Deno – A secure TypeScript runtime on V8 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/denoland/deno <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17183241](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17183241)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an excellent hindsight-2020 project, and the concept is overall an improvement on Node, but I'm afraid the ship has sailed and Node's momentum is too high to stop. Not that mainstream usage was ever its goal, it was basically a proof of concept for Ryan Dahl to demonstrate how he would do things differently if he could start over, and that yes, it would be demonstrably better than Node. On one hand I wish TypeScript got more love, but on the other hand its inherent unsoundness kind of makes me want something like ReasonML[1] to win out in the long term instead.

[1] [https://reasonml.github.io/](https://reasonml.github.io/)

<comment><USER4> What's unsound about TypeScript? I'm just learning it as we use it a lot at work

<comment><USER3> A lot of it is described in [https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/type- compatibil...](https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/type- compatibility.html)

More examples are on [https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/FAQ](https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/FAQ)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Ryan Dahl is fixing his Node.js design regrets with Deno"

[https://jaxenter.com/ryan-dahl-fixing-node- deno-146190.html](https://jaxenter.com/ryan-dahl-fixing-node-deno-146190.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Worth watching "10 Things I Regret About Node.js": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA)

<comment><USER3> And the slides: [http://tinyclouds.org/jsconf2018.pdf](http://tinyclouds.org/jsconf2018.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7>
        import { test } from "https://firstname.lastname@example.com/testing.ts"

Won't this get old really quickly? Most of my Javascript files start with 3-4 imports of the form `import React from "react"`, `import { sortBy } from "lodash"`. Having to type out the full path/version for those imports feels like a step backwards in usability, and makes it more likely that I'll end up with mismatched versions of dependencies.

<comment><USER8> Not a problem if the version part is excluded. Golang uses similar imports(think all the github.com/user/package) and seems fine.

But this could lead to a mess, as different files may end up using different version of same package.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Aims to support top-level await.

As a node developer: yum.

<comment><USER5> top level await is not important.

The easiest solution to this is just put one single line of code at the top of your application, then you can have as many awaits as you like under that.

<comment><USER9> It's more complex than just adding an IIFE, which is why Ryan mentioned it. You can't await an import, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why not a secure runtime on Golang instead? just curious since I saw in another article here today that the author of Deno(also the creator of nodejs) prefers Go for server stuff.

Leveraging JS popularity is one reason I can think of.

<comment><USER11> It seems like they've chosen Rust for the backend. This is a great fit in terms of preventing data races and having a no-GC performance profile.

<comment><USER12> JavaScript is garbage-collected. They are using Rust to avoid having two garbage collectors.</comment></comment></comment>


Investment Firm Expects AWS Will Hit $20 Billion In Revenues By 2020 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/14/investment-firms-predict-aws-will-do-as-much-as-20-billion-in-revenues-by-2020-draining-it/ <comment><USER2> A lot of people are saying the projecting out to 2020 is a ridiculous idea in fast moving industries like tech. But there's already a cliche that when AWS has an outage half of your favourite sites go down, and there's a reason for that - there is NO serious alternative to the AWS platform. They're years ahead of the little competition they have; no single other system does half of the things that AWS can. The scale of the engineering effort required to compete with AWS is enormous, and no-one's really trying it (except for components, like CDNs or S3 substitutes).

So I don't think it's that ridiculous - I can imagine Amazon one day being "that company that runs the internet, and also sells stuff".

<comment><USER3> Who would you say are the main AWS competitors today (at least in part)?

This isn't my specialty, but I suppose the list includes Microsoft's Windows Azure and the Google Cloud Platform. There are some open source efforts to watch as well, including OpenStack (backed by Rackspace and others). No doubt I've missed some.

There's plenty of time for those competitors to catch up to AWS by 2020.

<comment><USER4> >> There's plenty of time for those competitors to catch up to AWS by 2020.

Very true, but this fails to take into account that Amazon will not stay stagnant till 2020 for competitors to catch up.

Because Amazon already have a healthy majority of the users/marketshare, they are perhaps better positioned to understand and innovate upon the future needs of these customers, and keep building their product offerings by anticipating where the "puck is going to be."

With that said, nothing is set in stone, so competitors might as well overtake AWS by 2020, but if I had to bet my money, I'd bet it on Amazon.

<comment><USER5> Having majority of the marketshare in the marketplace is hardly the best breeding ground for innovation. That is when companies usually stagnate and entrench themselves.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you assessment, but as long as Jeff Bezos is able and leading the company, I am willing to bet on Amazon's dominance in it's core markets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of > course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet > whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus > or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and > eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like > unsolicited peer bonuses...

[https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesv...](https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

<comment><USER7> Since the writing of this post, AMZN has gone up ~150%.

<comment><USER8> The relationship between share price and Amazon financial results has always been a mystery to me. As are Apples.

<comment><USER9> Amazon's is based on an assumption that one day it will start to take profits, and big ones at that. Expanding into a service sector where it could have large profit margins (selling eBooks is another area) is integral to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Predicting tech more than 2-3 years out is like predicting the weather 10 days out.

<comment><USER11> Predicting the weather is easier than that... weather is cyclical.

<comment><USER12> Not in my part of the world! (Ireland)

Usually I bring sunglasses and an umbrella with me each morning, just in case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For reference, Amazon's revenues in 2012 for the entirety of its business was $51BB.

<http://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/revenues>

Too bad we'll never know AWS's margins. It'd be a lot of fun to look at the numbers for Amazon's product portfolio.

</comment><comment><USER14> Amazon will probably have some very strong competitors. For starters, there will be national-champion types, who will prosper due to geo-compliance issues if nothing else. (I.e., rules restricting cross-border data transfer.) Other security compliance will also matter, both pro- (strong enough security) and anti- (government back doors). OpenStack is currently an Amazon fast follower, but that's apt to change, with OpenStack getting some technical advantages as well. And OpenStack is likely to maintain the very big advantage you can move it among providers and hardware configurations, on-premise or off-.

</comment><comment><USER15> One flaw with AWS-like businesses is lack of lock-in because of customer churn.

Web site popularity on the Internet obeys a power law distribution--the top sites take the lion's share of traffic and money from the Internet.

AWS will never see revenue from the post popular sites, because once a site grows past a certain size, it's cheaper to build redudancy and host themselves (Netflix, Facebook, etc.). AWS is actually fairly expensive for handling a large stream of traffic--it's only for intermittent use or cash-poor sites that the economics makes sense.

So AWS is full of very small to medium size operations, which are constantly popping in and out of existence. And when a small site pops into existence, it has no legacy cloud APIs to support, and can go with whatever cloud provider has the best offering at that time.

</comment><comment><USER16> Another way to put it. AWS will require $50 Billion in Investments By 2020. Profit potential uncertain. Shareholders not worried.

</comment><comment><USER17> "The estimates reflect Wall Street's growing confidence in cloud services"

Seems silly to assume that Amazon will take the cake. By 2020 other offerings like Windows Azure may end up taking away the lion's share of profits.

<comment><USER7> I seriously doubt this. Unintuitively, I think it's more likely that niche cloud services with specialized features will be able to compete better by exploiting industry-specific economies of scale that Amazon can't by being so generalized. Any of these companies that resist a buyout will have huge profit margins like Amazon doesn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> _Investment Firm Expects AWS Will Hit $20 Billion In Revenues By 2020_

I expect that Investment Firms Will Keep Making Ridiculous Predictions Even In 2020 And Beyond.

Tech predictions on what will happen 7 years from now in a hotly contested field?</comment>


The Earth's core: the enigma 1,800 miles below us  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/science/earths-core-the-enigma-1800-miles-below-us.html

<comment><USER2> "It's a place where pressures bear down with the weight of 3.5 million atmospheres, like 3.5 million skies falling at once on your head."

I shouldn't be overly critical, but, well, that one's not working for me.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, what exactly does the weight of 1 sky falling on your head feel like? Feels pretty decent to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author of this piece REALLY wants to write fiction. I can appreciate the florid tones in a human interest piece, or in an epic tale, but time and time again, I found myself wanting more information where instead, I got a bit of fluff.

It was well-written fluff, but still. Facts, please!

</comment><comment><USER5> >As if the inside story of our planet weren't already the ultimate potboiler, a host of new findings has just turned the heat up past Stygian.

I hope, when old media finally dies, that this sort of "clever" news-writing dies with it.

</comment><comment><USER6> It is funny how regarding the polarity flip they just say "don't worry, you'll be dead.". Ok that may be true, but what would happen? If the rate of polarity switch is exponential, 10% in the last century could end up being, oh dec 12 2012? Even if that is just a silly mayan thing, what would theoretically happen? We get pelted by radiation?

<comment><USER7> Generally the models have it becoming fairly distorted in various ways and then strengthening again in the opposite polarity. It never goes to 'zero' because there isn't a model where the core stops moving. But there could be some 'local' poles in addition the primary poles. Think of it 'aurora borealis at the equator' kind of weird but not 'sleeting sheets of coronal mass ejecta raining death on helpless flora and fauna.'

Of course nobody really knows, we have models, we have guesses, we have theories. I've not seen any credible theories that result in the field going away but it doesn't mean they aren't out there.

<comment><USER8> Also, your ancestors went though this millions of times while living long enough to have kids. So, while it may be unpleasant chances are it's just going end up with lightly different lights in the sky and at worse a small increase in cancer risk.

<comment><USER9> The last one was about 780,000 years ago, sometime around the start of the Middle Pleistocene. The earliest known _Neanderthals_ are about 300,000 years old.

So no, none of our vaguely recent ancestors have lived through one. Plenty of Mammals have though!

<comment><USER8> Mammals are _also_ your ancestors. And, the reversal takes 1,000-10,000 years so /20 and you get 50 to 500 generations per reversal.

More importantly, the magnetic field can only stop charged particles which don't travel vary far though the atmosphere anyway as in a few feet and they hit something.*

PS: Someone mentioned OMG particles, however they ignore the magnetic field anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The BBC did a great Horizon documentary on The Core recently where they visited some researchers and looked at some shiny machines which attempted to replicate the conditions at the core and grow iron crystals or something. It talks about local variations in the earth's magnetic field as well. I recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER11> I would go for D) Scientists dont have a clue.

Because despite all human hubris, we are pretty much in the dark ages. When we have learned how to sustain ourselves without raping the planet, then maybe we can at least be called civilized. Although still a very primitive species.

Humans dont like viewing themselves as primitive and limited, but we very much are. We are unaware of the alien species constantly being around us, we think 90% of the DNA is "junk" because we dont understand what it does, we call space "empty" because we dont see whats there, etc.

Its all very much based on hubris and ego. Very very primitive. I often feel like Im watching a society that is completely nuts. Valuing paper more than the planet that is giving us life every second of every day (!).

Ok, rant over... its just mind boggling...

<comment><USER12> Everything is primitive, in that it is the origin for the things to come. The way I think of the situation is that our species and its civilization are frightfully _young_ , with all the arrogance and naïveté that entails. Here's hoping we're not the kind of teenager that kills ourselves by crashing the family car.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If heat is coming up 3x faster than expected, isn't there a good chance that this could have a material affect on global climate? Perhaps this is yet another significant piece of the chaotic climate record.</comment>


Facebook logged 100x more Instagram plaintext passwords than previously thought - <AUTHOR> https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/04/19/facebook-we-logged-100x-more-instagram-plaintext-passwords-than-we-thought/ <comment><USER2> It's the strangest thing. It's almost like Facebook CONSTANTLY lies about how big every mistake they have made is, only to drastically increase the original estimate later when people aren't paying as much attention.</comment>


Mono and C# 4.0  - <AUTHOR> http://mareksafar.blogspot.com/2009/12/mono-and-c-40.html

<comment><USER2> Cool ... now only if they fixed those tail-calls ...

<comment><USER3> Tail-calls and an easily accessible mono VMWare image which includes F# and mono is the only thing keeping me from making the jump right now</comment></comment>


Larsen C takes another step towards calving - <AUTHOR> http://www.projectmidas.org/blog/another-step-closer/ <comment><USER2> My gut says that technologists could lend a hand by applying some kind of more advanced predictive modeling or ML knowledge than is available to the scientists working on this</comment>


Fully functional adults with perfect ("endless") memory - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/16/60minutes/main7156877.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody

<comment><USER2> What surprises me (and makes me most skeptical) is that they can remember days by date. Did these people actually know what the date was every year of their lives? This implies to me that it is not just a camcorder-like memory that these people possess, but an efficient, numerical search ability on those memories. It makes me wonder how much one could duplicate this ability by purposefully associating numbers with days in a hierarchical structure (analogous to building an explicit tree structure on them).

Also fascinating to me is how this links with OCD-like behavior. My memory has always been considered very good (though not like these people), and I had extremely mild OCD during my preteen years, which changed its form when I became a teenager until I stopped manifesting most symptoms.

I also wonder what would happen if these people were asked to gather days by an arbitrary filter. For example, on which days during 1999 did it rain? Would they have to step through day-by-day and check each day, or would they be able to instantly run through the rainy days? The latter seems almost too powerful.

<comment><USER3> I agree.. Why did they keep saying "it was a Monday" or whatever? Seemed pretty random/uncalled for. Makes me think of they way things are organized in their brains.

I also wonder how they're not very high-performing and successful individuals. It seems to me an "endless" memory could be hugely beneficial, beyond the many (unethical) scheme they can exploit.

<comment><USER4> I also wondered if they see some historical patterns invisible to us normal people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These people's "perfect" memories are purely autobiographical. They cannot memorize large lists of numbers quickly, or recite the entirety of The Bible from memory, or excel at any other task that requires rapid, verifiable memorization. Nothing about this is inconsistent with these people simply spending, for whatever reason, a considerable amount of effort to memorize and catalog the minutiae of their lives, but otherwise having normal mental faculties.

<comment><USER6> I agree with the sentiment of your point, but this does represent "normal mental faculties" in any way. They are clearly extraordinary in this one sense and that alone doesn't allow them to be classified as normal.

I watched this spot on 60 minutes and I am not convinced that these people are normal with respect to mental health. They had a very odd affect at times. Still, it was amazing to watch people recall things that happened over 20 years ago with clarity and precision.

<comment><USER5> When I was in high school, I could recite nearly 1,500 digits of pi from memory. This wasn't because I had number-memorizing superpowers, it was because I was a geek and I spent time memorizing numbers. If you look at interviews with top competitive mnemonists, you find very few who claim to have (let alone actually have) any sort of "photographic memory" or even autistic savantisms. It's just a mundane subject with strategies and tricks. People don't close their eyes and see numbers, they break them up into convenient chunks, look for symmetries and patterns, and memorize them.

You can't underestimate what people can accomplish when they have severe abnormalities in their interests. Calendar-counting to compute days of the week is not hard. Weather patterns are easily mentally compressible, with natural chunking points from the seasons. Most people's work schedules are highly regular, so it's easy to break weeks into patterns and exceptions. And so on. Everything that's demonstrated in this article is well within the realm of feasibility for a sufficiently dedicated person without superpowers.

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry to inform you, but you in fact _do_ have number-memorizing superpowers (or, alternately, "focusing on task and persevering" superpowers).

<comment><USER8> I think the point he was trying to make is this: would you consider someone who could completely crush you at, say, basketball, to have "abnormal powers"?

I'm not talking pros, I'm talking about people who've played sports all their lives. They can probably beat most people at their chosen sports. And a lot of perfectly "normal/average" people are really good at one sport or another. We don't talk about them as if they're "abnormal".

Haven't done it, but I'm guessing that memorizing 1500 digits of pi is easier and less time consuming than getting to a decent level at some sport. Except that for most people, playing sport is fun, so they don't think about it as "extreme concentration". For the op, memorizing digits of pi was fun (I'm guessing?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm unconvinced - what verifiable memory feats are presented? If asked "what were you doing on such and such a date 20 years ago", they can say anything and who can contradict them?

Perhaps they simply are good storeytellers. Which is a feat in itself.

</comment><comment><USER10> This article skips a very important aspect of these subjects: can they choose a topic and learn it inside and out and not forget it? For example, if they were interested in, say, botany, could they use their fantastic memory to remember detailed characteristics of every plant species they study?

All they seem to remember is what the did on a given day, or who won a sporting event or the weather.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've read about people having this ability in the past, but it was usually related to either brain damage or idiot savancy. I think scientists have just starting studying "normal" people with the ability.

<comment><USER12> I'm pretty sure Sherashevsky (studied in the early 1900s) falls into the 'normal' people category. He certainly had problems but would be a very high functioning idiot savant at absolute worst.

[http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Mnemonist-Little-about- Memory/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Mnemonist-Little-about- Memory/dp/0674576225)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In short: it turns out there are (few) people that have almost perfect memory, even 20 years back. And that this type of memory is totally new to science.

<comment><USER14> Nope.

It was known that some could have perfect memory.

I read in my childhood about man who remember everything. He worked as a reporter and never wrote down any tasks editor gave him. That man told the editor that he won't forget and he did not forget anything, really. So editor send that man to psychologist who discover that he had perfect memory.

)the story was about 60-s or so)

The perfect rememberer had a mild case of synestesia, but he used it to his own advantage. He put so many hooks on anything that he couldn't forget even if he try. He remembers conversation by their content, sound, color, texture and taste (and much more). So every word has its own color, texture and taste, they make a web of them, much like labyrinth or city map.

When I need something I shouldn't forget, I also try to put as many markers as I could. It hepls sometimes. ;)

<comment><USER15> Radiolab (a podcast that any HN reader would love) did a piece once about a Russian who had perfect recall of his life and could also memorize endless lists of numbers and Dante's Inferno in Italian (and didn't speak Italian). Unfortunately, he eventually went mad because his brain couldn't make sense of all the interconnections.

The podcast in question : <http://www.radiolab.org/2010/apr/05/limits-of-the- mind/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of:

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

</comment><comment><USER17> There are a couple of cool ways they could exploit their gift

1) Take a drug once, remember the feeling forever, any time you feel like it.

2) Betting games on past events.

3) All kinds of trivia on TV shows

<comment><USER18> Remembering the feeling of a drug, emotion or experience isn't the same as experiencing it. Also (trust me on this) regardless of how good your memory is, once you start drinking, smoking pot, taking acid, etc. it's not going to be quite the same for some time, if ever, as your habits of recall and storage will change.

Trivia TV shows, no doubt. But I bet even these people's memories have a limit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> TL;DR: Some people have very good memory, and they're about the only ones who can remember what the article was about after 8 pages of the same thing.</comment>


Ask HN: Compete with Facebook? - <AUTHOR>

I ultimately would like to create a facebook alternative.  I understand that a lot of people also share my desire.  My question is, should I go for it, or look for a MUCH smaller niche? <comment><USER2> You have to come at them obliquely. If you set out to build a better social networking site for _everybody_ you'll fail, because they have more resources and more expertise.

Instead, try to figure out a niche that they're failing at - either an activity or a population of users - and that can be expanded into a full social networking site as it grows. Twitter's attempting to do this with status messages, Zynga with casual games. There've got to be a bunch of other sub-activities that people do on FaceBook that aren't well supported...tie into one of those, then gradually expand your usage base until you're better than FaceBook at everything.

<comment><USER3> > _for everbody_

This is key. It's arguable that Facebook is successful because it was exclusive to a smaller niche (college students) when it was starting out.

<comment><USER4> IMHO Facebook make a colossal mistake when they opened up the service to the entire world.

Now that they've let the genie out of the bottle, there's no going back. With 500 million users, every feature they add is a monstrous engineering challenge and every change they make is an impossible political challenge, guaranteed to piss off a major portion of it's users.

How do you market to 500 million people? How do you govern a sytem with that many users in any meaningful way.. you can't. There's nothing you can offer that many people except for lowest common denominator stuff like advertising.

The biggest challenge in business is finding a market you can clearly define, that can be reached easily. Had Facebook stayed "closed" and only available to college students, that's exactly what they would have had.

Imagine the possibilities.. Facebook would have been a right of passage for freshman students.. you go to college, you get a facebook account. College students and their families are some of the richest people on the planet.. just imagine what you could have offered them?

If a college social network is the primary product.. what are the related products, information, services and media? Dating, food, moving, insurance, travel (spring break!), textbooks, banking, car rentals, housing, used goods, career counseling, job searching, recruiting, training, social events, clubs.. the list is endless.

But with a market of everyone.. which products do you offer? When you picture "everyone" do you have an image of a person in your head? Of course not.. but "college student".. ahh you know immediately what to offer them.

Imagine how many companies would beg to offer their services and products on a college-only facebook network?

That's how you compete.. find a specific niche you can clearly define and build deep relationships with your customers.

<comment><USER5> Ermm, you can still easily target college students because they add their colleges to their Facebook network. Users tag their interests, music they listen to, books they read.

From a business stand point, I really can't see how you could say facebook made a colossal mistake by opening to the world. It made them rich and one of the most powerful websites on the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Niche social networks are dead. People are fatigued by the idea of a social network. The word itself makes me pretty much want to puke. Social is the web now; its a fluid idea. What do you want your product to do? to achieve? How is this going to make my life easier, better, more fun? Even if it is all about my profile and moments - how is it better?

<comment><USER7> My guess:

1\. by giving us back control.

2\. by giving us data portability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Remember when a lot of people used to think that the blue "e" icon is the internet, and "Microsoft" is "Word"?

Probably now many Facebook users think Facebook is the internet. Good luck!

What I mean is: they don't use Facebook because they think Facebook is so great, they use it because their friends use it (like email - it is just a way to send each other messages). They probably never questioned why they use it. Therefore it would likely be hard to make them switch to something else.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you were Mark Zuckerberg asking HN "Compete with MySpace?" a few years ago, you'd likely get the same advice you'll get now: they're way out in front of you and you'll have a much better shot at success if you pick a different niche.

 _The Bad News:_ You'll almost certainly fail if you try to take on Facebook.

 _The Good News:_ If you succeed, you'll almost certainly be a billionaire.

If you wanted to do this, I'd recommend reading up on what the Diaspora guys are doing and beat them at their game rather than attacking Facebook head-on.

<comment><USER10> Bad advice.

If your goal is money, just spend your money on powerball tickets since your chances are much, much greater.

If you do what you love because you're passionate about it, and you're exceptionally talented at what you're doing, rich is a natural byproduct.

<comment><USER11> You can be both passionate and exceptionally talented, and utterly broke, quite easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is an incredibly hard and most likely frustrating thing to do. Social networks require momentum to work. In other words, I won't join your social network unless most of my friends are there. Facebook was able to gain traction on MySpace because it started with a niche (colleges), LinkedIn also has a niche (business). Perhaps you can start with some sort of niche (furries?) and if the user experience is good, that community may extend it to their friends.

</comment><comment><USER13> I want a social place but not to share pics with my family and friends. I want to share knowledge and expertise. I want to ask questions, get answers, share code, show off my projects, learn from the experts, chat with colleagues, network and socialize.

Start with a facebook clon for hackers, then, like reddit, expand to all possible interests. Let people create their groups of interest and then grow, grow like weed.

<comment><USER14> _Start with a facebook clon for hackers, then, like reddit, expand to all possible interests. Let people create their groups of interest and then grow, grow like weed._

People like (and find it convenient) to split into tribes they identify with. Look at Usenet, Reddit, Facebook, IRC, etc. What if you took this niche-based grouping and applied it to a social network?

Imagine, for example, that I sign up with your site and join the "Lisp Hackers" group. I can private message other Lispers, I can pop open a chat window and talk live without having to open an IRC client, post code on our public discussion forum, view the profiles of the people in my group, look at their pictures, etc. The important thing would be to emphasize community-based subsites with a full suite of features for the members.

Facebook now works (to my understanding; I don't have an account) on the principle of "friending" everyone, and discovering some new people in "Groups" or "Fan Pages", which provide primitive utilities for talking with one another; at the end of the day, to get the full list of features, you have to add everyone to your giant "list o' friends." What would happen if you started with the idea of strict grouping instead?

<comment><USER15> Did you just describe Ning? I think I created a login once -- and i'm pretty sure that's exactly what it did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> @mkice: Please email me (email@example.com). I've got a massive engineering project that I've been working on for some years, and I definitely need help on it due to my busy education schedule. It's along the same lines of Diaspora, but a much broader scope: give all data a decentralized, ontological API and a node-based exchange platform.

I've taken some ideas from the Semantic Web community, but scaled them down so they're practical. I use a subset of RDF that maps cleanly to an SQL/ORM. Models are generative based on the ontologies you define. Types are hierarchical "Resources" that are uniquely identified (and sometimes dereferenceable) by URI and can be exchanged from the original source or via a p2p mechanism.

If this or any similar platform gains traction, Facebook is history. Blogs are history. Reddit, etc. -- it can all be emulated (and improved) on this platform and everyone can write code for it. No more data silos.

Personally, I'm not so interested in the social networking aspect, but social network tools can be built upon this. I'm more interested in creating a tool to route interesting information to and from relevant parties. I want an optimal web reading experience, and not even hacker news can provide this. (ie. I want to algorithmically find peers with similar skills/interests and fetch their highly-ranked stories/comments, data mine, personal interest profiling, etc. Can't do that without success/adoption of the platform though.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I sent you an email..

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The question I'd be asking myself is, what do you have besides the desire? Do you have some other advantages (contacts, technology, funding) that makes this even slightly plausible?

If all you have is the desire, you might as well take on General Motors.

<comment><USER18> Well...I'm already in a better capital position than them ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Personally I don't feel the need for a facebook alternative, and I'm sure that a majority of people feel the same way. Otherwise there wouldn't be 500 million facebook users. I'm happy with using facebook to connect with all my acquaintances, twitter to interact on the micro level and tumblr to blog. Here is a question you have to think about; "What can you possibly offer that would change my mind?"

I think everyone at some point wants to create the next big thing in social networking, but honestly, it just isn't a realistic expectation. Look how much Google has failed to compete, even with MySpace, in the social arena.Do you think you can you do better than Google?

<comment><USER20> II agree with everything you said, and still... I think there's a place for more social networks, if we redefine "social network" a little.

What there are are tons of communities, any of which a given user may or may not be a member of... and as long as people prefer to show a different face when interacting with a given community, or keep their interactions with the members of a given community separate - whether as a convenience, or for privacy reasons, whatever, there will be room for "social networks" around interests, geographic areas, etc.

So, yeah, a "social network" for Doctor Who fans, a "social network" for Mazda RX-8 enthusiasts, etc. This space is mostly filled by "forums" now, which don't necessarily have (or need, and this point is probably key) the same suite of features as a "full fledged social network."

But if there was a way to take advantage of all these discrete communities of interests, yet still give a user convenient access to their entire social- graph at all times, and a void "profile fatigue" and "password fatigue" then one could probably accomplish something.

Whether or not what Diaspora are building, or one of the other varied "decentralized social network" projects, remains to be seen. And how the hell you monetize it if you could build it also remains to be seen. But there point in all this rambling was really just to say that there are needs for "networking" that Facebook isn't filling at least not alone. Now the combination of Facebook, Gallifreybase.com and rx8forum.com may fill the needs of the hypothetical Doctor Who watching, RX-8 driving, social-networker. So would one really want to compete with Facebook or with rx8forum.com and gallifreybase.com?

<comment><USER19> It isn't just forums that are filling the gap it is sites like Ning, and Wordpress plugins like buddypress that are allowing people to develop their own "social networks" as well. Which has me thinking that it is probably better to create a service that allows individuals to design and develop their own communities that cater to whatever interest they may have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You need to cater to a real need if you want to be successful.

Why do you feel the world needs an alternative?

What problem would your product solve (that facebook isn't already solving)?

</comment><comment><USER22> Go for it. Just make sure and use Facebook Connect for auth.

<comment><USER19> Is this a joke? Wouldn't it make more sense to use Open ID or a custom build solution for user authentication/registration?

<comment><USER20> OpenID Connect? <http://openidconnect.com/>

<comment><USER19> that is what I was referring to yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why do you want to make a new social network?

If you goal is to make money, then ignore this comment.

If your goal is to make something better than facebook, you want to ask yourself, why you want to reinvent the wheel? Unless you have some great idea. Don't.

Check out Diaspora, maybe it's better for you to work on that when it comes out. They have some good ideas. You can also look around other open source SNS.

</comment><comment><USER24> Facebook is not about features anymore. It is about the fact that they have 500M users. When you want to compete with Facebook, you have to grab 30% from the 500M to your side to call it a competition. You have to convince them that you have a better service and that they won't miss the people that are still on Facebook.

P.S. 1% of Facebook users care about privacy. The rest are not aware.

<comment><USER25> Agreed. The network effect is their advantage. Features are for tech blogs to write about, real people care that their buddies from 30 years ago are online now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The answer is within you.

But without a great idea, excellent execution, a lot of technical talent and a pile of money, I'd choose the much smaller niche.

</comment><comment><USER27> Make a girls-only social network.

</comment><comment><USER28> You should go for it if you can offer a compelling feature that facebook lacks. (I mean really really compelling).

I think the advice about going at it obliquely is only necessary if you're creating a straight up clone, this targeting a niche thing is only about marketing, but if you can offer something better, I think you'll find many early adopters.

</comment><comment><USER29> Figure out why people use Facebook, and then do a better job at it than Facebook is.

Presumptions: Facebook does not actually understand its own audience and why people use the site. Also, I presume you will figure out what "better" really means for your audience and not just over-engineer something.</comment>


Worth watching before it's gone: A collection of every Apple television ad ever - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/11/27/worth-watching-before-its-gone-a-collection-of-every-apple-television-ad-ever/?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=share%2Bbutton&utm_content=Worth%20watching%20before%20it%E2%80%99s%20gone%3A%20A%20collection%20of%20every%20Apple%20television%20ad%20ever&utm_campaign=social%2Bmedia <comment><AUTHOR> Never seen the ad introducing the iPhone for the first time. Pretty surreal.</comment>


Ask HN: Can I email people who use my app? - <AUTHOR> I released an app an app a while ago, that initially suffered from not having a free-trial period.
People were downloading it and creating accounts, but failing to purchase premium features.  Based on my analytics, I can see that they poked around, saw that many of the features were unavailable, and never returned to the app.
I implemented a default free trial period as a solution, and that has been working very well with new users.  I would love to get the people who signed up before I was giving out free trials, to log back in, so that they can experience a free trial of the premium features.
This would require sending them an email.  I feel like this is a breach of privacy, since, I never indicated when they signed up that I would contact them or use their email in any way.  What should I do?  I'm prepared to consider that bunch of users a loss, but I figured I'd check and see if I'm crazy for not emailing them to let them know about the new free-trial period. <comment><USER2> When I sign up for an use an app I expect they will/could email me about the app.

If they were interested before, they would probably like to hear about new features and a free trial.

If you don't have a lot of users now, just add a reply with stop if you would not like to receive emails from us. Track these manually till you come up with an opt out email system.

Good luck converting some of the early signups to your app.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unless you had an options for your users to opt out of that kind of email, specifically telling you not to email them, giving an email address for a service assumes the service could email you for reasons pertaining to the product/service.

<comment><AUTHOR> hmmm... fair enough. I did not give them an option to opt out of emails. I never said anything about emailing them though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Laws vary quite a bit by country, and some industries have specific rules e.g. telco/finance/pharma will have additional regulation if your app category is here.

2 general rules that will cover you in most of the world are;

1) Service messages are OK but marketing messages should have opt-in. It can be a fine line but keeping as a service announcement helps cover permissions.

2) Every email communication should have'unsubscribe'.

</comment><comment><USER5> E-mail them. I've been e-mailed by an app developer in a similar situation. I used the app and he was not sure he could keep supporting it and wanted to know if his users would be willing to pay him. It was not an issue for me as it was a legitimate, app-related communication.

</comment><comment><USER6> Email them

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply. So, I can safely assume that if you signed up for an app, you wouldn't be upset or annoyed if they randomly emailed you? Maybe I'm unique in that way. Hence why this post :)

<comment><USER7> I'd say that you can email them, but only _very_ infrequently. Also, your first (and every) email to them should give them an opt-out mechanism, even if there wasn't one when they first signed up. (This means that, if you don't have the opt-out mechanism yet, finish that before you email them.)</comment></comment></comment>


Google Is Entering the Cryptocurrency Space - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/bexpro/google-is-entering-the-cryptocurrency-space-765a183fd702 <comment><USER2> > _They are already late and will try to catch up time by a number of serious > acquisitions. We shall see a multibillion M &A activity from tech giants > already next year._</comment>


Silicon Valley's Contract-Worker Problem - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/silicon-valleys-contract-worker-problem.html

<comment><USER2> Quite an insightful piece...my 2 cents If your homejoy cleaner still resides in the shelter, but is actively trying to seek to get his or her life together through working, doesn't these "middle-men" startups provide some sort of social value (of course, one can always debate about the wages of these labors)?

<comment><USER3> _... (of course, one can always debate about the wages of these labors)_

Yes, if you ignore the part of the employment/"contract work" relationship being criticized, it doesn't sound bad at all. There are upsides and downside to everything, and passing judgment on a labor relationship (or anything) does not require being at one end of the spectrum or the other.

The 1099 runaround has been around for ages. Just because it's relatively new (at least publicly) for the bay area tech startup scene, that probably isn't going to change society's views on the practice (though I'm sure we'll get some delicious "stifling innovation" rants trying anyway).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This really isn't limited to manual labor or any class of jobs. It affects high-tech workers as well. I have done quite a lot of programming work as a contractor. And I know the companies I was working for were doing it that way to control costs, regardless of whether they were large or small companies.

I think the economy is being squeezed at all levels. Even companies that have cash often are hard pressed to turn a profit. The employment situation is such that there are plenty of highly skilled workers available. So companies don't have to offer "full time" work or benefits in order to find good candidates. And even if they wanted to, most of them can't.</comment>


Penetration Testing - <AUTHOR> http://securityblog.howellsonline.ca/?p=34

<comment><AUTHOR> Why did you laugh ?

</comment><comment><USER2> I laughed at first.</comment>


NASA Mars Orbiter Images may show 1971 Soviet lander - <AUTHOR> http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-132

<comment><USER2> I'm confused. Why would they have a parachute on a moon lander?</comment>


Bitcoin-collateralized loans coming to Coinbase - <AUTHOR> https://www.coinbase.com/borrow <comment><USER2> Seeing bitcoin reinvent the banking system they set themselves to destroy has a very Animal Farm-y feeling to it.

<comment><USER3> Silicon Valley very often falls into this:

Step 1: Claim you're disrupting an existing industry (or creating a new industry that didn't previously exist because it was unviable - eg, electric scooters).

Step 2: Claim that this is going to make you far more profitable than that industry has traditionally been. Get Angel Investment.

Step 3: Raise money at a ridiculous valuation due to step 2. Series A.

Step 4: Use that money to undercut competitors in the existing market and gain marketshare whilst taking huge losses. Series B, C.

Step 5: Realise that you've just built another company that's exactly the same as all the existing companies in that industry with no real way of making a profit. IPO.

Step 6: Having thrown so much money at the problem that you've now got enormous market share (and driven the traditional companies out of business because they can't operate at a loss), pivot to using your monopolistic position to drive down costs and inflate prices.

Step 7: Slowly melt-down as investors realise Step 2 was all bullshit and regulators start catching up with step 6.

<comment><USER4> Phone-based ride hailing and scooter sharing did not exist before. These services are significantly better than previous alternatives.

Legacy taxi services in particular are extremely shitty and widely hated because of scammers.

<comment><USER5> Has anyone here tried libretaxi? (An open-source phone-based ride hailing service, where payments are made directly to the driver) It sounds appealing to me, but I haven't tried it, and I imagine that it could be lacking in the network effect department. Also, I am not sure if it has a reputation system like Uber and Lyft do.

Edit: Suddenly unsure whether my comment here is sufficiently on- topic/relevant to fit with the community norms here. My apologies if it is not.

<comment><USER6> Crap name as well. It's a shame that open source projects can't market their ideas to save their lives.

<comment><USER7> You think it is worse based on what quality than the names uber or lyft? Uber has to be by every known metric one of the worst names for anything ever.

<comment><USER6> By what specific metrics is Uber a bad name? Uber is a short, catchy, two- syllable name. Libretaxi is a mouthful. The only good thing about it is that it's descriptive. It doesn't really stick in your mind like Uber does, or their branding.

Disclaimer: I think marketing is a parasitic industry that gets way too much money for the value they provide. But marketing is important because it works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> ETH-collateralized loans are permissionlessly accessible on the Ethereum blockchain. Right now it's a 0% APR.

[https://oasis.app/borrow](https://oasis.app/borrow)

You can also get a Bitcoin-collateralized loan using the same service. A Bitcoin loan on the Ethereum blockchain. But, it's less secure because the WBTC "Wrapped Bitcoin" token on Ethereum relies on a network of custodians who redeem these tokens for actual BTC.

<comment><USER9> Why would anyone loan out money at 0% APR? That only makes sense if you value the ETH far more than the money. There is no way to profit from borrowers who pay the loan back. The only way you could possibly turn a profit is by speculating that ETH is rising in price and getting ETH as collateral when a borrower defaults but if that's your strategy why not buy ETH directly?

<comment><USER10> DAI, the stablecoin produced when you loan out money is in very high demand, so Makerdao is trying to encourage more people to create it.

There's a lot of demand for DAI because several protocols that use it are giving away tokens for using their platforms (governance tokens that have a tradable value).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Aside from the brand name of Coinbase, this seems worse than similar offering from Nexo (nexo.io):

\- Coinbase APR is 8%, Nexo is 5.9%

\- Coinbase max loan is $20k, Nexo is $2 million

I can see the appeal of borrowing against your bitcoin or other cryptocurrency, but I'm not sure if there's much value in borrowing $20k. If you're in a position to hold $60k bitcoin on Coinbase, do you really have a need for a 1 year bridge loan of $20k? At a rate only slightly better than a credit card?

<comment><USER12> > If you're in a position to hold $60k bitcoin on Coinbase, do you really have > a need for a 1 year bridge loan of $20k? At a rate only slightly better than > a credit card?

If the $60k of bitcoin on Coinbase was bought with a loan from Nexo because you have $100k of bitcoin on Nexo, then yes lol.

Wrap that bitcoin in RenVM to use it on the Ethereum blockchain, maybe some renBTC liquidity pool is earning you more, or sell it on Mooniswap for something else that is earning more. YAM/yCRV staking anyone?

<comment><USER13> Daily reminder that leveraged investment strategies can and will blow up in your face...

<comment><USER12> daily reminder that non-accredited investors should be able to blow up in private equity too, because they can already blow up in worse ways so it doesn't make sense to shut them out of everything that has a chance of being professionally run

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder how they're hedging the risk of Tether/Bitfinex losing their case(s) against the NYAG and others and the likely resultant drop in value of BTC.

<comment><USER15> Even if they do lose, it will not have a material effect on the price of btc (apart from a potential short-term wick)

<comment><USER14> That's an interesting view, what makes you say that? Tether's market cap is about $10b now and it's daily transaction volume regularly exceeds that of BTC.

It would seem likely that if that volume left the market it would have a significant impact on the cost of other coins, especially if they are not 1:1 backed.

<comment><USER15> Tether is just a vehicle for transferring offshore USD between third parties. It does not underpin the value of bitcoin, it is more of a parallel system to bitcoin for transferring USD.

<comment><USER14> you're assuming that Tether is not just printing Tether's out of nothing of course :)

As they have never had an audit and have already admitted to not being 1:1 backed, that's not necessarily an assumption that'll play out well.

<comment><USER15> Even if they are (having spoken to the cfo and ceo personally, i dont hink they are), this affects tether holders, not btc holders.

<comment><USER14> err it's been publicly admitted by Tether in documentation submitted to the NY courts hearing their case against the NYAG that they're not 1:1 backed.

From [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/holders-are-not-at- risk...](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/holders-are-not-at-risk- bitfinex-lawyer-responds-to-ny-attorney-general)

"Hoegner admits that Tether is operating under a roughly 74 percent reserve"

<comment><USER15> Thats two different things. They are backed by loans to bitfinex, like your money in the bank is backed by mortgages etc. I am not defending this, I think it is a major fuck up (one of many by bitfinex), but again, I do not think they are insolvent and that they will not be able to cover tether liabilities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ethereum decentralized finance is not "copying" the current financial institutions. If you think that, then you are misinformed.

</comment><comment> ur-whale This is a very interesting development, especially given Coinbase's reach and visibility.

The unfortunate effect might be that people who have been so far stubbornly HODLing their BTC themselves (self-custody) will be tempted to surrender their coins to the exchange in exchange of immediate liquidity thereby increasing the concentration of _actual_ custody of BTC by the exchanges ... the very thing Bitcoin was designed to avoid.

The temptation here is (at least on paper): you get to "keep" your Bitcoin while enjoying the benefit of them at the same time (betting. of course, that BTC will keep going up over time).

Here's to hoping hodlers will resist the temptation.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sounds like a terrible idea given how much bitcoin's value can fluctuate. And they may call the loan. This is if you are really bullish on bitcoin.

<comment><USER18> They loan up to 30% of the BTC value. So as long as it does not crash more than 70%, everything's fine [1].

[1] Which happened every time after the peak of a big bitcoin run-up ;-)

<comment><USER19> And then there will be margin calls and forced sales, which in case of a crash will accentuate the drop considerably...

<comment><USER20> In the scenario where the market is crashing faster than they can keep up with, do you think they'll put their own sell orders ahead of those of other customers? Could they get in trouble for that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Cryptocurrency was invented to remove middlemen and counterparty risk. Centralized finance (lending/borrowing) is the opposite of what Bitcoin was invented for. Decentralized finance extends Bitcoins vision beyond the small subset of finance that is currency. One such open source project is uniswap. Disclaimer, I founded a cryptocurrency.

</comment><comment><USER22> A lot of people are missing the fact that loans are not taxed in the US.

</comment><comment><USER23> Lending money with interest has been a known evil for thousands of years now, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all prohibit it. Yet, we do not learn from the past.

</comment><comment><USER24> Coinbase is supported by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan[1][2] no wonder they told them to start giving loans and turned them into a bank. Satoshi wouldn't like this; you can make smart contracts directly on the blockchain and give loans if you want.

[1][https://web.archive.org/web/20130109041534/https://blog.coin...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130109041534/https://blog.coinbase.com/post/39672092708/fred- ehrsam-joins-coinbase)

[2][https://www.wsj.com/articles/jpmorgan-extends-banking- servic...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/jpmorgan-extends-banking-services-to- bitcoin-exchanges-11589281201?redirect=amp)</comment>


LinkedIn's iOS app transmits names, emails, and calendar notes, in plain text - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/06/06/linkedins-ios-app-collects-and-sends-names-emails-and-meeting-notes-from-your-calendar-back-in-plain-text/ <comment><USER2> This is off topic, but the next web really needs to make an effort to properly credit images. They've been called out on this a number of times before, but the way they credit image sources is just plain wrong. In this article, for example, at the very bottom of the page is a generic link that says SOURCES: IMAGE CREDIT. With this particular image, the photographer very clearly says "please, kindly credit me (Nan Palmero) with the photo and link back here" - nowhere do they credit him by name. A quick check of all of the other publications using her photo do properly credit her by name, but the next web can't be bothered.

If the author of this article is reading - PLEASE CREDIT THE PHOTOGRAPHER

<comment><USER3> Thank you very much for looking out. It appears that this has been going on a bit. Matthew, can you help with the following pieces that also do not have my name attached to them, please? Doing so on both the desktop and mobile version would be greatly appreciated!

[http://thenextweb.com/location/2011/08/01/foursquare- reporte...](http://thenextweb.com/location/2011/08/01/foursquare-reportedly- to-roll-out-new-pages-that-anyone-can-sign-up-for/)

[http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/05/14/milestone- foursquar...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/05/14/milestone-foursquare- hits-10-million-users/)

[http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/03/17/agora-helps-you- meet-n...](http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/03/17/agora-helps-you-meet-new- foursquare-friends-when-you-check-in/)

[http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/10/24/linkedin-fixes- bug-...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/10/24/linkedin-fixes-bug-which- exposed-celebrities-email-addresses/)

[http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/08/16/linkedin-launches- slic...](http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/08/16/linkedin-launches-slick-new- iphone-android-and-html5-mobile-apps/)

[http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/01/13/32-of-my- friend...](http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/01/13/32-of-my-friends- changed-jobs-last-year-how-many-of-yours-linkedin-will-tell-you/)

[http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2010/08/31/mtv-to-reward-std- ch...](http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2010/08/31/mtv-to-reward-std-checkups- with-a-foursquare-badge/)

[http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/03/25/foursquare-plans- to...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/03/25/foursquare-plans-to-open-uk- office-during-the-next-year/)

[http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/01/27/linkedin-files- its-...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/01/27/linkedin-files-its-ipo- developing/)

@Richiezc what a cool chocolate wrapper, thank you for making such a fun piece.

<comment><USER2> Wow - I knew they were bad at image attribution, but that's just plain awful. And these are just the photos from one photographer that have been improperly used! TNW clearly has a large gap in their reporting standards that needs to be corrected.

<comment><USER3> Zee Kane, CEO of TNW is correcting the issue: <https://twitter.com/Zee/status/210444016016306176> <https://twitter.com/Zee/status/210444266185560064>

Thank you all for your help and support!

<comment><USER2> Glad to see it! Credit links in the body will be a great improvement!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Putting aside the issue that much of this data shouldn't have been sent anywhere in the first place, I'll never understand why, in 2012, SSL is still not used by default when sending any sensitive or private data across the network.

It's even more puzzling when we're talking about background data upload when the potential SSL handshake latency isn't going to pose any UX issue. This has boggled my mind for years actually. Why?

<comment><USER5> Maybe it's not an issue for LinkedIn, but the iOS app submission process requires developers to do a lot of paperwork with several governments (US, France) for export compliance when using any kind of crypto.

I can easily see smaller developers deciding to go for HTTP instead of HTTPS just to avoid dealing with all that bureaucracy.

<comment><USER4> I should go back and take a look at the exact wording of the Apple App Store rules but I never had problems submitting apps that use SSL.

There's one step of the submission process that asks about the use of cryptography and I've always picked the option that doesn't require submitting any additional paperwork - never had problems. I forgot the exact wording but I always worked under the assumption that SSL isn't what Apple is talking about when they ask about the use of cryptography.

If developers had to file paperwork with various governments just to use SSL in their app, then simply using one of the many third party APIs that require SSL (e.g. the Foursquare API) or even just embedding a web browser view that may end up loading an https URL would require the developer to go through the paperwork route to get their app approved. That wouldn't make sense.

<comment><USER5> You would think so, but I've never been able to find a definitive answer, in public at least. Some forum posts seem to imply you should answer YES if you utilize HTTPS/SSL even if it's just through the iOS standard frameworks. Whether anyone _really_ cares remains to be seen. The vague wording is probably Apple's way to C.Y.A. should any problems arise later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We've just posted a response about what we do and don't do. <http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/06/06/mobile-calendar-feature/>

Important point, all data _is_ shared of SSL.

<comment><USER7> > Important point, all data is shared of SSL.

What does that mean?

Since comments are disabled on your blog, can you tell us which data was _not_ sent over SSL? (and if that has been fixed now)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why would they choose to transmit the data in plaintext rather than use SSL? Lazy?

</comment><comment><USER9> What I find interesting is how Linkedin's approach to their mobile app was treated as technological savvy a month ago.

[http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/02/linkedin-ipad-app- engineer...](http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/02/linkedin-ipad-app- engineering/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29#s:1-linkedin- ipad)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3920368>

</comment><comment><USER10> This is only tangentially related but I really don't understand why anyone cares so highly about their contact list. Does it really matter? Why does it matter?

Concerns about spam seem anachronistic (in that you have to deal with spam and services like Gmail have become pretty good at countering it). Is it just privacy? If so, I'm confused.

<comment><USER11> Will you post your email and cell contacts to this thread now? If not, why not?

I'm confused that you're confused. There are a hundred scenarios I can think of. Gmail being good at spam detection is your defense? For one, I get text message spam all the time now. I dont want people having my number who don't need it.

<comment><USER12> > Will you post your email and cell contacts to this thread now? If not, why > not?

Well that is completely different to what LinkedIn is doing.

Sending information via plain text is bad but is fairly unlikely to be read in transit. (This isn't to say that it shouldn't be changed)

LinkedIn shouldn't be collecting the data. At the same time it isn't making the data public. It is somewhat unclear what they are doing with it. It is unlikely though that is for some evil scheme.

Compare this to posting a tonne of personal information on what is essentially a public forum. Completely different.

<comment><USER11> The OP was making a very broad claim. Why would anyone want to keep their contact list secret? Who cares?

In this particular case, I agree LinkedIn in all likelihood is not going to post your contacts to a public forum. But it's completely conceivable that it could happen.

But if there are hundreds of apps and services out there storing your contacts (and there will be if you're careless), then it's a virtual certainty that they will be used in ways you didn't attend.

It almost seems more likely than not these days that a big trove of personal information will be hacked. Even if it doesn't contain your credit card numbers, personal information is still extremely valuable because it allows hackers to bypass security questions and reset passwords.

EDIT: Haha, front page, huge dump of linkedn PW hashes leaked: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4073309>. I had written something about LinkedIn probably having "decent engineers", and being safer than giving your personal data to a shoddy government website. But I realize security is more a matter of process than hiring top engineers. And all these startups in a huge rush. They're only going to do security right after they're embarrassed. Being a programmer, I know how the sausage is made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am deeply disturbed by this. Now I know how the connection suggestions show up like they have a fancy algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER14> At least it's opt-in.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why would anyone be shocked at this?

They already spam anyone unfortunate to be in the Address Book of someone who signs up for this awful service and connects with their gmail whatever.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't believe that this is an egregious error.</comment>


Google clamps down on free storage - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-22/gmail-hooked-us-on-free-storage-now-google-is-making-us-pay <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21323015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21323015), which was posted earlier. I copied this submission's title, which is much better, to the other submission as well. That was a good rewrite, as the guidelines ask: " _Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait._ "</comment>


Ask HN: How do I know if I'm selling a pain-killer (and not a vitamin)? - <AUTHOR> I've built and am now selling my first SaaS product, and I'm trying to figure out if I'm on to something here or just beating my head in to a brick wall. I've routinely heard things like "this is what we need. Let's loop back next quarter," and last quarters leads are converting. But we're not hearing "Can we have this integrated by Friday!?" or "We don't need this." I expect sales to be hard, and doubly so when selling the first dozen customers on a new MVP-level product; is this the kind of response I should be expecting?<p>I'm persistent (possibly to a fault) but how do I know if this is the right thing to persist on? <comment><USER2> well the first thing you need to check in a pain killer is "is your product solving the most crucial problem" like something which can not be ignored, can not be avoided or cannot be dealt with later, if those three things are covered,then your product upto some degree is a pain killer.

second you need to check weither the product you are offering is the best solution to address the problem in the most possible sense, and with a good ROI, or is the product just fixing one problem while leaving the rest, your are not expected to build a swiss army knife of sort but even then, a product which is not usefull in the sense of usability is just a vitamin.

to summarize in short, any product which is handling a crisis situation and providing a good ROI, without being much of a hassle is a pain killer.

~there are other aspect as well but i believe these two are the most important one's among all.

<comment><AUTHOR> We offer high-alpha low-beta ROI (our fees are structured to align with our customers unit economics) and I think we're solving an 'unavoidable problem.'

> without being much of a hassle

There's room for improvement here, and improving it is our main development focus. It's a bit of an hassle to set up, and then easy to use. We think that's where our "lets task next quarter" comments come from. Leads don't think that they have the dev time to integrate right now.

> is the product just fixing one problem while leaving the rest

There are other adjacent problems that we plan to solve, but we excluded them from the MVP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's hard to say:

1\. is CLTV > 3 * CAC?

2\. do you have a way to get leads consistently

If so, keep going. even if it runs out of steam you can sell it if it generates cash flow.

</comment><comment><USER3> Next step, Are people actually using and paying for your product?

Also, if your not getting any resistance about price you may need to look at charging more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. 2 customers are paying, and we're never lost a paying customer. 2 others have signed service level agreements but aren't in production yet.

We get light pushback on price, but we've never had to give ground.</comment></comment>


How drones and UAVs are already affecting construction jobsites - <AUTHOR> http://www.equipmentworld.com/drones/ <comment><USER2> Friend is a site supervisor for a pretty big GC up here in Seattle - They used to pay a pilot a few hundred bucks every time to fly over job sites to take aerial photography.

He decided one month w/o telling the bosses to spend the money on a $500ish drone with a decent camera attached and cancel the pilot flights.

Showed the foreman the capabilities of the little drone, which quickly made it's way up the chain, and now one pilot is out of a recurring job.

Thanks robots.

<comment><USER3> And yet here we stand on the cusp of creating a whole new breed of pilots who are ready willing and able to follow simple common-sense rules for UAV aviation, creating a new sector of jobs that didn't exist before. Jobs that get the same results without all of the negative safety and environmental externalities of flying giant tin kites with primates stuffed inside.

Just make up your minds and tell us the rules already.

<comment><USER4> > Just make up your minds and tell us the rules already.

This is a bit off topic, but this is something that I've spent a lot of my life being worried about. I'm pretty sure that most people don't really understand what rules even are. Effectively they want two rules 1) things I like are good and 2) things I don't like are bad. However, you cant just come out and say that because of other social reasons.

Back on topic. I work in a 'nice' place in Indiana and recently there have been 35-45ish year olds wearing business casual showcasing their drone like remote control flying machines to their 35-45ish year old, business casual wearing friends. Additionally, growing up I went to church with a guy who ended up recently graduating college with some sort of piloting degree (sorry I dont know any of the details besides "he went to college to be a pilot"). He's now going to be a police man of some sort reportedly because recent piloting regulatory changes have made it even harder to make a living as a pilot.

With these two anecdotes in mind, my guess is that the chaotic social fabric that rules our lives will decide in favor of the UAVs and against manned aerial vehicles.

<comment><USER5> aren't the most recent regulatory changes all about requiring more hours before being able to do significant commercial flights?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The FAA is flushing a multi-billion dollar industry down the toilet with their ridiculous restrictions on this gigantic, growing drone craze. Most of these things weigh a couple pounds and are mostly harmless (definitely less than, say, a baseball hitting you). I'm glad I live in Europe.

<comment> at-fates-hands Mostly harmless like when you fly them next to an apartment complex?

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuBSsBscRDU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuBSsBscRDU)

I find interesting that people are more scared of the NSA and yet we have tons of people flying these around your neighborhoods and apartments and nobody bats an eye about your invasion of privacy.

<comment><USER7> Yes, still mostly harmless. Still comparable to playing baseball in a residential area.

As far as privacy goes, of course it's possible to violate privacy with a drone. But it's a lot more practical to violate privacy with a telescope or a camera with a zoom lens. The only thing a drone can get you is a shot of the roof or backyard, a really easy way to get spotted, and relatively short "mission" duration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's weird that this article left out Skycatch and Airware.

</comment><comment><USER7> > That's because most would classify the aircraft Evans and many other > tinkerers are flying as a "drone." Despite this definition being technically > incorrect (more on that in a bit)...

This tired old semantic argument again. The word "drone" has been used to refer to unmanned remote controlled (or autonomous) aircraft at least since the 1950s. I'm pretty sure the term was used throughout WWII, but the earliest source I can find right now is from 1951:

[http://books.google.com/books?id=cGPJ9fJDJNIC&pg=PA41&dq=%22...](http://books.google.com/books?id=cGPJ9fJDJNIC&pg=PA41&dq=%22target+drone%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=q9oYVLCoOIq7ogSauoHoAg&ved=0CEQQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22target%20drone%22&f=false)

<comment><USER9> I find it weird when press call what are basically kids playing toy helicopters 'drone operators'[1]. They are definitely playing on the negative connotations have with the word 'drone' which, as you point out, is closely associated with the military.

1: [http://onforb.es/1matUzZ](http://onforb.es/1matUzZ)

<comment><USER7> I obviously don't approve of blatant attempts to conflate toys with military aircraft, but that has little to do with the _word_ "drone." The military "drones" aren't even officially called that. The reason we call military remote controlled aircraft "drones" isn't that they shoot missiles and kill people. It's because they are unmanned aircraft. We don't call manned military aircraft "drones," and they also kill people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Shameless self promotion here, but we've seen an increase in job site quote requests on our site -> [http://www.dronehire.org](http://www.dronehire.org)</comment>


Brain Stimulation for the Masses - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/brain-stimulation-for-the-masses/

<comment><USER2> A title such as "Brain Stimulation for the Masses? Caution recommended" would better represent the linked article

</comment><comment><USER3> I've messed with it a bit but so far I haven't achieved any impressive results. I'm going to keep trying different montages, but I think the effects are more subtle that these kinds of articles imply.

</comment><comment><USER4> There is also a recent RadioLab episode about tCDS and its effects. A company is using them to train military snipers.</comment>


Spark, Lightbank And Yuri Milner Get In On OnSwipe's $5M 'Series Awesome' - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/02/spark-lightbank-and-yuri-milner-get-in-on-onswipes-5m-series-awesome/ <comment><USER2> OnSwipe has made my iPad browsing experience significantly more infuriating since it forced itself on scores of unwitting Wordpress blogs. If your blog is hosted on wordpress.org, please test it on an iPad. If you can't do that, at least disable OnSwipe until you can.

Of its many annoying quirks, the worst is that it makes scrolling really choppy. On a tablet, this is utter UX fail. It also strips your blog of any unique design. And the link to switch to the standard site rarely works.

I am stunned that there is so much enthusiasm for a product that creates a problem while solving nothing apparent.

<comment><AUTHOR> The initial Wordpress version is an earlier version derived from the Padpressed plugin. What were launching on June 21 is a new from the groundup framework. I bet everything this is great. One of the biggest problems is momentum scrolling. Even Joe Hewitt has been trying to solve it. We've got a solution for it and working with WP users to make it awesome.

The point is to do something new with tablet and the canvas it proxides. That's where the enthusiasm comes from.

<comment><USER2> _The point is to do something new with tablet and the canvas it proxides_

Do what?

<comment><AUTHOR> Whatever designers want now that content is touch enabled, it's not predefined. At first, were building some of the early layouts to build out the touch interaction framework. Eventually what's built will be up to a community of developers. What would you build?

<comment><USER2> The best way to make a web site "touch enabled" is to stick to simple, device- agnostic markup. The inventors of the web have advocated this since day one. The iPad and iPhone owe their very existence to the device-independent web and Apple has clearly put a lot of work into tuning them for it. If it wasn't for this quality of the web, we would all be using Windows PCs running the very native apps that you call "bullshit".

OnSwipe didn't take much input from the developers and designers of the Wordpress blogs that they surprise deployed to. And I don't know what input they or I could give without predefining what you are trying to accomplish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Congrats, Jason! Raising two rounds in less than 6 months, and getting into Business Week[1]. I hope this helps you get over the doldrums from getting turned down by YC this past fall. :)

ref:

[1] [http://www.businessweek.com/technology/special_reports/20110...](http://www.businessweek.com/technology/special_reports/20110517best_young_tech_entrepreneurs_2011.htm)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure you have better things to do, but blog.onswipe.com is basically unusable on (my) iphone on safari. or atleast holding it horizontally, and vertically is not much better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yikes, I know why. I was debugging something back in March and enabled iPhone as a user agent to show iPad stuff. So yeah, not going to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> wow! Congratulations jason and andres! Publishing apps are dead, long live to Onswipe!

<comment><USER6> Congrats, I certainly didn't think of OnSwipe as an ad network. This is a massive opportunity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I haven't said it yet, but this deserves it: Congrats to the OnSwipe team!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you man, it means a lot. Sorry when I was an asshole that one time back in the day. MIA represent!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> great job with fundrasing, congrats jason! good luck with your product i will be keeping eye on it!

</comment><comment><USER9> Awesome, congratulations!!

</comment><comment><USER10> Congrats Jason!

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice!</comment>


Flight Deck of the Space Shuttle Endeavour - <AUTHOR> http://www.launchphotography.com/Endeavour_Flight_Deck.html Quite an apparatus. An interesting mix of controls, from rotary buttons, linear gauges and toggle switches from the 70's, all the way to a modern glass cockpit.<p>The seats look like ancient torture devices. <comment><USER2> Back in 1996 I was part of the first class as the, now closed, Mountain View Space Camp. I was 11. When time came for the shuttle simulations, I volunteered to be pilot. After a quick 10 minute tutorial over what every button did in the deck we were off.

We were able to get out into orbit with the help of Mission Control, but on the way back it was just us in the deck.

We burned up on re-entry.

<comment><USER3> If anyone is interested, the X-Plane flight simulator has several space shuttle situations, such as full re-entry. X-Plane strives to be very realistic, and re-entry is very challenging.

<http://www.x-plane.com/>

<comment><USER4> There's also Orbiter, which is probably even more realistic since its main goal is realistic space flight. <http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/>

<comment><USER3> Awesome, thanks for that link!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Truly amazing. What's even more amazing is how ancient the technology inside one of mankind's most incredible inventions looks compared to what we know today.

It reminds me of a visit to one of Israel's Air Force bases where I got to see the F-16's up close. I couldn't believe it when we were told that pilots upon receiving coordinates, had to open up a notebook beside them and actually look it up to know where to go because their navigation system was so old. The F-16I had a lot of improvements in this area that no longer required manual lookup by the pilot.

<comment><USER6> I'd like to note that the shuttle fleet received a "glass cockpit" upgrade (around 1997-1998), replacing many mechanical indicators with multi-function displays. Here's a link to a (small) side-by-side comparison:

[http://human- factors.arc.nasa.gov/ihi/research_groups/isis/M...](http://human- factors.arc.nasa.gov/ihi/research_groups/isis/McCandless/shuttle.html)

Prior to the upgrade, the space shuttle looked dated compared to commercial airliners flying at the time. It's debatable whether the shuttles looked more ancient then or now.

<comment><USER7> Couple of years ago flew on an MD-80/DC-10 that had what looked like the original 1970's-era instrumentation. It did look pretty ancient. Wonder how many pilots are even qualified to fly on that, or if the qualifications are different.

The same plane was leaking fuel out of the wing throughout the flight. Not really confidence-inspiring.

<comment><USER8> There's a few parts of that anecdote which confuse me as a pilot. The first one is two vastly different aircraft separated by a slash as if to indicate that they are equivalent. The second is an air crew that completed a flight, while leaking fuel, without declaring emergency and putting it down. Lastly, someone _actually_ observing fuel leaking from the aircraft and thinking "meh, it's just old," rather than alerting the air crew.

(Put another way, I have doubts that you were observing a fuel leak. Those are generally pretty easy to notice -- "why are we consuming two thousand extra pounds of fuel per hour?")

<comment><USER9> Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story, unless you can't think of anything better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Getting an Error 999.

Here's a cached version:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:B4tHkMj...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:B4tHkMjhvUEJ:www.launchphotography.com/Endeavour_Flight_Deck.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER11> What's with the blue "ENDEAVOUR" sign in the last photos? Is that to avoid embarrassing "Oh dear, I appear to be boarding the wrong shuttle" moments?

</comment><comment><USER12> Those seats look exceptionally uncomfortable, I wonder if there is a reason for that?

<comment><USER13> My guess would be that during launch and reentry the astronauts are wearing pressure suits that include a backpack, are custom fitted and probably provide padding. In orbit theres no need for padding on the seats.

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

<comment><USER14> Yes, they wore ACES suits[1], which are partially pressurised.

Of course, at launch they wouldn't be sitting on the seats at all, they'd be lying on them.

[1]:<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Crew_Escape_Suit>

<comment><USER14> ^ Too late for me to edit this, I should have said _fully_ pressurised. The LES, the suit used on shuttle missions up to the late 90s, was partially pressurised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone happen to know the contractors involved with the primary computers in the Shuttles? I was told they used a newer iteration of the Boeing ACUs similar to what used to be in the B-52Hs for their Offensive Avionics System. Did they sit on a MIL-STD-1553 bus variant? Any truth to that?

</comment><comment><USER16> Same photo came up semi-recently: <http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120418.html>

</comment><comment><USER17> Did they sit in these seats during takeoff? And if so, how did they climb into those seats while the Shuttle was vertical on the launch pad?

<comment><USER9> The entire thing is planned, practiced, and executed, with the help of a team of specialists (some of whom are also astronauts): [http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/flyout/flyoutcapec...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/flyout/flyoutcapecrusaders.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nice pics but the fish-eye ruins it for me. The distortion is very distracting.</comment>


Lessons learnt from Tiger Airways' Cancellation Procedure - <AUTHOR> http://wakeless.net/archive/2009/10/tigers-cancellation-procedure

<comment><USER2> I respectfully disagree that Tiger Airways, and others of their ilk (same stripes?) around the world, need to care about your problem.

(The respectfully is because I would like these companies to do so. The disagree is because I don't think they should have to or that customers are entitled to act indignantly when it doesn't happen.)

Tiger are clearly positioned in the marketplace around lowest cost. That's almost certainly why wakeless and everyone else on this flight booked with them, as opposed to Qantas, Virgin etc - Tiger was cheaper. Qantas (I believe) would have paid for accommodation due to a cancellation (and possibly avoided the cancellation to prevent the expense of that policy) - but when you chose to pay $100 less for a flight, you waived that entitlement.

Why are Tiger cheaper? Because they have stricter policies and fewer, perhaps less-trained or experienced staff, and they build a business model on those factors, not around caring for you. If you want somebody to care, be prepared to pay for it.

Obvious exceptions to this rule apply when a business engages in misleading conduct. And I reiterate that I would like to see more companies caring.

But if I buy the cheapest shoes, drive the cheapest second-hand car, and fly the cheapest airline, I'm not in a position to complain about cheap customer service.

Edit: None of this means wakeless shouldn't have complained in the way he did, or even cried blue murder at the airport. By all means push for change, just don't expect it.

<comment><USER3> >Why are Tiger cheaper? Because they have stricter policies and fewer, perhaps less-trained or experienced staff, and they build a business model on those factors, not around caring for you. If you want somebody to care, be prepared to pay for it.

Exactly. That's Tiger's position in the australian budget airline market. Absolutely minimum cost - less staff, less service but they get you from point A to point B for cheap when it's economically sensible for them (they have a minimal number of services depending on seasonal demand). They have been getting a very high level of complaints this year (and apparently only allowed communication via post until recently!!!) [1].

Jetstar and Virgin can afford a couple more amenities/services and Virgin at least has tiered pricing that might allow them to offset some of those costs (including flexibility in cancellations/flight changes etc.).

1: [http://www.watoday.com.au/travel/travel-news/airline- complai...](http://www.watoday.com.au/travel/travel-news/airline-complaints- head-skyhigh-20090805-e9ny.html)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> That's not my point. My point is that once the flight was cancelled they handled it from that point badly. I just booked my flight with Jetstar, waited in line for ages to apply for the refund and then went on my merry way. The problem was that they could have saved the 100 or so people a lot of time by being far more upfront about what they were going to provide and how to get that.

<comment><USER2> Agreed - they could have been clearer and it wouldn't have been as painful an experience for all involved.

I'm not trying to disagree with that point ("they handled it badly"), I'm trying to make the case for the fact that their business model makes those snafus more likely, and we should expect that.

If they trained or paid their staff better, it may have been handled better. But if that adds real dollars to the price of seats, then people start choosing another carrier.

@ brucini, please understand I wasn't saying cheap cost = lack of _basic_ customer service, just that it likely equates to _cheap_ customer service. In an airline example, it probably also equates to cheap planes, cheap maintenance workers and pilots, and lower standards of maintenance quality. I would hope there were never any crashes - that would be an absence of _basic_ maintenance - but equipment faults, delays, and cancellations due to cheap maintenance? Well, it's a risk you take (and, frankly, which I'm willing to take in some situations) when you decide to buy the cheap option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's not logical to suggest, as JacobAldridge does, that the cost of a flight = a lack of basic customer service. Sure you might have to pay for your meals on flights now, but an airline should still ensure its customer service standards to deal with these cancellations. If anything budget airlines should be trying harder to maintain customer loyalty. As Wakeless says, he's not too bothered by the flight was cancelled (it happens to everyone) it's how it was dealt with. You shouldn't expect more cancellations of flights just because the average flight cost is generally cheaper than full-service airlines. Otherwise the argument would run that you should expect more crashes, and not complain, because you bought a cheaper flight ticket.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the US airlines have this sorted out. When my flight is canceled, I usually get an automated phone call saying that I'm booked on the next flight. (This is on AA, but I imagine it's the same for everyone else.)

When this doesn't happen, and I'm at the airport, I find it's easier to call Reservations from my cell phone and have them rebook me than to wait in line to speak with the gate agent. This is faster, saves waiting in line, saves listening to the people in front of you whine about how it's critical that they were there yesterday (yeah, they're going to uncancel the flight if you really need to see your mom...), etc.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sounds much less painless than what I experienced. They didn't even announce that you could call reservations and have them sort it out.</comment>


Raganwald now 'blogging' on GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/

<comment><USER2> Cool idea, but I've always found github a bit slow as a website (I'm in Australia).

</comment><comment><USER3> I really like the idea of using GitHub as a form of blogging about code, after all what better way to distribute code and small pieces of text describing it than a DVCS. I think I'll start doing the same with the code related posts on my blog.

<comment><USER4> " ... after all what better way to distribute code and small pieces of text describing it than a DVCS. "

Not that what Reg is doing isn't interesting, but what does a DVCS blog buy the reader? Will I be doing a local pull from someone else when github is down (or when he just doesn't feel like writing :) )?

On the other hand, the blog doesn't have support for comments, so I thought about forking the repo, adding my own comment to the text, then sending back a pull request. Presto.

<comment><USER5> > what does a DVCS blog buy the reader?

I don't know about the D part, but there are some advantages to a CVS. For example, if you cared to you could get everything for reading offline at your leisure.

And while it seems cumbersome for words, it is more convenient than a blog for code that I post. In the past I put some code up on web pages, some on FTP, and some on rubyforge, all linked from my blog. Now all the code you might want to download is in one unified repository.

This is an experiment, so we'll see how it goes. But I'm hoping that it will be a win for things that are code-y rather than wordy.

> On the other hand, the blog doesn't have support for comments, so I thought > about forking the repo, adding my own comment to the text, then sending back > a pull request. Presto.

I think you're onto something.

<comment><USER6> Developing a homoiconic entry in a distributed fashion.

How awesome

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On a sort of sidenote, what is raganwalds claim to fame? I see the name popping up everywhere, but I'm not really sure what he does in particular.

<comment><USER8> Learn more about the guy here:

<http://reginald.braythwayt.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's an interesting form of publication. I'm more of an RSS man myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> He does say "I will be tagging new 'posts' in del.icio.us. You can subscribe to an RSS feed that will alert you when I manually tag a new post."

<http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/raganwald/homoiconic>

<comment><USER10> Issue with that is no fulltext posts. Of course you can always hack together a Y! pipe that takes the post body HTML and adds it to the feed, but that seems like a lot of hackery just to get an RSS feed going.</comment></comment></comment>


Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League - <AUTHOR> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ <comment><USER3> "... great at what they're doing but with no idea why they're doing it."

From what I've seen this is absolutely dead on. Obviously I've met exceptions, but I have seen a pattern of people out of places like Harvard and MIT that are excellent at what they do but have a strange lack of intellectual curiosity.

I get the sense that many of these folks have gone through the programs they've done to satisfy others' expectations, not out of a personal drive to create or learn something. You can't force or fake genuine curiosity.

But the tough thing and the counter-argument is this: going to places like Harvard and Stanford gives you access to an unbelievable network. If you go to the University of Somewhere Not On the Coast, or don't go to college at all, you're going to have to work twice as hard at least to do something like raise money or land a really high-end job. Many doors are just going to be closed to you. The trend seems to be toward increasing concentration of wealth and therefore of network connections with access to it.

<comment><USER4> I graduated from Cornell in 2008 and while I met people who where there for other people's expectations in was a small minority and people who were "... great at what they're doing but with no idea why they're doing it" were even more rare. There could be a self selection bias at work here, but I still think that my experiences are not so unusual.

<comment><USER3> It's a really subjective thing, sure. I spent a lot of time in Boston in the Harvard/MIT orbit and I remember getting exactly the impression this article is talking about in many cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment's > notice.

This is said with a sort of tone of accusation, but I can remember a lot of cases where being always reasonably well dressed was considered a good thing.

May be here "ready to be interviewed" means "exceptionally polished extra- fresh look"? Then I understand - but it would be really interesting to see such people on every occasion in a college.

</comment><comment><USER6> TLDR?

<comment><USER7> the web is slowly but surely reducing the young's attention span - <USER2> results are predicted. some reference to ivy league colleges.</comment></comment>


Bloom Hash – Human Readable Long UUIDs - <AUTHOR> http://bloomha.sh/ <comment><USER2> Last posted two years ago... this reminds me of Bubble Babble which is an encoding to make things like gpg signatures memorable ([http://www.wiki.yak.net/589](http://www.wiki.yak.net/589))

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh boy. A blank, black webpage. Tab closed.</comment>


New Study Finds Transgender Kids' Brains Resemble Their Gender Identity - <AUTHOR> https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/science/new-study-finds-transgender-kids-brains-resemble-their-gender-identity-MAK4hCDgAU61w7arUZKY-g <comment><USER2> This could solve a lot of problems. A big barrier to allowing children to change identity/block pubertyl/etc. is that it's impossible to tell which cases of gender disphoria are biological and which may just be an expression of depression, social disorder, etc. Now we can brain scan kids to determine who would be eligible.</comment>


A simple and super awesome website - <AUTHOR>

http://about.me. I am not affiliated with the site, but I like it's simplicity. It does one think and does it extremely well. <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable <http://about.me> <http://www.about.me/directory/></comment>


Stem cell power unleashed after 30 minute dip in acid - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129542.500-stem-cell-power-unleashed-after-30-minute-dip-in-acid.html

<comment><USER2> An acidic environment with Ph 5.7. Let's Google that...

Oh my god, carbonic acid. That is the acid formed by adding carbon dioxide bubbles to soda. Could a giant bottle of Pepsi help cure your cancer? What about shooting up pure Coke, the cola kind?

Thought experiment. Take a clean syringe, draw it half full of Coca Cola from a newly opened bottle, stick it in a vein, draw a bit of blood, maybe one or two CCs, shake it a little to mix and leave the needle in the vein for 30 minutes, then inject the whole shebang, slowly with the syringe arranged vertically so that not too much CO2 goes in. Don't try this at home since injecting air into veins is bad, and I can't quite see how to avoid this with soda unless you have a lot more apparatus to help you with the job.

But it is technology that is within the reach of Stone Age people so this gives one pause for thought. Could someone else have stumbled across this way back when? A shaman? An alchemist? Hippocrates?

</comment><comment><USER3> It'd be funny if this was LSD instead.</comment>