What happens after Yahoo acquires you (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2777-what-happens-after-yahoo-acquires-you <comment><USER3> Maybe I'm insane, but when someone says "is the cash worth it to these founders?" when they presumably have the ability to do another startup AND they now have enough money to finance 100 startups and 3 generations of their family, I have to say a very strong yes.

<comment><USER4> You're not insane, and I often wonder about how others can criticize someone for accepting such a colossal life-changing offer. If a company were offering me a billion (or $35 million) dollars for my startup provided I delete all user accounts and data and shut down the entire service forever, I'd still take that deal. People will moan about it for days, but a year out they'll have found some other service and I'll be driving around Rome in my r8 dressed as Da Vinci eating as much of the world's best pizza as my stomach can handle, for the rest of my life.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like you're on the 'deferred life' plan. Drop the startup, get a job in Rome, and start enjoying the pizza. You can't have the fancy car, but you'd get bored of that in a month anyways.

<comment><USER3> But as I alluded to, at that point, when you're bored, start something new with the new capital and connections you have.

<comment><USER6> A truism of life:

If you drive an R8 around, eat the best pizza you can and dress as Da Vinci, people will call you crazy and lock you up.

If you drive an R8 around, eat the best pizza you can and dress as Da Vinci when you $35,000,000 in the bank, people pleasantly refer to you as eccentric and like having you around.

<comment><USER7> Eccentrism is by no means the sole privilege of the rich. Emperor Norton was a famously broke, yet grandiose fellow who was beloved throughout the city of San Francisco in the late 1800s.

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

<comment><USER6> You can draw any line you like through a single data point. But you also kind of missed the original reference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's not really useful to look at a bunch of (relatively) small acquisitions made by a Yahoo run by very different people almost a decade ago and try to extrapolate anything from it today. I don't think anyone would disagree Yahoo has been horribly mismanaged over the years. That at least may not be the case now.

More useful is to look at large, more recent purchases like Alibaba and Right Media which are doing quite well. A company is far more likely to let a $35m acquisition slip down the drain than a $1b one.

<comment><USER9> I agree, but the writer wasn't extrapolating to today. The article is more than 2 years old. Bartz was still running Yahoo!

<comment><USER10> True, but whoever posted it to Hacker News right after it was announced Yahoo is buying Tumblr certainly was.

<comment><USER11> Right - my thought, too. Especially coming from one of those companies that was acquired after the article was published. It hasn't all been roses, but we haven't been left to wither, either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Someone buys my house, but asks me to live in it and care for it. I then live it in like I've lived for years. One day they show up and chop down the tree I planted with my child when they were young, and change the color of the paint.

"What are you doing?! Do you know how much passion I've put into this property?"

"Who cares? It doesn't belong to you anymore, and you've got a pretty decent chunk of change in the bank."

<comment><USER13> That's a poor analogy. The goal of a business is ultimately to make money. The goal of a family home is completely different.

You sell your business because you believe the exit represents some version of reaching your goal running the business (if your goal is to run the business, just don't sell it). I don't see any analogous reason to sell your family home (you might be forced to for financial reasons, but that's not why either of the mentioned start-ups sold, nor is such a sale likely to leave you with much money in the bank).

<comment><USER14> _The goal of a business is ultimately to make money._

Meh... that seems to be the "received wisdom" around here, but I think that is either flat out wrong, or - at least - overly pedantic. A business _needs_ to make money to stay in business, but I see no reason a business can't have other goals, where "making money" is simply a means to an end.

 _I don't intend to build in order to have clients; I intend to have clients in order to build._ \-- Howard Roark

In a company which is still owned by the founders, the "goal of the company" is implicitly the same as the goal of the founder(s) and it certainly may be more than just "making money". Take my startup... we have a very specific mission statement[1] that _isn't_ just something we cooked up because "you're supposed to have one". It represents the mission and goals of the company, beyond simply making money. Now we obviously have to make money at some point or shut down. But we can certainly make decisions that prioritize fulfilling those items from our mission statement, in favour of optimizing profits down to the last cent.

[1]: <http://www.fogbeam.com/mission_values.html>

<comment><USER13> Well, I figured that this place more than most accept the definition of "making money" as "creating value, and capturing some of that value".

<comment><USER14> Fair enough. I might argue that a company can still have broader goals than _just_ that, but I certainly admit that a company must make money at _some_ point and to some degree! And clearly things do change somewhat if you're talking about a company with outside investors or a public company.

In our case, we are privately held by just the founders, so we only have to focus on "make money" to the extent that that supports out other goals. But we don't have to be the stereotypically ruthless, greedy, evil capitalist pigs who ruthlessly chase every cent they can grab, even it it means stealing from babies and old people, or whatever. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> At the risk of getting slammed by everyone, the evidence goes against starting a company, yet people still do it. The evidence goes against selling to a big co, yet people still do it to pay back investors and for the founders to release some cash. I know 37 Signals advocate not strapping the VC bomb to your back but once you have, your options are limited and if Yahoo offer the best deal I guess you take it...

</comment><comment><USER16> Hacker News founder Paul Graham (pg) wrote in August 2010 about his experiences after his company Viaweb was acquired by Yahoo in 1998.

<http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html>

He makes an explicit comparison between Yahoo and Google in his essay. Anyone looking at the strategy of large companies acquiring smaller companies might want to look at pg's essay as one more set of data points about what could happen after an acquisition.

<comment><USER17> Note this little nugget in the footnotes:

[2] In theory you could beat the death spiral by buying good programmers instead of hiring them. You can get programmers who would never have come to you as employees by buying their startups. But so far the only companies smart enough to do this are companies smart enough not to need to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think often times large companies purchase smaller ones because they cannot come up with new ideas on their own. Not that they are stupid but that the bureaucracy is too heavy for an idea to germinate into something big.

That same layer of bureaucracy and deadweight that keeps ideas from forming will also crush a new acquisition. The people at the large company are good at maintaining; not growing or inventing. Their nature fights new ideas and new methods.

<comment><USER19> Definitely. The large company I work for talks and talks about innovation, but the truth is very little actually happens. The big flexibility that comes with a new company is what creates disruptive technologies.

It's worth remembering that large companies don't always ruin their purchases. There will inevitably be a painful culture merging process after an acquisition (normally at the expense of the purchased company), but sometimes that process doesn't kill the purchased company. The resources and experience that a large company have can often take an almost-product the extra lengths required to be marketed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Though I am as sad as anyone that Yahoo! effectively killed several good companies (Flickr and Delicious top my list of unfortunate casualties), I'd like to point out a couple of things.

First of all, when Yahoo, Google or any large company acquires a product, they don't necessarily do it for the product, but possibly for other technology. The goals of the acquiring company, the founders and the users are not necessarily aligned. This doesn't mean the acquisition is bad for the company or founder, just bad for the users of the product or possibly for the founders if it goes in a direction he or she didn't like.

Second of all, founders leave for all sorts of reasons. It seems like some of these founders were frustrated by Yahoo!, but I have a feeling that founders in general would be frustrated by working for anyone in general. There's a personality that starts companies and there's a personality that works for them.

<comment><USER21> Flickr is dead? Not quite. There's a Flickr press event in NYC happening later this afternoon (5 EST), so expect some announcements. Live stream @ <http://screen.yahoo.com/yahoo-event-155000760.html>

<comment><USER22> Flickr was essentially killed. Yahoo is now trying to bring it back to life. Based on a completely unscientific survey of my friends it seems to be working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> (2011) should be added to the title.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was not aware of the "Exit Interview"[1] series of posts and, so far, there has been some good content.

[1] [http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Exit+Interview%22&site...](http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Exit+Interview%22&sitesearch=37signals.com/svn)

</comment><comment><USER25> Of that list, I'd say the Alibaba + RightMedia acquisitions were worth it. They're huge portions of the remaining value of the company.

However, in general I agree with the post: Yahoo's corporate development group and its management teams over the years have spent billions of dollars on acquisitions that have largely not panned out. That this resulted in founder defections and shuttered products is not entirely surprising.

</comment><comment><USER26> If you are your business, the likelihood that your business will be lost in a conglomerate is relevant. On the other hand, what happens to you as a person after Yahoo acquires your business is an entirely different matter.

Those mentioned in the article have had a life after Yahoo acquisition. A little Googling provides anecdotal evidence that getting purchased had a significant long term impact. Likewise, passing through a Yahoo buyout helped create the arc of Paul Graham's career.

<comment> daniel-cussen And it's worth pointing out, Paul Graham's product is still around and/because it made a lot of money for Yahoo over the years.

<http://store.yahoo.com>

<comment><USER26> Unlike Fliker or Tumblr, the monetization strategy was obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This article is two years old, sure. But now Mayer, who I respect a lot, is at the helm. So what's happened to these older, still-viable acquisitions? Virtually nothing. A new iOS app here and there. Flickr and Delicious are wasting away.

I can't help but think that Yahoo's destined-to-fail social network is in the wings. Instead of a @ or + name, it'll be a ! name. Marissa's there, but is there any real progress happening?

<comment><USER28> Yahoo sold delicious 2 years ago: [http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/27/yahoo- sells-delicious-to-yo...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/27/yahoo-sells- delicious-to-youtube-founders/)

And killed their social network about 4 years ago: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_360°>

And they tried a Facebook partnership that kinda went sour after Yahoo attacked them with patents last year: <http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/06/yahoo- facebook-patent/>

<comment><USER21> > after Yahoo attacked them with patents last year

While that statement is true, worth noting that the Y! CEO who did attack Facebook was fired shortly after and one of Marissa's first moves was to make amends with Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> You take the money and create a fantastically successful startup/incubation/seed funding program? Sounds good to me.

<comment><USER30> And yet, you can't always swap a startup built with one's own hands with a bunch of others, just as one's child is not tradable for a bunch of other kids. Some founders might view their startups as pure investments, but I'd wager that more often than not, they view it as their child.

<comment><USER29> Startups are businesses intended to make money. Kids are kids. While you may feel an attachment to the former, there may come a time when selling is the best strategy. With kids, that's generally frowned upon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> But this time its Marissa Mayer and i expect some good results from her. Finger Crossed X.

</comment><comment><USER32> What happened to Informix, BEA, SUN, ...? There is nothing special in the Yahoo acquisitions. Large companies buy marked-share, mind-share, users. The actual product or service often is of little interest to them.

</comment><comment><USER33> I feel as though some of these acquisitions represent not the purchase of something worth $x to Yahoo but rather the imperialism of traffic that costs $x to them, which are really the same thing but are rather different when viewed through the lens of shutdowns and stagnation. Yahoo is a content company, and content elsewhere means traffic elsewhere which is a loss for them. Facebook's purchase of Instagram, even if Instagram is shut down and loses all of its users is still worth the money if viewed through the lens of owning the traffic regardless.

</comment><comment><USER34> "And customers are left holding the bag."

Ok, let's dial down the drama here. I'm trying to understand the point, other than Yahoo has historically been a poor acquiring company. Shocker!

Let's see...Delicious, MyBlogLog, Flickr, Upcoming. How many of these services had _customers_ as opposed to _users_?

I'm pretty sure we can substitute names of large tech companies and their acquisition lists here and have the article read the same way.

</comment><comment><USER35> It seems fairly clear that Yahoo needs to not mishandle Tumblr in this way, and that Mayer is totally aware that this is a large factor on which she will be judged.

Maybe it's naive to think that a new CEO can cut through cultural and corporate cruft well enough to make this happen, but I think Mayer commands respect in a manner radically different to all but a few CEOs - <USER2> among developers.

</comment><comment><USER36> Please add (2011) to the title. It's really important to understand this wasn't written to contextualize this ac.

</comment><comment><USER37> This article misses the big point that there is a new CEO who may make different decisions regarding how to integrate a new company. Having a new CEO is enough to change the direction of a company (look at Apple), whether for good or bad.

Of course, Mayer has yet to prove what difference she can make.

</comment><comment><USER38> As of today, the first point in this post is already invalid.

If Marissa Mayer keeps going like how she is, I suspect that this post will be fully invalid in 5 years.

We would very well be witnessing the 2nd greatest tech turnaround after Apple - with Mayer.

<comment><USER39> can you please quote the 'first point in this post'?

<comment><USER38> The point of the first heading _" Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in March '05 for $35M"_ \- was to show that Flickr has been a failure ever since Yahoo bought it.

Given the recent reboot and redesign, I doubt that will continue to be the case - hence my statement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> If you define text color, you should define background color as well. Otherwise you are making unfounded assumptions about the user's default background color.

Of course I can always override the stylesheet.

</comment><comment><USER41> The following list is even more fascinating <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL>

</comment><comment><USER42> I think the redesign of flickr unveiled today makes this argument obsolete. It _was_ true under the old Yahoo! ... this one is far more aggressive.

</comment><comment><USER43> Are there any success stories - when a service is acquired and then developed and grown properly and come out in the black?

I can think of only blogger.

<comment><USER44> Reddit has been pretty un-fucked-around-with by Conde Nast's parent company since its acquisition. (It's been split off from CN as a separate business entity, but even during CN's stewardship, the messing around was very minimal).

It's debatable exactly how much money Reddit makes, and whether it could be considered "in the black." But it's a success story in as much as the site's userbase and traffic have grown, and the core service has not been tampered with.

<comment><USER45> It's not profitable, at least it wasn't six months ago, and very likely is not today.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/12v8y3/now_is_the_time...](http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/12v8y3/now_is_the_time_to_invest_in_gold/c6yfbuh)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It could be worse. You might be acquired by EMC!

You don't know pain and dissatisfaction until this happens to you.

</comment><comment><USER47> Mayer is a product person, so it will be interesting to see how things work out.

</comment><comment><USER48> Anyone wanna speculate on what Yahoo's going to do with Tumblr?

</comment><comment><USER49> Finally, an INTERESTING article about the Yahoo/Tumblr thing.

<comment><USER50> Except this isn't about Yahoo/Tumblr... this was written years ago. It might still be relevant, but given the new leadership at Yahoo, it might not apply anymore. At least, one can hope.

<comment><USER49> Well, why was it posted to HN in the first place? Because of the Yahoo/Tumblr sale. That makes it relevant.

<comment><USER50> Its a relevant story, but the conclusions may not be relevant to the Tumblr purchase. Why? Because the context that was written in has shifted. Yahoo is a different place with different management now. A significant amount of time has passed, so things might be different now.

The only question is: is Yahoo different enough to not screw this up? And that's not something that can be answered any time soon.

Given how they've treated things so far, it seems like they've learned some lessons from the (ahem) 'successes' of their prior acquisitions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> In 2011, that was a different Yahoo.. Without Marissa as CEO

</comment><comment><USER52> different time, different management via ex-googler.

<comment><USER53> Agreed, it would be more instructive to look to the acquisitions that shaped Marissa and board members like Max Levchin, Maynard Webb (Yahoo), and Roelof Botha (Tumblr)- YouTube, PayPal, perhaps Instagram. Surely top of mind and a big reason why Tumblr is staying independent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> There is also a story here about Yahoo's loss.

</comment><comment><USER55> Yahoo...where the internet goes to die</comment>


SingularityHub: GitHub for your Brain_s - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.me/ <comment><AUTHOR> Founder here: AMA

<comment><USER2> did you launch today on April 1? >_>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, perhaps bad timing. But some things are just too big to hold back. I tried to tell my otherself to wait but he just didn't believe me.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Use any text as a domain name - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/amoffat/hash-n-slash <comment><USER2> I might be missing something, but I completely don't get this idea, especially with the examples provided by the author. I have two major concerns:

> _Bind searches to domain names, eg "food in chicago" => > f02970848a63988965aa40cd368ffcf9046209ca.com_

This IMO is bad, and goes in completely wrong direction. We've invented search engines to have such phrases _not_ bound to a particular domain. Who would handle the "#://food in chicago" domain? Would it be Google? Bing? Yelp? Local restaurant chain? Or maybe some scammers? And who would maintain the completely different website "#://food in Chicago", and why "#://Food in Chicago" wants to silently install me some malware?

The reason searching for such phrases makes sense, while having them as domains does not, is that things like "food in chicago" are poorly defined, fuzzy concepts. It would feel weird to change one letter in a query, or replace word "food" with, eg. "something to eat", and see completely different website. Moreover, major search engines are more or less egalitarian wrt. buisnesses. Yes, there's the whole SEO thing, but you can't get full control of what food joints are listed near your location just because you've managed to get the register first. I can (and do) trust listings from Google; they have both incentives and track record of being fair. I will never trust listings from random-autogenerated-squat-scam-business-site.

Which brings me to the second point,

> _Good domain names are pretty scarce. It 's a source of frustration for > anyone who has ever tried to buy a domain._

Yes, they are, and the primary source of frustration is that they are mostly taken by various squatters and other scums of the Internet. What will happen is that, the moment there's any real possibility such hash-domain scheme is introduced, all those evil people and companies will take all the domains like "#://microsoft", "#://android" and "#://insert any popular keyword or phrase here" in order to sell them back to real businesses for boatloads of money. And then we'll be back to square one, with maybe a little bigger domain space than we have right now. Bad people win, good people loose and nothing changed.

So, again, the concepts behind this idea elude me.

<comment><USER3> "and the primary source of frustration is that they are mostly taken by various squatters and other scums of the Internet"

"Scums of the Internet"? Oh please.

Where are you getting this all from exactly? You've just decided that since you weren't able to buy a domain [1] that you wanted at a price that _you could afford to pay_ that all domains "are mostly taken by various squatters and other scum of the Internet".

I mean "scum"? How unfair that something that you want isn't available at a price YOU can pay. And if that price was affordable that someone else wouldn't have _beaten you to buying it_ (which is already what happened, right?). I mean it would just be sitting there because nobody else ever thought of using or buying, say "hackernews.com" until PG decided to start Hacker news.

Or perhaps you think that domains are a "public trust" and that there should be some official board designated that decides who is worthy of a particular domain and whether they are "using" that particular domain "the right way". You know to make things fair.

Is that it? Further you are talking about .com because in general and with maybe a few exceptions, you can find many names in other TLD's (you just don't want them) or make a slight modification and have the domain you want in .com.

By the way are you aware that google owns duck.com and refuses to sell it [2] at any price at all? (And has turned down $500,000 for it iim.) Of course they aren't "using it" [3] and only have it because they bought the company that previously owned it

At least if it was owned by a person such as you refer to it would be available for sale at some price.

[1] Or perhaps that wasn't even the case maybe you have just read about other people or know someone that this was the "aggrieved" party?

[2] I was involved in trying to do this. And I communicated and had back and forth with high level people at google who in the end simply said "sorry not interested at any price". And this isn't the first time this has happened with a company either.

[3] It redirects to google.com as if they need that traffic.

<comment><USER4> Squatters are scum. They add nothing of value and make a resource artificially scarce for their own profit. If domain names had no value and people could just buy another one, then squatters wouldn't be making money in the first place.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you. However making a resource artificially scarce to push the price up is what humans do. From where I am sitting I can see multiple items where this happens gold, diamonds (wife's ring), water (in a glass) electricity (well, a turned in light), several things with brand names on them (the copyrighted logo seems to keep that price up by ensuring that only one supplier exists, keeping supply low). I'd be quite surprised if there was much in the room which wasn't artificially price inflated.

<comment><USER4> Sort of but it's not exactly the same thing. Physical items generally take effort to build or to extract, and they generally pay for the land or materials or whatever. Copyright is meant to artificially inflate the value, for the benefit of the author who wrote it.

If there is a case of someone just inflating the price and adding literally no value at all then I would say that is just as bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of "RealNames". Dot-com era company. $130 million in funding.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames)

 _RealNames was a company founded in 1997 by Keith Teare. Its goal was to create a multilingual keyword-based naming system for the Internet that would translate keywords typed into the address bar of Microsoft 's Internet Explorer web browser to Uniform Resource Identifiers, based on the existing Domain Name System, that would access the page registered by the owner of the RealNames keyword._

<comment><USER7> Also, AOL Keywords.

<comment><USER8> And new.net, though I think that was basically malware. There were a lot of "DNS Alternatives" in the early 2000s.

<comment><USER9> New.net was terrible. It used to inject DLL into IE, hijack Winsock LSP and whatnot!

<comment><USER8> Yup, a bad idea implemented poorly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The is a horrendously horrible idea, for the same reason why unicode domain names are a bad idea. Domain names are important because they provide a reasonable amount of trust. If I type [http://apple.com](http://apple.com), I'm 99.99999% certain that I've connected to Apple's website. This gets nasty with unicode, because a person can spam your email account and get you to click on a URL which looks very similar to something like apple.com, but really points to a malicious site (thank you cyrillic characters).

Hash based domain names would be even worse. You have no idea what site is lurking behind some big string of hex digits. You could argue that a person should just compare the hash to some known set of hashes, but that's a. cumbersome and b. unrealistic. If it's done by humans, it's error prone (a malicious site could spoof the first few chars to point to their site), and if it's done by computers, what's the point? You've now effectively created a really shitty replacement for DNS.

<comment><USER11> >The is a horrendously horrible idea, for the same reason why unicode domain names are a bad idea.

So, you suggest that non english speakers should just "learn it" to use DNS?

<comment><USER10> Until we can figure out something that doesn't suck, yes. Look, I'm sympathetic with a huge chunk of the world's population having to deal with a (potentially) unfamiliar character set, but what can you do about it? There has to be some standard that everyone can agree to which doesn't compromise the integrity of the net.

<comment><USER12> This might at first sound like a xenophobic, anglocentric position, but it actually makes quite a bit of sense. There are a number of instances in which it is advantageous / critical to adopt a lingua franca -- that is, a single language that everyone in the world agrees to use for a particular purpose. In the case of domain names, Patrick is right: If we allow characters that appear to be one thing but are actually another, it opens up a whole bunch of evil possibilities.

<comment><USER13> Couldn't this also be mitigated by making all domains mandatorily delegated from a national ccTLD? Eliminate/redirect apple.com to apple.com.us, then make sure it conforms to the rules for US domains (Latin character set only, etc) whereas apple.com.ru comes under the rules of the Russian registrar?

<comment><USER11> I like this solution. However, ICANN already made profit on .us/.ru domains, when I really think that they should have come as 'free' suffixes to registrations.

e.g.

I buy 'apple.com' and while if I want to leave it as this, fine. However, I should also have 'apple.com.us' and 'apple.com.ru' so that I can handle these appropriately. It's not perfect, but it at least gives my users a chance to say "hey, I probably prefer (english|russian), so please give me that page."

Of course, this is also a bit lazy and somewhat of a non-solution, as this only addresses the issue for English speakers. A russian speaker using the .ru namespace is already willing to "play by the ascii rules."

People going to 'apple.com' really expect to go to the webpage of the American electronics company. One could assume this by the TLD. Users sending a request to 'apple.рф' would be doing something somewhat strange (user sends english base label, followed by a cyrillic tld). This isn't that absurd though, as english company names become loanwords (at least in russian -- see "xerox" or even ask a russian if he owns a 'yabloko makkniga pro' or an 'apple macbook pro' for example). Should the presence of a non-unicode TLD trigger country- specific mode in browsers for the sake of security? How do we handle loanwords (spoiler to above: russians say 'apple' when referring to the brand, even though it shadows the actual Russian word for apple) with non-ascii TLDs?

<comment><USER14> IMO different language versions of a site should not be based on TLD, but rather a subdomain: us.apple.com, ru.apple.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This mechanism is half way to a suggested scheme for domains that are less vulnerable to single-actor take-downs, posted here on HN a few days ago; [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964090](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964090) .

In short; instead of merely mapping to [hash].com the extension could map to [hash].com, [hash].se , [hash].ly, [hash].is, [hash].ch and then use a quorum consensus of whatever answer 3 or more of those names agree on. Effectively each TLD registry (and each of your registrars), along with their regulatory environment, would lose the ability to take down your name without international agreement.

For certain niches, such a feature might be a good enough value proposition to ordinary users to convince them to install an extension.

Other observation; 36-ary is probably a better encoding for the hash data than hex. DNS isn't great with lengthy answers and every byte is worth conserving. But it's cool to see something interesting like this in the form of a browser extension.

<comment><USER16> Or even ZCode32 to help with readability for when you need to copy written hashes. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is really cool. This is my favourite kind of idea; one that changes something fundamental in a succinct way.

This makes me wonder how important domains are at all. My mum never even thinks about the domains for the websites she visits, she just types in 'ebay' and Google does everything for her.

The only time I think about URLs (outside of coding) is when I have to share a link with someone, but I wonder if even that could be replaced with a sufficiently advanced search engine.

<comment><USER18> Google search indexing might be one downside of this system, as Google tends to give a lot of weight to domains that match your search term. But in this case the actual domain is a "nonsense" hash.

Perhaps the browser extension could be set so that whenever a search term is entered, it submits Google searches for both the raw text and its hash. If Google has indexed a domain that is a hash, and that exact hash is submitted as a query, you would get the right result as #1 every time.

<comment><USER17> According to Moz it's hardly important at all: [http://moz.com/search-ranking- factors](http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors)

<comment><USER18> Exact match domain has the highest correlation of any on-page factor in that table--even higher than keywords in the title or H1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would be in favor of this idea if a little more thought was put into how the hashing function works.

As it stands, someone typing in:

food in Chicago

will get a different URL than:

food in Chicago

And the same goes for: Chicago food, chicago food, food near Chicago, etc.

Every one, with a single character difference (extra space, different word order, capitalization difference, regional spelling like theatre vs theater, etc) will result in a different hash.

You've now made 'humanized URLs' into 'no one will guess your domain'.

It's an interesting approach to avoiding search engines, but it doesn't solve the problem that search engines do solve: multiple similar but different entries resulting in the same "appropriate"/top website result.

With this approach, not even face book, Facebook, and facebook would result in the same .com (and please don't suggest just purchasing a billion domains and redirecting them all).

<comment><USER20> >As it stands, someone typing in:

>food in Chicago

>will get a different URL than:

>food in Chicago

Why?

<comment> vezzy-fnord IDN homograph attack.

<comment><USER21> Are you sure? I just pasted both into my UTF8-encoded Linux terminal running `od -tx1` and got the same hex octets. (Also tried in Chrome's JS terminal "<paste string>".split("").map(function(s) { return s.charCodeAt(0); }) ) It's quite probable I don't know what I'm doing, so I'd appreciate knowing how to do it properly.

Also, since these strings would be typed, I'm not sure the homograph attack applies. Why would someone slip in a Cyrillic letter or something while typing the URL themselves? If extended to clickable links that displayed the pre-hash text, I could see the issue, but pudquick specifically said "someone typing in" the two URLs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> To the extent that TLD's are namespaces of hostnames, it's just adding the equivalent of another TLD, but implementing it as a weird proprietary extension on top of .com.

Why?

<comment><USER23> Some people don't remember RealNames and other keyword systems, and thus must reinvent them to realise it's a bad idea?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> My initial thought: This is terrible, because how would we ever know which sites we can trust? Something as tiny as an extra space would change the hash value.

But on second thought, the real problem is that we (the web technology community) have assumed domain names are even a remotely suitable proxy for trust. I don't think most common web users actually get this point. That's why phishing is so easy (except for the part about getting a phishing email past spam filters).

Do you think most people really know (or notice) the difference between webaccess.bankofamerica.com and webaccess.bankofamerica.x8.co? I doubt it.

So the real fix for this situation is creating a _true_ trust system that most actual end users can understand and rely on.

Then, it seems only natural for something like this to be the future. UUIDs will act as the underlying addressing technology with " _whatever you want_ " as your display name.

And as a bonus, it will really cut down on the cybersquatters' profitability.

</comment><comment><USER25> One downside of this is that you're using a secure one-way hashing function. This means that if for some reason you have the hashed url you can't get the clean one back.

You could use something something like base64 instead.. might work better but it would remove the ability to use files as domain names.

<comment><USER26> A TXT DNS entry could identify the unhashed text, eg:

      @    TXT   "v=sha1reverse; food in chicago"

The browser could look this up, verify it, and display "#:// food in chicago" in the location instead of the hashed domain name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Fun story, some of the older (hehe, older as in "older than 30 or 35) people here might remember that in the 90s there was a startup that did exactly this but with a browser plugin as I recall (well, not exactly, they didn't hash the text, but they took arbitrary plain text and mapped it to a URL). The idea was to sell short sentences to companies, so "seinfeld TV show" (or whatever) in the address bar would have gone to the NBC "Seinfeld" web site, etc. I think the idea was to make "deep" links easier for people to remember, but I don't remember the details, I just remember that it existed and I probably read about it in PC Magazine.

</comment><comment><USER28> This reminds me about how many people don't use domain names at all anymore. Many people probably type the name of their bank into the search bar and visit the first result. I've seen people literally pull up google to search for yahoo mail or ebay.

Domain names are still useful, for a start they provide some level of authentication when mixed with cryptography. (If you visit [https://news.ycombinator.com](https://news.ycombinator.com), you can be relatively sure there is no MITM with certain conditions present).

It would be interesting to see how this system can be adapted to work with our current Internet infrastructure.

<comment><USER29>
      --2014-01-01 16:45:59--  https://news.ycombinator.com/
      Resolving news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)... 184.108.40.206, 126.96.36.199
      Connecting to news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)|188.8.131.52|:443... connected.
      ERROR: The certificate of `news.ycombinator.com' is not trusted.
      ERROR: The certificate of `news.ycombinator.com' hasn't got a known issuer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This won't work because to me this is similar in concept to URL shorteners. The difference being in the shortening algorithm and the use of expensive domains.

So for example with current shorteners you have:

[http://shorturl.com/{algorithm](http://shorturl.com/{algorithm) for unique URL goes here}

In the above case using a browser plug in can also eliminate any server side resolution of domains.

With this proof of concept:

[http://{algorithm](http://{algorithm) for unique URL goes here}.com

... Except the implementation costs $ if it is to be accepted... And to be accepted it needs to have a benefit that isn't solved by URL shorteners.

</comment><comment><USER31> Aaand another Chrome extension that bundles jQuery just to do a couple of element selections that could have been done using querySelectorAll...

<comment><USER32> Fortunately, it is open source. Sending a pull request later this evening when I fix this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> In the interview that Eric Schmidt did to Julian Assange a few years ago, Julian talked about a similar system that I found quite interesting: [http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange- Schmidt#602](http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt#602)

</comment><comment><USER34> Well, DNS is nothing but a mapping from a domain name to an IP address. All this is is a mapping from a piece of text, to a domain name to an IP address. Alternatively, a mapping from a piece of text to an IP address. In other words, it's nothing but a domain name with different syntax.

</comment><comment><USER35> Neat idea! One quibble: since the essence is specifying a domain-name in a new way, it'd be good if the 'escaping' convention didnt' clobber/assume a single protocol/scheme. As it stands, it's not clear how this would be used for other schemes, even 'https'.

Perhaps allow 'scheme#' (where naked '#' implies 'http#'), or move the convention entirely to the domain-name area rather than scheme area. ('#food in chicago' -> '[http://#food](http://#food) in chicago' -> '[http://f02970848a63988965aa40cd368ffcf9046209ca.com'](http://f02970848a63988965aa40cd368ffcf9046209ca.com'))

</comment><comment><USER36> Nice! reminds me of the "4 little words" thing I put together a few years ago [http://blog.rabidgremlin.com/2010/11/28/4-little- words/](http://blog.rabidgremlin.com/2010/11/28/4-little-words/)

</comment><comment><USER37> I dont really want my mid-level domains to potentially be hashes - I want domains at all levels to be intelligible and, optimally, to be named what they are, i.e. foodinchicago.com or food_in_chicago.com or food in chicago.nlp_name

Perhaps enabling spaces in domain names is possible? Since spaces in filenames are allowed I don't see why spaces in names shouldn't be allowed. And then you could have a default root domain for natural language names - .nlp, for instance, and then just assume that name when someone types in a natural language URI with no tld.

We could use something like NameCoin for this TLD to avoid collisions.

</comment><comment><USER38> As a tangent, I read this earlier today and then got annoyed at not having a quick URL shortener on hand (I got spoiled at my last job, where I could use internal shortcuts for complex URLs like create new Google Doc / link to specific doc, etc).

So, decided to write my first Chrome extension, modelled loosely on your domain name hashing, and here it is: [https://github.com/jennielees/jump](https://github.com/jennielees/jump)

It's entirely a personal itch-scratcher, but thank you for the inspiration!

</comment><comment><USER39> I think this could be accomplished without creating a new system of domain names by using visually similar non-ascii characters in an IDN[1].

"food in chicago.com" becomes "food⋅in⋅chicago.com" becomes "xn-- foodinchicago-lj4hc.com"

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name)

<comment><USER40> IIRC these "visually similar" characters cannot be registered anymore due to widespread abuse in phishing/spam emails (päypa1.com, e.g).

<comment><USER41> They can, but there are limitations. For example, ä can only be used in certain countries (for example, a country where a large number of people speak a language that uses ä).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I like the concept but it still doesnt the solve the problem:

The concept is that if it were accepted by browsers, devs wont have to struggle with squatters for domain names. So instead we register the hash for a word or phrase we want to use and us that as the domain.

BUT. nothing stops the squatters doing the same thing on this new concept. the squatters will just register the hash leaving you in the same problem as before

</comment><comment><USER43> I don't get the benefit .. the only 'pro' I can think of (spaces in domain names) would be better answered by allowing a space-to-double-hyphen transcoding so

hxxp://food in chicago.com/ encodes to hxxp://food--in--chicago.com

Pros: * Domains can now have spaces

Cons: * Domains are now case sensitive * You visit a domain and it isn't reversible * The google-juice assigned to domain names is gone

</comment><comment><USER44> just think, if you add a salt that you can change to switch "virtual DNS networks" then _everyone_ can own their own google.com!

</comment><comment><USER45> Domain names are already a layer of indirection, a friendly way to specify IP addresses. This layer would be a friendly way to specify domain names that are a friendly way to specify IP addresses. And you gain not much else besides the ability to add spaces.

Still, the implementation approach is interesting.

</comment><comment><USER46> It would be really cool if a tool like this could be used to resolve TOR services' names into hidden service urls. That would make TOR more useful in general, if you could #://wikileaks, for instance.

<comment><USER23> Hidden service URLs are intrinsic to the security of connecting to them. That's why they're complicated. By adding a second resolution step, you introduce a lot of security issues. How is a user assured that "bla:wikileaks" is the "real" wikileaks, for whatever value of "real" you choose?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I love the idea, I've been thinking along similar lines.

I would add less strict spelling, ie. spelling correction for existing domains, and for domains that are not recognized, go straight to search engine search (ie. google).

</comment><comment><USER48> My interest was piqued at document archival/confirmation uses.

</comment><comment><USER49> There was a Chinese company call 3721. They did a similar thing about 10 year ago. They were acquired by Yahoo. Yahoo 3721 was closed about 5 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER50> The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this: hash collisions. Could problems arise from two keywords that hit the same domain?

Really cool idea, though.

<comment><USER51> With SHA1 the chances of that happening are so close to zero that you'd have to create trillions of keywords before you even approach a minuscule chance of hitting a collision.

One of my favorite analogies for SHA collisions: [http://stackoverflow.com/a/4014407/690258](http://stackoverflow.com/a/4014407/690258)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is awesome! I wonder if this could be integrated with "I'm Feeling Lucky"? It would be good for most Google searches IMO.

</comment><comment><USER53> 759730a97e4373f3a0ee12805db065e3a4a649a5.com is available, someone inform cutts

</comment><comment><USER54> this is a bad idea that will never work

/s

<comment><USER55> Why do you think that? Please elaborate! HackerNews isn't supposed to be about trolling.

Personally, I like the idea and i'm going to use it. However, it relies on people downloading the extension. If there are enough people using it (which is definitely possible) then it would be successful.

<comment><USER56> Maybe because it says that on the page that was submitted.

<comment><USER55> Okay, true. I concede. It's nevertheless interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> This would have some interesting implications for MVC architectures.

</comment><comment><USER58> Nice idea, but I can see the hash clashing a bit with HTML anchors.

</comment><comment><USER59> This is quite an interesting experiment, and a step in the good direction, which should and must lead us to the complete removal of domain names.

Why are domain names bad? That should be obvious.

The main symptom of domain names' inherent brokenness is that the law must patch it so that an unknown squatter cannot kidnap some domain, e.g. register "france.com" and ransom it to the people who are most qualified to claim it. This is ridiculous: the squatter should not have had the opportunity to squat this (I know it doesn't apply for "France" but it applies for many other names). Nowhere in the world we see kids grab the seat in front of the fireplace and not let their grandma have it.

Moreover, what if a single ascii string refers to two different things equally claimable by two groups of people? E.g. what about "francfort.com"? Which city would it refer to? A contrieved case: If Chinese people chose a translitteration scheme for their language so that "google" would mean China, wouldn't they have some rights over google.com?

This level of brokenness is not even because of a leaky abstraction, this is a sunken boat everyone has to use to cross the river.

On a more philosophical stance, domain names are wrong because they build a kind of universal language out of nowhere, grounded on nothing, whitout any kind of democratic digestion and acceptance by human beings. We could have a universal language shared by all humans, but it would be a very long process of slow acceptance, with a percolation through all societies all over the world. In this way, there would be many adjustments, reverts, and eventually we would come up with a set of names that is good enough, but right now domain names are just a musical chairs game that is ridiculous and must be stopped.

So I think using a string's hash is a nice step, because it starts blurring the domain name.

However, I think a much better scheme should be to use the hash of the page _content_ as the domain name. In this case, once the hash is determined, who cares where it is, who care which domain it has? It would just be way to download the content. And the job of search engines would be to point us to these hashes.

And dynamic content you tell? Which dynamic content? Does one really care about changes in wiki pages? And for the twitter feed, each tweek is a fixed content snippet, and the javascript fetching them is also fixed, or could be a browser extension. And an up-to-date search engine would have the latest hash for a keyword such as "twitter" or "The Guradian".

A nice side-effect would be that domain name based censorship would become ineffective. And downloading content could be just some p2p checkouts.

<comment><USER23> How does this solve anything? Instead of registering france.com, I'll register the hash of "France". Adding a level of indirection hasn't provided any benefits.

People can already register domains like "food-in-chicago.com" or "for-sale- baby-clothes.com".

Your contrived example about "Google" meaning "China" in Chinese, is irrelevant. The .CN registrar can enforce whatever rules they want. The US .COM registrar can have its own rules. There's no issue there.

<comment><USER59> The problem is that .COM is de facto the universal entry point.

<comment><USER60> De jure too, isn't it? .us exists for US-specific content; .com ought to be reserved for international sites.

<comment><USER61> They ought, but aren't. Unfortunately, .com and most (all?) of the other non- national TLDs are under US jurisdiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> rot13 domain names are the future? Humorously, tbbtyr.com is already taken.

I wonder about memfrob based domain names.

</comment><comment><USER63> This is like pet names but pointless.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petname](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petname)</comment>


Is Space a Human Place? [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://www.sapiens.org/technology/space-colonization/ <comment><USER2> Has the HN placement algorithm changed? This is #19 on the homepage with 1 point. It doesn't seem to be from the second chance pool but I may be wrong there.

Would be a cool change if it's something that lets more new submissions get a chance on the homepage

<comment><USER3> I've been noticing a lot of the topics on the front page have fewer comments than they used to (kind of disappointing to be honest). So yeah maybe the algo did change.

<comment><USER4> As I write this there are seven topics that have five or fewer comments.

If I have plenty of time I might read articles like these. But if I'm pressed for time I'll pick stories whose subject is interesting and that have a lot of comments, using # comments as a quick proxy for whether the HN community has been engaged with the subject and might have generated some useful discussion.</comment></comment></comment>


Mass Incarceration, Then and Now - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/mass-incarceration-then-and-now <comment><USER2> In New York state, recent criminal justice reforms have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. An illustrative story:

[https://nypost.com/2020/01/17/bail-reform-bank-robber- surren...](https://nypost.com/2020/01/17/bail-reform-bank-robber-surrenders- inside-nyc-courthouse/) Accused six-time bank robber freed by state bail reforms is finally jailed — by the feds</comment>


Ask HN: How to develop logical skills? - <AUTHOR>

For what is worth, perhaps very little, I would like to develop my logical skills. I'm referring to the skills needed to complete sequences of numbers, images, etc. The reason I want to develop them is because I really enjoy solving them in the first place. I wonder if someone know some good resources for practicing or he/she has some advice.<p>Edit: sorry if the question is confusing. What I'm referring to is the ability to solve logical puzzles, like where you have a sequence of images and you need to choose which one comes next. Example from searching on google: http://img43.imageshack.us/f/testdk.jpg/ <comment><USER2> I don't think logic means what you think it does.

Logic is about using deductions to reason about a thing. For example, in sudoku, "If I write a 5 in this cell then the column will contain two 5s. Therefore, this cell can't contain a 5."

Completing sequences of numbers like:

Q: What comes next? 2,3,5,7,11,...

A: 13, it's a list of primes

isn't about logical deduction at all. If anything it's about inference, but I'm probably classify it under pattern matching or something similar. In some sense these problems are meaningless. You could also answer the previous question with

A: -302, the list is the sequence {2,3,5,7,11,-302,5903,pi,....}

and no one can argue with your claim beyond "That's not what I/the author had in mind."

To get better at such things you just need to collect examples. Maybe look at <http://oeis.org/Seis.html>

<comment><USER3> I think you may be referring to the "rule following" paradox [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein_on_Rules_and_Priva...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein_on_Rules_and_Private_Language)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://projecteuler.net/>

If you don't understand how to solve a problem, there's always Google to "cheat". The discussions are pretty often very enlightening, and have some wild solutions.

In more abstract means... number theory is handy, and I don't know what else you'd be interested in, the question is fairly vague. Read lots of puzzle books?

<comment><USER5> I second that. Also you may find this helpful <http://projecteureka.org>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The best tip I've been given for practice is to actually sit with a piece of paper and write out your thought process whilst solving these little problems.

It's feels a bit laborious at first, but I find it makes for much more effective practice than getting to the answer in a roundabout way, and not really knowing how you get there.

As in hackerblues' comment, sitting and explicitly writing: "If I write a 5 in this cell then the column will contain two 5s. Therefore, this cell can't contain a 5." is more effective than bumbling around and just getting it right, particularly when practicing with simple examples.

</comment><comment><USER7> Do real math. Not this fake logic puzzle BS.

<comment><USER8> I second the idea that learning real math will help, but there is a purpose to using "logic puzzles" also - math doesn't help much with learning to recognize various "difficulties" - cognitive biases, like framing issues, and common fallacies, like ad hominems. Besides practicing logic puzzles, you need a good overview book, Robyn Dawes, _Rational Choice in an Uncertain World_ , is the single best volume I have found.

<comment><USER7> Are we talking about the same kinds of "logic puzzles"?

I'm referring to e.g. stuff in Mensa books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Get one of those lateral thinking puzzle books (there are probably 100s of websites online as well).

You could also take practice LSATs to get your fix.

<comment><USER10> I felt I needed to give more than +1 to support this comment. Studying for the LSAT's is an extremely effective way to increase your logical skills. For whatever you think of lawyers and the legal profession, being able to "think like a lawyer" is an incredible asset.

I thought I had a strong ability to recognize logical patterns and avoid making categorical assumptions until I took the LSATs. Thankfully, I am not a lawyer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Learn to follow Metamath proofs. (<http://us.metamath.org/>) Metamath allows you to start with the axioms of propositional calculus and go all the way up to set theory and beyond. When you understand Carew Meredith's sole axiom for propositional calculus, you will know a lot about logic.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you are interested in learning more actual logic, and scientific reasoning, I suggest _Bad Science_ by Ben Goldacre, a book about pseudoscience. The author explains some flaws in some bad science in popular culture, and by learning from him you can learn how to critique bad logic.

</comment><comment><USER13> I can't recommend H. W. B. Joseph's _An Introduction to Logic_ highly enough. Once you master basic logic, Fred Sommers' Term Functor Logic is exceptionally helpful. <http://www.ontology.co/sommersf.htm>

</comment><comment><USER14> [http://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-Heuristics-Zbigniew- Michalew...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-Heuristics-Zbigniew- Michalewicz/dp/3540224947/)

That book will help you on your journey.

<comment><USER15> I second this.

This book is the textbook for my 'Heuristic Problem Solving' course @ NYU this semester. I'm normally not one to touch my textbooks, but over Thanksgiving break I decided to crack it open - suddenly I was 200 pages deep into it.

(Check out what we do in the course at <http://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall10/G22.2965-001/index.html> )

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Study computer science / mathematics? Solve riddles?

<comment><USER17> Look into abstract algebra. Often those types of problems need to be solved by forgetting any assumptions you make and focusing solely on the information given. Being able to work in an abstract ring or group requires that ability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I guess it's same question as "How can I learn to play guitar?"

</comment><comment><USER19> engage in purposeful discourse on something you disagree with or know little about.

</comment><comment><USER20> Look at LSAT prep materials.</comment>


Customer service is not cost of sales. It's a marketing expense. - <AUTHOR> http://www.paraschopra.com/blog/personal/customer-service-is-not-cost-of-sales-its-a-marketing-expense.htm <comment><USER2> To paraphrase, "this is so bad, it is not even wrong".

Firstly, both cost of sales (COGS) and sales, general and administrative (SG&A, where marketing belongs) are profit and loss statement (P&L) items. They really have nothing in common with balance sheet.

Secondly, it is in COGS, because support is directly attributable to specific product and directly impacts given product's gross margin. You can specifically tell, which product is well or badly designed, due to support it requires.

In specific cases (one-off products - projects), support is financed from reserves created for specific projects. These reserves impact the margin of the project (and the project manager's bonus is usually based on the project margin).

Thirdly, it is not "management" who decides, what goes where. It is CFO and his minions, who base it on "accounting standars" (US GAAP or IAS, depending where you are), so the revenues and cost structure is comparable among companies. Benchmarking is not used only in tech field.

Fourthly, where comes this belief, that management does not slash SG&A costs, but does COGS? They do both, but COGS, if it leads to acceptable gross margin is left alone; SG&A is being cut at any possible chance.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hate to burst his bubble, but management feels the same about paying for marketing as they do for paying for sales. It's practically the same thing, when it comes down to it.

I'm all about good customer service, but relabeling it on the expense sheets is not going to change anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> It changes how you look at the expenses. An extra dollar to more marketing isn't always necessarily frowned upon. But an extra dollar to a cost is always considered avoidable.

<comment><USER4> Not as much as losing a liability lawsuit. Good customer service is partly a marketing exercise - in the sense of spending some resources on avoiding negative publicity. But shuffling it around from one cost center to another is essentially a form of defining the problem away, and it's not a good foundation to build on. 'Sure, you feel unhappy with our product now, but try thinking of yourself as being happy instead.' If you define it as marketing then you're just going to get a customer service experience featuring relentlessly happy people who refuse to admit the product could have any shortcomings.

Search on 'sirius cybernetics corporation'.

<comment><USER5> >If you define it as marketing then you're just going to get a customer service experience featuring relentlessly happy people who refuse to admit the product could have any shortcomings

Other than the happy part, this varies from most customer service departments how?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rethinking the 17th-Century English Surgeon - <AUTHOR> http://remedianetwork.net/2015/10/26/butchers-surgeons-rethinking-the-17th-century-english-surgeon/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me of this paper: [http://honors.uoregon.edu/files/Keller%20Living%20Instrument...](http://honors.uoregon.edu/files/Keller%20Living%20Instruments.pdf)

You can see the effect of the perception shift if you read enough papers in computer science.</comment>


More questions and answers about Stuxnet - <AUTHOR> http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002066.html

<comment><USER2> It seems like there's a race between Symantec and F-Secure on who gets the last word in the coverage of Stuxnet. If one comes out with something, the other one follows with a release or a blog post a few days later and such..

</comment><comment><USER3> Surprisingly interesting. I really like the format of this interview. Great follow-up questions.</comment>


Design case history: the Commodore 64 (1985) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/ns/pdfs/commodore64_mar1985.pdf <comment><USER2> It's a shame that there is no longer this level of openness in talking about tech and engineering. Even in modern papers, there is still a lacking of 'bigger picture'

<comment><USER3> How much of this is to hide proprietary information, and how much is because no one person actually understands the bigger picture enough to write about it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a nice read on the same topic too:

[https://www.filfre.net/2012/12/the- commodore-64/](https://www.filfre.net/2012/12/the-commodore-64/)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's incredible how much I miss this kind of articles, like those I read on Byte and on several other magazines.

I am old, I know.

<comment><USER6> I really enjoyed Acorn User and later Byte and Dr Dobbs. MagPi sort of has that quality now, but because there's so much information on the Internet now, I just don't think there's a need for that type of magazine any longer.

<comment><USER7> And a magazine like Byte would be very expensive these days.

<comment><USER8> I would pay for something that I can hold in my hands and read that has deep detailed and interesting stories. I would love to have a new magazine that is somewhere between Dr. Dobbs and Byte.

To be fair, I pay for the Finance Times and The Economist right now because I find them to be worth more then the free information I can find on the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice article. I actually liked it better than the book "Commodore: A company on the edge" which is a bit lengthy :)</comment>


Ning Proves That There's Life Outside of Facebook and Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.briansolis.com/2009/12/ning-proves-that-there's-life-outside-of-facebook-and-twitter/

<comment><USER2> You can create new Ning "networks", but you cannot search for existing networks. Apparently the search feature was taken away because it was "primarily being used by people moving from one illegal Ning Network to another." [http://blog.ning.com/2009/11/redesigned-ning-com-is-now- live...](http://blog.ning.com/2009/11/redesigned-ning-com-is-now-live.html)

This makes Ning networks a lot less valuable.

<comment><USER3> It also makes them a lot more private which is a pretty significant feature in today's social web. The question is how important is that, and to how many people? My bet is the number is growing fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.briansolis.com/2009/12/ning-proves-that- there%E2%...](http://www.briansolis.com/2009/12/ning-proves-that- there%E2%80%99s-life-outside-of-facebook-and-twitter/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Darn. I can't edit the link. I swear it worked in rehearsal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Link does not work for me.</comment>


Ask HN: We built a website and got traction. Is it enough for the next YC batch? - <AUTHOR>

We built a flight search that is able to outperform other searches in many cases (USP). We also got some good traction over the last weeks...<p>Is that enough to apply for YC? How much traction should we have? Since they are invested in Hipmunk,  is there still a chance? - https://tripdelta.com <comment><USER2> Ummm...and delta airlines isn't going to have a problem with the name in the url/brand, same market category, and same color scheme?

<comment><AUTHOR> When we chose this name we were certain that we won't have any troubles.

<comment><USER3> Respectfully, unless you have a letter from Delta legal, I find it very hard to believe that they wouldn't bring action. Even assuming, arguendo, that your right, it's a waste of investor dollars to prove that in court. This would be a red flag for me, were I a potential investor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We should add that we are a German-based company. Is it more difficult for international companies?

<comment><USER5> YC has funded many international companies, Theres no harm in applying to YC but you need to make a case for how you're better than hipmunk and ITA

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> No idea about the YC-ability, but your round trip suggestions don't return you to the same airport, which seems... non-optimal

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. This is actually intentional. But you can always display the original search (on filter right below the search).

But splitting your return flight into an open-jaw ticket is part of our algorithm. In some cases this provides you with significantly cheaper results.

Like here:

[https://tripdelta.com/results/SFO/YVR/11-09-15/YVR/SFO/13-09...](https://tripdelta.com/results/SFO/YVR/11-09-15/YVR/SFO/13-09-15/)

If you don't like the suggestions, you can hide them ;). Hope that helps?!</comment></comment>


Inventing a whole language - <AUTHOR> http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/how-to-invent-a-language-tolkien-burgess/ <comment><USER2> An example that gave (and still gives) me the creeps: A guy seeing videos with lots of blood (vino) and a gang rape (the old in-out)

 _And then, what do you know, soon our dear old friend, the red, red vino on tap, the same in all places like it 's put out by the same big firm, began to flow. It was beautiful. It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen. Now all the time I was watching this, I was beginning to get very aware of like not feeling all that well, and this I put down to all the rich food and vitamins, but I tried to forget this, concentrating on the next film which jumped right away on a young devotchka who was being given the old in-out, in-out first by one malchick, then another, then another...When it came to the sixth or seventh malchick, leering and smecking and then going into it, I began to feel really sick._

From Clockwork Orange

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been learning Lojban off-and-on for a while. I think the core idea behind it is very interesting: sentences as logical predicates. The root word concept is powerful. But I feel like most of the rest of it is too complex. They could have would up with Prolog. Instead they wound up with C++, where everything they could think of wound up in the language. That said, it's still big and inspiring. But a lot of talk about Lojban turns into talking about whether a sentence is valid or not.

The software ecosystem around it has grown up a huge amount in the last few years.

<comment><USER4> Lojban would have been infinitely more promising if it didn't force you to memorize a completely arbitrary argument template for each root and instead used standardized semantic role prepositions (destination, agent, reason, instrument, etc.).

<comment><USER5> There is an argument about that here: [https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Why_positional_case_system](https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Why_positional_case_system)

I think your position is more persuasive, although I've never argued about this with an expert Lojbanist.

I speculate that overall they feel that (1) there could be dozens or hundreds of different cases reflecting the role that a noun plays in a particular predicate relationship, (2) most don't apply at all to any given selbri [predicate relationship], (3) [an argument made in this page] some people's feeling of which case is appropriate for describing a particular relationship is culturally arbitrary, as they differ significantly from natural language to natural language, and (4) they don't want to _force_ the use of prepositions, for concision.

<comment><USER3> Even with "just" transitive verbs taking three arguments, it's easy to lose the plot in natural languages like English. The idea that it wouldn't happen in unmarked sentences with two more seems absurd to me. They found some natural relationships that happened to have five members and they had five vowels, so the whole FA series came from that. Also the SE series only seems speakable for se/te. Beyond that, I think it would be a head-scratcher in English.

I also think even if people are getting fluent in Lojban, they're unlikely to be gracefully handling free word order scenarios where the selbri shows up not in position 2. Are there SOV-speakers producing SOV-ish shaped Lojban and everybody is getting along fine?

If you look at the official cmavo list above, FA and SE account for five words each, so ten of the 1000 in the list. Of course, they're pretty productive as prefixes too, so more than that. But I think part of what makes it complex is that there are so many of everything... forethought and afterthought of all the connectives; differently typed connectives for combining sumti, selbri, bridi; the non-obligatory tense/aspect/mood system that accounts for probably at least 40 particles; etc.

It's a neat language. There's a lot of neat stuff in it. I'm sure it's fun to be able to speak and understand it. I guess mainly I think it doesn't speak to your innate language facility's strengths, so I doubt it can be done realtime as a language, as specified. It can clearly be done with our reasoning faculties. Maybe that's enough.

<comment><USER5> I have a feeling that the things in Lojban that are semantically significant and super-hard to keep track of in real time in your head go pretty far beyond the noun case system. :-)

<comment><USER3> I agree, but I feel like, if simple things are hard, what will hard things be like? :) Then again maybe with practice it becomes easier?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here is an episode of Lexicon Valley with an interview with David J. Peterson, the language creator for Game of Thrones. [1] The amount of depth that has been put into the Dothraki language is very impressive.

[1] [http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2015/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2015/05/lexicon_valley_dothraki_and_valyrian_inventor_david_j_peterson_on_creating.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://reddit.com/r/conlangs](http://reddit.com/r/conlangs) is a wonderful community of language creators (conlang = constructed language). It's surprisingly popular, there are many posts a day there. There are other forums and blogs and such as well.

</comment><comment><USER8> I actually like the idea of invented auxiliary languages like Esperanto. I've spent 10% of the time on it that I did on Spanish in HS and understand probably 5x as much due to the grammar. No gendered nouns, suffixes and prefixes on words to keep extraneous vocabulary down...etc. Also, having one sound per letter and no trilling R is nice.

<comment><USER4> Really the biggest reason Esperanto is easy is that it doesn't have a whole culture constantly pumping in new slang and arcane idioms. You can see a word used once or twice and be reasonably certain that you are not missing some subtle nuance or alternative meaning.

<comment><USER8> Well it does have a culture. Lots of conventions, original literature and music...etc, but yea even that isn't the same as a culture of millions.

<comment><USER4> The biggest difference isn't the raw number participating in the culture but rather that Esperantists mostly keep in mind the goals of semantic transparency and simplicity when coining new words and idioms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> People interested in this topic will enjoy the book "In the Land of Invented Languages" by Akira Okrent [1]. It's an easy non-technical read.

[1][http://inthelandofinventedlanguages.com/](http://inthelandofinventedlanguages.com/)</comment>


POC: User Data API - <AUTHOR> https://sandbox.davebennett.io/projects/poc/ <comment><AUTHOR> A random idea I came up with in the shower. Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER2> how is the token chosen for a new token? also couldn't a bitcoin address be used 1. it's unique and 2. you can pay for the data

<comment><AUTHOR> It would have to be a UUID or something of the sort I imagine. Hmm... Using a Bitcoin address would be interesting but I'm not sure if that would make work since every app should have its own token.</comment></comment>


Ideas Aren't Worthless - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.bozho.net/?p=1317

<comment><USER2> In every context I've heard or said myself that ideas are worthless, it has always been about money.

You build the product for some equity and I bring the idea - no, ideas are worthless.

I'll sell the idea - no, ideas are worthless.

I can't tell you what I'm building without an NDA because you'll steal my idea - no, ideas are worthless.

The context of "ideas are worthless" has never, in my experience, been that of personal projects, learning projects or other things you do for fun. In these cases ideas obviously aren't worthless.

<comment><USER3> Yes, the context I've heard this phrase the most is in Craigslist posts, for example, where someone's had the idea for the 'next facebook' and wants a developer to build it for him. It's not so much that the idea itself is worthless (though it very well might be) - it's just that in terms of value, the person who has the idea is probably going to contribute nothing to the implementation of the idea, which is the part that takes solid hard work, planning and maintenance.

It's not so much that the idea is worthless - it's that a person whose only role in the implementation is to come up with the idea in the first place is worthless to the process of implementation.

<comment><USER4> This is generally true, but the implementer(s) may think that the idea originator will have more good ideas in the future - they may decide to cut the idea originator in just to get access to their future ideas.

<comment><USER2> The future ideas are just as worthless than the first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ideas are like children. People love their own; and relatively few others.

<comment><USER6> did you just come up with that? it's a pretty brilliant turn of the word.

<comment><USER5> Apparently; after googling; it seems I plagiarized this.

<comment><USER7> Way to steal someone else's child. You monster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _I can have a dozen ideas per day._

And that's why they're close enough to worthless to not bother qualifying the descriptor. They're easy to make, and if you don't do anything with any of them (which amounts to darned near 100% of all of them) they're worthless. Think of all the otherwise useful stuff you throw out because one piece is missing: an idea without execution is destined to the mental trash bin.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some ideas are worthless. Not all of them, and the hard task is to distinguish. And an idea is not simply "hey' let's have this". An idea includes specifics :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There's No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles."

\-- The many and varied advantages of philosophy

(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)

</comment><comment><USER10> Ideas are valueless, not worthless. Obligatory link to Derek Sivers' ideas being multipliers: [http://sivers.org/multiply](http://sivers.org/multiply)

</comment><comment><USER11> It's not that ideas are worthless, more like ideas are like assholes, everyone has one. Ideas are cheap, execution, implementation and "finish" is hard.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think founders are inspired by the challenge of creating a company. The whole "I could make this but it's not interesting enough" is an excuse I used for a long long time. There are things I would never do (such as social media) because they don't interest me in the least bit. But, the fact is, you will probably pivot. And if you do, you may be working on something that is no longer interesting to you.

But, building a company is interesting to me. Creating culture, cultivating talent, contributing to GDP and changing an industry are the motivational factors behind me creating a company. And it's extremely challenging. Anybody can create interesting technology; turning it into an self sustaining business is the hard part.

Just my two cents. I agree that ideas are not worthless. Some are plain bad. I've always wanted to ask a VC, "If ideas are so worthless, and the focus is on the founders, why do you have them pitch their company to judge them? Wouldn't another interview process be better."

</comment><comment><USER13> Slightly OT, but I ran the text your blog post through the TextAnalysis API demo (another link on HN's front-page today) and got a very interesting summary. In fact, I think it captures the soul of your post in the last two/three lines:

> An idea will bring you nowhere – you need implementation, focus, a good > team, the right environment, luck, etc. > And I won't argue with that – > obviously, an idea doesn't bring you anywhere by itself. > But that's the > perspective of the businessman. > And that's all great. > Except that it's > not technology.

DISCLAIMER: Not affiliated with AYLIEN, TextAnalysis or the OP of this post. Just a random commenter, that's all.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think one of the main objectives of anyone is to achieve freedom. I think hackers do this, they do stuff to first achieve the freedom to pursuit other achievements. I dont care the money, I just want enough money to seriously do all the things I want.

<comment><USER15> I've never understood this.

You want money, you want what it offers, but you don't care about money. That strikes me as an inherent contradiction in terms. Money represents your time, labor, etc.; it's merely a vessel holding value you've generated. I assume you do care about those things. If you work for 80 hours to generate $8,000 - those dollars you get represent your time and labor. Would you then say you don't care about your life / time / labor?

I'm also guessing that the response to supposedly not care about money, is because the love of money as an end in itself is viewed as being evil. Money is properly merely a tool for exchange however. Who doesn't regard their own time to possess a high value?

<comment><USER14> I believe money becomes important when you need it to survive. When you have all the money you need to survive, it becomes irrelevant since it doesn't represent the problem. Most millionaires I've meet don't care about the money, they mostly care about the projects they're involved into. They know they have money, they know they will get more money. I want to have that feeling: to not worry about the money at all till the last day of my life and worry about the things I want to do. Most of us will do this while working: someone hires you to code, to paint, but isn't the same, imho.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "The ultimate point is not to have a startup, to get acquired, to make money. The ultimate point is to make something cool, something different, something technologically innovative."

The point to make money is no more selfless and noble than the point of making something technologically cool.

I think the only selfless goal is to find and solve a problem that needs a solution.

</comment><comment><USER17> Simple ideas are worth little.

Ideas that are well-researched, catching a good technological or sociological wave, consider possible pitfalls and optimal implementation plans that are presented in a professional manner can be worth a considerable amount monetarily.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great ideas are the ideas that aren't worthless.

<comment><USER18> Hm, can you name one idea, where the idea was so strong that the execution didn't really matter?

<comment><USER4> Yep :)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematical_Theory_of_Commun...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematical_Theory_of_Communication)

<comment><USER18> Mhmmm, but you can't really call that an idea anymore. Then you could also count Einstein's theory of relativity as an idea, since with these two the execution is basically proving things mathematically, no?

An idea as it is debated here is more like a paragraph describing the idea.

<comment><USER4> These are certainly great ideas that have value outside of any implimentation. A simpler pure idea of great value would be something like the Kelly Criterion [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I mean, it's good to have write ups that speak to the broader point that an idea by itself can have inherent value and then it ceases to have value if you don't execute on it.

Maybe thinking about ideas like a limited time coupon is probably the best way to summarize the idea vs execution debate, in my mind.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Ideas are worthless" is obviously false -- investors will _occasionally_ invest on an idea alone, so there is clearly some value to them. "MOST ideas are worthless", however, is very much true. "GOOD ideas are priceless".

<comment><USER21> An investor who invests in "an idea alone" is actually investing in the person (or team). They believe that the person with the idea is capable of implementing it. Implementation is where the value lies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's the combination of idea + you that creates the value for a given idea...and that value is always relative to how valuable the 'you' in that equation really is (and keep in mind that value is always relative)

</comment><comment><USER23> Ideas can be useful to those who have the ability to execute them.

Ideas guys are not useful because they do not have that ability.

<comment><USER24> Meaning "Ideas are worthless" is a (semi) polite way of saying " _You_ are worthless".

<comment><USER25> Maybe a more tactful (and effective) response: "if your idea is so good, why aren't _you_ implementing it?"

<comment><USER24> The obvious answer is "Because I can't." Unfortunately, this admission of incompetence carries a nasty subtext which is "because the task in question is beneath me."

That's why you hear people saying "It's 'just' a matter of execution", which simultaneously elevates the person with the idea while diminishing the person bringing it to life (which frequently requires fairly major departures from the initial concept).

God I hate that word, "just". 9 out of 10 times the person using it is an irredeemable asshole.

<comment><USER25> _Unfortunately, this admission of incompetence carries a nasty subtext which is "because the task in question is beneath me."_

Funny how their idea is _so_ valuable and would make _so_ much money if implemented, but it's still "beneath" them. If it ain't worth them "lowering themselves to that level", it ain't worth my time to consider implementing it, much less signing something like an NDA or agreement where I do most of the work and they keep most of the profits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> anyone who says ideas are worthless has never tried to execute on a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER27> ideas are like a tool. it's only useful if you know what to do with it

</comment><comment><USER28> This keeps coming back to HN every n months. At this point i would expect every HN reader to fully understand that ideas are, at best, a potential starting point from which opportunities might be discovered. The vast majority of ideas anyone generates do not align with real opportunities and, therefore, would be foolish to pursue. An idea backed up by a tangible and real opportunity could very well be like finding a diamond in dirt. The value is in opportunities.

I'd rather someone come to me with an opportunity than an idea. You can throw money at an opportunity and have it multiply. Not so with ideas.

Now, to be fair, sometimes it is really hard to recognize and even quantify the opportunity. Examples abound. Facebook, eBay and Pinterest come to mind.

</comment><comment><USER18> There is some truth to it, because there are a thousand ways to implement the idea you had, however only five of these ways will make the idea take off.

That's why an idea without knowing exactly how to get 10,000 users without any funding isn't worth much.</comment>


Cursewords, a crossword puzzle solving interface for the terminal - <AUTHOR> https://parkerhiggins.net/2019/03/cursewords-crossword-puzzle-solving-interface-terminal/ <comment><USER2> Very nice interface programming! glad to see my "blessed" library used :) thanks!</comment>