Utu: Zed Shaw's replacement for http - <AUTHOR> http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com/design.html

<comment><USER2> But, see, people _like_ not having strong identities on the internet, and where it matters, reputation and identity get built up organically already (i.e., I don't need Utu to know who the idiots are in my favorite IRC channels).

</comment><comment><USER3> Because of Utu's resounding success as a replacement for IRC, it now does HTTP! Oh wait...

</comment><comment><USER4> listing what ciphers and hash functions you're using for a project has got to be on the top 10 list of signs that you don't understand security.

<comment><USER5> As a practitioner, I'm going to chime in and agree completely.

Shaw has created a merit badge sash of crypto exotica: Needham-Shroeder key exchange (oh, sorry, "ISO IEC 48798783 without the Helsinki vulnerability"), a bizarro block cipher mode, a custom PRNG, and no explanation whatsoever of the motivation behind his choices. Of course, this is all just libtomcrypt under the hood, which probably explains the showy idiosyncrasy.

You'd be able to take something like this more seriously if Zed "So Fucking Awesome" Shaw had ever contributed any findings against TLS, or even SSH. But that would be Hard, Harder than "fighting the cargo cults" --- people much more demonstrably competant than Shaw have already shaken the bugs out of TLS.

Generally, I find Shaw's arguments and reasoning about security unconvincing. For instance, there's a place in that article where he argues that "binary protocols have fewer buffer overflows" --- he might as well just write "I don't pay attention to vulnerability research". He seems to believe that Ragel, an obscure regex-modeled lexer, is a talisman against vulnerabilities. His "Hate" protocol assumes that attackers originate from single sources, not from armadas of compromised machines.

Sigstoat isn't the first person to comment on this "top 10 list of signs of bad security" --- this is a point Schneier makes, often.

<comment><USER6> Being cryptic is bad -- in "secure code" and just about everywhere else. Unfortunately, that's not the point the commenter made at all.

As to your praise of the notion that the author of an open, civilian protocol is making his protocol less secure by revealing what hash functions he's using, well, I'm just going to say that I'm a practitioner too and I've never heard of openness about the algorithms involved as a sign of bad security. Indeed, I've never heard Schneier _once_ make that point, much less hear him make it often and I read Cryptogram almost every month. Sorry, but I'm calling bull on that one.

The only folks who get a pass on not revealing their algorithms are NSA cryptographers who create Type 1 National Security systems and that's only because they have a large, knowledgeable community of cryptographers within the organization that does their peer review, thus obviating the need for vetting their protocols with the greater academic community.

<comment><USER5> You just spent 3 grafs kicking a straw man, which you'd know if you'd read the article. This is a discussion about an article. The source code for the software the article is about was published in 2005. Nobody argued that he should have kept his algorithms secret; they argued that bragging about them in an article didn't make him look more competant.

Also, you already said you _weren't_ a practitioner; which is it? Your use of the term "Type 1 National Security systems" allows me an educated guess, but you could clear it up.

<comment><USER6> Let's see, I replied to someone's comment with a valid criticism. I just read the entirety of Zed's piece and, lo and behold, my argument against the comment still stands. (Whether or not Zed's protocol still stands is an open question.) Meanwhile, you've been attacking a strawman the whole time.

Now you're trying to personally attack me. I'm not sure what your problem is or what you're trying to prove, but I am a practitioner.

See here:

[http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-85B/SP800-85b...](http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-85B/SP800-85b-072406-final.pdf) [PDF]

or here:

[http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-83/SP800-83.p...](http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-83/SP800-83.pdf) [PDF]

or here:

[http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips201-1/FIPS-201-1-...](http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips201-1/FIPS-201-1-chng1.pdf) [PDF]

(You won't find my name in that last document, as authors and supporting researchers are not listed on FIPS.)

I'm not going to ask about your credentials because, frankly, they don't interest me. You've jumped the shark and I'm done responding after this. Don't make this thing personal; you've got a problem with my comment, do us all a favor and keep it there. You trying to start a pissing match with me is boring for everyone and ultimately wastes both of our time. Chill.

<comment><USER5> You're right. I'm infinitely more irritated at the mentality conveyed by Shaw's document, that "security" is a combination of using the most "advanced" crypto constructions and using parsing tools to avoid superficial overflows than I am at you for arguing with people about a post you didn't bother to read.

For that, I apologize.

<comment><USER6> All good, man.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


These languages differ from INTERCAL in that their designers were serious - <AUTHOR> http://funcall.blogspot.com/2011/01/bit-of-history.html <comment><USER2> Also noteworthy: RPG --- a language originally designed to look like a notation for the control panel wiring on IBM's relay-controlled punched-card tabulators (the stuff that gave them a monopoly on industrial data processing before World War II). This was particularly obvious in some of the original training material for the language (referring to it by its first name, FARGO), which showed wiring and FARGO statements side by side.

This language has, of course, continued into modern-day use. Apparently it has not yet been extended to support object-oriented programming, but there are rumors that IBM might try that for the next release...</comment>


The Baby and the Baath Water - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/THE-BABY-AND-THE-BAATH-WATER <comment> grey-area The original story has a bit more to it, this is just a relink to the older blog entry which is here:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/the_baby_and_the...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/the_baby_and_the_baath_water)

</comment><comment><USER2> Miles Copeland, the CIA officer whose book Curtis relies heavily on in the article, was an interesting character. I've been meaning to look up that book for a while. Has anybody here read it?

(He was also the father of Stewart Copeland, the drummer for the Police, not that that matters.)

</comment><comment><USER3> How about the USA clean up it's own act at home before trying to intervene in another nation which poses zero credible threat to the USA.

Look at how Korea, Vietnam, Libya, etc, have ended up after US intervention.

Such a horrendous track record should preclude repeat performances of a similar nature.

<comment><USER4> The stated goal of military action in Syria isn't regime change. It's creating a powerful disincentive against the use of chemical weapons, agents of mass murder that kill indiscriminately. I didn't completely understand the need for action, so I did some Wikipedia reading on the history of chemical weapons, and now I'm more conflicted about it. I highly suggest doing the same.

<comment><USER5> When the government comes out and says -

"The evidence and proof that Bashar was the one that ordered chemical weapons use _is so obvious and unquestionable_ that you don't really need to see or ask for it... Because doing so would be irrational!"

Start worrying.

In a few weeks or months when it comes out that the chemical attack was really done by one of the 57 or so US and Al-Qaeda backed + funded insurgent groups operating in Syria, I really hope that Obama keeps his word on punishing those responsible (for crossing the red line).

Though the best info I could get is saying right now that the rebel group that launched the attack didn't know what they had, and thought they were launching conventional rockets. So I'm not sure you can blame them the same way you could blame Bashar.

The funny thing about all this is that if the US just came out and said we are doing this to secure the next 50-100 years of US energy needs and geo- political strategy - I'd be all for these middle-eastern wars because I understand the need for it. But I'm not sure the general public could shed its moral supremacy desires, nor understand complicated issues or how the world really turns.

<comment><USER6> Or, as another poster summed up [1]:

 _Syria sits right in between the oilfields in the Middle East and the oil consumers in Europe, so when a pipeline is built connecting the two, Syria has a vote for or against its completion. Since oil pipelines are both necessary and quite profitable, this can lead to very large disputes. Al Jazeera covered this last year here [2] where it was suggested that the West would be inclined to usurp Assad for someone more favorable to the West 's long term energy interests. It seems their prediction was correct as the US (along with Britain and Turkey) is escalating relations with Syria, using chemical attacks and civil rights violations as justification._

 _The Guardian also has a great summary of the issue here._ [3]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6313628](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6313628)

[2] [http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/20128513344...](http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/20128513344..).

[3] [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth- insight/2013/au...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth- insight/2013/au..).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The picture of the American military recreation room around the tomb of the founder of the Baath movement is pretty intense. Did they not know it was a tomb?

<comment><USER8> I would hazard a guess that those military personnel aren't well read on Iraqi and Syrian history.

<comment><USER9> Why would you think that? Looks like they went out of their way to be disrespectful to the tomb of one of the intellectual leaders of their enemy. This is consistent with the US military policy of treating the various artifacts Saddam's government (up to and including the actual bodies of Saddam and his family) as illegitimate and not worthy of respect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> God, is everything America's fault?

How convenient that the author focuses on one American intervention, as if they were the first. Nothing of the Turks, the French? They conquered and ruled the area for (combined) centuries, but no - it's the Evil American Capitalists and their one short intervention to blame.

And who's to say that Za'im wouldn't have launched a coup in absence of American suggestion?

<comment><USER11> I am yet to see a US intervention that did not.resulted in disaster...

<comment><USER12> WWII

<comment><USER13> ... Which was pretty much won by the USSR.

<comment><USER14> WWI, then?

<comment><USER10> Won by the Jews.

/s

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Everything Adam Curtis does is amazing. The ending to this article sums up western perspectives on the middle east very well, in my opinion.

<comment><USER16> While I normally dislike Adam Curtis's work, I totally agree with you about the ending on that article. That's certainly the sentiment I sense, as an Arab currently in the UK.

<comment><USER2> I'm curious. What do you dislike about Adam Curtis' work?

He has a considerable gift for digging up and presenting historical material. For example, the stuff about Bernays and Freud at the beginning of _Century of the Self_ is riveting. But some of the narratives into which he frames that material seem questionable.

The one time I knew something independently about what he was presenting, I was surprised at how distorted it was. That was in his documentary about the Rand Corporation and game theory, when he included the radical Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing as an example of psychologists who worked to expand state control. To anyone who knows anything about Laing—a fascinating figure in his own right—that doesn't pass the laugh test.

<comment><USER17> Can you explain why it "doesn't pass the laugh test"?

<comment><USER2> Laing was an anti-institutionalist who became famous for challenging the inhumane practices of psychiatry (his profession) and helping to set up safe houses where people having psychotic episodes could undergo them with emotional support from others without the intervention of medical or social authority. He became associated with a model of psychotic experience as a kind of inner process that some people go through. He was a charismatic guy and became a star of the 1960s counterculture, a bit like a Timothy Leary or Allen Ginsburg--an older mentor and kindred spirit to the hippies. He was also involved in the radical liberation politics of the time.

Laing's work was about giving support to non-conformist experience and building a conceptual model in which it could exist on its own terms, speak in its own voice and so on, instead of immediately being reduced to mental illness, a brain disorder, delinquency, or what have you. This was a popular view in the late 1960s. The idea that at the same time he would have been consulting for the Rand Corporation on how to apply psychological principles to reinforce a docile consumerist society doesn't pass the laugh test. It would have been far out of character for him.

If I recall correctly, Curtis brought up Laing in the context of game theory and how it was being (mis-)applied psychologically. There had been a massive bestseller called "Games People Play" in the mid 60s that applied some of these ideas to ordinary life. Many people became interested in the power dynamics of everyday relationships. This tied in to some of Laing's earlier work (especially about the power dynamics of family systems), so it was natural for him to use this language in his later work. My memory is that Curtis picked up on that and linked it to the mathematical game theorists of the Rand Corporation--and some of their more Strangelovian politics--in an entirely specious way. He simply juxtaposed them and said they were working on the same thing, with scary background music. No doubt it was very convincing, except to anyone who ever read Laing. He might as well have put J. Edgar Hoover together with the Beatles.

I hope it's clear that my point isn't about R.D. Laing. It's rather that I randomly happened to have read him and so could instantly see that Curtis wasn't just a little off there, he was totally full of shit. So I can't help but wonder where else he might be.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_\(book\))

<comment><USER17> I think you're projecting a bit. You're talking about Curtis' _The Trap_. According to the wiki summary:

 _A separate strand in the documentary is the work of R.D. Laing, whose work in psychiatry led him to model familial interactions using game theory. His conclusion was that humans are inherently selfish, shrewd, and spontaneously generate stratagems during everyday interactions. Laing 's theories became more developed when he concluded that some forms of mental illness were merely artificial labels, used by the state to suppress individual suffering. This belief became a staple tenet of counterculture during the 1960s._ [1]

I don't remember Laing being particularly lambasted in the documentary as you do, and I don't recall Curtis simplifying things so much. If so, the above summary is being really charitable.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_%28television_document...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_%28television_documentary_series%29)

<comment><USER2> That's possible, because I don't remember the details. But I distinctly remember the feeling that Curtis' portrayal of Laing was badly distorted, and I recall that a commenter who had known Laing personally said the same thing. If I have time later, I'll try to take another look.

<comment><USER17> If you go on YouTube and search for the doc (The Trap), and speed up to 36:50, they start on Laing.

Quote from the doc: _He was about to use his growing power to attack one of the most powerful professions in America: The Medical and Psychiatric establishment. The result would be dramatic, but the outcome would be very different from what Laing intended. His ideas would undermine the old controlling medical elite, but far from liberating people, what would actually emerge would be a revolutionary new system of order and control, driven by the objective power of numbers._

He doesn't portray Laing as in cahoots with some evil plutocrats, although he does talk about the Rosenheim (sp?) experiment separately.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mailper: Disposable Mailboxes - <AUTHOR> https://mailper.com <comment><AUTHOR> Mailper provides a simple interface to create disposable email addresses.

You can create a mailbox in less than 30 seconds, doing just three steps:

1 - Insert the username for the email.

2 - Choose the domain.

3 - Select the expiration time.

We hope you enjoy Mailper; let us know in the comments if you have any suggestions about the product

</comment><comment><USER2> Can't see the mailbox name I'm creating in Firefox. Field stays black but does accept the field.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, what version of Firefox are you using ? This is an example I just recored: [https://vimeo.com/404161208](https://vimeo.com/404161208)</comment></comment>


Haitian Quake Person Database (Scrapes Victims/Missing/Survivors Info) - <AUTHOR> http://www.haitianquake.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> A few friends threw this together today. Right now it's pulling in info from the following sources:

* <http://www.familylinks.icrc.org/haiti/people>

* CNN iReport

* #haitimissing twitter tag

* koneksyon</comment>


New Google patent: automatically sending your videos and photos to law enforcement - <AUTHOR> http://www.phandroid.com/2014/01/29/google-mob-sourced-video-patent

<comment><USER2> I wonder if the patent system can be used to protect civil rights the future. i.e. we file overly broad patents on methods likely to be used in a dystopian surveillance society and sue anyone who uses those methods in order to make sure they are never used.</comment>


How "Shareholder Value" Is Killing Innovation - <AUTHOR> https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/shareholder-value-is-killing-innovation <comment><USER2> Prof. Lazonick's piece is interesting, but it seems like there are other forces at work, too. The central thrust of his argument is that public markets have not lived up to their function as capital providers to firms, noting that american markets have been cash negative. He then notes that this is caused by result the prioritization of shareholder value, which consequently undervalues research and other innovation.

Let me provide an alternative thesis: Firms weigh the value of research and have recognize it is too expensive to be more useful than returning money to shareholders. They do this because the tools they use to understand their capital tell them that's the case. But there's an issue there: What if those tools are wrong and the quantified value of research endeavors is commonly calculated wrong. If that's the case it isn't a problem with prioritizing shareholder value that's at issue, but instead an issue with research being unfairly handicapped in a fight against a share buy-back or dividend payment on the finance sheets.

Research valuation is commonly undervalued because alternative use cases for the capital rarely, if ever, account for the erosive effects of competition upon their margins and sale volume. Accordingly, at steady state, large firms predispose themselves to stop researching once they've finished growing and reached stable market pricing. There was a fantastic article about this, but I can't seem to find it, but there is support from an econometric perspective that this effect is visible in the markets though [1].

[1] [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/0022-1082.00411/f...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/0022-1082.00411/full)

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the few compelling reasons to go public is to give employees with stock access to liquidity. As article notes, public companies pay in order to provide this. It's a good thing to do for employees. It's a narrow, idiosyncratic view of "value" that views that as "value destroying".

Also, how companies ought to financed, organized and managed _if_ the purpose of a company is rewarding value creators as oppose to maximizing shareholder ROI generally is a discussion worth having, but how public companies (anyway a tiny fraction of all companies) use the stock market in practice doesn't necessarily tell us that that's what the purpose ought to be. One is an "is" and the other is an "ought" and anyway the connection between the two is pretty loose.

</comment><comment><USER4> Kind of disagree. The best companies focus on the long term. Making short term profits may boost you, but only short term (duh).

<comment><USER5> That's the point, that it's better to focus on long term but the game puts a lot of pressure on you to optimize for short term

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One assumes any worthwhile company has strategies for both short-term and long-term profits.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting take, but a focus on shareholder value is of course actually very important for sustainable innovation. The author questions the idea that the stock market is a source of capital that is beneficial to corporations by pointing out that the stock market actually draws money out of corporations. He seems to think that this is wrong, hampers innovation and investment in the core businesses, creates income inequality with rich investors taking all the money away from the people who are actually innovating, etc.

To me this seems like a very narrow way of looking at things. Of course on net the stock market takes money away from corporations. If the market were not on net transferring money to shareholders why would anyone want to buy shares? It is exactly these cash extractions from successful corporations that allow risky new companies (which may fail and loose all of the investors money) to raise money on the market. People are willing to risk losing their money on some crazy new idea precisely because they will be able to extract profits if the company is successful. If companies didn't pay their investors back, there would be 0 incentive to give them the cash they need to get off the ground in the first place.

Secondly, it makes no sense to denigrate the people repeaing the benefits of a corporations success as "value extractors" as opposed to the "value creators" at the company. First off, as the article points out employees of the company are compensated with stock and stock options and thus the share price and earnings growth is an important factor in attracting and retaining talent. If the company is focused on creating shareholder value and the stock price is going up that's only going to help the quality of the team and their innovative capabilities. What do people do with the money they make in the stock market? Many times, reinvest it in another innovative company! Is using money from past successes to fund promising new enterprises at startups and existing corporations a bad thing? I think it's a good thing and very important. Let's not forget that people owning shares aren't just Wall Street fat cats. There are retail investors and ordinary people's retirement funds too, and extracting money from corporations to fund people retirements is a good thing too.

In fact, a company can invest as much or as little as it wants in research and innovation. There is no requirement at all that a corporation pay a dividend or buy back stock. Amazon doesn't, but investors can still profit off share price growth because there are other investors willing to buy the shares expecting that there will be dividends and buy backs in the future as Amazon's earnings continue to grow.

Now of course it is entirely possible that management could make short sighted decisions and under-invest in the business to boost the share price in the short term but ultimately decrease the long term value of the shares because of the lack of innovation. However, in an ideal world where information is not hidden hopefully management, shareholders and the board would notice this kind of short sighted behavior and try and push for the business maximize the long term value of the business.

The system can sometimes create some perverse incentives, but I think it is safe to say that on the whole corporations focusing on shareholder value is a net-positive for innovation in the world.

<comment><USER8> Im from germany, i have seen family controlled companys regularly out-pace performance and innovation-wise by shareholder companys, whose shares where distributed and volatile.

There is in particular a type of CEO who regularly appears and lines up his short-term interest with the short-term interest of the volatile shareholders, turning the whole company into Swag and leaving afterwards. There is no mechanism to punnish this or refuse rewards after shortterm gains on substance losses.

<comment><USER9> And I think the quarterly reorting cycle helps exacerbate this problem.

I would love to have my views altered if someone can point to cases where r&d benefits from the current state where quarterly reports seem to make or break companies.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Convince me to learn Emacs/Vim - <AUTHOR> I've always used IDEs and GUI editors for coding: Zend Studio, Visual Studio, Eclipse or even Dreamweaver (believe it or not, it's very handy when it comes to CSS/HTML auto-completion, validation, cross-browser compatibility and boring stuff like DTDs). Lately, I've been trying to convince myself to learn Emacs or Vim since it seems to be the cool editor for hackers. Yet, I am still unsure whether learning those tools will really make me more productive in the future or just make me look cool... So, I'd like your opinion on how those editors are superior and if they are really worth learning. Have you seen an increase in productivity after learning to use them? How do they compare to fully featured IDEs? If that can help, I do mostly web development (PHP and Rails). <comment><USER3> One cannot be convinced to use vi or emacs, one arrives at this inevitable conclusion at the end of a journey.

Eventually one tires of the Sisyphean mouse, keyboard, mouse, keyboard loop and thinks "there must be a better way".

This is the beginning of enlightenment.

<comment><AUTHOR> This didn't help at all!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nobody has yet mentioned one of the main reasons to use Emacs (or Vi; substitute below as necessary): it's easily extended. Find yourself doing the same thing to your code over and over? Want to use a language that doesn't have syntax highlighting yet? Need to communicate with an external process? Write it up in Emacs Lisp.

I don't (currently) write code for a living, and I have never spent much time using or learning an IDE. My untutored impression, however, is that even when they are extensible, it's more of an afterthought than a truly integrated part of the design.

Emacs, by contrast, is mostly written in Emacs Lisp. You have access to all the same features that the people who designed Emacs used to implement its vast capabilities. You aren't limited to the set of features that the IDE designer predicted you might need.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well it depends on whether you are editing or writing code.

If you are writing code you just need easy navigation, code folding and basic search.

When you are editing code or config files you need a whole array of different features:

1\. Regular Expression matching (And substitution)

2\. Edit in place (Specially with space sensitive configs)

3\. Key shortcuts (You could copy paste a code 30 times or just "yank and paste repeat 30" with 3 vim commands)

4\. Scripting. Whether you like to do emacs-lisp-magic or just raw vim, sometimes you just need to script your code.

5\. GDB (Most IDEs take care of this, but emacs/vim + gdb works great for command line dev).

6\. Vi is included in any Unix or Unix like environment and can be usable even from the slowest SSH or Telnet session (Once or twice I have had to edit config files over my smartphone and restart the servers, vi visual edit commands are a godsend when you don't have a mouse).

So if you are just an "Developer" hacker, it's ok to just use IDEs but for me any respectable "Sysadmin" hacker does need to know this stuff.Plus in my book any Dev must at least know how to setup a LAMP server without a GUI, though I know some PHP kiddies won't agree.

</comment><comment><USER6> Look into org-mode and the stuff you can do with it: <http://orgmode.org/> <http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html> <http://orgmode.org/talks/index.html>

Then realize that you need to pick up Emacs to use it.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you "mostly [do] web development", it may never matter. Using Emacs or Vim because they're cool is not likely to last. If you want to look cool, use something _shiny_ , not a goddamned text editor designed by bearded people in the seventies.

Do they have substance? Yes. Will that substance ever matter to you? Hard to tell. If you're in the business of making things happen with structured text, though, they're proven tools.

Personally, I appreciate the mouselessness and sheer _integration_ of Emacs, though vi's terse/modal approach also has major advantages. If you're as curious and patient as I am, I'd suggest learning both. (And then Acme/Wily.) You gotta be in it for the long haul, though - learning vi is a hassle upfront, and Emacs's design trade-offs are predicated on it _being your workbench for years to come._

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm a vi guy. IME the big virtue of vi and it's various clones (vim, etc) is that it's easy to install and likely to already be there. Vim is pretty feature-rich too.

I don't know that it's worth learning unless you work in a UNIX environment. I myself use it in Windows precisely because I can't be bothered learning another, different-but-no-better text editor. Is it worth learning from scratch if you live in Windows? I honestly don't know. In UNIX, of course, the historical reason for knowing vi (and ed, its line-editor cousin) was ubiquity. It's less of an issue these days - the odds of vi being your only choice are, I daresay, slim.

The downside is that its UI is ancient and wierd.

If I had to make a recommendation, it would be to learn the very basics. It won't take long and it might come in handy one day.

<comment><USER7> Yes, but vi's UI is ancient and weird for the same reason APL's is - <USER2> it gets the job done_.

<comment><USER8> It's ancient and wierd because it gets the job done _even if all you have is a teletype_. It's very rare nowadays that you need something that can work in that sort of situation.

<comment><USER3> I work on systems over vsat on a regular basis. 750ms rtt at times. Vim is a godsend. I find myself wishing for a good fast 60's style teletype at times.

<comment><USER8> Have you considered ed? I dimly recall trying a line editor over a slow-slow link and being pleasantly surprised at the difference it made...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used to use Emacs and Vim and switched to IDEs. I'm not going back. Don't waste your time.

</comment><comment><USER10> What do you think about all of those other IDEs? Did you learn anything from using them? I'm sure you found things you liked and other things that you hated. The key is, did you take something away from the experience that you can apply to future coding work?

I can't convince you to learn Emacs or Vim, but I can convince you that you'll learn. If you stick with one of them for a while, you'll learn a lot, and maybe in time you'll be as productive as (or more than) you were in the other editors. There's reasons why people swear by these old editors... are you curious enough to learn why?

</comment><comment><USER11> Well I don't particularly feel the need to convince you, but I can tell you some of the advantages that Emacs has for me: completely mouse-free operation (important to me for ergonomic reasons), available freely everywhere I want to work (give me emacs and firefox and I could do 99% of my work), one-stop shop for any language or platform (I use it as my email reader, my usenet reader, for documents and for code in any language under the sun), trivial to use remotely over ssh, without X, etc.

But dude, whatever works for you is fine.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you are happy with the IDEs then just use them. Having learned both vim and emacs over the past few years. I learned emacs so that I could use slime with lisp. Vim so that I could edit stuff on any server. Emacs has a big learning curve, vim is a bit easier to get into. If you use a mac you can try textmate, I've heard good things about it. On the vim side macvim, gvim are pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER13> You use vi/emacs when you care enough to not want to learn yet another editor.

</comment><comment><USER14> hackers run backconnect shells.. how do you run your Zend Studio, Eclipse, Visual Studio through telnet/ssh? =)

ps: joking (almost). But it seems very good tool working thourhg ssh for me =)

</comment><comment><USER15> Eventually one completely tires of meta key chaining and reaches a state of zen. This is a truly enlightened being. A master of vim.</comment>


Ask HN: Do You Release on Fridays? - <AUTHOR> How do you balance possible user downtime with developer work/life balance? <comment><USER2> Nope. Every other work day at any time is fine. In fact multiple prod deploys per day is perfectly fine.

Sometimes something has to be coordinated but we try to prevent that with feature flags or putting "shims" of code in to bridge us from one workflow to another and just remove the "shims" later.

Continuous integration plus small feature changes per 'ticket' and each item can be deployed whenever it is ready. Ability to roll back a deploy in minutes.

Occasionally if there is a fire or bug fix that needs to go out, those will go on Fridays.

Who wants to be fretting all weekend about if something is going to blow up?

If you deploy on Fridays because of low user counts and there is some unforeseen problem with actual users then you start your work week on Monday with that problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> I support enterprises, it's actually easier to release on a Firday for us. Typically, if we mess up it gives us the opportunity to fix the issue.

That being said, last time that happened was 18 months ago.

Most people don't work over the weekends so it's actually not too bad for us.

<comment><AUTHOR> how is Friday easier for you; fewer users?

Why not Thursday?

<comment><USER4> I think the point was that enterprise users probably don't work over weekends. Of course that might be a bad assumption.

That way if something goes wrong on Friday you've got a weekend to fix it, before the users come back on Monday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I release on Friday, it is not any different than any other day. Canary deployment is the way to go and quick rollbacks makes your life easy

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes. Friday is perfect. It's weekend in the country where we operate (United Arab Emirates).

We're based in central Europe. So friday is a work day. Friday is weekend in the UAE so there's usually less traffic.

If it the release/deploy doesn't work out, we roll back and try again the next week. We make it a point to release small, reversible change sets.

Also, regardless of the day: deploy before 12:00. This is usually enough to prevent release related work (or firefighting) from spoiling into personal time.

</comment><comment><USER7> We do, we found that having a no releases on Friday policy was just an excuse and diverting us from actually improving our CI/CD, monitoring and alerting infrastructure.

We invested work on those and try to deploy as we can.

It works great for us but obviously you need to try and see what does for you.

</comment><comment><USER8> Depends what you mean. On Friday in general? Sure, as long as you've got the time to fix any issues that crop up, it's not the end of the world.

But companies I've worked for in the past have generally avoided releasing anything after a certain time on a Friday. Usually, anything we want to release that day needs to be out before 4pm or so, to give people time to catch any issues that may crop up.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sure thing, but early in the day. That said we are a smaller team and very conscious about the scope and QA. I guess we take calculated risks to not work overtime into the weekend. Worked out so far quite well.

<comment><USER6> I've found that releasing early in the day really stops from interfering in people's personal life. Usually after hitting the deploy button; there's a couple of hours of checking, verifying and testing to make sure all is well. By releasing early, you make sure all of that is done during normal work hours.

+1

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Big releases - weekends only, usually Saturday morning. The least impact on customers in case something goes wrong and you still have entire weekend to roll back or fix, while not many may even notice.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hell no. Don't push to prod on Friday. Ideally, don't schedule any meetings on Friday either.

During the summer, we rotate to give everybody every other Friday off, and the rest of the time it's generally the policy to work from home Fridays unless there is a really pressing reason not to.

This tends to allow a lot more real work to get done on Fridays than any other day of the week.

</comment><comment><USER12> No, we avoid friday releases, as we aren't paid to provide weekend support. Every second friday we dedicate to cleanup activities (which is a lot more fun than it sounds, because we use it to improve parts of our stack, little things that were bugging us)

</comment><comment><USER13> Depends on the Friday. We have official release windows on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. So we could. And sometimes do. But mostly, we choose for each release based on how big of a change it is, whether there are data migrations that will take time, and whether the people involved in the change have plans those nights.

</comment><comment><USER14> Hell no. We release on Wednesdays after business hours. If everything goes well, then the developers get to bugger off early on Friday afternoon. It's the only practical way to avoid working more than 40 hours a week unless it's a literal _life or death_ emergency.

</comment><comment><USER15> Nope

There's no need and any pressing release is artificial. I schedule the releases to go out at any time during the week, except Fridays. Fridays are for heads down work, then some pair programming stuff for my engineering team.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sure maybe Friday morning but not after lunch

</comment><comment><USER17> We release on Fridays, but approaching or after 4PM we ask ourselves "can it wait till Monday?"

</comment><comment><USER18> hopefully not. Most fridays are read-only, except for major bugs in production.

So, a friday deploy means our test-suite has failed us...

</comment><comment><USER19> Hell no!</comment>


In Fantasy Sports, Signs of Insiders' Edge - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/12/sports/fantasy-sports-draftkings-fanduel-insiders-edge-football.html <comment><USER2> If your takeaway from this article is "if only I had more time to write an algorithm" or "if only I could get my hands on some better data", you're missing the point here.

That geeks with computers were going to win all the money should have already been obvious to anyone who hangs around here. The scandal here is that employees of these two sites have been effectively colluding with each other to dominate each other's contests. So even if you had implemented your can't-lose algorithm, you'd still be losing.

As to buried ledes, how's this?

 _Neither company would say how much its employees had won, but Justine Sacco, a spokeswoman for FanDuel, said DraftKings employees had won less than $10 million in her company's contests._

Infamous Twitter pariah Justine Sacco is working again. Good for her.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow re: Sacco! Good recall -- assuming it's the same person. I guess her PR spin abilities apply to her career too.

P.S. I find the language re: $10M funny. $1 less is still a big number, and I sense weasel words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I signed up for an account on Draft Kings last year after seeing a ton of advertising for it. I had been seeing the daily fantasy sports stuff for years after the U.S. destroyed online poker but allowed for betting on fantasy sports, but hadn't tried it and it didn't seem all that popular. After signing onto Draft Kings, I saw that it had obviously become extremely popular.

I dabbled around a bit in the NBA games and quickly saw some strategies that would likely work if tailored more. However, it was entirely clear that the way to win money in those contests would be to build a model that could spit out lineups. In the big tournaments, a model could easily create a large number of high-variance lineups. In head-to-head or smaller games, it could create lower-risk lineups.

I started to draw up a lot of ideas on what the model could do to try and predict things like playing time, share of points/rebounds/assists, etc.

When it came time to actually build it out, I shelved it, largely because it was going to take time and money to work with the type of stats I needed, but also because I'd assume there are already a lot of people on these sites doing this. In fact, I'm assuming everyone who is profitable on those sites is running model-generated lineups. There are still lots of fish pumping money in, but the people taking it out would be at least as, and likely more, sophisticated than what I could do.

There is an extremely popular NBA bettor and he runs a multi-million dollar operation, hiring several analysts to help him make his predictions. In fact, he's actually consulted privately with several NBA teams because his analysis was ahead of what many NBA teams were doing several years ago.

If those are the types of people you're up against, it's a battle of algorithms, not people.

<comment><USER4> I had/have an algorithm that I use for MLB games. The stats are relatively easy to find and past that it's just trying to figure out what things "matter". I had a lot of fun day dreaming about which things are important to factor in. Some parks are hitters parks, some pitchers walk batters more often, most batters have a better average depending on the handedness of the pitcher, etc. There are thousands of things you can factor in.

If I'm being honest, it didn't make a whole lot of money before I shelved it myself. The most important factor is that the lineups are rarely submitted early enough for me to bet on a full day. Usually I found myself being able to only play the late games, which is typically 4-6 total teams. It really limits the creativity of the lineups.

In the future I'd like to try it with some other sports (NBA is a big one, because the lineup issue shouldn't be as big of a factor, same with hockey). But I don't expect to make millions, it's just a programming problem that's a ton of fun to solve for.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it's very hard for it to be a completely "hands-off" process. Just some warning though, NBA is actually one of the worst offenders in having incomplete lineup information until right before games start because NBA teams are not required to list their inactives (NFL teams are with at least one hour notice before kickoff).

I liked playing NBA last year, but you have to basically block off 6-7pm EST to just track injury news, late scratches, and changes to the starting lineups :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I still find it hard to understand why fantasy sports that pays money to winners is different from bookmaking. Betting on players instead of teams is hardly different; all you are doing is narrowing the odds a little. You are still betting money for a chance to win money. Maybe people think it's more like playing Powerball.

<comment><USER7> Here's the simplest explanation. Neither should be illegal, they made a law that explicitly banned one and not the other.

Also there's fundamentally a difference between playing against other players and playing against the house. If the professionals on draft kings / fan duels got to play the house in a similar setup it would be even worse for the people playing for fun.

Why are people allowed to go to the movies? In New York a movie ticket is $15 and 90% of the movies are, in my opinion, absolute crap. So that's $15 with a 10% chance of getting your moneys worth and a 90% chance of losing all of it and 2 hours your time!

I think the one reason why it's different for the leagues is that daily fantasy doesn't really create as large of incentives to throw games or rig games as much from the refs or players point of view (not that it's common, but it's definitely happened in the past).

<comment><USER8> I'm not going to disagree, but...we are chemically-driven machines. Gambling triggers addictive releases of pleasure/pain that aren't equivalent to most other forms of entertainment. Most forms of gambling are successful because they are excellent at delivering random reinforcement to players, which is key to many addictive behaviors. But the games themselves are not intrinsically interesting to most people.

DFS takes applies the same principles of gambling and couples it with the most popular sport in the country.

<comment><USER7> I agree with your general assessment. I think one sane area for regulation is tracking large losers and having mechanisms to help addicts create self- enforcement (banning themselves effectively).

However, I think the mobile gaming industry is probably just as responsible in this way. Clash of clans has people spending 50k+ per year (outliers of course) on the game and also tries to trigger a similar gambling-style positive feeling. They also are some of the most effective mobile advertisers tracking individual customers all over the internet. Do you think these "whales" get enough control on how they're targeted by companies?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've had decent success at buying this kind of "edge". There is a ton of free information out there, but if you are willing to shell out a little money upfront, you can get pretty close to the same tools the "pros" are using. $50-100 for a season can get you access to algorithmic/machine-learning backed predictions (with secret sauce) and $20/month for high quality lineup optimization tools and automated entry scripts. The vast majority will not pay for tools/projections but for an outlay of ~$100, I won around 10x that on NBA games last season (plus had a lot of fun).

<comment><USER9> Would you mind sharing a few links? I've been interested in the prediction engines for NBA games for a few years now.

<comment><USER5> Sure, here is what I used for last season:

[https://basketballmonster.com/](https://basketballmonster.com/) for projections (terrible website, but really good). Don't have much information on their approach, but the common wisdom for NBA is to project fantasy points per minute and then predict how many minutes each player will get. Factors also include pace (how many possessions each team will get) and DVP (defense vs position).

[https://twitter.com/baskmonster](https://twitter.com/baskmonster) the best twitter account for posting injury/lineup news

[https://www.fantasycruncher.com/](https://www.fantasycruncher.com/) lineup optimizer and scripting auto-entry. Also has a really nice free feature called "Lineup Rewind" that you can use to "back test" previously days/weeks data.

Fantasy Cruncher comes with their own projections, but I didn't use them; you can import the BasketballMonster projections into the tool instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _On Wednesday, he posted his story on Reddit.com. Twenty minutes later, the DraftKings co-founder Matt Kalish called him. On Friday, Robins, Kalish and Liberman — the founders — sent an email intended to mollify their customers, many of whom are concerned._

Can anyone find this Reddit discussion? I'd like to see what the public thinks of all this.

</comment><comment><USER11> No one is forced to bet on fantasy sports, so I hope the government does not get involved trying to make it "fair".

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know why American headlines are written in this way? It would sound more natural if it was "Signs of Insiders' Edge in Fantasy Sports"

I've seen this a few times before, so I'm guessing it must be a cultural thing.

<comment><USER13> It might be a New York Times thing, or at least one that has perhaps spread to other American journalists: [0][1][2]

 _" The new-style headlines are a far cry from stereotypical Times headlines, which have been mocked for the prepositional phrases that often introduce them, like this one from last Monday's paper, "After 8 Shots, a Quiet Officer Now Scorned." Their frequency years ago once led to a Twitter meme in which book titles were rewritten in that style. (Among them: "Of Oz, the Wizard.")"_

0\. [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/public-editor/hey- google-c...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/public-editor/hey-google-check- out-this-column-on-headlines.html)

1\. [http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/193943/on-twitter- book...](http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/193943/on-twitter-book-titles- rewritten-as-new-york-times-headlines/)

2\. Yes, the irony is that this is also a New York Times article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just as with sports betting in general, there will be a very small cabal of bookmakers and pro punters who absolutely clean up and everyone else who funds them.</comment>


A wedding gift for our co-founder became our startup's newest product. - <AUTHOR> http://www.thrilledforyou.com

<comment><USER2> As someone who sells products to several thousand wedding professionals (mostly photographers) and who has photographed plenty of weddings, here's what I think:

\- Instead of a "bulk discount for professionals", you should just sell them a $399 version that they can use to modify each title (looks like it's just a PNG file in the resources anyway).

\- I can't see a bride and groom buying this very often–they are already busy and budget-conscious ... but I could see a best man, parent or bridesmaid doing it (assuming they had a macbook available). They often are bringing a laptop for a slideshow anyway, so it could work.

\- I think the price might be a little high ... $49 to $79 seems more reasonable to me–especially since I'm still doing all the editing/uploading/sharing work myself afterwards.

\- Use wedding blogs to get the word out and offer up some free demos or prizes. There are blogs for fancy weddings, green weddings, DIY weddings, budget weddings, etc.–and they are very popular with brides. It's a good way to get noticed.

\- I can probably help you spread the word among some wedding photographers (including some who have well-read blogs). A lot of them are doing video too (as many SLRs now do HD video) so they could easily incorporate these into a DVD. Plus, several are doing photobooths or slideshows at receptions.

I'll blog about it too if you'd like–feel free to get in touch. I could get some photographers using it this weekend and giving you feedback.

<comment><USER3> I don't own a Mac and I'm married already so might opinion might not matter that much, but if I was getting married, I'd want the videographer to set this up. Somehow I don't feel comfortable buying this kind of a thing for $99, but if a videographer charged me $99 to have a Macbook (better yet an iPad!) at my wedding where people could easily record video messages, I'd feel much better about it. The difference is that it becomes the videographer's problem if something breaks. Otherwise, if I bought it and brought my own computer to set it up I would (a) worry that somebody stole my beloved laptop and (b) something went wrong and nobody is actually able to record the videos. Targeting this at videographers might not bring in as much dough, but it seems to me it would have a higher chance of having satisfied end clients.

<comment><USER4> This. I was worried about so many other things on my wedding day. The last thing I'd want to fret over was doing tech support for a laptop and piece of video software. Most of my groomsmen were top-notch tech guys and I wouldn't even want them to worry about it. They were there for me, my wife, and our wedding day, not to play help desk tech.

But if this was something our videographer or photographer had offered I would've jumped on it in an instant.

<comment><USER5> The advantage of having a direct-to-consumer approach is that I can see a market for non-wedding occasions, where there is no official videographer. Baby showers, graduations, retirement parties, it wouldn't surprise me if some people even wanted it for a funeral/memorial. It's a pretty neat idea.

[Edit: just thought of another one - military people posted overseas, I can see people at the family gatherings like Thanksgiving wanting to send individual video greetings]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really like the idea. And the design is very nice (be it for the site or the app)

One thing though is that, from the site, I'm not really sure what I would get and in what form: where are the videos? are you hosting them? how do I change the settings of the app? do I get some kind of video album?

I see that the demo file left a couple of videos in my Movies folder, so I get it: I pay $99 to have the custom software with the right names and date, and it saves everything as local files in my Movies folder.

But, in that case, $99 is a lot of money! Correct me if I'm wrong but it's a one-time use app, right? I only get that one customized version for one wedding? That feels very very expensive… it's a nice packaging for PhotoBooth pretty much. And yes, for a wedding, that packaging makes a big difference, but I don't think I could buy it myself.

That being said, as Brian Cooley said, $99 is a drop in the bucket for most weddings, so I think that you could make some money with that (as I said, for a wedding the packaging is very important, thus the money will follow).

edit: to sum up, I'd say that it's a nice idea but to justify the $99 I think it would need to actually produce some kind of "video guestbook", something similar to an iMovie template, or what Animoto does. After the event, I just get a bunch of video files that I need to do something with…

<comment><USER7> Regarding the Animoto proposal: You should look into the Stupeflix API (<http://www.stupeflix.com/api>), which could easily automatically stitch the videos together into something that looks impressive. Let me know if you would like a personal intro to the Stupeflix guys.

<comment><USER6> One issue is that you can't always expect an Internet connection at a wedding. But interesting link nonetheless.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. That's why we made Thrilled for You as a client app that requires no internet connection. Internet is still so flakey... it's the last thing anyone should have to worry about.

<comment><USER7> True. I guess you could just do the conversion at some later date when the computer is online -- that would still free the couple from the burden of having to do any video editing themselves, but I suppose it would be a little tricky to build.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like this so much. $99 is a drop in the bucket for most weddings, it's a big market, and this seems so much less intrusive than the traditional "Aunt Ethel with a camcorder" approach.

One thing that stuck out to me was that the guy in the purple tie was a little out of frame. That would have made my wife object to this idea for fear that everyone would end up with their heads cut off. FWIW, I'd maybe move that part to the end or cut it altogether.

Like the music, too.

<comment><USER9> "$99 is a drop in the bucket for most weddings"

Sad but true.

<comment><USER10> It is sad. With how some weddings are you could probably get away with selling them a $1200 iMac with this preinstalled and configured and people wouldn't even notice the price.

<comment><USER11> Adding an iMac to my registry right now...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Photo booths have been mentioned and it's probably worth repeating. I've been to a couple of weddings where they rented out a photo booth and allowed the wedding attendees to take photos of themselves with their significant others. Of course by the end of the night, they're really goofy. The bride&groom got one copy of the photos, the picture takers got the other copy.

You should have a "photo booth" option where someone could just walk up, click the photo booth option, and the system takes four timed photos (usually about 5 seconds in between poses). <http://www.rentphotobooths.com/>

You could then put those photos in the album.

Not everyone wants to give a personal video message (especially if you're shy and in an open reception hall), but maybe more (especially if drunk) would like to get a little crazy and contribute some goofy photos.

<comment><USER12> Oh, and allow them to type a little message to accompany their goofy photos. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What a fantastic Idea! This little innovation here will probably create the most value the night of the wedding.. besides the obvious.

I got goosebumps watching the demo. I can see myself using this at my wedding.. the next step now is finding a wife! haha

Intrinsic product! Please do all you can to keep your idea in publics eye. I bookmarked your service, but i'm not sure I will remember the name when it comes to actually needing it.

</comment><comment><USER14> very cool!

The music on the video threw me a little bit, maybe I'm just too much of an english centric guy. Also, I'd love to have heard the voices of the people come through a little bit. Maybe as a sample, but maybe just because if someone is talking at a camera I want to know it they are saying for some reason?

Again, very cool!

</comment><comment><USER15> Great product idea!

But I have one recommendation that I think, though it would certainly take effort, especially if your company is mostly Mac programmers, would pay off bigtime. Offer hardware. Knock together an Atom-based system that comes preloaded with the software (obviously this would not be an OSX machine, a free stripped-down Linux distro would probably be a much better idea) that can be sold to the professional videographers or photographers, or even venue owners. This would open up the people that don't own Macs and, more importantly, the market of people uncomfortable with computers who wouldn't feel comfortable with investing this kind of money and importance in a software product and their computer.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you were to offer a hardware system a modbook might be a good choice...

<http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=modbook>

You could do the video and hand written guest notes on the same device.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's my parent's sliver wedding soon and they're having a big party. This seems like quite a cool idea and I was considering setting it up for them.

I'm not having too good a time with the demo though. I ran the program and it popped up the thingy with the video stream and the name box, but then keyboard didn't seem to work. The record your message button just pops up the "whoops you forgot to type your names" message and there appears to be no other way of shutting the darn thing down. I was just about to switch off the mac (and lose unsaved work in Photoshop) when the 10 minute timer kicked in and it shut itself down.

Still, sort out that bit and I think it's a great idea.

</comment><comment><USER18> wow what a great idea! nowhere close to getting married, but i'd love to have this at my wedding.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm about to get married and I love the idea. I need to think about who I am going to entrust my macbook to. I'll ask the mrs. and get her opinion on it. I think this is a great idea.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'd love to hear more, too. I wish I had thought of this!

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a good call. My buddy had me put together a system like this for his wedding a few months ago. I was shocked that it didn't already exist.

</comment><comment><USER22> I love the idea. You people might want to talk to wedding photographers or planners to promote this idea.

</comment><comment><USER23> very cool! can we get a blog post on more of the back story?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the announcement blog post:

[http://www.jacksonfish.com/blog/2010/02/07/thrilled-for- you-...](http://www.jacksonfish.com/blog/2010/02/07/thrilled-for-you-wedding- video-guestbook-kiosk-software-for-the-mac/)

Basically, a year and a half ago we decided to focus more on software we could charge for (vs. ad/sponsorhsip supported). At the top of our list was a storytelling app called A Story Before Bed (www.astorybeforebed.com) which we shipped this past November. But Jenny (our co-founder) was getting married last August so we paused our development on our primary product and spent some time developing Thrilled for You - a video guestbook for Jenny's wedding reception.

Things have calmed down a little since we shipped A Story Before Bed, and we realized we still have the app we wrote for Jenny. With wedding season coming in a few months we did some more testing, tweaked the UI, came up with a bunch of themes, and put together the website for Thrilled for You (www.thrilledforyou.com) and offered it for sale as of yesterday. :)

There are so many things we love about having our own startup... the ability to do things like this is definitely one of them. We feel the software we make is so personal when it comes out of a need we had ourselves.

Thanks for asking for more details. :)

<comment><USER24> What a cool story. Thanks for sharing it. Sounds like you followed the ideal from the SvN post on reusing your own 'by-products' <http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1620-sell-your-by-products>

Talk about a nice pivot - Wedding software is a great niche. Once your software is in the reception, it could do lots of other cool stuff. Guest lists, aggregation of iPhone / photo content from guests and speech programs come to mind.

It could even live-blog the content it gets into a timeline online during the reception. You could have a stack of 100 cards with a key on them next to the PC, accessing the online site requires a card as the login for privacy. Purchasing 100 more cards is a $10 transaction online and covers the timeline service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> make it work for Windows?

<comment><AUTHOR> If there are enough requests we'll definitely consider making a Windows version. :)

<comment><USER26> Keep in mind that many of your potential customers will see that it's Mac-only and just move on. Windows is still by far the market leader, and you're really limiting your potential market by not having Windows support.

That being said, this seems like the type of product that Mac users would be more likely to go for, so you could just hold off on a Windows version until you know whether the product is viable (based on sales)

One more thing: The "buy" button is not obviously for that purpose, and I was about to comment asking whether you can only buy from within the demo. Consider rewording the button to make it clear that that's where you buy the product from.

<comment><USER27> But what does the market look like for "laptops with webcams"? Windows might still be winning, but I bet its not by much.

<comment><USER28> What? Most windows laptops i've seen in stores have webcams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> imho $99 is a bit too steep..

</comment><comment><USER30> Great idea, but you should make one for plain and simpel "parties" and not just limit it to weddings IMHO I would buy one for my Bday party probably for example

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. With enough demand... we'll add more versions. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm going to be synical first, and it may come across as mean, but it's the honest truth in my opinion...

Yes, if there's one more thing I wish I had to do at my wedding, it would have to be tech support for the web cam that wasn't working properly on the Guestbook Mac.

I also wish that every one of my guests put their hands all over my computer as they walked in and out the door.

Also, when they get drunk, I don't want them trying to film something for me while they stumble over my expensive computer with an open container.

Now, enough being a jerk.

I think some kind of mashup between live streaming and wedding templates is more appropriate since people already have video recorders in their pockets on their phones now.

Why not setup a public DropBox folder that everyone can drop their iPhone photos into while at the wedding?

I just don't think this idea was very thoroughly thought out. Putting your expensive Mac at the front door of the reception hall just seems ridiculous.

<comment><USER32> I hate to be that guy...

... but my mac's camera has always Just Worked.

<comment><USER33> Even after someone poured a glass of wine over it?</comment></comment></comment>


How many founders should a startup have? - <AUTHOR> http://arshadchowdhury.com/1587-how-many-founders-a-startup-should-have/

<comment><USER2> The common advice I've always gotten is that it should be two. Many incubators/accelerators won't take solo entrepreneurs, and get suspicious if there is more than two. Personally though, as long as the necessary skill areas are covered I don't think it should matter.</comment>


A Personal Message [about  Brendan Eich's donation to Prop 8] - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mozilla.com/dmandelin/2012/04/10/a-personal-message/

<comment><USER2> I don't understand how something being "personal opinion" or "political belief" makes it beyond the purview of your professional life. I know a lot of people think that their work is "just a job" and has nothing to do with ethics, but it's different for me. My work and my ethics are tightly bound, and it's extremely important that any organization I work for operates in a way that's consistent with my ethics.

As such, if my CEO is funding a campaign to curtail human rights, then that matters to me. My participation in an organization is based on a certain amount of trust... trust that my co-workers are going to act on behalf of the organization--on behalf of _me_ \--in a way that I can be proud of. I can't monitor every one of my co-workers, so building trust is a necessity.

Brendan's funding of Prop 8 tells me that he is not, in his professional duties, capable of extending to LGBTQ members of the Mozilla community the respect that I think all people deserve. And therefore I could not have faith in him as my CEO.

I realize that many people would have the exact opposite opinion, and I respect that. We're all entitled to our individual political and ethical views. But the notion that we should separate them from our professional life strikes me as intensely wrong.

Edit: I want to add that were Brendan to engage the discussion of his donation, to listen to the criticisms and dig into the issues, and take them seriously, I absolutely _could_ regain trust in him as a CEO. But as it is, with him writing the issue off as a non-issue, I could not.

<comment><USER3> I agree with your opinion that the ethical and moral background of a person does transcend the barrier between personal and professional life. While I share your disappointment, I feel this leads to a larger problem than any of us would like to acknowledge. We're here (and Brendan Eich is here, by extension) because we share a common interest in technology and startups. From time to time it's necessary to remind ourselves that this is our only uniting quality. Just because I'm a secular guy that doesn't mean this is a given as far as any other member of the geek community is concerned. I'm probably not the only one to be occasionally surprised and dismayed when a fellow HNer casually expresses $insert_fundamentalist_traditional_value$. But it's worth reminding oneself that we don't in fact have a shared moral value system here, not even when it comes to basics.

I'm making this observation because I don't think the actual donation is the central problem, it's Mr Eich's deeper seated belief system which some of us find appalling. But this and many other belief systems like it are quite common, it's just a facette that usually stays hidden during the normal flow of geek-to-geek interaction.

I think the whole tech sector would just disintegrate if we started compartmentalizing based on world views.

I remember when I was working at a startup, I somehow got into a discussion with an employee who firmly believed that I (and in fact the majority of people working there) would be going straight to hell to be tortured for all eternity. Not only that, he admitted that he was convinced we all _deserved_ to go to hell and said the notion was filling him with a strange mixture of joy and pity. The thing is: we all got along great. This guy was always super nice to everyone, there was no way to tell from the outside. I decided then and there to just accept this and move on. Apparently, it's possible to work together (and even be friendly) even with the guys who are secretly wishing you harm. It's sad and depressing, but it works.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's Brendan's post on the subject: <http://brendaneich.com/2012/04/community-and-diversity/></comment>


Fermilab is building a "Holometer" to test theory of holographic universe - <AUTHOR> http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2010/10/20/fermilab-scientists-to-test-hypothesis-of-holographic-universe/ <comment> brown9-2 [http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/dw3sh/will_you_moro...](http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/dw3sh/will_you_morons_stop_submitting_stories_about/)

<comment><USER2> The original post doesn't appear to misuse the technical term holographic. If a journalist twists their story into "reality is virtual" or "we might live in the matrix" then they would be reporting their sensationalist (perhaps intentional) misunderstanding, and this guy would be right. But I don't see how it applies to this article. It could be better explained, but it doesn't completely misrepresent the science. The holographic principle is legit physics.

Did you post this for the comments that explain the difference between the holographic principle and Star Trek?

<comment><USER3> > The original post doesn't appear to misuse the technical term holographic.

If fact, the lead sentence is exactly such misuse: "The 3D universe in which we appear to live is no more than a hologram." I don't think I've ever heard a physicist use the word "hologram" to talk about the holographic principle, so that word can only be interpreted as an actual, star-trek style hologram.

<comment><USER2> Such phrasing is not all that uncommon. But I agree the following few paragraphs could do a better job explaining what the word means.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHgi6E1ECgo>

<comment><USER3> Frankly, I'm more inclined to fault Bousso for using misleading language. That's a lecture for a general audience. The word "hologram" isn't used in physics articles except for poetic fluff. For instance, in Bousso's much-cited review article, the word is used exactly once in the main text:

"Holographic screens with this information density can be constructed for arbitrary spacetimes—in this sense, the world is a hologram."

This is mostly marketing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "In a classical interferometer, first developed in the late 1800s, a laser beam in a vacuum hits a mirror called a beamsplitter, which breaks it in two."

Uh...

<comment><USER5> I can _just_ parse that as being sensible. Classical interferometers were first developed in the late 1800s, and if you put a laser in one then it will hit a beamsplitter.

(Similar: "In a steam locomotive, first developed in the early 1800s, a robot arm shovels coal into a furnace")

Not the best writing, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "To Hogan, the jitteriness suggested that the experiment had stumbled upon > the lower limit of the spacetime pixels' resolution."

Couldn't they just enhance that?

</comment><comment><USER7> The background on that site makes it nearly unreadable for me.

<comment><USER8> Readability (<http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>) takes care of that.

So does Instapaper (<http://www.instapaper.com/>).

<comment><USER7> I'd heard of readability but never used it. Wow what a difference that makes. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Y Combinator diaries - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080609.wgtYcombo_1_0606/BNStory/Technology/home

<comment><USER2> This is one the biggest PR scores you can achieve in Canada. The Globe and Mail is one of the most reputable newspapers in the region.

That said, I have personal antipathy towards this particular newspaper for some shoddy political pieces and I look forward to the day old media is transformed with social attributes.

</comment><comment><USER3> The reason why I read the globe&mail every morning.

And why I made: <http://userstyles.org/styles/2477>

</comment><comment><USER4> Interestingly, the one thing that really jumped out at me from the first installment was the fact that YC has 22 groups this summer. Wowzers - that's a lotta people. Agree with the first commenter at G&M - give us an RSS feed though ... The odds of me remembering this, despite it being something I'd like to read, are low to say the least.

</comment><comment><USER5> Cool! I sat/stood next to Mike for much of Startup School. Very glad to hear the YC interview was successful for him!</comment>


Skiffle Craze: An Interview with Billy Bragg - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/08/01/an-interview-with-billy-bragg/#more-113321 <comment><USER2> For those who don't know him, Bragg is an especially smart, witty songwriter and performer. I've heard few more persuasive spokespeople for the radical left (though I don't necessarily agree), and I've seen few more witty performers.

Some examples of political songs; I encourage you to find them online performed live (he's much less impressive in the studio):

[http://www.billybragg.co.uk/music/album.php?albumID=4&songID...](http://www.billybragg.co.uk/music/album.php?albumID=4&songID=36)

[http://www.billybragg.co.uk/music/album.php?albumID=17&songI...](http://www.billybragg.co.uk/music/album.php?albumID=17&songID=41)

[http://www.billybragg.co.uk/music/album.php?albumID=20&songI...](http://www.billybragg.co.uk/music/album.php?albumID=20&songID=179)

[http://www.billybragg.co.uk/music/album.php?albumID=24&songI...](http://www.billybragg.co.uk/music/album.php?albumID=24&songID=33)

<comment><USER3> Always partial to "Greetings to the New Brunette":

[https://youtu.be/kLo-LQklAVQ](https://youtu.be/kLo-LQklAVQ)</comment></comment>


3D Comics - <AUTHOR> http://yiwenl.github.io/Sketches/exps/30 <comment><USER2> That reminds me a bit of this Calvin and Hobbes strip redone in 3d: [https://sketchfab.com/models/dd484cd2dc9e477381e152b69d32950...](https://sketchfab.com/models/dd484cd2dc9e477381e152b69d329506)

<comment><USER3> The OP and this are quite beautiful. I can't quite put my finger on what I like so much about them, I'll keep thinking about it.

<comment><USER4> It is like a little diorama.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems to not be working with HTTPS (at least with HTTPS everywhere).

If you only see a bunch of static images and nothing happens when you click them, this might be the reason.

<comment><USER6> Mixed Content: The page at '[https://yiwenl.github.io/Sketches/exps/30/'](https://yiwenl.github.io/Sketches/exps/30/') was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure resource '[http://yiwenl.github.io/Sketches/experiments/comic/dist/inde...](http://yiwenl.github.io/Sketches/experiments/comic/dist/inde...). This request has been blocked; the content must be served over HTTPS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe this just doesn't work on mobile, but this appears to be a static two panel comic with a perspective effect applied. If it is that, I suggest the site implements a notice that it needs to be viewed on desktop.

<comment><USER8> Which browser?

On Firefox for Android, I'm able to interact with it and rotate it with full 360° range of motion.

<comment><USER9> Not working for me on safari

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My favourite version of this is all of the cutscenes in the PS Vita game "Gravity Daze" (Gravity Rush). They're all drawn comics, but with the layers set at appropriate depths. The game uses the Vita's gyroscope to lock the 3d camera to the handheld's orientation. You really get the feel that you're looking /into/ a comic!

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a wonderful concept.

To my eyes however, there's much better stuff on the rest of that repository:

[http://yiwenl.github.io/Sketches/](http://yiwenl.github.io/Sketches/)

<comment><USER12> I like the Wolf in the Grass one [http://yiwenl.github.io/Sketches/exps/23](http://yiwenl.github.io/Sketches/exps/23)

<comment><USER13> Somewhat inspired by Okami: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZloCD06QjiE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZloCD06QjiE)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> While this is very cool, it raises the cost to produce and deliver comics by an order(s) of magnitude.

Comics have always been a easy low cost way for artists or even people with just idea's to communicate their ideas.

For an extreme example of this [http://www.qwantz.com/](http://www.qwantz.com/) Where the ideas are amazing, but he uses the same few cells for ALL of the comics.

This comes from someone who has worked with 3D content for years, and I see mesh based 3D as the Ultimate machine in handing power to people with money.

<comment><USER15> Also, can you explain your last comment further?

<comment><USER14> The current level of art assets requires displacement maps, specular maps, texture maps, a zbrush high poly model, lods models, and physics models. While all of these things are very doable, in order to DO them, you takes highly skilled artisans. Highly trained artisans are expensive. Therefore if you want to create some new art assets it takes lots of money. Lots of money means getting investors. Investors mean giving up significant amounts of equity. Which means you have a very narrow window in which to succeed and if you do, they benefit disproportionately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Warning: some of these sketches play music quite loudly.

It's pretty cool, I wish more of them worked on my computer. The reflective/translucent ones all appeared as black or the models didn't load at all.

</comment><comment><USER13> Neat! I've had a long-term interest in "toon shading". The problem with a lot of the traditional real-time methods of creating the outlines is that they're too literal, and cause unpleasant artifacts at some joints and seams. Also, you typically only have one parameter to tune, for the whole scene: line thickness. The problem is finding a value or range of this one parameter that works for a whole scene. E.g. if you use the same thickness for close and far objects, then the farther objects will appear more black since a greater proportion of their area is devoted to outline.

Another problem (for VR) is that current VR systems don't deal well with thin lines. You really want to avoid aliasing (crawlies) for high-quality VR.

Would love to see something like Paperman implemented in real-time:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZJLtujW6FY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZJLtujW6FY)

</comment><comment><USER17> Appears related to research done by Kopf and Lischinski[1] back in 2012. See parallax layers demo 2:33 into their video[2].

[1] [http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/labs/cglab/projects/comics/](http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/labs/cglab/projects/comics/)

[2] [http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/labs/cglab/projects/comics/comics.m...](http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/labs/cglab/projects/comics/comics.mp4)

</comment><comment><USER18> I've always wondered if this kind of art style for 3d were possible without the use of shaders, just with a custom 3d engine in place...

I'd love to recreate something like this in a 2d canvas.

<comment><USER19> Certainly is "possible" (and if you search you'll likely find some "3D renderers" for 2d canvas) but that'd need a rasterizer implemented in JavaScript and if you want anything more than 1-colored triangles, _some_ notion (even if haphazard, custom and callback-or-so based) of "shading" \--- should screech to a crawl quickly.

<comment><USER18> I think I'd have to move away from the concept of using polygons for such an approach - I had thought about just using a simple 2d projection of a 3d path, but I'd obviously run into quite a few problems regarding occlusion and a bunch of other things with that. But I'll be having a lot of fun trying out some different approaches to 3d rendering ;)

<comment><USER20> Maybe you'd be interested in this experiment I did with straight lines a while ago. I project 3d points onto 2d and make lines out of rotated divs. But I don't use css 3d rotation because I want to keep the fixed width of the lines themselves.

There isn't proper occlusion but I fake it by applying a different style to edges that are facing away from the camera. You could also do like the OP and draw white polygons in the space between lines.

Have a look here [https://jsfiddle.net/cyt0o7m9/](https://jsfiddle.net/cyt0o7m9/)

<comment><USER21> That's a great little demo - thanks for posting it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When I first started playing with Tilt Brush, I had an idea that "VR Comics" (or at least, 3D comics drawn via VR) would be an interesting concept.

I'm no artist, but I did manage to whip something up to test the concept: [https://twitter.com/Zikes/status/769433398217629696](https://twitter.com/Zikes/status/769433398217629696)

</comment><comment><USER23> I had to "load unsafe scripts" on Chrome to get this to work (OS X). Just a heads up in case it's not working initially for anyone.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is there meant to be a lightbox or something? Doesn't load for me in firefox. I just see a gallery that can't be scrolled or clicked.

</comment><comment><USER25> Looks like most of demos from this page don't work in current stable Chrome (56)

<comment><USER11> I had the inverse - most of them DO work. (Also Chrome 56 stable, but on Windows)

They do leverage OpenGL - so maybe that's the problem?

<comment><USER25> idk, tried Canary on macOS no luck..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Some of these are truly stunning [http://yiwenl.github.io/Sketches/](http://yiwenl.github.io/Sketches/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Interesting, the music theme from the third comic in the first row[1] is the exact copy of the famous game Star Trail[2] (The Dark Eye) from the nineties. I hear such similarities occasionally and always wonder if this is either a strong influence or a deliberate copy (No offense, just curious).

[1] [http://yiwenl.github.io/Sketches/exps/28](http://yiwenl.github.io/Sketches/exps/28)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NyJlx2Ws18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NyJlx2Ws18)

<comment><USER28> Well, setting aside the fact that they sound nothing alike, that music theme is a sample from "Fanfare for the common man". So if anyone copied anyone I suppose it was the game copying Aaron Copland.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Very very beautiful. Art and tech at it's best

</comment><comment><USER30> Unable to view the webpage on firefox

<comment><USER31> disable strict https

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> XKCD would probably love this.

<comment><USER33> There you go [https://sketchfab.com/models/5659b3b539e94dcca00a315ac6a4825...](https://sketchfab.com/models/5659b3b539e94dcca00a315ac6a48256)

<comment><USER34> That XKCD one is one of the best I've seen, even better than the Calvin & Hobbes one which I loved - full 360 rotation on all axes possible. Very well done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Funny how the sun slightly extends from the back of the box

</comment><comment><USER36> wow, beauty! Not even the idea and the implementation, but also the _very_ short story, it somehow reminds me Delphine's Another World

</comment><comment><USER37> I guess nobody tried opening this on an iPad.</comment>


Vinyl record grooves under an electron microscope - <AUTHOR> http://www.synthgear.com/2010/audio-gear/record-grooves-electron-microscope/ <comment><USER2> Many years ago I ran a record label, and as part of the process of manufacturing I took the source DAT tapes to a cutting studio, where an engineer cut the "lacquer", which is a one-off, soft wax version of what will later be pressed into hundreds of records.

After he had finished mixing the record and used a lathe to cut the lacquer, he showed me the grooves which has been cut using a microscope attached to the lathe. Not quite as much detail as the photos above, but more than enough to see clearly how the shape of the grooves creates the resultant waveform.

Really, really incredible feeling.

Vinyl records are, without a doubt, one of my favourite pieces of music technology.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hue shifted the 3D one for blue/brown lenses incase anyone's interested.

<http://i47.tinypic.com/2hr25go.jpg>

Also, original link [http://www.optics.rochester.edu/workgroups/cml/opt307/spr05/...](http://www.optics.rochester.edu/workgroups/cml/opt307/spr05/chris/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Free upvote to the first person who writes a program to play the waveforms directly from the scanned images... ;)

<comment><USER5> A modification to the process described at <http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/> could do it, but you'd get like a fraction of a second of decoded audio from the images on that page, so not that interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is the sound created by the change in the depth or the shape of the groove?

<comment><USER5> Both!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record#Stereo_sound>

While the stylus moves horizontally when reproducing a monophonic disk recording, on stereo records the stylus moves vertically as well as horizontally. In fact, prior to the full development of the 45/45 system, the first stereo cutting heads were made by bolting together one lateral cut head and one vertical cut head sharing a common stylus holder. Feeding the driving coils with suitably phased material achieved the 45/45 groove.

<comment><USER3> I always wondered how stereo was achieved. God bless Wikipedia!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: A one-way video interview and Video interviews in general? - <AUTHOR> Hello
This is my second time to get an invitation.
I find it very humiliating.
Is it becoming a trend?
If I tell them I don't like it, will they understand?
Also, can I refuse to have a video chat? Or is it their right to see my face?
Edit: fix the title <comment><USER2> I was just asked for the first time the day before yesterday to participate in a one-way video interview. I sent the recruiter an email letting them know I was extremely privacy conscious and didn't feel comfortable recording an interview. I explained I wasn't after an exception, rather that I was no longer interested in the position. How a company handles recruitment and the hiring process is usually indicative of how the company will treat you as an employee.

I understand that company time is important, and that's what they are trying to save, but the lack of respect shown by asking a potential employee to interview in this fashion is disturbing. The recruiter wrote back, and asked if I would be willing to do a direct Skype call for the interview instead. I'm honestly not sure if I should proceed. (I am more okay with using Skype live, verses a recording, but still don't care for it.) Do I still want to work for a company that views potential employees this way?</comment>


Google Dart breaks into the top 20 programming languages - <AUTHOR> http://sdtimes.com/google-dart-breaks-top-20-programming-languages/ <comment><USER2> Does anyone here use Dart? I'm curious to how they like it compared to JS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got two web apps in production - one of them >10K LOC.

I'm former .NET dev missing IDE like VS in open source world - and Dart makes me quite happy. Dart has decent (not great...yet) IDE with nice debugger, sane SDK and very nice package repository (pub.dartlang.org).

Biggest flaw - it still has relatively small community/ecosystem compared to eg. nodejs.</comment></comment>


Kn0thing on Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000091110&play=1

<comment><AUTHOR> FYI, this was erratic when played on Chrome / Linux. Just fine on Chrome / OSX.

His linkage of privacy concerns to potential business problems is really well done.</comment>


22-Year Veteran Of Startups Says Employees Are Getting Screwed By VCs And CEOs - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.in/This-22-Year-Veteran-Of-Startups-Says-Employees-Are-Getting-Screwed-By-VCs-And-CEOs/articleshow/31565456.cms

<comment><USER2> His last clause is interesting:

> Last, because two thirds of employees know squat about acquisition-based > vesting acceleration triggers, they often sign offer letters that give them > no protection against being demoted or fired before or after (but in > connection with) an acquisition.

How would one negotiate something like that into their contract?

<comment><USER3> Decline the stock offering. Don't give them an incentive to get rid of you during these transitions. Note that you can't judge the probability of the latter, since no matter how good the will of the current players, a new investor might turn out to be a devil (been there, done that, resigned _en masse_ with 12 others, almost all, and of technical staff all but one new hire; had to use the government just to get back pay).

It's all a risk/reward calculation, and with the closing of the IPO exit for all but the most exceptional, stuck by lightening companies, it's pretty clear the possibility of a big reward is _very_ low. But balance with your estimate of the probability of a big success, and how well you can make such an estimate.

I can see this presenting "you aren't a team player" problems, though. Certainly signals you don't believe the company will be a big success.

<comment><USER2> I don't understand what you're saying. Decline which stock offering? Don't work for equity at all, you mean?

<comment><USER3> Exactly, except it's "don't work for non-vested, they can take it away from you" equity (which is not to be confused with equity where they have the right of first refusal to buy it back if you separate). When they ask you to sign up for deferred stock options, which requires paperwork you need to sign, don't.

Or if it's a sufficiently confused small startup, never return the paperwork and let it slip through the cracks ... although when it comes time for the investment/sales event, they've got to _know_ you have no options....

Hmmm, for excuses maybe mention some of the screw cases where people got options vested---exercised them? I forget the details---but the stock then tanked, and they had a big tax bill. I.e. throw FUD on the mechanism, the IRS, etc., but not the company. Or say you're a proletarian ^_^?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Platitudes in the Making–Precepts and Advices for Gentlefolk"– Holbrook Jackson - <AUTHOR> https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uva.x004114910;view=1up;seq=8 <comment><AUTHOR> From [https://austinkleon.com/2018/08/30/reading-with-a- pencil/](https://austinkleon.com/2018/08/30/reading-with-a-pencil/): "G.K. Chesterton once went through a friend's newly-published book of aphorisms and answered each one with his pencil. (It was later published as 'Platitudes Undone.')"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Published in 1911 and then annotated by G.K. Chesterton; hand-written annotations appear in PDF linked in OP.</comment>


Reversing the wall - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@fz/reversing-the-wall-92f22a2ad538#.lighpxwhb <comment><USER2> This is fun and cool and clever. :+1:</comment>


Elder-Care Challenges Prompt Tech Executives to Create Startups, Apps - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/12/28/elder-care-challenges-prompt-tech-executives-to-create-startups-apps/ <comment><USER2> The article itself is pretty light, but I've always been interested in the tech opportunities for caring for the elderly, and there's a huge market there :) .

I based my Master's business plan on a pill reminder app ( [http://www.dontforgetyourmeds.com/](http://www.dontforgetyourmeds.com/) , never finished it )

The analysts call the sector "mHealth", and while several companies have identified the opportunities, "Most of these apps are actually awful. There may be 12,000 apps out there but they're not 12,000 good apps," Chris Wasden, Global Healthcare Innovation Leader for PwC.

I'm convinced there are a lot of opportunities in healthcare out there, though it's a hard to reach market.

See these links for more information:

[http://gigaom.com/2012/07/10/mobile-health-is-taking-off- but...](http://gigaom.com/2012/07/10/mobile-health-is-taking-off-but-whats- still-in-its-way/)

[http://www.doseofdigital.com/2010/04/no-one-uses-your- health...](http://www.doseofdigital.com/2010/04/no-one-uses-your-health- medication-exercise-tracker/)</comment>