A lot happens - <AUTHOR> http://jessenoller.com/blog/2015/9/27/a-lot-happens <comment><USER2> I can't say I've been there, but I've certainly been to the same city. It's why I now work part time. We don't achieve anything without goals and aspirations, but it's easy to get crushed under the weight of too many. Jesse is a fantastically talented guy, and - in one of life's little perverse twists - that's exactly what makes him vulnerable. Those who are most gifted and most able tend to develop the highest expectations, both internally and on behalf of those they love. It's tough to feel like you've fallen short, even when you realize the goal was unrealistic or that others would have been happier for you not to try. It takes a real adult to engage with these issues, and something more to share the process with the world as Jesse has done. That's courage right there.

I doubt that Jesse will ever read this. I sure wouldn't if I were in his position, because this is exactly the kind of non-supportive community he was talking about. Nonetheless, I'll say I'm glad to see he's moving forward once more, still kicking ass even when his legs are sore. Good to have you back, dude.

<comment><USER3> I did. And thank you - you hit the nail on the head with "It's tough to feel like you've fallen short, even when you realize the goal was unrealistic or that others would have been happier for you not to try."

As for the rest, simply thank you - and yeah, I shouldn't be reading the comments ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's so easy to get carried away by enthusiam, ambition, pride, fear ... it happens to most of us all the time. Luckily I belong to the people who run out of energy fast. Therefore I need to stop and break and make a reality check for myself regularly.

I'm still driven by the ambition to achieve greatness (change the world, become famous, buy myself an island). We need to use our brains first to understand how wrong this motivation is, then to build great applications.

Edit: In my Python days I was a great admirerer of Jesse. The times he created the multiprocessing module. I hope he will get back on his feet.

<comment><USER5> > It's so easy to get carried away by enthusiasm, ambition, pride, fear ... it > happens to most of us all the time. Luckily I belong to the people who run > out of energy fast. Therefore I need to stop and break and make a reality > check for myself regularly.

I recognize myself in the behavior that the writer describes. Going all-in on too many things, and all the negative consequences that result from that.

The feeling I felt as I read the article wasn't just recognition; it was _envy_. Because I am actually one of those people who run out of energy fast, my 'all-in' has not even resulted in a partner, kids, 'prominence' in any community, etc.

Basically, I am in much of the same place as the author, for the same reasons (to the degree that I can tell from one article, of course), except that I have nothing to show for it.

The best I can say about that, perhaps, is that by having less to 'show for it' I also have less to mess up or lose.

Small comfort.

Discovering that I also belong to the people that run out of energy fast, and that even operating at 'normal speed' can be disastrous for me in very particular contexts is a good thing though. If I learn to make these 'reality checks' regularly, I will most certainly be happier and more grounded, and in fact I'm pretty confident I'll even be able to 'achieve things' in the long run.

And that's a ray of hope, however small and however far off its source seems. Slow and steady wins the race, I think, applies very much to me.

My primary challenge is that I find it really, _really_ difficult to 'make reality checks'. I have recently been diagnosed with (mild) autism, and apparently this inability is pretty typical.

How do you keep yourself from either going too much all-in, or hiding from the world too much, when much of the time you're barely aware of whether you're doing one or the other? How do you remind yourself to do a reality check when you forget about the reminder, because your brain is stuck on some random obsession?

Sometimes I feel that I live in a world that is fundamentally not suited to me. I don't think of eating unless someone else starts eating, but because I live alone in a big city with some flatmates I barely know, I am often not triggered. I don't think of leaving the house to socialize because there is no clear pattern or cohesive structure to my social world. It's all opt-in and based on personal initiative, mostly. I sometimes struggle doing work as a freelance developer, because my brain gets stuck in a loop and I just pace my room talking to myself. Or, the other way around, I work and work at the expense of everything else and end up in a pretty bad place because of this. It made me understand why weekends and vacations are important. If only I could remember this. I've tried for years.

I sometimes miss the period in my life where external structures provided me with a socialization pattern (student org.), where deadlines and tests forced me in some kind of rhythm, or, longer ago, where living with my family provided me with the triggers I need to engage in normal, healthy behavior (eat well, sleep regularly, get outside, talk to people, sit with people not talking, emotional 'cleanup' by talking to parents/siblings, etc).

Sorry about this reply getting off track. It sort of got away from me...

<comment><USER6> I'm someone who only has limited amounts of energy (as in, sustained hard thought and focus), combined with a tendency to get hung up on briefly fascinating, but ultimately irrelevant details. My approach to making progress on projects is to keep a very short list of things that I think I really _can_ make progress on, along with a few footnotes about what imperfections to ignore, followed by a paragraph about _why_ I think I can make progress on these items.

Then, on any day where circumstances are in my favor, I can look at the list, pick something, and start doing it. Or, if I disagree with the list, then the immediate task is to fix the list. Anything I no longer agree with, or don't have the means to pursue, is removed. It feels important to me that the list remains concise and focused.

I _think_ that I'm now better at switching off, being able to do other things, being able to unwind, partly because the list gives me the confidence that I'll be able to pick things up again tomorrow, without needing to wear a furrow in my brain in the meantime.

<comment><USER7> Well said. The most industrious are those who live their lives by some form of checklist, and manage to at least check some of the items off. The only problem I have with checklists are those who obsessively try to achieve each task on the list and presuming each item is somehow not complete unless the others are completed.

A little known phrase that should be tattooed inside their skulls is "opportunity cost" which I learned from Mark Manson's blog, and it is a great phrase. Try to read "No you can't have it all".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ha. As I was reading the Carina announcement [1] yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to see Jesse Noller as its author and I wondered to myself what happened to him. He was everywhere, couple of years back and I had no idea that you were going through pain.

As a fellow pythonista from far away land, thanks for everything you've done for python. And good to have you back.

[1]: [https://getcarina.com/blog/announcing- carina/](https://getcarina.com/blog/announcing-carina/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Why doesn't OP move to Boston? If your daughters are the most important thing in your life, then moving across the US to be close to them seems like a no- brainer. One of the great thing about tech is that it's pretty easy to switch jobs/work remotely/branch off and do your own thing.

Maybe there were some reasons that couldn't be stated in the article, and maybe I'm being callous, if so, I apologize. Also, if OP was considering that but wanted to wait till he got a better grip on himself, that's fine too.

<comment><USER10> > Why doesn't OP move to Boston? If your daughters are the most important > thing in your life, then moving across the US to be close to them seems like > a no-brainer.

My (future ex-)wife is the same. She says she loves her 3 children more than anything, and she misses them when she's abroad for work, but still, she chooses not to be with them.

Either they love their work more than anything, but don't want to admit it, or they love their children but don't feel the need to be with them as much as any other person.

Maybe it was a mistake for such a person to have children.

Sorry if I sound too harsh, but being recently in the same situation, but on the other end, is pretty rough :(.

<comment><USER11> _My (future ex-)wife is the same. She says she loves her 3 children more than anything, and she misses them when she 's abroad for work, but still, she chooses not to be with them._

People are different. Lots of people get lengthy deployments on oil rigs, in the armed forces, or even high pressure international sales gigs - I don't think these folks love their kids any less than me.

I love my wife and kids loads, but I also love being away from them for brief periods of time (only up to a week in my job). It makes it so much better when I return. We are all wired up differently emotionally - absence truly does make the heart grow fonder in _my_ case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been through this three times in my life, each time it hits me harder and harder, I'm going through it again right now in fact, my story could read almost identically to this one. I often wonder if it's the crux of ambition.

I'm not one for self help books or any of that bullshit, however, The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth by John C. Maxwell is an excellent read on this subject.

Finding your purpose is hard, really really hard, I firmly believe some never really do.

<comment><USER9> While I don't intend to be rude, not sure how else I could say this -- you're not ruining other people's lives all three times right? There are a lot of I's and my's in your comment which makes me wonder how much empathy you're employing...

Also, have you tried to stop? Has it occurred 3 times unintentionally and this article was the impetus you needed to make a change?

[EDIT] - lightened wording around the last few questions, comments have noted that I was being too coarse, and ironically unempathetic

<comment><USER13> > makes me wonder how much empathy you're employing... Also, do you... want to > stop? Has it occurred 3 time unintentionally and you just can't stop?

You really don't see the irony in questioning his capacity for empathy while minimizing his hardships and suggesting they're likely all his fault?

<comment><USER9> Are any of the answers to those questions obvious upon reading the original comment? I asked because those points weren't clear when reading the original comment -- he notes it like it's a terrible thing but I was wondering how it could happen 3 times, when OP had it happen once and had so many undesirable things happen.

I must confess I haven't had something like this happen to me at this level, so maybe my capability of empathy is diminished, but the questions do not imply that it's entirely/likely his/her fault, outside of the fact that you generally can't get into a situation like this without some action on your part. This is precisely why OP is trying to take steps to change his behavior.

Maybe what I should have asked was: "Care to share more?" Without the pointed questions.

<comment><USER12> I'm sorry, tone is difficult over the internet I suppose. I presume you read my post as if I was whining, I genuinely wasn't. I've considered it many many times. Sometimes I think I should go work at a convenience store and just pick a simpler journey.

However, It's mostly positive, as I'm sure Jesse is finding out. I wouldn't trade anything, it's just hard, and that's that. Humbling, really. It's feeling like you've failed yet you've not begun.

I had the privilege of talking with Sean O'Sullivan for an hour or so recently, he coined the term we use today as "cloud". I explained how I felt, and my situation (as mentioned, similar to Jesse). He made a pointed observation about success. Often with success comes great failure, and it's in the failures that we have the learnings, that lead to success. I wrote a little about learning by doing: [https://medium.com/love-etc/small- talk-795a6bc9b615#.kc8kopb...](https://medium.com/love-etc/small- talk-795a6bc9b615#.kc8kopbnq) \- Learning by doing requires failure. Recently, someone who I'll love eternally shut me out of their life because I prioritized my work over them for months and months and months, I didn't listen, I didn't act, but I did learn.

Frankly it seems most of us are not particularly vocal about our failings, maybe some of us are perfect.

All of the times I've failed it's been because of me, and every time I fail, I learn more about what it means to be: me.

<comment><USER9> It certainly is -- it's my fault, I should have phrased it better with that in mind.

Thanks a lot for the thoughtful reply -- wish you the best! As you've put it, it's certainly a journey (no way, don't pick a simpler one!), and it looks like you're ready to be in it for the long haul. 100% agree on your thoughts about success/failure and found your thoughts on smalltalk/education/love interesting.

I have a brother who is trying to learn programming and I wish I could infuse him with the spirit you've learned (I'm sure the hard way) to have. If only there was some way to consistently teach tenacity.

<comment><USER12> Thank you for your kindness. <3

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is love worth it?

Interacting with people, playing with children, etc. can be enjoyable activities. Not saying that we should withdraw from it, but as intelligent people can we take a step back and question _love_ itself, especially as it causes so much pain?

Instead of loving and getting heart broken when the associated people depart from one's lives, why not simply enjoy the company of people (without love, trust and the concomitant sadness, resentment) and continue that enjoyment whenever alone time is in order (short-term or long-term)?

More curiously - why are people _reluctant_ to question love itself? (it is always one person or the other's fault, but never love's fault; why?).

<comment><USER9> Feel free to question it -- but also realize that you may come up with the wrong answers.

I think it's wise (in most case) to defer to older generations when stuck with serious questions like these -- and I doubt you'll find an older person/person on their deathbed who would say something like "I wish I would have spent less time loving, trusting, and committing to others".

I get the feeling if you took the approach you'd describe, all you'd end up with are a bunch of loose acquaintance-like relationships, and nothing deeper. Generally the realization that all your relationships are shallow is what triggers people to seek out deeper relationships, which need/require love/trust/commitment. Also, even if you were able to become completely content with nothing but shallow relations, good luck not regretting it/wondering if life could have been something more.

<comment><USER14> > Feel free to question it -- but also realize that you may come up with the > wrong answers.

Which is why sincerity is essential.

> I think it's wise (in most case) to defer to older generations when stuck > with serious questions like these -- and I doubt you'll find an older > person/person on their deathbed who would say something like "I wish I would > have spent less time loving, trusting, and committing to others".

The older generation are no better than us in regards to enjoying life without sadness, loneliness, and so on ... and as such are not a reliable source to draw inspiration from.

> I get the feeling if you took the approach you'd describe, all you'd end up > with are [...] relationships, and nothing deeper. [...] shallow is what > triggers people to seek out deeper relationships, which need/require > love/trust/commitment). [...] shallow [...] regretting [...] something more.

Words like "relationship" or "deeper" and "shallow" and "regretting" and "something more" are indicative of love in operation ... and questioning love means questioning those associated beliefs as well. Why is it necessary to _relate_ to fellow humans when they are already here on this planet? Why not question the need to relate? If the ability to relate vanishes, what happens to loneliness itself?

<comment><USER15> > The older generation are no better than us in regards to enjoying life > without sadness, loneliness, and so on ... and as such are not a reliable > source to draw inspiration from.

I think half of this statement is true. Yes, the older generation is no better than we are at living well. They're just as likely to make mistakes. However, that's the beauty of experience - you make mistakes, and you learn from them. Experience is the best teacher, in any field. You're dismissing out of hand the best resource we have to living better lives - the accrued experience of our older generations. That just seems foolish to me.

> Why is it necessary to relate to fellow humans when they are already here on > this planet?

The fact that you're posting this question on a message board for other people to read,comment on, and interact with suggests that you don't believe the things you're saying.

<comment><USER14> > You're dismissing out of hand the best resource we have to living better > lives - the accrued experience of our older generations. That just seems > foolish to me.

Except I'm not talking about "living better lives." The "better lives" wisdom of older generation usually means "make the best of it [with love, of course]."

Whereas I'm talking about questioning love itself. What is life like without love and the associated feelings/beliefs? I'm interested in a perfect live; a life full of enjoyment - and the older generations have nothing to offer in that regard (to the contrary, they favour love and as such tacitly prevent any questioning into it).

>> Why is it necessary to relate to fellow humans when they are already here on this planet?

> The fact that you're posting this question on a message board for other > people to read,comment on, and interact with suggests that you don't believe > the things you're saying.

The word "relate" is used in its affective context, stemming from hardwaresofton's use of shallow/ deeper relationships. Thus for clarity I'd rephrase that question as: Why is it necessary to feel a relationship/ connection/ bond with fellow humans when they are already here on this planet?

I'm quite, if not fully, confident that love is a hindrance.

<comment><USER16> I believe humans (and possibly other mammals) wouldn't have made it throughout our evolution without love. Look at how helpless humans are for at least the first 8 years of life. That's 8 summers and 8 winters. There are many many opportunities for parents to move on and say, "This is taking too much of my time and energy, I want to do something more enjoyable."

I think this is one thing that older generations have context for that younger ones (before becoming parents) can simply be unaware of. I know, I became a parent within the last year and it has changed my thinking on many things.

Even if we tried to live a life without love, I don't know that it's possible. Individually perhaps, but not as a strategy to have the human species continue to go forward. Empathy is something that healthy brains do naturally, and is really useful to keep a tribe or a society going (could even be required). This goes back to keeping children alive; when parents can't or won't, the tribe steps in.

Perhaps the modern world can make love obsolete; I hope that isn't the case. I think our minds have evolved to live in a pre-modern era. Until we fundamentally change our biochemistry, I'm pretty sure we'll have to make do with it (along with it being a hindrance).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow, super depressing. Don't forget that there's more to this life than writing code, folks.

<comment><USER18> Like what?

<comment><USER19> If you're asking that legitimately, not sarcastically, I'm sure we can help you out. :)

<comment><USER18> Indulge me.

<comment><USER19> > No, I'm attempting to prove a point. Indulge me.

No thanks. I was asking genuinely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Thanks to Jesse for having the courage to share this. Long and protracted arguments online can give your mental fatigue in a way that in-person ones cannot. The fact that this can happen to such a prolific Python contributor is probably a great reminder for me to step away from the keyboard more often.

In fact, I think I'll do that right now :)

</comment><comment><USER21> For anyone who's into Constructive Developmental Theory (In Over Our Heads, by Kegan), this is a classic case of why people go through the "adult"-ing process of generalizing over relationships. Being all-in emotionally, being unable to prioritize work and family and personal ambition, not having values that he's proud of, not setting boundaries - it's all part of a bigger problem that so many people are going through. Emotional maturity and personal grown doesn't stop being important when you turn 18 or 22 or even 30.

<comment><USER22> Or even 40; I assume even 50 and beyond, but I haven't been there yet. If we stop growing, we start dying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Most useful takeaway from this post:

> Just saying things "will be ok" isn't enough, I've got to start making > things better.

</comment><comment><USER24> For God's sake, man, move to your kids. Jobs are everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER25> Hi Jesse, I'm Aryeh. Perhaps one place to start is to forgive yourself and start afresh. Consider the past over, finished and done. A new "you" if you will, not the one you were before.

All that matters now is what you "DO", not what you think or believe. Smile, don't judge others, do what is good and right, and say only good things of others. This is the human challenge and journey.

If you want, say "hi" to me at aryehof at gmail anytime!

</comment><comment><USER26> Wow. That is an intensely personal, and really thought provoking, post. I happen to be going through something startlingly similar, so this hit home pretty thoroughly.

I wonder if this is more common in our industry than in others. It feels like it is incredibly easy to get wrapped up in tech and, as Jesse noted, it seems like it is happy to take everything you're willing to give.

</comment><comment><USER27> Great thought provoking read. Did you say "Hi" to anyone in the coffee shop?

</comment><comment><USER28> Many people often try to optimise for the world view of themselves, rather than their own experience.

Instead, when one starts to optimise for ones own experience, the idea of falling short of expectations doesn't arise.

Life is lived in ones own experience and each person to himself is the most important entity. Going through mental suffering is very hard, unnecessary and I hope everyone that does go through it, comes out of it.

I wonder if this is the same Jesse I knew of. So much energy, so much capability to do so many things.

</comment><comment><USER29> Yeah, as others have said: thanks for everything Jesse. I regret that it took this outpouring - which is wonderful and important and super brave of you - for us all to remember to say thanks.

I told a story at PyCon 2014 Storytelling about a job that I did over the course of 6 months wherein the client was a bit abusive and I brought it home and destroyed a relationship with a really cool lover.

It's really good for us all to seriously talk about this stuff.

Hope to see you in Portland buddy.

<comment><USER30> Something that's never taught is how to deal with emotions in constructive ways. At least, I don't know who I was supposed to learn it from. I think a lot of us carry emotional turmoil with us that boils over in unrelated situations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Success isn't what it looks like. Meaning, the image of success is not true success (personally meaningful success), and true personally meaningful success doesn't look like the oft-projected successful image.

It takes real effort to figure that stuff out.

</comment><comment><USER32> Wow. This was touching and very intense. As a student, this definitely goes into my diary for the future.

</comment><comment><USER33> "Jesse" not "Jeese"

<comment><USER34> and known, not know.

<comment><USER35> And "Python", not "python".

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, thanks, all fixed ! Surprising how many mistakes one can make in a simple sentence...although, as feeble justification -- I wrote that right after I read the article and was still thinking about some of the stuff. There was a bit of irony though in these corrections -- how we tend to focus on and willing choose to spend energy on the things that don't matter in the long run for things that make us feel good about ourselves.

<comment><USER36> _the things that don 't matter in the long run_

Not just the long run! It looks like 'dang' already rewrote it to get rid of all of those words. But at least I'll sleep easier knowing that as a team we were able to fix the mistakes before it was erased. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "It's so easy to get carried away by enthusiasm, ambition, pride, fear"

ahahahahh.

That's so immature...

You have 24hours in a day, decide how you allocate them. You'll soon realize that there's a _choice_ to make. Since we're coder, we need time to achieve. So it's dead simple : * full time on code and you'll achieve => hapiness * full time on family and you'll feel right => hapiness * 50/50 and you'll have none of them and just have a basically I'm-not-extraordinary life

It always blows me away how many people refuse to see that this choice is inescapable and that it implies abandpnning a bit of yourself to keep in touch with humanity (i.e. friends, wife, children).

<comment><USER2> What I think you're missing here is the role of ambition. Full time on coding might make some people happy. That can happen if you only care about coding as an activity, and not about reaching specific goals. It can also happen if your goals fit within the amount of coding you can do individually in whatever milieu you're doing it. What if the thing you want to do, the software you want to create, requires more than that? Then you have to pull together a team, which brings in a whole bunch of complexity and loss of control. It can be awesome, or it can be draining and frustrating. Sometimes it's both.

On the flip side, "full time at home" isn't an option for many (probably most) people who'd be reading your comment or mine. Somebody has to make some money, not for its own sake but to reach family goals - housing of a certain quality, schools, sports or hobbies, whatever. Then there's a time commitment on top of that. It's a lot with one kid, it's more with two or three, it's _far_ more if any of them or ill or troubled or disabled.

For many people, just having to choose is frustrating. People want to have a successful career _and_ a good family life _and_ time for themselves, and they just can't have all of them. Giving up on "having it all" is really really hard, and it's not immature. In fact it's the characteristic struggle of mature people, leading to burnout and mid-life crises. It's the immature, with fewer commitments and simpler goals, who seem least affected.

That's (part of) why I think your "that's immature" is itself the most immature thing I've ever seen on HN. It shows a startling lack of empathy for people going through something you apparently never have. I hope you _are_ young, because if you can still say such a thing from the vantage of experience that's even more pathetic. The struggle is real, and being laughed at or condescended to as you go through it doesn't exactly help. It's part of what Jesse was warning about.

<comment><USER3> Grow up without money and constant financial worry, without a sense of home / self and few / no friends and start in the workforce when you're a teenager. You find yourself in "always make more money to be more secure" and "always look for validation from other that you belong". You become career driven as thats what defines you - and a "community" becomes your self reinforcement and friends.

<comment><USER38> Wow. That's a very interesting point you touch on!

I've noticed that many of my late-twenties / early-thirties friends struggle with their current lives, and I think it often is because of what you describe: they spent so much time trying to 'become' that they never really considered or learned how to 'be'.

I struggle with this myself sometimes, too, and I consider learning how to 'be' with what I am now to be one of my biggest challenges and most important skills to practice.

<comment><USER2> I don't think it's a late-twenties or early-thirties thing. I'm 50, and many people in my own age cohort (including me) have to deal with the same issues. IMO it has to do with the kind of community one grew up in vs. the kind of community one occupies as a computer professional. If they're significantly different, there's a feeling of being an outsider/impostor and of having to _try_ to fit in. If they're the same, there's no such drive. People who grow up poor and find themselves living amidst the relative affluence of high tech are often the most aggressive about either saving money or showing the outward signs of wealth. People who are the first in their families to get a good education are often the most likely to value it and/or show it off. You see the same sort of thing among people who lived through the Great Depression, or WW2 and its aftermath. In contrast, people who had all these things since birth tend to take them for granted and not think about them much. Cinderella never quite felt as comfortable in the castle as everyone else seemed to.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Feedback on my new website? - <AUTHOR> http://www.eser.org/usa Hello everyone,
I'm doing a website to host demos of LAMP websites (Drupal, Mambo, osCommerce, SugarCRM, WebERP, MediaWiki, Joomla, etc..).
I like demoing new websites from Sourceforge.net, but it's annoying to have to download and install each one. Plus, some of the websites on Sourceforge require root access and/or have security vulnerabilities. VMware is great, but that still means spending time going through README's and tweaking webserver config files. Some of these websites have online demos, but not all of them work. And some of the demos that do work are really slow.
So, I'm creating ESer.org.
So far, I've got 105 website demos on eser.org. See: http://www.eser.org/usa
I'm looking for interesting/new/unique open-source websites to add to eser.org.
Any suggestions?
 eser <comment><USER2> I just don't get what your site does. You should explain it better.

Other thing you have to do is to improve your HTML and add some CSS, don't use tables.

Hope that helps.

<comment><USER3> I second that. It's good to give users content right away, but add something to explain to people why they should dig in. Your About Us section is still a little vague, but it's a good start. Shorten it a little, clarify it, and give it more prominent placement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The blog does a good job of explaining whats going on. Try lifting & editing some of the content from there to explain what the site is about ~ <http://blog.eser.org>

</comment><comment><USER5> you should pick out a creative commons css template here: <http://www.oswd.org/> \- it's free

since you're selling websites it would probably be good to have a decent ui and maybe screenshots of what's on sale</comment>


Jakob Nielsen: Front Page Structure of Corporate Blogs - <AUTHOR> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/blog-front-pages.html

<comment><USER2> "the user"

You can hardly conclude by testing with only one user and even if there were more it is only 5 different weblogs.

It might seem intuitive that summaries are better, but how many of the people, sorry, how many articles did the person go on to read?

I think it depends much more on other variables, but fare enough in a corporate blog I would be skimming.

<comment><USER3> There's not enough information to discern how many users were involved in this study, which limits its applicability. Also, there is a very "pepsi-challenge" aspect to this. Are these just otherwise uninterested users thrown in front of these sites? This doesn't necessarily tell us anything about the experiences of users who go to these sites with a purpose in mind.</comment></comment>


Justin.tv  to Launch Pay-Per-View Service  - <AUTHOR> http://www.beet.tv/2009/12/exclusive-justintv-to-launch-payperview-service-.html

<comment><USER2> Hmmm. I wonder how they'll deal with policing this for porn.

<comment><USER3> I wonder what liability it opens up if someone does a show for a movie/tvshow and charges for it.

Indirectly profiting from infringement is different than directly profiting from it.

<comment><USER4> It's already being done. Megavideo basically does this. They seem to be doing OK (thus far).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is Justin Kan still with the website? He seems to have disappeared from it completely, a bit surprising considering the fact that he used to be the only face of the site.

<comment><USER6> Justin is still with us - he's a founder! He just doesn't broadcast anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I put the over/under for a UFC deal at 2.5 years.</comment>


Kedit, the text editor of John McPhee - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XEDIT
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/magazine/the-mind-of-john-mcphee.html
> McPhee sat down at his computer and clicked around. Green text appeared on a black screen. That was all: green text. No icons, rulers, or scrollbars.
> McPhee began to type in command lines.

  x coded.*

  dir coded.*

  x coded-10.tff

  x coded-16.tff
 > Up came portions of his book "The Founding Fish." He typed in further commands, and hunks of green text went blinking around: a complete inventory of his published articles; his 1990 book, "Looking for a Ship."
> I felt as if I were in a computer museum, watching the curator take his favorite oddity for a spin. McPhee has never used a traditional word processor in his life. He is one of the world's few remaining users of a program called Kedit, which he writes about, at great length, in "Draft No. 4." Kedit was created in the 1980s and then tailored, by a friendly Princeton programmer, to fit McPhee's elaborate writing process. <comment><USER2> Interesting; I have never heard of this editor before now.</comment>


Sony announce PlayStation Store, PlayStation framework for Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/27/sony-announces-playstation-suite/

<comment><USER2> > Sony just dropped a bomb on the Japanese stage

"Someone set up us the bomb"

"We get signal... main screen turn on"

Hello gentlemen, all your games are belong to us.

I think smartphones are currently too limited for gaming. You can create some touchscreen/accelerometer based games, but still I think a resistant D-Pad and two buttons should be mandatory for phones, or maybe if Android would add support for attaching a real(preferably smaller) controller... that would be an improvement.

I don't think hardware speed is an issue for mobile gaming anymore though.

<comment><USER3> The billions of dollars smartphone game developers make disagree with you. I can't find exact numbers but a quick Google session reveals that total console game sales ($11-12 billion) are not far ahead of mobile game sales (a significant portion of total mobile app sales, estimated to be around $5 billion).

Given the rate smartphone sales and smartphone app sales grow, I don't think it will take a long time until mobile game sales with overtake console game sales.

<comment><USER2> I didn't imply they are not making money, I didn't even touch the financial side of this, I just said that the lack of "proper" game controllers is a limiting factor, which should be addressed.

> Given the rate smartphone sales and smartphone app sales grow, I don't think > it will take a long time until mobile game sales with overtake console game > sales.

I don't think we will see that anytime soon, you won't get big screen experience from mobile phones that you can get from playing on your favorite console on a Full HD screen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Sony says the next-generation PlayStation Portable will be compatible with games developed for PlayStation Suite right off the bat._

Also, I think these PlayStation Suite games require proper buttons, either virtual on-screen or real. So, these games could also be played on PS3 as well. Sony looked at what MS did with Wp7+Xbox and took it one step further.

So, I hope, games developed for PS suite could run on PS3+PSP2+PSPhones!

</comment><comment><USER5> Good for Sony, but not so good for Android as it's becoming even more fragmented.

<comment><USER6> By that logic, iOS is fragmented because there are over 200,000 apps available, most of which duplicate functionality available in other apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Too little, too late.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nah, I don't think so, if only because it's still really really early in the mobile revolution. But this is really big for Android devices (that support the spec...) for three other reasons:

1) It gives them a huge library of premium titles. There are a lot of really good PSP titles which blow most iOS games out of the water.

2) It gives Android a premium, curated, and branded app store.

3) It should vastly cut down on device compatibility issues for developers. There's still going to be multiple devices (and resolutions), but at least you know a "PlayStation Certified" device will meet a certain minimum requirement.</comment></comment>


Twitpic is shutting down - <AUTHOR> http://blog.twitpic.com/2014/09/twitpic-is-shutting-down/ <comment><USER4> So, with three weeks notice, all tweets that have ever been posted that included a picture using Twitpic (which is a remarkable number) will no longer have their picture available? In fact, do we even have three weeks? I just did a search for "saurik twitpic" on Twitter ([https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=saurik%20twitpic](https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=saurik%20twitpic)) to find people who had posted pictures of me, of them for me, or of my products to show to others, and I'm seeing just a bunch of broken images (the few that work, as in the few that still show images on Twitter's website, such as [https://twitter.com/MuscleNerd/status/296068187353661440](https://twitter.com/MuscleNerd/status/296068187353661440), are simply a cache from Twitter's twimg.com: clicking through to Twitpic doesn't work). It seems like twitpic is already offline :/. (So like, I was going to go through and try to frantically download images I'd find relevant in the next week, but I guess it is already too late.)

(edit:) Even the broken previews are now disappearing (making this both a little less obvious that there is missing content and also a little more barren-looking). I guess Twitter notices the original image is gone and stops trying to render it through twimg.com, so most of the tweets in my posted search result are now just "imageless" (before they looked like this one, which is older enough that I hadn't rendered it yet to get its cache to clear: [http://cache.saurik.com/tinyimg/twitpicoff.png](http://cache.saurik.com/tinyimg/twitpicoff.png)).

<comment><USER5> The Twitpic homepage[1] is also 404'ing big time, perhaps it's just a devops issue more than them pulling the plug before the sunset date?

It almost seems like they're playing a little hardball and showing everyone what things will be like if they disappeared from the web, which seems to be what Twitter is threatening them with since they're unable to secure the use of their name and yet millions of images are linked based on that (domain) name.

Still, we've seen this story before, Twitter doesn't give a fuck about developers now that they have sufficiently used them to build their platform and brand.

But, what's funny is, it was the use of "tweet" that Twitter frowned upon for 3-rd party names -- "twit" was considered fine...

[1] [http://imgur.com/YLOEKEs](http://imgur.com/YLOEKEs)

<comment><USER6> > Twitter doesn't give a fuck about developers now that they have sufficiently > used them to build their platform and brand.

I really hate that this is the standard model for building startups these days. Make a free service, grow your userbase using investment money and by encouraging developers to build on your platform, then once users and developers are dependent on the platform, start littering it with ads, selling users' data, and shutting down all your API and all the developers' work. We've seen this happen over and over. Will it ever stop? One thing is for sure, developers will wizen up to this if it continues and stop building on top of platforms, which just sucks for everyone.

<comment><USER7> I completely agree with you, but for the use of the word "dependent". What user is dependent on Twitter? Seriously? Can't one stop tweeting in an instant without any ill effect on her life?

For developers it's a different story -- but they should know better.

<comment><USER8> Aside from people with huge audiences and Twitter-related businesses, anything you choose to use and incorporate into your life is at least somewhat of a dependency, even in the presence of substitutes.

For example, I love Chick-fil-A sandwiches. When I moved, the closest Chick- fil-A is now far away. I was dependent on Chick-fil-A, and I'm less happy without it, even though I have missed no meals and probably eaten healthier in its absence.

All kinds of things are like this - if emacs went away, I could learn vim. If my apartment building went condo, I could find another place to live. If my favorite TV show got cancelled, I would find something else to watch, read a book, etc. But those are all things I chose to use, and taking any of them away would reduce my welfare by definition, even if only a little bit.

<comment><USER7> If words have meaning and if we try to stay away from hyperbole, you are not _dependent_ on Chick-fil-A, never have been, never will be.

<comment><USER8> What would you suggest (more for e.g. Twitter users than my example)? Reliant? Used to? The whole concept of dependence is that substitutes aren't perfect. Windows/Mac, Android/iOS, emacs/vim - no one is dependent on those, but a lot of people would be pissed if any one of them went away.

<comment><USER9> The issue is obviously one of semantics but your concept of dependence is not the widely accepted concept. Dependence means completely reliant on - <USER2> substitutions would do. The thing you're dependent on is a requirement, not a preference. For example, you are dependent on food. Remove food from the equation and you will perish. You are not dependent on Chick-fil-A.

Twitpic is dependent on twitter. There are no substitutions that they can make and still survive. They can't port to a service comparable to twitter as there are none.

EDIT: Whether or not users are dependent on twitter is up for date. I imagine it depends on their use case.

<comment><USER10> > Dependence means completely reliant on - no substitutions would do.

I disagree with that. Package managers have concepts like optional dependencies or alternatives (only 1 of multiple options required). Anyway, you seem to be speaking of dependencies in a technical sense - <USER3> dependencies, package dependencies, etc. In a more general sense it is quite normal to say something like "I depend on my bike to get to work" even if I could take the subway or use Uber, or "I depend on YouTube for my daily dose of cat videos" even though you wouldn't really die without them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's a reminder to please donate to the Internet Archive. [https://archive.org/donate/index.php](https://archive.org/donate/index.php) They have tons of old twitpic pages! [http://web.archive.org/web/20140304234132/http://twitpic.com...](http://web.archive.org/web/20140304234132/http://twitpic.com/) See that timeline at the top? You can go to any date and browse around.

And the Internet Archive is more than just the "Wayback Machine" that lets you browse old versions of websites. They have massive datasets of video, audio, and texts too - check out the examples on the homepage. And you can add your own collections now. [https://archive.org/create/](https://archive.org/create/)

They just finished ingesting 2TB of public Fotopedia photos before it went down. Do you know how much it costs to store a terabyte permanently? Not an offline backup, but accessible 24/7 forever? About $2,000! Power, cooling, redundancy, and especially dedicated people to keep it all going. [https://archive.org/donate/index.php](https://archive.org/donate/index.php)

<comment><USER12> Shoutout to Jason and #archiveteam. Great work on Fotopedia, ready to launch DO instances to go grab Twitpic!

<comment><USER11> I didn't mean to leave out credit to Archive Team :) But last I checked they don't need more help, whereas most of the data they grab ends up on the Internet Archive who really could use the money.

<comment><USER12> > whereas most of the data they grab ends up on the Internet Archive who > really could use the money.

Completely agreed. The IA is a treasure, an underfunded one at that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Two lessons:

1\. Don't base your entire business on another business' product. Especially one that has had such a hostile relationship with third parties. When the other business decides to discontinue your access to its service, or otherwise change things, or basically copy what you do under their own brand, you're screwed.

2\. Don't create a similar name that will give you trouble in trademark disputes. (Seriously? TwitPic? I work in technology, and even I thought they were owned by Twitter, though admittedly, I don't use Twitter much and don't use TwitPic at all).

<comment><USER14> I don't think those lessons apply well to this TwitPic scenario, since they have been breaking them for 5 years without any problem.

<comment><USER15> Inasmuch as it came to a sudden, screeching halt _even after_ five years highlights the value of those lessons even more so, IMHO. Five years is long enough to get (falsely) comfortable and that's when ignoring those lessons really gets dangerous for a business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's more to this story... If I had to guess I would say that it's no longer profitable (or at least, very profitable as it once was) and it's not fun to run an image host (imagine all the trouble that comes with just copyright issues, let alone criminal matters). The founder also has a new startup called Pingly which I'm sure is more rewarding to be working on.

On its face Twitpic is shutting down because they won't get their trademark, but they've never had their trademark and have had no problems operating. Twitter isn't suing them, they're just saying they are against the trademark application. They don't need the trademark and it's bizarre to shut your company down for the possibility of being forced to change your name in the future.

If Twitpic wanted to continue running they could without any changes or extra work. It's a dead end though, Twitter has its own image service and there is little reason besides legacy to use Twitpic. Here's their traffic situation which should pretty well mirror revenue as it's web based advertising paying the bills:

[https://www.quantcast.com/twitpic.com](https://www.quantcast.com/twitpic.com)

They're hemorrhaging traffic. Globally there were 85,043,992 visits in the month period a year ago compared to 13,315,016 in the most recent month. That's also just the past year, Twitpic has been on the decline for years and peaked in July 2011 with a cool 280,021,248 visits.

Expenses are likely not down nearly the same amount as they have to store more and more images every month (with less traffic there is less bandwidth, but this doesn't count images not loaded on their website).

Just in the last month they lost 46% compared to the previous period. It's falling off a cliff. This seems like a good way to get some sympathy on the way out. A rude move to their users though. Maybe Twitter can step in and offer a bottom dollar buyout so that the links don't break.

<comment><USER17> This echoes my thoughts when I read the post. Sounds like a clasdic case of simple cloud service losing profitability; answer shut down and screw your users. Afaik the service was free, so I don't have much sympathy for the users; but blaming twitter seems disingenuous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So, there is a bunch of info we dont have... But would it not make sense to just rebrand? From a preliminary search on twitter, there is a huge amount of users still using twitpic. Seems like this is a biz that could/should make millions a year with some cost reductions and run mostly on autopilot.

Also, what happens to the millions of pictures previously hosted with these guys? Even if you can backup/export all your data, think about all those links on twitter that are going to suddenly stop working. Its basically like a URL shortener shutting down.

Shit, send the site over here and Il provide the resources to keep it going. Just seems like such a shame.

<comment><USER19> My thoughts exactly. Why is the trademark so important to them? And as I read it, Twitter never demanded that they stop using the name, just that they do not apply for the registered trademark. This decision seems rash.

<comment> at-fates-hands >>> My thoughts exactly. Why is the trademark so important to them?

Because it would protect them from Twitter going after them for infringement on Twitter's trademarks. I'm sure Twitter knew they had no argument for the "Likelihood of Confusion" Test and TwitPic would've been granted its trademark in due time.

From a legal perspective, it looks like Twitter felt if they got trademark protection, they wouldn't have any leverage to sue them to get them to stop treading on their business. Instead of mounting a legal defense in the courts, they simply used what leverage they did have and threatened to cut them off from their API - which is everything for TwitPic.

For you non-legalese folks:

[http://marklaw.com/trademark- glossary/confuse.htm](http://marklaw.com/trademark-glossary/confuse.htm)

"The terms, "confusingly similar" or "likelihood of confusion" both refer to the standard required to prove infringement of a trademark. Specifically, if the relevant consuming public will likely be confused or mistaken about the source of a product or service sold using the mark in question, then likelihood of confusion exists, and the mark has been infringed.

The likelihood of confusion test is also one of several examinations conducted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in determining whether to approve an applicant's trademark application. It is worth noting here that even if there is no likelihood of confusion, i.e. no trademark infringement, you may still be liable for using another company's trademark if you are blurring or tarnishing their mark under the state and/or federal dilution laws."

<comment> squeaky-clean >I'm sure Twitter knew they had no argument for the "Likelihood of Confusion" Test and TwitPic would've been granted its trademark in due time.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but are you saying it's not confusing that TwitPic is not owned by Twitter? (At least from a legal standpoint)?

I always assumed Twitpic was owned by Twitter, and it seems many other HN members did too. I'm amazed they lasted more than a month with that name.

<comment><USER20> At the time, Twitter gave specific guidance that ecosystem applications with the term "tweet" in it would not be allowed, but twit was OK. That was specifically covered. I know for a fact because I ran a site with "twit" in the title, and cleared it with Twitter. Dozens of modestly popular sites (around data, retweets, images, etc) were using "twit" at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sad news. Just the latest victim in Twitter turning on it's own developer ecosystem. :-/

<comment><USER22> They stuck it out pretty long with a good customer base, I personally kept using them even after Twitter introduced the ability to embed images.

They just never adapted, I feel like their site design/experience hasn't changed since their initial launch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's a shame Twitter has become so developer-hostile. When it first came out, I remember the excitement of using Twitter as a host platform for other apps. Now I couldn't imagine writing a line of code that interacts with their platform. It's a nightmare. I wish app.net had been more successful: it was clearly an attempt to ride the waves of that excitement after it'd been made clear that Twitter had jumped the shark.

<comment><USER24> > It's a shame Twitter has become so developer-hostile

Nothing about this is developer hostile. I'm rather surprised this did not happen sooner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I suspect Twitter's demand is the straw that broke the camel's back. I'm sure Twitpic use has declined significantly since Twitter introduced their own image hosting. The team has moved on to other projects so there's not much incentive to fight it.

<comment><USER26> Pretty big straw... Not many fully functional and profitable companies can handle a "Drop your trademark or we'll sue" legal demand from a company like Twitter.

<comment><USER27> Except they're not threatening to sue, they're threatening to drop TwitPic from their API.

<comment><USER28> That seems like a much, much bigger threat in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> A year ago I wrote a quick Python script to export all my images. If anyone wants to use it (or improve on it) I blogged about it at [http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/08/exporting-twitpic-images- pyt...](http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/08/exporting-twitpic-images-python/)

<comment><USER30> THANK YOU!!!! I just used a modified version of your script to download all my data. Again, THANK YOU!!!

My version: [https://gist.github.com/hugs/fa7892da03ce660c212e](https://gist.github.com/hugs/fa7892da03ce660c212e)

Changes:

      * Use the short_id as the image filename.
      * Use https instead of http when downloading the json data.
      * Save the json data to individiual "page-*.json" files.

Quick question: Is it okay to use the MIT license for this?

<comment><USER29> Go ahead :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't understand why Twitpic would be shutting down. If they are growing and doing well, then why not just change the business name? Or is it that things aren't going well (usage dropping drastically) and they've already been thinking about shutting down or moving on, and maybe this trademark issue was just the last straw?

</comment><comment><USER32> long time coming really. follows long narrative/twitter history where twitter forced it's way into owning the photo content shared on the service....allowing only a few like twitpic to maintain the key aspect 'embeddability/previews'. What still remains interesting to me is that at one point instagram was gaining an incredible amount of speed in becoming the defacto picture sharing service on twitter -- but then they had the spat with fb/insta and twitter stopped the previews for instagram pics. Instagram has a huge community so survived fine, but it could and still could be so much more with twitter integration...but that sanction has never been lifted.

<comment><USER33> Actually it was Instagram that decided to stop including the Twitter preview of photos, because "we want images viewed on instagram.com".

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/05/kevin-systrom-on-pulling- tw...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/05/kevin-systrom-on-pulling-twitter- cards-integration-we-want-images-viewed-on-instagram-com/)

<comment><USER32> sorry yeah, you're right. There just seemed to be an air of 'fb v twitter' and content owning about it anyways....and really, at the time anyone will remember that instagram was becoming really popular for sharing pics on instagram + twitter...and then boom. Insta silo'd and twitter aggressively pushing pic.twitter.com native hosting

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Are they just playing chicken with Twitter here?

It seems odd that, because Twitter are being trademark jerks, they're going to just take their ball and go home. This feels more like attempted blackmail.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seems they're continuing their aggressive push towards controlling it all. Anybody have recent numbers on 3rd party client tokens remaining? And what happens to clients like TweetBot when they run out of tokens?

</comment><comment><USER35> Here is the relevant Archive Team project for Twitpic: [http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Twitpic](http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Twitpic)

</comment><comment><USER36> So it's time to try this backup tool [https://github.com/Stantheman/Twitpic- Backup](https://github.com/Stantheman/Twitpic-Backup)

<comment><USER37> Thanks for the shoutout! Twitpic-Backup is pretty old but will definitely get your images. Props to pcgMongo for today's PR:

[https://github.com/Stantheman/Twitpic- Backup/pull/2](https://github.com/Stantheman/Twitpic-Backup/pull/2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> They could always go back to twitter and propose dropping the lawsuit if they change their name?

Yes I know Twitpic is the brand, but if they were to simply DNS redirect Twitpic.com to ickleimages.com [1](available!) then twitter wouldn't be littered with old broken images, and the company could work on pushing the new brand. They do now support more than twitter after all.

If it's a viable business, it seems crazy to throw it away to prove a point that many probably saw as an issue from the outset (That is the use of twit* for a service that leeches off twitter's success).

I'm sure changing every single link to serve twittermademedoit.gif would be frowned upon.. but then the company isn't going to exist any more..

disclaimer. I've never used Twitpic before, nor posted on twitter so may be missing something..

[1] [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ickle](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ickle)

</comment><comment><USER39> When is Twitter shutting down its API?

</comment><comment><USER40> Sounds like there is either more to this or this is a strategy. I'm guessing they would like to sell but can't do to possibly of being sued by Twitter over their name. Not so much that Twitpic can't continue but they can't get further funding or bought out due to risk.

</comment><comment><USER41> I wonder how well Twitpic is doing revenue and profits wise and how much that affected the decision?

It's hard to believe only the patent issue is the cause here. Open closing down announcements are nice, but should list all the facts and circumstances, not try to spin it PR wise.

<comment><USER42> A 2010 interview with Mixergy, the founder Noah Everett stated: "TwitPic is generating $1.5 to $2 million in ad sales on an annual basis, with 70% profit margins. It was roughly similar revenue in 2012.

In interview last month, he said his other company, Pingly will revolutionize email. He's changing focus on something that has real revenue potential and possibly good VC?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'd always assumed Twitter had purchased Twitpic a long time ago. Interesting plot twist.

</comment><comment><USER44> They're going to pivot and introduce a suite of new services which use the same underlying engine to share pictures across a variety of social media sites:

      Googpic: share on Google+
      Facepic: share on Facebook
      Instapic: share on Instagram
      Tumbpic: share on Tumblr
      Pinterpic: share on Pinterest

When interviewed, the founder stated "We plan on filing trademark applications for these new service names and anticipate no further legal issues. It's regrettable that Twitter is acting so unreasonable by taking reasonable steps to protect its mark."

<comment><USER45> They weren't facing legal issues with Twitter, so that last part seems somewhat off base.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Never ever, ever build a service that is 100% dependent on another service that you don't have alternatives for and never use someone else's trademark in order to leverage your business. That's two fatal mistakes in one go, they should be rather surprised that they held on this long. But maybe the 'user outrage' will be enough to get twitter to buy them, though - assuming twitter isn't dumb - that would be a bad move because that would lead to hundreds of copycat attempts.

</comment><comment><USER47> To be perfectly honest, I am surprised to learn that twitpic is owned by a different company than twitter itself, which is precisely what trademark law is supposed to prevent.

</comment><comment><USER48> I must not be paying enough attention, because this doesn't make a lick of sense from Twitters side. If I had a company that was willing to host images instead of me, at no cost to me, and no restrictions on me, I would be a barking mad idiot to disrupt this relationship. Unless I was about to sell...

<comment><USER49> I don't think it mentions anything about Twitpic as a service. It's only about the trademark.

That being said it makes a lot of sense for Twitter want to control the user experience. The cost of hosting low resolution thumbnails can't be a pressing issue for Twitter. User experience and engagement on the other hand....

I'm not saying it's worth sabotaging relationships with 3rd party developers but there's a certain mindset in which this type of thinking makes a lot of sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> If Twitter killed the API that would put Twitpic out of business - but how is that worse than shutting it down? They might as well call Twitter's bluff, if the alternative is just as bad.

</comment><comment><USER51> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4315663](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4315663) I guess stocktwits is next on the chopping block.

</comment><comment><USER52> I think the issue here is that Twitpic's business model is having people leave the main Twitter interface to take them to another domain, where Twitpic can extract advertising money from the impressions. Twitter has image previews these days, which offer a nicer user experience and keep users on the main Twitter site. With Twitter hosting images itself, it makes little business sense for them to continue letting Twitpic make ad money off a feature duplicated externally.

</comment><comment><USER53> Hopefully somone like the Archive Team will at least manage to save most of the images. Urls used for images and links seems to be sequential numbers.

<comment><USER54> I just _really_ hope that no-where in the shutdown does twitpic put up a restrictive robots.txt. Archive.org's retroactive robots.txt and all that.

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady >> "Unfortunately we do not have the resources to fend off a large company like Twitter to maintain our mark which we believe whole heartedly is rightfully ours. Therefore, we have decided to shut down Twitpic."

Is this supposed to be serious? You're shutting down your company because you're stubborn and not getting what you want??

<comment><USER55> Probably a poker move to put pressure on Twitter... If the company is doing well, they'll do what it takes to keep it running, even if it means changing its brand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Isn't the entire reason companies aggressively pursue trademark claims against small fry precisely because lack of enforcement leads to weakening of the mark?

I don't see how Twitter has a brand confusion case against them since they've obviously known twitpic existed for many years now and haven't asserted brand confusion until now.

</comment><comment><USER57> > "A few weeks ago Twitter contacted our legal demanding that we abandon our > trademark"

Guess it's time to abandon Twitter.

<comment><USER58> Alternatives?

<comment><USER57> Well... there is app.net - But honestly I don't think that anyone beyond a certain german podcast-bubble really uses this.

<comment><USER58> German podcast bubble? I'm from Germany and I don't know what you are talking about.

I asked App.net about alternative paying methods because in Germany it's not very common to use your credit card. Nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> This is why you want to run your own server for this sort of thing... or at least use something standardised and portable.

</comment><comment><USER60> After having both Lightbox7 and whatever Sonys big photo-store/share platform close down and wipe out my high school/college albums I've learned to definitely not rely on any image hosting services.

Back then there wasn't twitter or any other good social media and you found things out by visiting the site or through ICQ.

</comment><comment><USER61> Lets put this in perspective. Some twitter pictures are going to disappear. In the grand scheme of things the people who had the luxury of using this service will survive just fine. Please stop the navel gazing.

</comment><comment><USER62> Lesson to learn: don't tie down your service and/or brand to an existing brand/service. Otherwise you're both dependent of that service and/or at risk to get sued sooner or later.

<comment><USER63> This is a good point. I've heard of many companies learning this point the hard way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> This is revealing in 2 ways.

1\. Twitter doesn't care about developers. 2\. Twitpic wasn't making enough money.

</comment><comment><USER65> Why didn't Twitter acquire them instead? Did they try that and fail?

<comment><USER66> Why would they? What assets does Twitpic have that Twitter wants? They built a "better" service on their own. They don't need the brand Twitpic. What's left?

<comment><USER67> thousands/millions of images form twitter users that could be converted seemlessly in to twitter's in house solution providing a good user experience for their users preventing the breakage of the site and creating a PR problem for them...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I don't get it. Why not just change the name and keep going?

</comment><comment><USER69> i saw an article mention noah working on this [http://pingly.com/](http://pingly.com/)

</comment><comment><USER70> Isn't he the guy from Heello?

</comment><comment><USER71> Twitter being dicks... As usual

</comment><comment><USER72> Link rot

</comment><comment><USER73> Just change the name already. Jeepers.

</comment><comment><USER74> At what point do you forego patents for the sake of usability. Twitpic has been around for so long and they have tons of media hosted, all of those Tweets are now essentially broken. Twitter should instead foster a relationship with Twitpic.

Twitpic is DEPENDENT on Twitter to work, it's not taking users from Twitter at all (other than hosting media). Truly sad to see.

<comment><USER75> USPTO: US Patent and Trademark Office. P is not the relevant letter here, T is.</comment></comment>


Flash + 307 redirect = Game Over - <AUTHOR> http://lists.webappsec.org/pipermail/websecurity_lists.webappsec.org/2011-February/007533.html <comment><USER2> Doh! Sam Quigley called it. In the 307 redirect case, which instructs the client to redirect POST data as well as the bare request, Flash can be coerced into honoring the crossdomain.xml file from the REDIRECTOR site instead of the REDIRECTEE site.

* Attackers control redirectors (they can just set up their own).

* Flash will set custom headers if crossdomain.xml allows them to.

* Rails and Django rely on the fact that attackers _can't_ send custom headers (in particular, the XRW header that told Rails and Django "this is Ajax, don't worry about CSRF").

* So attackers can basically forge the crossdomain policy for arbitrary target sites using Flash, bypassing the CSRF security check in Rails and Django.

So much win!

<comment><USER3> This explains a lot, but thing it doesn't cover is why the patch for Rails ends the session when a CSRF token is missing.

I'm guessing this is just extra paranoia, but it opens an obvious attack to log people out of a site maliciously.

Any ideas on that one?

<comment><USER4> I guess they forced the end of the session to allow non-session authentication, for example for an Client accessing an RESTful API.

I didn't found anything about this, but when you look at the related commit in rails ([https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/66ce3843d32e9f2ac3b1da...](https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/66ce3843d32e9f2ac3b1da20067af53019bbb034#L1L144)) they also removed the white listing an all non html-requests ("content_mime_type.verify_request?"). So any (api) client modifying XML or JSON resources of an rails app would not be allowed to do so, because of the need to provide the authentication token. Which isn't available for an API client, because there is no session.

So instead of throwing an exception to prevent an CSRF-attack they just kill the session to prevent authentication by this session. For an api client this is no big deal, because normally it authenticates with per request credentials.

If you don't feel/have the need to support non session authentication, my guess is you could simply overwrite the handle_unverified_request method in your application controller to throw an exception again. But I would wait for further explanation by the rails core team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is so difficult to follow.

1) Who hosts the flash app? The site owned by the attacker? Or must the flash app be maliciously uploaded to the site being attacked?

2) And seriously, the final result of this scheme to to make a post to "www.victim.com". Doesn't "victim" mean someone who is exploited? I would expect that data would be taken from a victim, not posted to a victim.

<comment><USER6> It's actually fairly straightforward

1\. It doesn't matter where the SWF is, as long as it can make requests to a redirecting script. That's the point of the attack: you can make cross-domain requests via a redirect.

2\. Victim is referring to a victim domain. Pretend victim.com is your bank, and the POST is to send some cash to my account.

<comment><USER5> So my bank would have to already have a page which returns a 307?

<comment><USER6> No. Let me try explaining the simplest possible version of this attack.

Your bank (<http://victim.com>) is running its external-facing web application on Ruby on Rails. If you send a POST request to <http://victim.com/transfer>, you can transfer money to another person (the recipient is specified in the POST body).

The attacker sets up the following things on attacker.com:

1\. A page that replies with 307 redirects to a specified destination

2\. A Flash applet that makes POST requests

3\. A page embedding that applet

The attacker sets the applet as if it were making a POST request to <http://victim.com/transfer>, setting the X-Requested-With header to bypass CSRF protection. But instead of POSTing directly to victim.com, the attacker POSTs to the redirect script.

So the end result looks something like this:

1\. Flash checks to make sure that it can make requests to attacker.com (via crossdomain.xml, or by the same origin policy). It can.

2\. POST request to attacker.com/redirect is made

3\. attacker.com/redirect says "307, the request should go to <http://victim.com/transfer>

4\. Flash says "OK" and makes the same request but now directed at victim.com

5\. After the request has been made, Flash checks the crossdomain.xml file and says "whoops, shouldn't have made that request: you can't see the response."

<comment><USER7> Good explanation, thanks.

The part I don't understand is the POST hitting the victim app. I don't know django but rails apps require an authenticity token to be included in all non- GET requests. How does the attacking app satisfy this token check?

<comment><USER5> Rails WAS configured to accept the token OR a custom header, relying on the fact that custom headers can't be created cross domain. The patch fixes this, by requiring BOTH. Hmmm... So how do they know what the custom header is? Are they typically static?

<comment><USER8> The CSRF token is generated and stored in the user session, so rather than just X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest, you now also get an X-CSRF-Token: <some token stored in the user session>.

Rails doesn't check for XRW anymore; it just cares that you passed a valid CSRF token through, either as a POST variable (normal POST/PUT/DELETE) or in the X-CSRF-Token header (AJAX).

In case you're wondering, yes, this does make caching with Varnish a bitch and a half.

<comment><USER5> I want know how the exploit works. The Flash app has to write a custom header. How does it know the value to put in the header, unless it's always the same for all sessions across all users.

P.S. You cache POST/PUT/DELETES?

<comment><USER8> That's the point of the fix. The header is custom per user now. Before, the presence of the "X-Requested-With: XmlHttpRequest" header was enough to let Rails assume the request was legit. Since Flash doesn't respect the victim's crossdomain.xml, this is no longer a valid assumption, and you have to use a unique header per session.

This means writing this unique value out into the page somewhere, to be included with any AJAX requests, which means that you cannot cache these pages as you might before, since AJAX calls would fail for everyone except the person who populated the cache.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _After a confirmation message that will be unclear to most users_

i.e. it requests permission?

</comment><comment><USER10> I have a stupid question: Does this vulnerability exist if rails runs https?

<comment><USER6> Yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hooray flashblock.

<comment><USER12> Flashblock would probably not save you. It doesn't actually prevent Flash content from being downloaded and run; it just hides it with CSS.

I use NoScript myself, but that tends to break too much by default for most people. When I set up a flash blocker for other people, I give them NoScript in "Allow Scripts Globally" mode.

<comment><USER6> Are you sure about that? Because that's not the way Flashblock describes itself:

        Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape browsers that takes a pessimistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves placeholders on the webpage that allow you to click to download and then view the Flash content.

It would be pretty useless if all it did was hide the content via CSS.

<comment><USER12> Wikipedia cites this as the source for that assertion:

<http://flashblock.mozdev.org/faq.html#fbFlashCookies>

If it prevented the object from loading, it would block Flash "cookies".

edit: Looks like it does call StopPlay() on the movie, which prevents any audio/visual effects.

<comment><USER6> I just tested the extension and I can confirm that Flashblock only downloads and runs the content when the placeholder is explicitly clicked on. So, Wikipedia is wrong. ;)

Edit: If I browse to an SWF directly, it does appear to load the content. If I create the SWF via SWFObject, it does not load until I explicitly click on the placeholder.

That question is poorly worded. It's referring to blocking Flash cookies in general. Flashblock will not prevent the use of Flash cookies by applets that you allow to run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why don't they use the session nonce instead of double-submit cookies approach to CSRF prevention?</comment>


Ask HN: Contact form. Serious enough? - <AUTHOR>

Is it worth to implement contact form? Are people so lazy to contact with you via regular email? Opinions? <comment><USER2> I wrote a webapp to handle your contact form.

<http://www.strikeform.com/>

You just copy and paste a few lines of javascript onto your page and it generates a contact form, handles validation, and e-mail delivery. It's very basic, it asks for Name, E-mail, and Message. If anyone wants more features/fields added just let me know.

The reason I wrote this was because I got sick of having to make a contact us page for every site I was building, but I felt that having a contact us page is pretty important.

</comment><comment><USER3> We have several sites where a contact form and direct email address are displayed on the same page.

 _Very few_ (<20%) use direct email.

YMMV - HTH.

</comment><comment><USER4> Split test this yourself. Every situation is different</comment>


I/o Ventures – A Work/Cafe Incubator Launches In San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/06/io-ventures-incubator-san-francisco/

<comment><USER2> The space is really cool. It's right next to San Francisco's best scifi bookstore (Borderlands), and in the heart of some of the world's best taquerias and dive bars.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know if there's a list of all known startup incubators in the US, and which cities they're in?

</comment><comment><USER4> Should be able to easily apply to both YC and IO; their application page is definitely inspired by the YC application. <http://ventures.io/apply></comment>


Facebook has your complete phonebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/friends/edit/?sk=phonebook .. and this is the tip of the database-iceberg ;) <comment><USER2> There was a hubbub about this a while ago. How it works is, you have to install the Facebook app on your phone and then enable contact syncing. When you do that, you get a big confirmation screen that says this:

 _If you enable this feature, all contacts from your device (name, email address, phone number) will be sent to Facebook and be subject to Facebook's Privacy Policy, and your friends' profile photos and other info from Facebook will be added to your iPhone address book. Please make sure your friends are comfortable with any use you make of their information. [Cancel] [I Agree]_

EDIT: However, IIRC they added or strengthened this warning after the initial controversy.

I would argue this is bad UX because it forces the user to all at once make such a big nebulous decision about what their friends are comfortable with.

<comment><USER3> Headline: "People outraged at feature they actively enabled".

<comment><USER4> Probably a better headline is something like "People moderately surprised at something that sorta makes sense after a reminder".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps I'm a bit weird, but it doesn't entirely surprise or upset me. In fact, I just found a lot of people I'd lost touch with and didn't think to check for them on Facebook.

They should have asked, but whatever. Are you shocked? Iirc I synced my Address Book to Facebook anyhow.

My Address Book is on Apple's server, my TimeMachine drive, Google's servers, apparently Facebook, and any number of other online services. I don't really care. I'd much rather have the data backed up than risk losing it. And having it on Facebook has obvious utility.

</comment><comment><USER6> Misleading title but scary nonetheless. It's not my complete phonebook... not even close. But it does have numbers of friends who aren't in my phone (which is useful and possibly OK considering they added me as friends).

Nevertheless i never explicitly opted into this which is bad.

<comment><USER7> It is just showing a list of friends that have put their phone numbers in their profile. For me, it's a list of about 20% of my friends. Certainly not contacts from my phone. I checked my phone and I had never turned on "Contact Sync."

I don't know what else someone could think "Contact Sync" _does_. But yes, if they ever turned that on automatically, for shame. I don't see any evidence that they did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes, of course I knew - they had a big flashing warning sign that they were syncing your contacts to their cloud that you have to click through.

I actually like this a lot. If they then shared those phone numbers publicly I would complain...but why would I not want to sync my phonebook to Facebook (anymore than I'd not want to sync my phonebook to Google, which I certainly do as well?)

<comment><USER9> From what I saw, the Android doesn't seem to give any warning about _my_ contacts going to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I opened this and discovered a lot of names and phone numbers I didn't recognize.

As it turns out, these contacts were all from my dad. I used his blackberry once last year to check my Facebook and I guess it loaded his contacts into my Facebook account. I don't remember authorizing it to do that (though it was likely in something I just clicked through). Still, this seems like an easy way to steal contact lists from people - "oh hey, can I check my Facebook real quick?"

Like I said, this was a year ago, so I'm sure things have changed (another commenter mentions "a hubbub about this a while ago"), but neither I nor my dad realized what had happened until now (he still doesn't know, I suspect).

</comment><comment><USER11> You crossed a line on that one, facebook (again). It's getting really tiresome to keep updating my settings to keep you out of my life.

This sort of thing is what keeps people from doing anything substantial on facebook. Can you imagine "Facebook Docs", FMail, or anything of the sort? No. Because facebook would make it all public without telling anyone.

I really believe that in the very long run, this culture of invasion will limit facebook's potential.

I'm sure this was in the TOS somewhere, but really? It's just disrespectful.

<comment><USER12> What precisely are you upset about? I did not work on this feature, but I'm trying to understand your reaction.

Your friends entered their phone numbers. They are your friends. You can see those phone numbers if they choose to allow you to do so. You also (possibly) chose to import _your_ address book of _your_ friends and Facebook is showing them to _you_. The numbers are _not_ public and everyone involved explicitly agreed to share the information. What part of that do you object to?

<comment><USER13> There are phone numbers in that list of people who aren't on Facebook, and given Facebook's relationship with law enforcement, I'd rather they not have them. I understood the Facebook app to be syncing information with people who were _already on Facebook_ , not my _entire phone book._

<comment><USER14> That is absurd logic. Law enforcement has no problem getting information about the people you contact from your phone company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Actually, no I did not know that and I find it hard to believe because I don't have a Facebook account.

</comment><comment><USER16> This has been around for a long time... it's the phone numbers that your friends on Facebook willingly submitted, they just make it easy for you to see whose phone number you already have access to through Facebook without having to go to someones profile.

<comment><USER17> No - they also take phone numbers from your phone and upload them to Facebook (if you use a mobile Facebook app).

<comment><USER18> Not "if you use a mobile Facebook app", more like "If you said yes to some option that allows them to do this". I've had the Facebook app on all my phones the past few years (1 java, 5 android, 1 symbian), and yet I have no phone contacts here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Facebook hasn't my complete phonebook. Following your URL, I get a list of phone numbers of some friends, not my complete phonebook, i.e., phone numbers entered by my friends and not from my phonebook.

</comment><comment><USER20> Where is this setting now?

Edit: Found it in Friends -> some arrow button on the top-right -> Sync contacts -> Enable. So you can go there if you want to enable/disable the feature.

When I installed the app, Facebook didn't even ask me if I wanted to enable it. I actually manually typed all of my contacts instead. I wish I knew about it before :(

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't have a mobile phone so it only shows my Facebook friends who publish their numbers. Nothing to see here...

My phone number is the only public piece of information I have on Facebook. That's only because it's a Google voice number which is the best thing since sliced bread.

</comment><comment><USER22> When you delete your facebook, all you friends who were using this will no longer know your phone number.

</comment><comment><USER23> For the iPhone, if you want to check if you are sharing your contacts, open the Facebook app, go to Main Menu > Friends, click the icon on the upper right and then Sync Contacts.

I believe the syncing option is off by default

</comment><comment><USER24> Facebook only has phone numbers posted by my friends themselves and my Windows Phone syncs my Facebook contacts. Bi-directional sync of your phone's contacts back to Facebook appears to be an iOS/Android only thing.

</comment><comment><USER25> Every iPhone application can also access your entire phone book, too.

</comment><comment><USER26> You can see specifically who has been imported and delete them here: <http://www.facebook.com/invite_history.php>

</comment><comment><USER27> I have my number in Facebook, but my friends dont see it (I checked) so this happens only for people who actively published their phone number, or a 'friend' did it for them.

</comment><comment><USER28> Wrong. I have used the facebook app on Nokia symbian phone, but I only see a short list of friends who have shared their number. Not even close to being a full address book.

</comment><comment><USER29> That's rather helpful actually. I just wish it matched my Gmail contacts. (And since I synced both to my Droid, you would think they would match.)

</comment><comment><USER30> Most annoying. It makes no attempts to delete multiple contact data. From all the syncing each non-facebook contact has 13 listings!

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't think that's my _complete_ phonebook

</comment><comment><USER32> 9 of 170 friends, not very complete.

</comment><comment><USER33> Since when are submissions requiring me to register or sign in ok on HN? Flagged.

If you wanted to make some point by posting this link you should have written your thoughts down somewhere and linked to that instead.

</comment><comment><USER34> it's only available if you have an iphone and use the facebook app (not sure about android)

<comment><USER35> No, any phone you install the Facebook App on. As Facebook has my phone contacts. I don't own an iPhone and only use a BB.

<comment><USER34> thanks for the update!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I just turned this feature on because I didn't know the iPhone supported it. Thanks Facebook!

</comment><comment><USER37> Glad I dumped their iOS app a while back...

</comment><comment><USER38> That's great, now how do I export all that data into AddressBook on my Mac? If I need to call Joe, I'm not logging into Facebook to look up his number, unless I'm desperate. I'm looking in the AddressBook. So, if Facebook wants to be more hot than crazy on the crazy/hot graph, they should let me import this data to my address book!

</comment><comment><USER39> I am happy I didn't even agree to the T&C of the facebook app forced by my phone manufacturer.

</comment><comment><USER40> fuck iphone app! is it standard opt-in?

<comment><USER41> This comes from the "contact" section of your profile and is only shared if you type it there yourself.

<comment><USER42> No, this definitely has things that have been uploaded from my iPhone address book.

<comment><USER43> Agree - I saw this a few days ago. When they are "syncing" their app they are taking your phone numbers, not just using it to display photos on your phone for your contacts, which is what I thought I remember this started out as.</comment></comment></comment></comment>