2.1e12 dollars (or 2 Trillion dollars)

Unless there's a massive devaluation of the dollar, I don't see this happening. BtCs have no intrinsic value.

It's not a reliable store of value (ok, you lost your wallet.dat now what). Right now even pieces of paper issue by a central bank somewhere under the mattress seem more reliable.

Reliable: liquid and is not subject to big variations.

<comment><AUTHOR> His point is that if the worldwide money supply is estimated to 60 trillion USD, and if Bitcoin manages to capture, say, 10% of that then the 21 million bitcoins should be worth 6 trillion USD.

There is no need for the USD to be massively devalued for this scenario to be possible. Technically and economically speaking, all the currencies in the world need to be devalued by merely 10% for this scenario to be possible.

PS: you can back up your wallet.dat, which you cannot do with physical money.

<comment><USER5> About the "only 10% of the world value", top-down estimates rarely work =)

Working backwards (bottom-up) usually gives a more realistic estimate. Especially if you base this on existing data.

Oh sure, you can back your wallet.dat.

It also can be copied over the internet by a malicious sw, unlike physical money.

<comment><AUTHOR> _It also can be copied over the internet by a malicious sw, unlike physical money._

There are multiple efforts from different groups/companies developing hardware wallets to precisely reduce this risk (think tamper-proof chips storing your coins). This format would still allow backups to exist (eg. saving coins in a 2nd identical chip, or saving the "seed" generating private addresses externally, for example on paper if you want to mimic the security feature of physical money).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what effect an article like this will have on Bitcoin trading today, as half of HN's readership suddenly think FREE MONEY and go try buying some Bitcoins...

<comment><USER7> Apparently quite a bit: BC on mtgox is now at $46 -- up from $35 2 days ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Written by a man who has gone "all-in" on Bitcoin.

<comment><USER9> At least he puts his money where his mouth is.

<comment><USER10> I think what we see here is a case of putting your mouth where your money is.

<comment><USER9> Since BTC is at an all-time high, at the very least if he didn't believe in BTC anymore he could get out now without a loss. So he still seems to honestly believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _This leads us to a target market cap of 600 billion to 6 trillion USD, to be fulfilled by about 6 million bitcoin, which makes for easy calculations. That means that each bitcoin would be worth $100,000 at the low market cap and $1,000,000 at the high market cap._

There is some terrible math/economics here. You can have the bitcoin value @ $1/bitcoin and fulfill 6 trillion USD/day transactions if you want. The author forgot that Btc velocity matters here, and a lot.

BTC can be worth $1m right now, we don't have to wait for the 6 trillion USD transactions for that to happen. It's about investors, speculators and hoarders. Will the velocity of BTC be different than other currencies velocities? Well, we can't know for sure now, but it'll be interesting to watch how this currency evolve.

If you are betting on BTC, you should bet on a BTC business and not on the value of BTC itself.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't like bitcoin because everytime I turn on the Bitcoin app it takes so long to "Synchronize with the network". Basically confirm transactions for other people. I'm not sure what is the algorithm's running time. Is it O(n) where n is number of transactions? That would be excessive, because the number of transactions is very much bigger than O(m) where m is the number of people.

Anyway, there is a chance I'll be wrong and bitcoin will be worth $1 million one day. To hedge against this possible situation I have procured myself 0.05 of a coin, some year or two ago when they were worth $0.8 each. At the time I basically took the number of bitcoins that will ever exist and divided by current population of the US. 21m/300m = 0.07, of which my 0.05 is pretty close to.

<comment><USER13> You've waited too long between running the app so naturally there will be a long wait. If you do this at least daily, it won't be such a problem.

Bitcoin economy exists solely by the confirmation of transactions by other people, so you're just doing normal housekeeping. The network is the bank. The very nature of the currency makes you to take some odd ways about generating and maintaining it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Agree that long term the value of Bitcoin will go up provided that there is no technical flaw that gets exploited in the long run (which I'm not sure will be the case).

However, these predictions are completely wrong. At best the drivers of Bitcoin growth in the foreseeable future will be illegal trade and people trying to capitalise on the growth in value by speculatively buying up Bitcoins. The growth of Bitcoins has a theoretical cap though, because the more common they become in illegal trade, the more likely they are to be outright banned by governments. If they can't ban people from buying drugs they will just stop them by proxy by banning Bitcoins.

The idea that ordinary people will go through the hassle of transacting in Bitcoins is nonsensical.

</comment><comment><USER15> Just checked MtGox, Bitcoin is now trading at $46... it was around $35 this time yesterday.

Things seem to be getting out of hand.

<comment><USER15> Historic prices in USD for those interested:

<http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25>

<comment><USER16> "you are here" comparisons are obvious. i think i'll be buying some bitcoins in 3 months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Whilst it is believable that a system like Bitcoin could have a market cap that supports a BTC price of $100k, how do we know that a different system won't take its place before it does? Bitcoin is in a strong position as it is first to the market but I think something similar could easily take its place if it was considerably better technically. Whether this will be a totally different system or a Bitcoin 1.1 that can be migrated to, I don't know.

You could have said that the total market for IRC is 7bn people using it every day but now there are more people using other systems like Facebook Messenger.

</comment><comment><USER18> I remember some commenter saying on Scott Sumner blog, with reference to the discussion whether bitcoin is in bubble or not.

      *The price of bitcoin is volatile, because the future of bitcoin is volatile*

Yes in one of this futures where Bitcoin is The Money having a whole bitcoin will be a big deal, in which case it will make no sense to speak of the price of bitcoin in dollars.

I can think also of a transition period when bitcoin will widely acceptd and function in parallel with the dollar. For such a future the price range seems about right

</comment><comment><USER19> He's assuming perfect implementation of the highest goals of any strategy I've ever seen, and there's no one entity to carry it out. What can we look at in the past to not consider this insane?

<comment><USER4> Linux for various OS needs?

Torrents for various digital content delivery needs?

<comment><USER20> Linus would be considered the "one entity".

<comment><USER4> Same way "Satoshi Nakamoto" can be considered "one entity".

I think the parent meant someone to execute grand strategy all the way, not the very powerful and important rock that started the avalanche.

I think such entity is not necessary. On the internet good things that get started tend to grow on their own to fulfill all the need if they are useful without wealthy entity to support the growth, sometimes even against coalition of wealthy entities.

Easily transferable wealth storage is useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have been sort of an outsider on this bitcoin investing, but I know about the service.

Do you really think bitcoin is going to continue increasing in value? It seems to me like people are almost exclusively buying bitcoin as an investment. Very few people buy it to spend it. Doesn't that mean that as soon as people lose a bit of confidence, which is likely to happen some point, the price will completely dump? I am sure this has been talked about a lot - is there a better argument one way?

<comment><USER22> Bitcoin volume is only ~100k / day. So, with just ~200k BTC, it would be possible to force a crash in the BTC market, right?

So, here's the question. Is anyone willing to lend me 200k BTC for a few days?? :p This seems like the better investment right now... borrow someone else's bit coins, sell them on the market, and then buy them back after the crash.

Its called "short selling". And if enough people short sell at the same time, the short sellers can spook the market into a selling frenzy, and the short sellers will siphon out all the money from the system...

<comment><USER23> I'm not sure the volume is what you want to be looking at. Perhaps you're thinking of market depth?

Here's the mtgox depth: <http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD_depth.html>

If you sold 200k BTC in a "fill or kill" fashion without giving the market time to respond, you would definitely wipe out most of the bid order book. The highest bid price standing after your apocalyptic trade would be $5. You would get about 4MM for your 200k coins (avg $20 ea).

However, there are currently only 66,000 bitcoins for the asking on mtgox. So how are you going to cover your short?

You _might_ trigger enough of a panic to pump another 100k bitcoins or so into the market at fire sale prices.

However, it's much more likely you will get killed on the ask side trying to buy your 200k BTC back.

<comment><USER22> Thanks for the market depth information.

If Mr. Shark were a bitcoin bank (such as Flexcoin), then they would have enough BTC to cover the short. Mt.Gox themselves presumably has ~100k BTC on hand, and would also have the power to crash the market in this manner.

FlexCoin and Mt.Gox however have a vested interest in making sure Bitcoins succeed. So they probably wouldn't do this. A more likely malicious actor would be the hackers who stole 50,000 BTC some time a year and a half ago. [http://www.dailytech.com/Inside+the+MegaHack+of+Bitcoin+the+...](http://www.dailytech.com/Inside+the+MegaHack+of+Bitcoin+the+Full+Story/article21942.htm)

Crashing BTC with stolen BTC is free.

The presumption is that a lot of people right now would sell their BTC when they see BTC drop down to $5. People panic when they see losing value... and you buy back the BTC you sold at that point.

<comment><USER23> OK, so I still don't think what you're describing could be profitably executed. But playing devil's advocate...

> Crashing BTC with stolen BTC is free.

Yes, agree that you could definitely crash the bid price by dumping 50k stolen BTC. This might also happen naturally if someone holding lots of BTC is forced to sell to get USD quick (e.g. "oh no, huge unexpected medical bill, tax bill, fine...").

[Not sure it's "free" though; what about opportunity cost?]

> The presumption is that a lot of people right now would sell their BTC when > they see BTC drop down to $5. People panic when they see losing value... and > you buy back the BTC you sold at that point.

So during your buyback, you'll be bidding against all the bitcoin loons who also want to buy after you crashed the price. These people are just irrationally exuberant about internet play money and have been waiting for the price to hit $5 or $10 again.

You also have to convince the other loons who are holding lots of BTC that their play money is now worthless. You need to convince them to put down the cheetos, transfer BTC to mtgox and plug those sell orders in there. I'm not convinced crashing the bid price alone would be enough to achieve that. As well as manipulating price, you also need to kill the enthusiasm and belief.

I think to really trigger some selling for your buyback, you would want to carry out a smear campaign at the same time. You want to inject some fake news articles (either via hacking or social engineering) and create confusion on the forums. Convince people that bitcoin is doomed (e.g. "all BTC exchanges to be illegal, say regulators"). Or that you have a technical attack on the network.

Pub the articles first, smear forums, then DoS forums (to prevent corrections), then trigger the "mother sell"... that would give you the best chance of success for the attack you are thinking of.

</devilsadvocate>

What I wanted to finish with though, is that anyone trying to pull something this would have to actually believe that BTC are valuable, or equivalently that suckers will pay more for them later. Otherwise they wouldn't be buying them back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I believe a Bitcoin will one day be worth at least thousands of dollars, too. However, I also think the road to that will be _very_ bumpy, and I could see Bitcoin going to $100 now, then back to $20 all of the sudden. Then maybe go to $200 next year, and again back to $50, and so on. I don't think this will bother the people owning Bitcoin too much, and it shouldn't affect its future much, but it will probably make a lot of "normal" non-Bitcoin owners fear it and criticize it a lot. The truth is Bitcoin will not be a "stable" currency until its transactional value outweighs most of the speculations done on it, and that may not happen for a long time.

<comment><USER25> The "bumps" are getting smaller and smaller as amount of transactions and amount of users grows. As BTC dissipates through hundreds of thousands of hands, a single person's decision to sell or buy affects the price much less. The only reason for general panic would be a global problem like successful attack on the network or on popular services like MtGox, Coinbase etc. As times goes on we are having more exchanges, they get compliant with all the regulations, and most importantly, we have more businesses that accept bitcoins, so the demand for BTC-USD exchange slowly goes down (it's far from being small, but as BTC economy grows, the need for USD goes in the opposite direction).

I would not expect big crashes due to pure speculation. And I'm quite confident that amount of money, people and experience in this game is big enough to ensure much more stable growth than 2 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So... lets say we have this guy, lets call him "Mr. Shark".

Mr. Shark notices that MtGox only has 107159 BTC trading volume. When converted into USD, that is about $5 Million. So... Mr. Shark learns that he can control the market price in any direction, with approximately only $5 million USD of investment.

Mr. Shark's strategy therefore, is to build up enough money to "spook" the market by controlling it for a full day. ~100,000 BTC would be enough to crash the market for a full day: and hopefully the spooked long investors will help create the crash afterwards. Mr. Shark would then make sure the majority of his bet is in the form of a Long Straddle. Mr. Shark rides the market up till BTC has hit some absurdly high value, maybe issue a press release or two to help fuel BTC's rise.

One day, Mr. Shark sells 100,000 BTC all at once on the Mt. Gox market. He cashes in at BTC's high price, then BTC crashes. (EDIT: For clarification... Mr. Shark loses some money here, on purpose).

Mr. Shark then cashes in on his Call Options portion of his Long Straddle, and makes money because the market went down.

Long story short: Mr. Shark wins a ton of money, and everyone who has "invested" into BTC these past few weeks loses their money to Mr. Shark. Mr. Shark leaves the market without any worries that investigators will be after him. (Its not like there is a Bitcoin version of the FTC)

Until Mt. Gox's volume gets high enough to resist an adversarial trader, or until there is some group in charge to make sure that blatantly adversarial trading doesn't happen on the Bitcoin market... the BTC currency will be too risky for me.

<comment><USER26> You are absolutely right and... Bitcoin FAQ covers this: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#Does_Bitcoin_guarantee_an_inf...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#Does_Bitcoin_guarantee_an_influx_of_free_money.3F)

See "As an investment, is Bitcoin a sure thing?".

<comment><USER22> And now we've got the reason why the USD is better.

Because the FTC is the government agency designed to stop bull$$$$ like Mr. Shark, and throw people like him into jail. Who is to protect me when Mr. Shark come after bitcoins?

<comment><USER26> This. IMHO the main difference between bitcoin and dollar is that dollar is centralized and bitcoin is not. Question is who you trust more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Anyone in San Francisco willing to sell me some bitcoins? I'm looking to buy up to 10. We'll meet up in a café and I'll give you cash for them. I don't feel like jumping through hoops getting verified with Mt Gox. Happy to pay a 10% price premium...and happy to show you some ID.</comment>


Why GitHub is not a great package repository - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jteeuwen/go-bindata <comment><USER2> Every repository has the same problem. Here's an incident in npm [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/)

For legal and moral reasons any package repository needs to allow deleting packages. Either because the content violates some laws or because the author decided he no longer wants to publish his stuff.

In practice removal of packages happens so rarely that it's not a problem. At least on github you can find forks of go-bindata.

</comment><comment><USER3> Link won't work...

<comment><USER4> That's exactly the problem. People can just remove their Go packages.

<comment><USER5> It's not a problem - other people have the right to do what they wish with their own projects.

Not cloning your dependency tree or maintaining a local fork precisely so other maintainers' nonsense can't hurt you is the problem.</comment></comment></comment>


Meh and the Mundane Sublime - <AUTHOR> http://www.bogost.com/blog/meh_and_the_mundane_sublime.shtml

<comment><USER2> If I'm not mistaken, the Netflix recommendation algorithm corrects for this effect by normalizing the scores. For example, suppose you're a movie cynic. The most you'll ever rate a movie is 3; suppose your average rating is a 2. Someone else might rate movies from 3. to 5 with an average rating of 4. From the recommendation engine's point of view, the cynic's 2 rating is equivalent to the other person's rating of 4. Thus the algorithm corrects for different notions of "average."

</comment><comment><USER3> This starts off as a somewhat dull Netflix rant, but turns into a sublime masterpiece of drivel:

'While "meh" may seem to imply disapproval or disinterest, it is actually a sophisticated response of veneration, a celebration of something's ability to be a part of the anonymous formlessness philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy calls "whatever."'

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't call that drivel- obtuse maybe.

I think the reality is it's important to care about how many of the eyeballs who watch your movie, listen to your talk, or try out your new product are glazed. That is the percent of people who bothered to respond vs. the total number who responded.

With Netflix (or IMDB reviews) I would rather watch a polarizing film where the majority of viewers felt they needed to voice their praise or disgust than one that illicits a non-response.</comment></comment>


News.ycombinator software/similar available? - <AUTHOR>

Is there an open source application available similar to news.ycombinator? <comment><USER2> As far as I know news.yc source code is at <http://arclanguage.org/install>.

Reddit is open source (<http://www.reddit.com/code/>) but it is under Common Public Attribution License (you need Reddit logo).

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I tried googling and searching HN archive but didn't manage to return any meaningful results, thank you.

<comment><USER3> It is not that hard to build yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's just a matter of time tbh--me not having it! = ) Plus maintaining it too, if it's OS then it's much better for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's available as part of the arc language distribution...

<http://arclanguage.org/>

This is an incredibly popular question... something should be put in the nav maybe

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, and agreed.</comment></comment>


Recoverable System Upgrades - <AUTHOR> https://coreos.com/blog/recoverable-system-upgrades/ <comment><USER2> Yeah, a mechanism that is almost pointless. There's still user data that needs to be upgraded. User data is the very thing upgrades are difficult, and CoreOS doesn't address it in any way. Otherwise running `apt-get upgrade' on a second root in LVM would be really just enough.</comment>


Show HN: Wasmer – A Go library for executing WebAssembly binaries - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/wasmerio/go-ext-wasm <comment><USER2> WebAssembly is still being designed as we speak, but I love how Wasmer has been the "less talk more action" actor since the beginning.

That being said, and while it's cool to be able to run WebAssembly code from PHP, Ruby, Python or Go, I'd love to hear about some actual use case for this.

Being able to reuse code across multiple languages is nice, but that's already doable, and usually easier and faster, by building a shared library and using a FFI interface.

Is it only about the debatable security of WebAssembly's linear memory model?

<comment><USER3> > "I'd love to hear about some actual use case for this"

I use WebAssembly for non security critical but fun in browser Augmented Reality experiences. We have an ever improving 10 year old fully tested C++ SDK which has bindings to iOS, Android, Windows (DLL, Electron forms), and macOS. We use Emscripten to transpile our code to ASM.JS and WebAssembly for the JavaScript in browser version.

From a company perspective it is great to reuse well tested code on another platform without investing time rewriting it.

From a developer perspective it allows my R&D engineers to write what they love in the language of their choice. Not fighting a new language each time.

From a user perspective the speed of WASM is significantly faster than pure JS and even ASM.js. This increases the experience frame rate from ~30 to 60+.

So all in all I am a huge fan of WebAssembly experiences. The only major problem encountered was when Spectre / Meltdown appeared we had issues around SharedArrayBuffer which resulted in temporarily moving clients from WASM to ASM.JS, but we have found solutions for this since.

<comment><USER2> Sure, but this is off-topic.

My question was about why one would want to call WebAssembly functions from Go or PHP.

<comment><USER4> You can use wasm as a lingua franca between languages if you have some good libraries or programs that you want to share.

<comment><USER2> Like... a shared library?

I have a single libmysql.so file installed on my system, and it's used by Python, Ruby, C and PHP.

Why should I replace libmysql.so with libmysql.wasm?

<comment><USER5> Because libmysql.wasm runs on any platform whereas libmysql.so has to be replaced with libmysql.dll on windows.

<comment><USER6> Just like libmysql.dll, that libmysql.wasm will only run on Windows, if there is a Windows application that knows what to do with it.

<comment><USER7> Yea, that's generally how code works - no?

This is simply an abstraction "everyone" has agreed on. Conceptually no different than if everyone had agreed on Java, or Python, or Brainfuck.

<comment><USER6> Exactly, and neither the first not the last at it.

<comment><USER7> But that's not a bad thing. To me it appears better than previous attempts, I heavily look forward to it.

The HN drama around WASM and cries of the days of Java always leave me perplexed. Makes me wish Java didn't suck so bad so these convos could end haha.

<comment><USER6> All previous attempts, starting all way the back to UNCOL in 1958?

WASM only exists due to political reasons of Mozilla not embracing PNaCL.

If Chrome already had the current market share back then, we wouldn't be seeing such adoration, as if no one ever done it before.

<comment><USER7> And if Java managed to get a hold we'd be asking why this is better than Java _(which doesn 't exist with these features in this manner)_.

That's the point. It's seemingly good, and available. Why the pushback? I don't get your _(or anyones)_ objections.

> If Chrome already had the current market share back then, we wouldn't be > seeing such adoration, as if no one ever done it before.

I think you misunderstand the adoration. It's not as if this has never been done before. It's that this isn't done now. What else can I use? Nothing. I remember 10 years ago dying for a way to run Python in the browser and having no reasonable options for general web.

Even now, what _other_ option do I have? ASM.js is the only thing that comes to mind, which has significant downsides.

It feels like the dislike/complaints are pointed in the wrong direction. If you're upset that this isn't Java _(not that you are)_ , complain about why Java can't be used right now like WASM can. Complain that Java didn't manage to hold favor 10 years ago.

<comment><USER6> I complain about the adoration, like WASM was some kind of gift from God and everyone else that came before never existed.

10 years ago there were ways run Python in the browser. ActiveState used to have such plugin for example.

Why do you think there is a _language_ attribute on the _< script>_ tag?

And for some strange reason, the same ones that adore WASM, seem to only be aware of Java as bytecode format and nothing else.

<comment><USER7> > 10 years ago there were ways run Python in the browser. ActiveState used to > have such plugin for example.

I didn't say it was impossible, but it's a massive stretch to compare WASM now and some hack that worked if you had the right plugins installed. Common dude, that's just disingenuous.

 _edit_ : To think of it differently, I'm able to compile any language to run on any modern browser _(which is most these days)_. I can even do it at my work, since we support Chrome. This was never possible before. I waited for _years_ to run Python in browser without hacks or trickery. You're thinking I just oopses, missed that this was all possible before?

Sigh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seems a bit confusing since "Wasmer" is also the name of the umbrella project.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the ping! We decided to use the same name (Wasmer) for the language embeddings as for the standalone runtime as we thought it could be easier for people to find related resources for the runtime. Hopefully is not too confusing! :)

<comment><USER8> The more usual solution would be to use a longer name containing "Wasmer". So, "Wasmer Go Library" or "Wasmer for Go" or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very cool! Could you add "native" to the benchmark so that we get a better idea of the scale?</comment>


Ask HN: Who is a hacker anyways in today's context? - <AUTHOR>

It has almost been 1 year since I starting reading HN and must say I absolutely love it. From time to time, I have read diverse articles on the topic of "hacker".
I am really itching to ask the question here so that the experts can take a shot at it. Is learning a bunch of new technologies enough to make someone a hacker? Does randomly pulling in a git code base and modifying it make one a hacker? And the biggest doubt I have: Does a CS degree automatically qualify someone as a hacker?
Not sure if anyone shares my opinion: I just don't get the same heroic feeling I use to get when I used to hear the word "hacker" a decade ago. Any thoughts on this? Who is a hacker anyways in today's context? <comment><USER2> A deluded person who defines their self worth by having uncommon knowledge of computer technology. There are countless of these people. So, asking the question of who is a hacker is like asking who is a super hero. Why do I say deluded? Most people who fit this category don't understand that the knowledge is only uncommon in their small universe as there are whole industries which built the technologies they 'hack.'

</comment><comment><USER3> Hackers are not defined by a degree, skill or field. Hackers are defined by a thirst for knowledge and a motivation to improve or manipulate the world around them.</comment>


No Secret: the Demand For Mobile Engineers is Absurdly High - <AUTHOR> http://blog.yesgraph.com/secret-ios-engineer/ <comment><USER2> Actually, you could just write something like "I'm looking for a new job" in your linkedin and get tons of such messages (they worth nothing actually).

<comment><AUTHOR> How are they worth nothing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So you can make tweets and get links to job boards.... maybe I can just skip this and use the job boards directly...</comment>


22.214.171.124: The story behind a DNS legend - <AUTHOR> http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles/famous-dns-server/ <comment><USER2> Instead of hunting for a public DNS server to use, you can just run your own. djbdns, for instance, comes "out-of-the-box" with a working cache. This puts some marginal extra load on the DNS roots, and so it's probably not a great idea for Microsoft to build it in as the Windows 7 default, but it's perfectly fine for one-offs.

In some limited testing, I find Google to be faster than 18.104.22.168, both to be faster than OpenDNS (which you shouldn't use, because they suppress NXDOMAIN), a local cache to be competitive with OpenDNS, and all of these options to be faster than AT&T's DNS, which is simply appalling.

(I test with nsping, which is a goofy program I wrote in the mid-'90s to test the resolvers at an ISP I helped run).

<comment><USER3> With OpenDNS you can enable or disable NXDOMAIN: <http://www.opendns.com/support/article/312>

<comment><USER4> but only for a static ip. If you use OpenDNS on your laptop, and go use coffee shop wifi, unless someone else has disabled NXDOMAIN from that IP, you will get their NXDOMAIN landing/redirect page instead.

Which limits its usefulness to desktop systems on a static IP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Your ISP's DNS servers are the best choice for use as your DNS servers._

In theory, yes. Your ISP is obligated to provide them, and they're probably very close on the network. In practice, I've seen shockingly slow DNS on fairly high-speed internet connections. Switching to 220.127.116.11 or 184.108.40.206 on those connections drastically improved web browsing.

<comment><USER6> Another problem is that some ISP DNS servers will redirect you to one of their landing pages when you mis-type a URL.

<comment><USER7> Time Warner occasionally sends me to their stupid "landing" page even if I get the address correct. Their DNS service is definitely sub-par.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've used this for pinging for years when there are dns problems. If dns is working I usually hit google or yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER9> For everyone interested to change their DNS check out <http://code.google.com/p/namebench/> For me 184.108.40.206 and others are faster and work better then the one provided by my ISP, at least it feels that way.

</comment><comment><USER10> There is no way in heck I am giving Google all of my DNS requests on top of email and adsense on every site I visit.

If we aren't supposed to be using 18.104.22.168 what's another option than 18.104.22.168 or opendns?

<comment><USER11> is there anything wrong/dubious with openDNS?

<comment><USER12> yes. see tptacek's comment.

<comment> mike-cardwell You can easily configure OpenDNS to work exactly like a normal resolver.

People always seem to forget this point.

<comment><USER13> I didn't forget that I can login to OpenDNS and fix my settings every time my IP changes, I just think it's ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _John Hawkinson had set aside 4.2/16 ("under the label "Numerology" since he had the wisdom to see that the numbers in themselves could be valuable")._

 _My opinion is that among the reasons it is so well known are that it was designed from the very beginning to be memorable, and they folks setting up this service had the foresight to realize that having it on an easy IP was valuable._

I don't agree with the author's idea that an easy IP address is especially valuable. They're not making any money when technicians use their service because the IP is memorable...

<comment><USER15> I am very very sure Google does use the data coming to their DNS for statistical analysis etc. If it is your intend to see what people visit, DNS is a highly valuable resource and an easy IP might make people use yours.

<comment><USER16> <http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#privacy>

If you are correct, there is a massive conspiracy at Google, where a single whistleblower would be able to cost the company billions of dollars.

<comment><USER15> Not sure what you mean. I mean plainly logging the domain lookups, using the data what the _masses_ do not tainting the privacy of the individual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I found my DNS servers at <http://www.dnsserverlist.org/indexbeta.php?oby=Q_RTT>

</comment><comment><USER18> I have been using 188.8.131.52 for years but did not realise others were until now. It was the only IP I could remember from public dns servers list.

</comment><comment><USER19> I thought I was a nerd, but I must not be, because that was one of the least interesting stories that I've ever read. I want my 3 minutes back.

<comment><USER20> To each their own, I suppose, but I enjoyed this story quite a bit. A bit like the Fast inverse square root story, or the Control-Alt-Delete stories, it's fun to see the origin of interesting and neat things, even if they are somewhat predictable.

I've been using this server as a ping and DNS test for at least 5-6 years, so it's great to hear more about it.

<comment><USER21> Do you have links to any of those other stories? (I'm thinking specifically of the cntrl-alt-del story but anything else interesting would be neat)

<comment><USER20> <http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/>

<http://www.gannettonline.com/e/trends/18001162.html>

<comment><USER21> Great Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Some Lesser Known Truths About Programming - <AUTHOR> http://dotmac.rationalmind.net/2010/08/17/some-lesser-known-truths-about-programming/ <comment><USER2> > A good programmer is ten times more productive than an average programmer. A > great programmer is 20-100 times more productive than the average. This is > not an exaggeration – studies since the 1960′s have consistently shown this.

That's folklore, not fact. The short form of the argument is: the studies are old, not very credible, and based on a notion of "productivity" which is most generously described as vague.

See <http://leanpub.com/leprechauns> (disclosure: I'm the author) for the long form, with a detailed bibliographical investigation of the "10x studies".

The rest of the "truths" in the OP are of a similar caliber: they are more properly called "opinions". A better title would have been "Some opinions about programming that you don't necessarily share". I happen to agree with some of them; but that doesn't make them true.

<comment><USER3> The truth is that the difference is even more extreme. Good programmers are much more than 100 times more productive than average programmers.

Good programmers create features, designs, and implementations which are more elegant, cleaner, more understandable, more robust, less buggy, and much more valuable to the end user.

Consider J. Average Coder. He implements a feature in a typically half-assed way. The feature isn't well thought out, it barely works from a user perspective and has horrible usability. Anyone who doesn't think this is how average coders work has never experienced software developed by average coders. More than that, it's buggy and hacky and it serves as a development time sink, a tar trap for the entire development team. Bugs get reported and because of how messy and convoluted and fragile the code is it takes a lot longer to fix each bug. And in the end the effective productivity of that coder ends up being astoundingly low. Because the end result is a single feature that has taken a tremendous amount of coding and especially bug fixing on his part and on the part of his co-workers. The ratio of total end-user value to total invested dev-hours is incredibly low.

Now compare this with Dudley Code-right. He comes up with not only an excellent feature with high-user impact but he also comes up with a very elegant way to implement it. Boom, it's done, and nearly bug free. What bugs are found are quick to fix because the code is so clean and well put together. The ratio of total end-user value to total invested dev-hours is through the roof in comparison. Not just a factor of 100 different, but factors of thousands different.

There are tons of easy examples out there in the real world. Look at open source projects with tiny dev. teams, like nginx or varnish, and the value of those code bases relative to the effort behind them, then compare that to some random line of business software abomination from the enterprise trenches that has had hundreds of thousands of dev-hours dumped into it.

<comment><USER4> You can create a fictional story to prove anything.

<comment><USER5> And some things you don't have to prove, because you've seen them with your own eyes. Have you ever seen a programmer that is crazily more productive than another? If yes, then you know what we're talking about.

It might not be 10x or 20x --which is hard to measure anyway--, but we've all seen programmers that are far far better than others.

What's crazy to me is why would anyone try to argue otherwise. Isn't the same true for EVERY other field of activity?

There are painters (e.g Picasso) that are crazily more prolific than other painters. There are inventors that are crazily more prolific than other inventors ( _cough_ Tesla _cough_ ). There are athletes that are crazily better than other athletes. Writers. Composers. And so on. On some of those fields (like sports) we even have objective ways to measure how better they are. But in all fields, we know there are geniuses, crazy good guys and average ho-hum dabblers.

So, why exactly, would it be any different in programming?

<comment><USER6> _So, why exactly, would it be any different in programming?_

Sadly, it's not.

Thomas Kinkade was, I believe, _far_ more prolific than Picasso. But I do not want Kinkade-grade developers.

There needs to be some other metric for software development. Figuring out what that should be, and how to accurately measure it, is non-trivial.

<comment><USER5> > _Thomas Kinkade was, I believe, far more prolific than Picasso. But I do not > want Kinkade-grade developers._

I meant "prolific" in the sense of producing lots of GOOD work, not merely churning stuff.

Which for Picasso, it was. If anything, the critics agree (which is as far a metric as you get in the fine arts).

> _There needs to be some other metric for software development. Figuring out > what that should be, and how to accurately measure it, is non-trivial._

Sure, but the "good programmers are X times more productive than bad" (as I see it) is not about producing more code, but about producing more of what a project needs. I.t they are qualitatively more productive, not quantitatively.

Come to think of it, it sounds more of an obvious statement, almost a tautology or truism: "good programmers produce MORE good code than average programmers".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm disappointed that an essay about the writing of less code failed to mention this: you will spend far more time reading your own code than you will writing it: so don't take syntactic shortcuts that obscure meaning.

I only relatively recently grokked this, and it's helped me to stick to best practices and naming conventions when in the past, I'd just throw in the first thing off the top of my head.

</comment><comment><USER8> The last point is the best. I frequently step away from a project and take a shower or go for a walk to think about what I'm doing. Usually the problem is that I'm over complicating things and the answer will come as an "Ah-ha!" moment.

Conversely, I have to do something like read or watch a movie before bed to get my mind off of whatever project I'm working on or else I will lay awake thinking about it.

<comment><USER9> I'm actually starting to find that many times I'm more productive, feel better, and I believe do better work when I do my "thinking" on paper/white board. When I sit down at a computer to do the actual coding, my brain isn't processing a ton of information. It's just using what I've already written down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This blog post seems to be about pigeonholing other people - "John is a bad programmer because he does $x / Mary is good because she does $x". Labeling people doesn't help them. Pointing out problematic behavior doesn't directly lead to solutions. It doesn't tell people how to change their behaviors to remediate the problem.

These generalizations seem too high level to be of any use, anyway. Good programmers want to program, and their interest will carry them up through skill levels. They'll want to learn and improve, and if they can't learn from your workplace you're wasting their time and yours. Bad programmers don't want to program, and should do something else.

<comment><USER11> couldn't agree more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> First and foremost, these are not "lesser known". Most of these have been discussed ad naseum since at least MMM and Peopleware. Second, as others have mentioned, at least the one about some programmers being 20-100 times more productive is far from "truth"; it's highly debatable with data for and against, and if anything is "true", it's that the data is inconclusive.

</comment><comment><USER13> > "Although most software is made by teams, it is not a democratic activity. > Usually, just one person is responsible for the design, and the rest of the > team fills in the details."

This hasn't been the case on any non-trivial project I've been involved in.

However, a defining quality of successful projects I've been involved in is that there is one person driving the overall design and that person runs things closer to a dictatorship than a democracy.

<comment><USER14> > However, a defining quality of successful projects I've been involved in is > that there is one person driving the overall design and that person runs > things closer to a dictatorship than a democracy.

Yeah, that's been my experience too, but I keep running into people who think everything runs better if the whole team decides and everyone gets a say. OK, there's definitely merit in getting input from what one hopes is a bunch of smart people, and it also helps morale for everyone to feel like they're being heard, but at the end of the day I think there really needs to be one or at most a few people who make the final decisions.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a project based book or course on Go for writing web APIs? - <AUTHOR> I am in the process of learning go and i think something like Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial would fit nicely for me right now. I've looked at usegolang.com but i am not sure it has emphasis on API's. Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> I saw this recommended on HN the other day which covers that ground. Have not done it myself so this is a pointer rather than a recommendation: [https://buildsaasappingo.com/](https://buildsaasappingo.com/)

<comment><USER3> Hi, I'm Dominic the author of Build SaaS apps in Go, thank you for sharing the book website. If there's any questions please do not hesitate to ask. Here's a 25% discount direct buy link if that can help.

[https://store.dominicstpierre.com/build-saas-apps-in- go?coup...](https://store.dominicstpierre.com/build-saas-apps-in- go?coupon=TWITRLIMITED25)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In [https://www.manning.com/books/go-web- programming](https://www.manning.com/books/go-web-programming), they start with server-side rendered views and then dedicate the whole last part of the book to web services. It's pretty good!

<comment><USER5> At first I thought book was in Slovenian or something, until I realized there was some DOM level decryption happening. I simultaneously wanted to open it up to figure out how it worked and close the page because it was so broken and counter to the supposedly simple idea of displaying words on a page that it infuriated me.

I hope the book is good, but I guess I'll never know.

<comment><USER6> What do you mean you'll never know? Your parent comment said it was pretty good. A single data point is not authoritative, but it shows a pretty solid trend toward "pretty good."

You already know the book is pretty good, you just wanted to complain about DRM, I suspect. I hope that's not the case.

<comment><USER7> Eating rotten carrots is pretty good.

A single data point is not authoritative, but my comment shows a pretty solid trend toward "pretty good." I expect you'll run out to go find some rotten carrots to eat now?

<comment><USER6> It's funny that you think that reading a book of unknown quality and eating a rotten carrot, which is guaranteed to be rotten, are comfortable in any way whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm working through Let's Go! by Alex Edwards right now, it's not specifically focussed on APIs but the book guides you through building a web application in Go. My experience so far has been very positive.

[https://lets-go.alexedwards.net/](https://lets-go.alexedwards.net/)

<comment><USER9> well the structure is so so and everything is in package main in every file in every project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you're coming from Ruby, you might like Gin[0].

I'd also recommend learning to write web APIs with the standard library so you know the primitives. Writing Web Applications[1] on golang.org covers the basics.

[0] [https://github.com/gin-gonic/gin](https://github.com/gin-gonic/gin)

[1] [https://golang.org/doc/articles/wiki](https://golang.org/doc/articles/wiki)

<comment><USER11> I've had a bad experience with Gin and when asking about alternatives in a local Go meetup I was given the advice to use [https://github.com/go- chi/chi](https://github.com/go-chi/chi) or gorilla/mux.

<comment><USER12> Could you go into more detail about this? I'm using Gin currently and would like to avoid any potential landmines if possible.

<comment><USER13> I've used Gin for several small to medium projects without too much difficulty. I think Gin is a good way to learn quickly since its ecosystem introduces you to a lot of the pieces you will need. Personally, I don't do enough web development to grow out of it, since my web related projects are not a primary focus.

One thing to note is that Gin's Context is not the standard context.Context, which some find problematic. Most (vocal?) Gophers prefer sticking with the standard library and Gorilla.

<comment><USER10> It's true that Gin's Context is different from context.Context, but I don't see how that's inherently problematic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like Asta Xie's "Build Web Application with Golang" GitBook: [https://astaxie.gitbooks.io/build-web-application-with- golan...](https://astaxie.gitbooks.io/build-web-application-with-golang/en/)

(Repo: [https://github.com/astaxie/build-web-application-with- golang](https://github.com/astaxie/build-web-application-with-golang))

</comment><comment><USER15> [https://github.com/quii/learn-go-with-tests](https://github.com/quii/learn- go-with-tests) is a great resource. It has some relevant sections to writing Web APIs.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not a tutorial but here's a project that goes over the architecture of building one using best practices. You may not need everything in it (so take from it what you will), but it should be helpful:

[https://github.com/ardanlabs/service](https://github.com/ardanlabs/service)

</comment><comment><USER17> I got an email about this book the other day: [https://gumroad.com/l/kjHSa](https://gumroad.com/l/kjHSa)

From the writer of this blog: [https://www.thepolyglotdeveloper.com/](https://www.thepolyglotdeveloper.com/)

</comment><comment><USER18> [https://gowebexamples.com/](https://gowebexamples.com/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Excellent thread! Thanks all. Also in the process of getting GOing on Go. >:) (Yes, I am a geeky pun guy)

</comment><comment><USER11> Haven't read through it myself, but I think it's noteworthy and it wasn't mentioned here yet:

[https://astaxie.gitbooks.io/build-web-application-with- golan...](https://astaxie.gitbooks.io/build-web-application-with-golang/en/)

<comment><USER20> Second this, I've used this as a resource for ramping up medium-experience web developers in Go. It's great because it sticks to the `net/http` basics, and is fairly concise and blunt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you really want to get a good understanding of Go and web, I would work through building your own router see:

[https://vluxe.io/golang-router.html](https://vluxe.io/golang-router.html)

For an example</comment>


Why does each drive have its own current directory? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2010/10/11/10073890.aspx

<comment><USER2> According to the linked article, in order to understand Windows' behavior vis- a-vis drive letters and subdirectories, one must first:

> Set the wayback machine to DOS 1.0.

About the problems modern Windows versions create for us, no more revealing sentence was ever penned.</comment>


300+ Arrested at 'Democracy Spring' Sit-In at US Capitol - <AUTHOR> https://www.rt.com/usa/339192-democracy-spring-protest-capitol/ <comment><USER2> Related website: [http://www.democracyspring.org](http://www.democracyspring.org)

</comment><comment><USER3> If they could only stick to being encased in freedom cages, they could peaceably protest miles away from the Capitol in freedom zones.</comment>


Google agrees to €1bn settlement with French tax authorities - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/658170a8-d576-11e9-a0bd-ab8ec6435630 <comment><AUTHOR> > The deal includes a €500m fine to bring to an end an investigation by the > National Finance Ministry and a $465m tax adjustment.</comment>


Quasi-War - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-War <comment><USER2> >"Adams took sudden and unexpected action, rejecting the anti-French hawks in his own party and offering peace to France."

Adams considered the peace he established with France as the greatest accomplishment of his Presidency, to the point of wanting his actions in averting an all out war commemorated on his gravestone.</comment>


With Trains Like Schwebebahn, No Wonder Germans Love Public Transit - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/02/germany-public-transit-schwebebahn-wuppertal-trains/581815/ <comment><USER2> The OP is right about the Disneyland connection; it's more than a resemblance.

The Wuppertal train was the inspiration for Murel Goodell's _Trailblazer,_ the first commercial monorail in the United States and the first modern monorail anywhere. Instead of steel wheels and rails, Goodell used rubber tires on a concrete beam.

His first design was suspended like the Schwebebahn, but his investor, Axel Lennart Wenner-Gren preferred a straddle-beam type where the train sits atop the rail instead of underneath it. Goodell's second generation design is what was installed at Disneyland (and Las Vegas, and Tokyo, and China, etc.). It was named ALWEG as an acronym of the investor's name.

I'm in the process of building the Goodell Monorail Museum website to lay out this history in more detail with some terrific archival documents and photos that haven't been seen in 50 years.</comment>


Keymaster.js: micro-library to add keyboard shortcuts  - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/madrobby/keymaster#readme

<comment><USER2> I've been using shortcut.js for keyboard shortcuts. Works great.

<http://www.openjs.com/scripts/events/keyboard_shortcuts/>

<comment><USER3> Cool. How would you compare that to keymaster.js?

<comment><USER2> Roughly, keymaster.js is focused on being small, while shortcut.js has been through a few iterations and is focused on being feature-rich. But they are both fairly small and they have many of the same features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a question about the way keyboard shortcuts are implemented: are the keys mostly chosen for their value or their position?

For example (and please correct me if I'm mistaken), "Copy" is "C" because it's the first letter, and "X" is "Cut" because it looks like scissors. But "V" was chosen because it's next to the two others, despite not hinting at "Paste" at all.

The reason I come up with that question is that I use a French keyboard (AZERTY) which modifies a dozen of key positions, and it makes some shortcuts hard to execute. Sometimes, they're even _impossible_ to execute. For example, the numbers row needs SHIFT to type a number. In QWERTY, to get a "1" you just type "1" but on AZERTY you type "SHIFT+&".

I'm sure other international keyboard layouts have the same issue and wondered how those who implement those shortcuts deal with that.

<comment> jarek-foksa When you attach 'keypress' event it will give char code which can be easily converted to sign, e.g.:

        document.addEventListener('keypress', function(event) {
          sign = String.fromCharCode(event.charCode);

          if (sign === 'A') {
            console.log('Pressed shift+a');
          }
          else if (sign === 'c' && event.ctrlKey) {
            console.log('Pressed ctrl+c');
          }
        });

I have tested this technique with several layouts (azerty, dvorak, bepo) and it seems to be working fine. For special keys such as enter, esc or backspace you will have to listen for 'keydown' event instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Someone should make a JS framework to easily integrate 'Next page' / 'previous page' and map it to a universal keyboard shortcut that isn't used for other things.

It's not as easy as it should be to go from page to page on some sites and would be cool if there was a way to do it via the keyboard!

<comment><USER6> It's already part of HTML - [http://diveintoaccessibility.info/day_15_defining_keyboard_s...](http://diveintoaccessibility.info/day_15_defining_keyboard_shortcuts.html)

<comment><USER7> I don't think the liks is about the OP says (e.g next page/prev page mapped to arrows, as plenty of sites do).

Noticeably, there is no access key in the prev/next links in diveintoaccessibility :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We are using it without complaints so far. We just changed one line (#62) so it would work inside inputs and textareas. It's just 150 lines of code, so there's no reason not to read the source before using it!

</comment><comment><USER9> Could you use this for controls in a javascript game? :-) Thanks. I am starting to make games, and want to use keyboard keys now.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for posting. The source code is going to help me improve a key-powered project I am working on.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was actually thinking about how to do keyboard shortcuts today. I'm glad I came across this.

</comment><comment><USER12> There are no shortcuts, only Zuul?

I approve of this project name. :D

<comment><USER13> Just don't pair it up with something called gatekeeper.js

</comment></comment><comment> k-a-r Very cool, H5F for starter. Thanks for posting this.

</comment><comment><USER14> super cool - thanks for posting!</comment>


The Mesmerizing Math of a Wind Turbine on Fire - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/08/mesmerizing-math-wind-turbine-fire <comment><USER3> I thought the post perhaps was this unbelievable flaming UFO...

[https://m.imgur.com/dm2o6h5](https://m.imgur.com/dm2o6h5)

(Starts slow, but worth watching past the initial smoke.)

<comment><USER4> Here's a video full of these! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRQaXDafs_Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRQaXDafs_Y)

<comment><USER5> awesome! a bit like how power station boilers used to be lit.. "light blue touch paper and retreat in haste"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That has a longer story attached to it, another windmill in the background is _also_ on fire. I suspect a fault in the grid coupling causing overvoltage (which would cause the windmill to start acting as a motor, in which case it could easily exceed it's designed maximum RPM, and with the air braking it a fire is pretty much inevitable in that situation, the alternator windings are not made for that situation).

<comment> josh-wrale Isn't it possible that whatever _might be_ keeping the foreground turbine from disengaging could also affect the other turbine? Factory defect?

<comment><USER6> Overvoltage can weld relay contacts together when the relay is opened, even with AC the spark would be considerable. I'm sure that the wreckage was studied extensively to figure out what exactly could have been done to prevent this from happening.

It's one thing to have to design for fickle winds, it's quite another to _also_ have to design for a fickle grid!

Windmills tend to have a destabilizing effect on a grid, if the grid is unable to sink all the power pushed into it the voltage will rise.

Even so, you'd wonder just how much of a rise would be required to cause a catastrophe like this.

Those people filming this are braver than I would have been in the same situation, a mill considerable smaller than this one failed on the island where I lived and the blade was found the next spring. It was embedded several feet down in the soil and about a mile away from the base of the mill!

Dying windmills are dangerous, and to stand there to film it took a lot of courage.

<comment><USER7> > Dying windmills are dangerous, and to stand there to film it took a lot of > courage

Or they were unaware of the dangers and wanted to shoot a cool video.

<comment><USER6> The award for the coolest video is called 'Darwin Award'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very interesting video, but given this title I was expecting far more interesting math than a simple helix.

</comment><comment><USER9> that's one of the most frustrating videos ever filmed. what the hell, cameraman.

<comment><USER10> what's so frustrating about it?

<comment><USER11> and at one of the most amazing moments - when the blades fly away - <USER2> cameraman points away and stays away.

<comment><USER6> That's because he has just had his wits scared out of him. Being that close to a windmill that comes apart is super stupid and must have caused him/her to think 'what the hell am I doing here?' at the moment it came apart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> josh-wrale Looks like the smoke helix is forming coils slower than rate at which the turbine is rotating. Perhaps some drag on the smoke makes it this way.. Or maybe it's just an illusion.

<comment><USER6> You are spot on, that is more confirmation for my suspicion of overvoltage. The power _drives_ the windmill, so the machine is rotating faster than the wind it generates due to slippage.

Normally it would be the other way around, the wind would pass through the turbine faster than it could move (Betz' law, in both cases but for the opposite reason, just like it is impossible to extract all the power in the wind due the air then having to 'pool' around the windmill you can't transfer power with 100% efficiency from the rotor to the air either, you'd create such overpressure behind the windmill that some of that air would have to move back to the front of the rotor. This stuff is all not-so-intuitive and the video is actually (accidentally) a _really_ nice illustration of Betz' law at work.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm confused. If the fire is in the center, why only one of the blades release smoke?

</comment><comment><USER13> Something like three fail-safe systems have failed or weren't installed in this case.

All to generate a bit of neat smoke?

</comment><comment><USER14> Is it possible to use Vpython for Computational Fluid Dynamics? I'm interested in making an animation of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability.

<comment><USER15> You could use it for visualization. With the actual solution computation, you'd probably want to use numpy/scipy.</comment></comment>


A Few Bad Apples - <AUTHOR> https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2019/10/a-few-bad-apples.html <comment><USER2> I already hated the apple tv update that put the completely pointless tv app on the home button. I'm sure that app is useful for some but in my country it's pretty much just what's also in itunes.

</comment><comment><USER3> I watched Commando and RoboCop as a kid, and was extremely overjoyed with them! John Wick would probably make me happy too, if it was around at that time.

</comment><comment><USER4> YouTube played some "It 2" ads for my kid while he was watching paw patrol. I'm about 30% annoyed by technical embarrassments by big tech companies, 70% reminded why I'm always closely monitoring his screen usage.

I can't rely on the competence of any of these large companies. They're chock full of mediocrity and will get these things wrong often.

</comment><comment><USER5> I love when my watch tells me to go out for a walk at 11:30 at night in the middle of a thunderstorm.</comment>


Issa: Flawed SOPA Bill Not Headed to House Floor - <AUTHOR> http://oversight.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1558&Itemid=29

<comment><USER2> Apparently the House Oversight Committee runs on Joomla.</comment>


A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO FONT LOADING STRATEGIES - <AUTHOR> https://www.zachleat.com/web/comprehensive-webfonts/ <comment><USER2> EXCELLENT ARTICLE, THANK YOU FOR POSTING THIS.</comment>


An American banker, a Saudi billionaire, and a financial implosion - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/the-kings-of-the-desert

<comment><USER2> Fun fact, the credit bureau problem is a real thing in the GCC.

So in states like Qatar, many people (I think the majority local citizens) caused enough problems the Central Bank has put many limitations on when people can take out loans. Friends who have long standing here indicate to me certain families still have banks look the other way, as it risky to dare check their eligibility. Many people here take out loans, get into arrears, and then go to court and keep negotiating down the debt owed arguing personal problems (I have lots of kids and mouths to feed and business is bad), and keep paying a few payments over the restructured agreement to ignore it again, go back to court, and keep negotiating the amount owed down. Not sure true this is, but I am told for many locals running business this is common knowledge. Ironically, as an expat, the restrictions got very tight because people would just flee, and now you can only leave the country for good once you have a no objection letter, meaning no bank over the course of a week can present you owe debt. This can get nasty, like the unemployed Irish dude in the neighboring UAE who lives in his car because he had nowhere to stay, no job, and selling his car would not even get him out of debt.

Granted, locals and expats alike are incredibly irresponsible, but the lack of credit bureau and honest reporting makes me wonder what America was like in the "good old old days" where creds got you what you wanted.

</comment><comment><USER3> I lived in Khobar, Sanea spent like absolute crazy. Family and friends always joked about how it looked like a 7 star hotel instead of a hospital. They bought several residential compounds, including one I formally lived in. It always seemed like something was wrong, while the hospital was a fairly crowded one, there was no way it was actually turning a profit. The other stuff about the banking came as news to me though. Really interesting read.

Edit: To add on to this, the Gosaibis were a well respected name, they have since been driven AFAIK to the brink of bankruptcy, as the article mentioned they sold off their PepsiCo. factory and some of their other assets as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> There is really interesting yet somehow disturbing trend that a lot of these foreign scams use a westerner to provide a feel of honesty and legitimacy.

I read a story before that during the massacre of Rwanda the dominant faction hired a Belgian and made him the biggest radio star in Rwanda. His job was to tell Rwandan Hutus that it was ok to murder Tutsis. Somehow the Hutus felt better if these instructions came from a European.

</comment><comment><USER5> I recognise Sanea's story from all the spam about it that I received. Searching in my inbox reveals 6 of them in lists mostly about programming languages.

I wonder if they're what inspired Nicholas Schmidle to write about this.

</comment><comment><USER6> Somehow I thought this was going to be a walk-into-a-bar joke, like

An American banker, a Saudi billionaire, and a financial implosion walk into a bar. Bartender takes one look at the implosion and says "You suck. I'm not serving you." Banker says, "Don't worry, he'll be gone in a sec but we're regulars."</comment>


This Week in Servo 43 (submitted via Servo itself) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.servo.org/2015/11/30/twis-43/ <comment><USER2> The killer feature in this week's newsletter is an image of using Servo itself to post this link to HN :-)

<comment><USER3> I can appreciate the honesty of that video.

<comment><USER4> This bug (input field doesn't scroll automatically, but spills its text into the surrounding elements) is a good demonstration of just how many, many small details you have take care of when implementing a browser engine.

A really monumental task. The servo devs have my respect!

<comment><USER5> Maybe I'm missing something hugely obvious, but shouldn't the input field be rendered using a native control which would preemptively eliminate that bug and reduce the need for rewriting code that's been written countless times before?

<comment><USER6> > shouldn't the input field be rendered using a native control which would > preemptively eliminate that bug and reduce the need for rewriting code > that's been written countless times before?

Broadly speaking, native controls don't like being composited into OpenGL scenes (which are necessary for things like 3D transforms).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> (Copying my comment here from Reddit /r/rust:)

Just to repeat, because this was somewhat buried in the article: Servo is now a multiprocess browser, using the gaol crate for sandboxing. This adds (a) an extra layer of defense against remote code execution vulnerabilities beyond that which the Rust safety features provide; (b) a safety net in case Servo code is tricked into performing insecure actions.

There are still plenty of bugs to shake out, but this is a major milestone in the project.

</comment><comment><USER7> You mentioned the URL-parsing macro twice.

Congrats to the whole team!</comment>


SuchFlex Public Beta now accepting new users - <AUTHOR> https://www.suchflex.com <comment><USER2> If this is your site Ivanzone, looks like there is an issue with your ssl cert</comment>


An experiment in combining Clojure and Terracotta - <AUTHOR> http://paul.stadig.name/2009/02/clojure-terracotta-yeah-baby.html

<comment><USER2> I think this is great. It's time we should shift from traditional ORM mapping to something less painful.</comment>


Rust's new documentation generator: 95% done - <AUTHOR> https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-August/005219.html <comment><USER2> I want to point out that this entire project was conceived and implemented by members of the Rust community. For such a young language, I'm elated at the quality of our community contributions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Rust looks very interesting to me, but seems to be in in a state of high flux. Does anyone have experience with sustained work in the language? How often are you hurt by the rate of change?

<comment><USER4> It's not so much the rate of change, but maybe just how much stuff is missing that has to be supplemented by bringing in C libraries, which is totally OK. Rust is going to take a long time to mature, much longer than Go for example, because the project is maybe more ambitious and doesn't have a Rob Pike or a Brad Fitzgerald supporting it and a giant Google behind it. The risk is that it could flounder without critical support, but Mozilla seems to be committed to it. I hope it does well.

<comment><USER5> It was also announced at an earlier part of the maturation cycle than Go was, due to Mozilla's 'everything is all open source all the time' nature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks great, but it should be easier to get back to the front page [http://seld.be/rustdoc/master/index.html](http://seld.be/rustdoc/master/index.html)

I had to look at all links (tutorial, manual, documentation, ...) and guess which is the right one.

<comment><USER7> Good point. The logo should definitely be clickable, and the menu items clarified a bit. The navigation was sort of in a tentative state until now since it isn't even integrated in the rust-lang.org website yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congratulations on having it be usable on an iOS machine straight out of the gate. This is something that still eludes scaladoc, for example.

<comment><USER7> Thanks I guess, but I wouldn't call it "working" just yet :)

It does render, but it seems like the search engine initialization is blocking for quite a while on iPhones, and in portrait mode it could use some more responsiveness.

Did you try it on an iPad or what device exactly?

<comment><USER8> It was my iPhone (5) that I tried it on, but I confess that I didn't try the search. I was just happy to be able to navigate and read. Scaladoc has much bigger sins than blocking the event loop for a while: it shows you the top fragment of any given page and won't let you scroll down to see the rest.

Anyway, thank you for your work here. If you ever want me to be your iOS guinea pig (phone or tablet) let me know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing that hurts functionality discoverability a bit is that methods are hidden within traits. If it can be done without too much cluttering, it would be nice for the module overview to list the functions within the traits (without any details, e.g. type).

For example, if I am looking for the `insert` method for a vector, I sort of have to understand something about the inner workings of `std::vec` to know that I need to look within `std::vec::OwnedVector` rather than, say, `std::vec::MutableVector`.

<comment><USER10> This is unfortunate, but it mostly applies to built-in types (since they don't have a declaration anywhere). Types that are defined entirely in libraries do have their trait implementations explicitly listed, e.g. [http://seld.be/rustdoc/master/extra/dlist/struct.DList.html#...](http://seld.be/rustdoc/master/extra/dlist/struct.DList.html#implementations)

<comment><USER9> Ah. Maybe a the built-in types could have special cases built into the doc generator?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That is gorgeous and a huge step up in readability over the previous docs (and most others that I see, honestly). Amazing work, everyone involved.

</comment><comment><USER12> The next step is a formatter like gofmt. I really hope more languages adopt something like gofmt over normal linters.

<comment><USER13> Wouldn't 'indent' be the closer relative, not 'lint'?

<comment><AUTHOR> Besides, rustc already does an impressive amount of linting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would love to see the docs have a page with a consolidated list of all the traits declared in the std and extra libraries. Library developers could more easily discover additional traits they might be able to support on new libraries without browsing through every section. Release notes could highlight new traits too.

</comment><comment><USER15> If only Rust had same implicit interfaces and visibility (first uppercase/lowercase letter) as Go...

<comment><USER16> We can't have implicit interfaces because they're incompatible with adding methods to types that you don't own (for example, adding methods to builtin types like int). Having this functionality is very important for our generics to work.

Using case for visibility is convenient but it can cause problems when you change a method from public to private or vice versa; that's why it's not done in Rust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> judging by the updates on the mailing list, @cmr has been working hard at this. Congrats!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, but Seldaek (Jordi) has been doing all the stuff with the frontend, which is where most of praise deserves to go IMO</comment></comment>


North Korea Owes Sweden €300m for 1000 Volvos It Stole 40 Years Ago - <AUTHOR> http://europe.newsweek.com/north-korea-owes-sweden-eu300m-1000-volvos-stole-40-years-ago-still-using-267043?rm=eu <comment><USER2> 1000 Volvo's for 300 million, that's 300,000 euro per Volvo. Granted, the article says 'adjusted for interest and inflation'. But that seems wrong, if you had the choice in the 70's to buy a Volvo but instead you put the money on the bank, you would have only the accumulated interest by now, not anything else to offset the inflation.

Calculating backwards with an average 4% interest rate for 45 years gives an original price of about 55,000 euro in 1971. For that money you could buy a villa in Sweden around then.

<comment><USER3> The Swedish Government are as good as professional loan-sharks at getting back what they are due, and sometime using similar tactics.

Case in point, my country was paid $28 million in 1929 by the Swedish Government (or a specific Swedish company, not sure) so that the Swedes would take over control over the entire matches market in Romania, becoming a monopolist, in fact. This by itself is no thing to brag home about, but that's how capitalism works.

20 years later a new regime is installed, the communists, who don't have a pretty view on capitalism much less so on monopolistic practices in which they are not the main actors, so they decide to nationalize the Romanian matches industry from under the Swedes' control.

Come 1989 and the fall of Communism the Swedes become active again and now ask us for $800 million as compensation, never mind that most probably the initial investment had most certainly paid by itself in those 20 years in which it had monopolistic control over a quite big market. To make sure that they get their money back a Swedish official even bribes one of our economy ministers with around $600,000 (for which said Swedish official had some issues at home, probably nothing came out of it), and it all got settled down for "only" $120 million in 2003.

This only happens because countries like Sweden have a disproportionate influence on the world stage. We (Romania) also got swindled out of $1 billion by Saddam's Iraq, the cost of us selling things and services to them in the 1980s. After Saddam fell the Iraqi Government and its babysitters (the US) never felt the urgency of paying us back, our Government also closed their eyes because the US is "actively protecting us against the bad Russian Bear from the East", plus, if a country like Romania would ask for such a big sum of money back you can be pretty sure that no-one in the Western media would pick the story up like it happened in Sweden's case.

<comment><USER4> Come on, there were lots of cases in Eastern Europe where previous owners wanted compensation for property that was stolen by the communists. (This gets extra weight when demands come from inside the EU when the country wants to join the EU, of course.)

Not saying the official Swedish policies aren't disgusting in their shameless double standards, of course.

References to that bribe would be interesting for me, to put on FB for my Swedish friends? (I'm Swedish and have been quite a bit in Romania. This is the first time I hear about it. I don't doubt you, news like that don't really show up in Swedish media -- see previous paragraph.)

I should add -- if you want to talk compensation, talk about how the whole western Europe left the eastern Europe to rot as slaves for generations. :-(

Edit: After the 1980s, the US and Saddam weren't on the best of terms. :-)

Edit 2: lostlogin is correct. Forget previous Edit please, I read sloppily. The comment talks about after 2003, not after the 1980s.

<comment><USER5> > if you want to talk compensation, talk about how the whole western Europe > left the eastern Europe to rot as slaves for generations.

You've got that wrong, western European countries have no responsibility to do anything for eastern Europeans aside from being respectful partners.

It is the eastern Europeans responsibility to improve their own societies if they want to.

Astonishing how anyone could even claim victimhood about that.

<comment><USER4> The point is -- Eastern Europe was in practice left under occupation by one of history's worst dictators as part of signing the peace after the 2nd world war.

It is shocking, when you read up on the subject and see how many percent of the population ended up in horrible jails in the "less" bad places like Romania.

And yeah, you don't risk global nuclear war over other people's liberty. (A good reason why places like Iran and North Korea want to go nuclear.)

<comment><USER5> No, no one "left" someone under occupation, it wasn't the decision to make for the West in the first place. The responsibility for the US is primarily for what happens in the US, the same is true for the UK and Romania.

Romanians ran the Gestapo like security apparatus called "Securitate", Romanians ran the Romanian army and Romanians ran the Romanian government. Whatever happened in Romania is primarily the fault of Romanians. Don't tell me how I should have fought or even died for your freedom, better ask yourself why your people didn't do it.

There are examples of other countries (like Socialist Yugoslavia) that fought for their freedom against the Nazis, and who then stayed independent from the Soviets. (even though Stalin threatened to invade)

When the Nazis came the Romanians went along with them and submitted (not only that, but they also supplied hundreds of thousands of soldiers), when the Soviets came the Romanians went along with them and submitted. (again supplied soldiers to fight for their cause)

What you are essentially doing by calling them victims is asking for some higher authority that should make things right that you don't want to fight for yourself. Maybe some United Nations Socialist world government? I can tell you with absolute certainty that we are not going to have any of that. Maybe you will though, it is your own choice. But don't blame us when it doesn't work out the way you hoped.

<comment><USER4> In principle I agree for the 1940s, a pan European brotherhood was probably not so important at the time. [Edit: And when they saw what they had done, it was a MAD world...]

But Yugoslavia was a special case, there the new government didn't come in, riding with an occupying tank army that broke the back of the population with hunger, Siberia and torture.

Hungary 51, Czechoslovakia 68, the forest brothers of the Balkans... They did try. Hard. (Edit: Note -- when it was clear that Soviet tanks wouldn't roll in over the borders any more, the dictators went out quickly.)

Democracies _should_ try to spread the liberty. It is the modern missionary statement. If nothing else, it is good for everyone.

Edit: Where I would put the disagreement: History shows that a brutal enough junta _can_ keep a population down for generations. 1984, with history as a foot stomping in a face. (The junta probably needs control over the information for that to work.) So a population have an impossible time freeing itself from a pack of criminals without external help. And it is the moral duty for free societies to aid in this. (I hate idealism. But this is one I can stand for.)

<comment><USER5> I'm not in any brotherhood, I'm not a missionary and I'm not waging some kind of Jihad to spread my ideology in the world.

You seem to not recognise that freedom cannot be obtained without self responsibility as you are constantly seeking to minimize the responsibility that people had for their own bad decisions and the bad outcomes that resulted from it.

<comment><USER4> Soviet literally sent most of a troublesome population (and large parts of others) to Siberia. After 1945, a few percent in prison with torture was mild. Troublesome countries/populations could be _permanently_ cured.

You really write I " _minimize the responsibility that people had for their own bad decisions_ " \-- when I note that the populations knew that if they rocked the boat it would end with mass deportations to Gulag and/or genocide? (In many cases -- again!)

Seriously... Enough.

Edit: A large fraction of Lithuania did try and paid the price. Deportations and political prisoners in Gulags was 15+% of the population of around 2 millions in total then (see Demographics_of_Lithuania on wikipedia). The point was made that Soviet had no problem continuing up to 100%. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Lithu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Lithuania)

<comment><USER5> It is one thing what I personally dislike (for example what happened in Romania) and what I'm vocal against (Communism, Socialism) and what my country is responsible to fight for. (especially if the adversary was the Soviet Union)

You are not going to convince me that the West is responsible for what happened in Romania unless you prove that the West forced you into Communism and actively helped to keep this Gulag system running.

The only case you seem to make is that countries like Romania and Lithuania are no real sovereign nations because they are too weak. Am I right? What's your suggestion to solve this? You submit to someone else who is not the Soviet Union? Or you hope you'll find someone who will risk his safety for you for free?

<comment><USER4> 1\. I am not Romanian, be careful with personal details in personal attacks.

2\. Most of the world's countries will be weaker than some neighbour.

USA have not gotten enough credit, I'll agree with that, but I'll also dismiss you by hoping that you're a troll.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a 20-year-old swedish car that I wouldn't mind keeping in mint condition for another twenty years. But how do I do that (while still keeping it in service)? Rust in particular seems to be a big killer. It doesn't help that the manufacturer is no longer around and spares are likely to become hard to obtain. Did the North Koreans buy spares for their Volvos?

<comment><USER7> They have total access to a lot of industrial equipment to create proper parts replacements in case they need it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ah, the power of compounding.

</comment><comment><USER9> (2014)

It's probably more now!

</comment><comment><USER10> NK seems to have a thing for MB, exhibit A - Kaengsaeng 88:

[http://www.caranddriver.com/features/cars-from-north- korea-f...](http://www.caranddriver.com/features/cars-from-north-korea- features)

</comment><comment><USER11> Communism always liked volvo. East german officials also had volvo's while their people was waiting 10 years for a Trabant.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Then the Swedes nuked everybody." \-- Now we know how it comes about!

<comment><USER13> Interesting, and a little scary: Sweden did actually have a nuclear weapons program during 50s and 60s.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What about statute of limitations?

<comment><USER15> What statute of limitations?

<comment><USER16> Unacknowledged debts expire in most jurisdictions

<comment><USER15> Huh? No they don't, that'd be an easy way to get rid of debt - just ignore it!

<comment><USER17> They do in the UK. If you don't acknowledge a debt for 6 years, and during that 6 years the creditor doesn't take legal action against you, the debt becomes unenforceable - statute barred debt is the technical term.

The debt still exists, they can still harass you about it, but you cannot be taken to court and made to pay.

Now, in most cases, that doesn't happen that frequently, as most creditors would take you to court well before the 6 years are up.

<comment><USER15> Sure if the creditor doesn't take action. The Swedes have been taking action for decades.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>